14 Comments

  1. Wonderful episode!

    I love the way that Paul’s designs emphasise elements that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with machine-only methods.

    The moment when the mallet sound changed exactly at the point where the joint seated at the correct point was very satisfying. An implicit lesson here is patience when fitting and being prepared to pare and refit multiple times – I’ve often screwed up by being too impatient.

    I’m in the process of building an electric guitar trying to use mostly hand tool techniques (i.e. not doing almost all shaping with templates and electric routers). I wonder whether some variation on this joint with hand cut and fitted tapers would be useful for the mortice and tenon between neck and body? It should ensure good physical contact between the two pieces.

  2. When you talk of the wood bruising what should I be looking for? In this video you talk about some shininess in the wood, is that all or is there something more I should look for ?

    1. I wondered about tapering only one side, too. In fact, if you kept the face on the side next to the delicate short-grained side untapered, I wonder if you could reduce the risk of breaking it during assembly.

  3. Love this joint too, the only shame is when it’s together no one will see it!

    Paul J asked about using this joint to attach a guitar neck to the body. Fine guitars should use a dovetail joint to attach neck to body (what I’ve been told) it increases tonality across the whole guitar. Larivee guitars in Canada makes there acoustics this way.

  4. Uhh-Oh.
    The end of my rail snapped. 🙁 What to do?
    I’m amazed to be the first to confess to this error (surely I’m not the first dufus to do this?).
    I did glue is back and clamp it, on the hope that it will hold.
    FYI, I’m working in Eastern Cedar, because that is the wood I had available.

    1. I’m guessing the split is on the rail from the top of the halving joint section to the end? Gluing and clamping it back on then very carefully fitting it making sure the joint is definitely not tight should work. The one thing you can do if that doesn’t work is to screw through the broken off piece into the main rail from the bottom, as long as you pre-drill to the size of the shank of the screw through the broken off section then recess the heads of the screws. The broken off section may be too wide for this though. Hope that helps and makes sense.

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