Chop

Most of the work done on the project so far was either sitting around waiting or doing something which was kind of annoying - at least from a crafting perspective. So here I was - ready and fired up to do something fun.

What you need

• table saw

The Workshop

I graduated workspaces from a downtown backyard to the old-timer mechanic workshop of two good friends. Christoph and Franky, both of you know that I will forever be grateful for the awesome times we shared throughout the “umme - skate or don’t” weeks

I set up a table saw and got to work. Based on my earlier research, I decided to trim the treated decks, such that I could press and glue the pieces together more easily. Also, cutting nose and tail off the full decks would allow me to utilize my material more efficiently. All excess wood, which was large enough and left after trimming, was cut into 1.5cm wide slices. 

At the end of this step, I was left with a bunch of deck planks. These would eventually make up the top side of the guitar. For the backside of the instrument, I had cut slices to compose a mosaic from, which would be held together by an epoxy pour.

Note, the “How it's made” video for Prisma guitars shows how 12 decks are used to create one instrument body. With the roughly 16 decks we had gathered, we were 8 decks short to realize this plan for two guitars. That is why I collected all remaining wood and threw it into a bucket. These leftovers would be waiting to be salvaged for whatever purpose. 

All the sawing had created quite a mess of dust. Saw dust can really come in handy for a variety of purposes, but I’ll get into that later. So I collected a bunch before cleaning up the rest.