Construction of the Soundboard

Well, the guitar's been taken apart, so the next step is to take the composite plate we've received from ACP Composites (http://imgur.com/qXf5QPn). The plate is of wonderful quality and as mentioned in the FAQ rings like a drum when struck.

We sketched the outline of the guitar by tracing the bottom plate of the body (The top is slightly warped without the soundboard attached). A bandsaw that's built to cut steel was used to cut the shape. As much excess as possible was cut to leave as close to the actual shape as possible, then the edges were covered in masking tape, the outline was redrawn, and detailed curvature was removed little by little. We had to use a pneumatic sander to do the tighter curves on the side. I'm afraid we haven't many pictures of this process as I was assisting Garret by removing the carbon fiber dust with a vacuum, as it's toxic and itchy if it makes contact with your skin. Most of the process is rather intuitive though.

Taping the rough cut soundboard 

The second task in cutting the soundboard to size was removing the sound hole. A cardboard template was made from the original sound hole and used to trace the new hole. The center was a identified and a hole saw was used to remove the sound hole. 

Soundboard with hole under the hole saw

The other task completed while in the machine shop was trimming down the bridge to fit the new soundboard (the composite is slightly thicker than the wood). The pneumatic sander was used again as well as a rotary sander. A mill was considered for a more precise cut, but the irregular shape of the fret board made this a difficult task. However, as the bottom was sanded away, the frets were reached, and the fretboard had to be left slightly arched as too much was taken away. This may pose a problem if the height of the strings off the sound board, or the action as it's called, is not high enough.

Garret Sanding a rough edge on the fret board