Making a shape out of wood.

So, I regrettably don't have a lot of photos still of the first project we did this year, but I do have a couple of photos from the process of making my octagon, so I figured I would make a quick write up. 

The first step was cutting all the boards to the length of an outside edge! Then, beveled edges at 1/2 the angle of the shape you're making. I also cut this wedge of the bottom to make space for tuners. All of this is done on a table saw and is relatively straightforward if you go slow and have a miter gauge!

When working with plywood, you're usually good to glue with no fancy joinery up to a miter of 45 degrees. However, solid wood requires either a finger joint (easy for a square) or a tongue and groove joint in the case of the octagon. This is to keep our ratio of end grain to long grain in check. Long grain is good for glue joints and end grain is useless!

With all the sides cut, I put them end to end and used packing tape to go over every joint.

Which allows flipping the whole system over! Then it's time to apply the glue.

After glue is on every edge, the tape is used to tension the boards into shape, but "closing" the loop. Then tape goes across, around, back and forth and everywhere.

That's pretty much it!