Everywhere I go I find a pal

Peter Weinschenk, Editor, The Record-Review

Building a guitar from scratch is great. You get to use a variety of woods and make use of traditional tools, such as planes, files, drills and saws.

But that doesn’t mean the guitar builder has to stay traditional. He can boldly step into the Space Age.

That’s what I did this past week as part of my ongoing archtop jazz guitar project.

My task is to glue a piece of unidirectional carbon fiber plate onto sections of my ebony guitar tailpiece to strengthen them and prevent future cracking.

I received my carbon fiber from ACP Composites, Farmington, Conn., a couple of weeks ago. It is a three feet by one-foot sheet that measures twenty-three thousandths of an inch thick. The material is light and strong. It is composed of carbon fibers (originally used as wire in Thomas Edison’s light bulb experiments) all lined up in a single direction and impregnated within a sheet of epoxy resin.

The stuff is difficult to cut and shape. You can cut the high-tech material with a regular pair of scissors, but it tends to shatter and bust up. I found the only way I can cut the stuff with control is with a jeweler’s saw fitted with a fine-toothed blade. This is tedious work. You can shape the plate with a tungsten carbide bit whirring in a Dremel tool, but this, too, is slow going. Sandpaper and files also work, but, again, it’s hard to make much progress.

Working with carbon fiber is a pain. The last thing you want to do is breath in any carbon fiber dust. Hence all work on the carbon fiber must be done with nitrile gloves, a dust mask and eye protection. I run a shop vac to immediately carry away any carbon fiber dust from my work bench.

I feel a little tool envy when I work with the carbon fiber. The YouTube videos I’ve seen all use complicated, high tech computer assisted router machines to shape carbon fiber. They drill holes in the material under water. I am using only basic hand tools and elbow grease.

One fear I have is gluing the carbon fiber to ebony. I am prepared to use black-tinted epoxy to join the two materials, but I’ve heard that you can’t glue an epoxy product to anything else using epoxy. I performed an experiment and the epoxy I used worked well. I couldn’t pry the wood and the carbon fiber apart.

I am hopeful I can glue on and clean-up the carbon fiber on my finished (even polished) tailpiece parts without too much damage. We’ll see how careful I can be.

I am enjoying the challenge of working with high tech materials, reveling in the joining of old school and cutting edge technologies.

I respect carbon fiber. It is amazing stuff. It’s easy to see why it is the go-to material for airplanes, satellites, drones, racing bicycles and ski poles.

Oh, and, yes, guitars.