Today I made progress on the pieces that I’ll need to create the mold for building the bowl of my lute. A few weeks ago, I cut each individual piece from the main board of MDF, thinking that it would be easier to trim each part separately. This was a big mistake! As it turns out, cutting a small piece from a large board is much easier than sawing the excess edges from a small piece. Holding the work-piece was difficult because it was so small and prone to move around a lot from the sawing. Once I discovered how difficult it was working each piece with a coping saw, I spent a couple of weeks trying to decide if I should start over or if there were any other steps I could take to make it any easier. Eventually, I gathered my patience and just got to it. As scary as I had built it up to be in my head, I was able to finish everything in an afternoon. The weather was perfect and I did my best to contemplate my previous decisions and what I have learned so far.
The next big lesson I learned was how little sanding by hand accomplishes. I left myself a fair amount of room in case my edges were not quite vertical. I bought 80 grit sand paper and a sanding block and figured I could just quickly sand the edges down. Progress proceeded very slowly, and even though I tried to keep the edges vertical I still somehow ended up with an uneven sanding. I tried making my own leveler with a few blocks of wood and a square but the sanding still took much too long.
I spent about a week or so learning about disc sanders, read a lot of guides and watched a lot of video reviews. While I really wanted to keep this project to hand tools only, I’d also like to have a completed lute one day! So now I’ve got a disc sander on the way and looking forward to finishing up the mold, hopefully soon.