Taking Shape...

Wow...two consecutive "work" days at the shop!

Today I rolled some glue onto my maple and marine plywood and threw them both into the vacuum bag.  A couple of 1" headless nails held it all in place until the glue set.

Vacuum Bagging Maple and Plywood

19 inHg this time (We fixed some leaks in the bag.) which converts to 9.33 psi or about 1800 lbs. Two and half hours later, I pulled the (now one) piece of wood out and saw that it was good.  A quick inspection showed me that the pieces were very well laminated to each other.

A Good Connection

If you look carefully, there are no gaps around the perimeter between the maple and the plywood.  Now that it is together, my ruler tells me that my finished thickness is just shy of 1-11/16".

1-43/64" Thickness?

The discrepancy between this thickness and my proposed 1-3/4" has to do with how much I had to plane down the bottom face of the maple to make it sit flat on the plywood.  I shouldn't have had to do that, but the maple pieces came out of the thickness planer not exactly uniform.  Time to check the blade alignment I think.

Now I had to decide exactly where I wanted to cut my body out of this rectangle.  I traced around my MDF guide in pencil where I thought it looked best.

Chosen in Pencil

In this perspective, I was centering the body right and left onto the book-matched joint.  As for up and down, I aimed the bottom line with the point where those two distinct grain lines meet.

Now for cutting.  Off to the band saw to cut just heavy of the line.

Careful to Cut Outside of the Lines

You'd be surprised how nerve-racking it is to hold a heavy piece of wood steady with one hand on a turned-on band saw while taking a picture with the other hand.  These outside curves aren't so bad, but there is a bit of a trick to cutting out the inside curves.

Notching Out Inside Curves on the Band Saw

By cutting away most of the material in a rough triangle, the next step is to cut a series of notches making a series of fingers in the wood.  That way, when the blade passed to cut off each finger, the wood is removable allowing the blade room to "bend" around the curve of the line.  It's really the excess wood that prevents the blade from bending around curves if you don't use this technique.

A careful twenty minutes late, I am left with a rough body shape.

Rough Body

That's as far as I got today.  Tomorrow, I will temporarily hot-glue my MDF guide to the top of my body and use a trim router bit to cut away the excess 1/16" or so around my body.