New Acoustic Guitar(s) Project

Well, I'm about to embark on another "two week" woodworking journey.  This time, Joshua (my son) and I will be making some acoustic guitars this summer.  I'm planning to take a one-week vacation at the beginning of summer and another at the end in which we'll do most of the work.  In the meanwhile, I'm doing a lot of the design work and building some of the jigs and tools.  I've built lots of guitars before, but Josh wants a smaller guitar, so I need a new set of jigs that will fit.

The first step is to make a body mold to layout the design and to hold the sides when constructing the body, and also some "spreaders" that will push the sides into the shape of the mold.  This weekend, I used my CNC router to cut the pieces for the molds and spreaders, which gives me a ridiculous level of precision.

MDF pieces that I cut with the CNC (this is enough to make 1/2 a mold and 1/2 a spreader; there will be 2 molds and 2 spreaders altogether):



Gluing up two spreader pieces (note the alignment holes that were machined on the CNC when the part was cut):




Pounding in dowels to align the two pieces perfectly:



All clamped up:



I did a similar process with the other spreader and the two halves of the body mold.  Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to sand this mold and spreader and start machining the other set.