Project #6 begins
Saturday I got out all my wood for project #6. I decided to make it all out of wood, and I’m hoping that’ll turn out to be a cool idea instead of a lame one. When I pulled my wood stock out of the box where it’s been neatly stored in the garage, I found that a piece of ebony had just up and split. I’m thinking our famed “dry heat” is probably the culprit, because it got to the yellowheart, too. It split in my hand when I picked it up. You can see that it’s intact in the first photo. I brought the rest into the house, where we’re running the swamp cooler 24/7 now (it was 106 today!), and that should keep it adequately hydrated to avoid more splitting. It makes my guitars happy, anyway.
The split piece was just the size I needed for all the yellow pieces anyway, so it was no hardship. I got my patterns glued on with white glue and watered my plants, washed our long-neglected bicycles so we could use them, and fixed a broken lawn chair while I waited for it to dry. I originally had planned to put this into the same ebony stock I did the last one in, but since all the wood stock is 1/8”, that would’ve been a little too thin. So I picked up a length of 1/2” cocobolo to use as a ground, and cut off an appropriate length with my circular saw.
Having rushed into sawing and sanding and who knows what else before glue was dry in the past, skirting the edge of heatstroke from being out in the hot garage that long, and having a birthday doings to go to, I let them be for the night, planning to saw the next day.
Everything was set for sawing.
I discovered immediately that I wouldn’t be able to saw the small pieces out of the very long and unwieldy pieces of wood I had, so I had to cut them down. That process was a bit sketchy, as my saws were only 3” deep, and while they could cut across with no problem, trying to salvage large stretches of wood along the grain by sawing in that direction wasn’t very successful.
The sawing was pretty easy, although some pieces gave me trouble, or maybe the blade was getting too warm, as it seemed to bind. I don’t know if it was me or the wood grain. It was interesting to see the different properties of the wood. Ebony and padauk produce more sawdust than the other woods. So much so that I had to put the vacuum on and keep it on the padauk just to see what I was doing; the usual blower from the aquarium pump just wasn’t cutting it.
Of course, that added a new level of difficulty, as I sucked nearly finished pieces into the shop vac because I got too close. So I had to dig them out of it. Fortunately, that was pretty easily done. And hey, there’s the pencil I was looking for! 
I got most of it done, but I was getting tired, and decided to leave the most complicated pieces for the next time. Getting the fingers to line up with the space I’ve cut in piece #3 will be tricky, as will the face bits. I also need to redo the center of the sun. I’d had this idea to split it into 2 parts, also orange and yellow, in a vague kind of yin/yang symbol, but as you can see, my sawing wasn’t up to snuff and there’s a gap. I think I’ll just do a plain circle this time. I’m looking forward to working on it this coming weekend. It’s challenging, but I still find it satisfying on so many levels.
