Finished carving the back!

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Man, this is exciting. I spent a good bit of time finishing shaping the recurve on the back, and then wrote a lot of measurements on the top of the back so I could start getting everything symmetrical. I got the top shape and recurve symmetrical visually, and then carved the places that needed to be thinned from the inside. The inside has a real nice deep bowl shape to it. The true test will be once it has finish on it, imperfections and imbalances will be easy to see. I sanded with 220 last night and got it looking REALLY good, but under low light where you can see shadows, I noticed there are still some tool marks I need to work on before I can say I'm completely done. I am positive that I will finish it tonight. When my Stew Mac order first arrived yesterday, I tried my finger plane on the inside of the back, as well as on the recurve, but I could tell almost immediately that it removes way too much wood for me to use it at this stage. I easily got rid of the plane marks with my gooseneck scraper, and then continued carving with my old trusty scraper. Here is a pic of the back, not a very good one but hopefully you can see the back shape and the recurve shape.

By the way, I plan to glue the back on without cutting to the final shape. I'll trim the sides of it flush after it's been glued on, there's less room for newbie error doing it this way.