PREPARING THE END BLOCK

Last night I made the end block. I used some off-cut the kind people of Rockler had given me for free. It wasn't perfectly quartersawn, actually it wasn't really quatersawn at all, more on the rift side of things but otherwise nice and clean.

I have been 'uhm'ing and 'ah'ing about which way to orient the grain on the end block for some time now. As with so many things in lutherie there seem to be many ways to approach the building process and there are equally many conflicting arguments as to why and why not. I ended up making the block with the grain running parallel to the grain of the sides. The theory behind it being, that the two components will have a similar movement when exposed changing humidity and temperature.

Anyway, I started by cleaning up one face and then proceeded to true one of the sides and one of the ends. Once they were true and square I cut the block to almost final dimension on the bandsaw and subsequently cleaned up the cuts on the shooting board. Finally the other face was planed so the block was left with a final thickness of 18mm.

To get the slight curve on the face that is going to be glued to the sides (to follow their curvature) I skewed the blade in the block plane with the lateral adjustment knob in the back. This way it was cutting deeper on the right side than the left, or rather, it was cutting a slightly skewed cut on the right side only. With careful planing this allowed me to visually see where and how much I was cutting off as the cross grain cut left a distinct mark on the wood where it started. Three stokes on each side of the middle did the trick, though I will probably have to make some slight adjustments to get a good fit, once I get to the assembly.

Last, I trimmed the corners of block by 'eye' just to create little more pleasing looking lighter block.

TRUING THE FIRST END

CUTTING TO DIMENSION

SETTING THE LATERAL BLADE ADJUSTMENT

TRIMMING THE CORNERS

FINISHED END BLOCK

FINISHED END BLOCK