Official Luthiers Forum!

Well, I started off Radiusing my braces in the radius dish. It was effective, but for these reasons I searched for a better way.
-Took a lot of time and elbow grease.
-Occasionally skinned a knuckle or two on the sandpaper.

Then I bought the Brace Radius jig, but honestly don't like the design. For these reasons:
-More times than not the jig won't hold a brace down in the radius. It might hold it for a second, but it slowly slides back up and I'm getting tired of battling with it.
-Waste. Because you're running the brace across a jointer, it must be a given height to be able to clear the jig. Often this is a big waste of brace material and probably kills almost twice as many trees as needed.
-Width limitation. While most of your braces are usually within this width, I occasionally have a brace that just wont fit in this jig.

I'm looking for either an alternative solution to brace shaping that is easy to do, effective, and doesn't require a lot of elbow grease.

OR

A solution to getting the Brace Radius jig to at least hold the stinking brace down like it was intended to.

Thank you all in advance for your thoughts and ideas.

_________________
Thanks,
Blain

http://www.ullrichguitar.com

"89.67% of all statistics are made up on the spot."

Please delete this. I posted in the wrong forum.

Sorry.

_________________
Thanks,
Blain

http://www.ullrichguitar.com

"89.67% of all statistics are made up on the spot."

Jon Sevy has an interesting way of radius his braces. http://gicl.cs.drexel.edu/people/sevy/l ... ching.html . There is a lot of good information on his site.

If you use the curve of the sanding bowl to trace the radius onto your brace you can bandsaw the curve and get real close before you sand in the dish. That saves a lot of time sanding in the dish.

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"Building guitars looks hard, but it's actually much harder than it looks." Tom Buck

I got the idea for this jig from The Zootman some years ago (when he used to build guitars). I run them past a 1/2" dia. pattern bit on the router table and then touch them up on the radius dish...all in less than a minute. You need to know when to climb cut to prevent blowout but it works just fine.





One side is radiused for back braces (15') and the other is for top braces (25').

_________________
JJ
Napa, CA
http://www.DonohueGuitars.com

Same as JJ. Finish them up on the radius dish.

Like Mario says, "Doesn't get much simpler then this."


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/user/closetpicker#p/u/3/C2Qeh9vjrck[/youtube]

Well now that's what I'd do......

Way to go Mario