Making your own radius dish!
 

I found an article about a rather ingenious way of making your own radius dishes!
http://acousticblog.mokkou.jp/?p=44

It took me a couple minutes to understand the whole thing but if you use the formula and compare it to the excel sheet it is pretty self explanatory and a good idea!

If you have the money, I strongly encourage you to buy one.
I've made a couple and it's quite a mess.

plus one...i made one...never pass up an opportunity to avoid routing mdf...

There is a video on youtube showing the whole process to build one just like this one. I thought long and hard about making one but after figuring in the time, labor, material, and mess, I opted to buy one. There's a guy on ebay who uses a CNC machine to make them selling for less than $50.00. I figured that was money well spent. :)

Maybe try this..............not as much mess.!!!

http://www.ukuleleunderground.com/fo...-a-Radius-Dish

Tom

Making your own radius dish!
 

Come on guys! Messes are fun! What a bunch of neat freaks :lol: it's a shop, not a clean room :lol:

I have seen the other methods of making one and I like the one I posted. I started on it today and it hasn't been bad at all. That and I am making it a different radius than you find on Ebay and a different shape.

Is a guitar a circle?? Usually not. So why use a circular dish?

I made my present forms out of mdf using a router to ONLY make a few landmark depth points, then used a scraper to scrape out a logical egg-ish shaped dome for the soundboard. Presently, I build classical guitars as well as a custom bracing design steel string guitar, so with a standard x-braced steel string, I can understand the desire to have a full radius.

Point is, making your own dome is pretty quick. 30 min to an hour total. And it can be customized to one's own sensibilities and logic.

That is what I did differently too. I did not make a circular dish I made one more resembling the shape of a guitar. I do not have the space for a go-bar assembly so I made a smaller radius dish that would be portable and plan on using clamps instead for the braces. Similar to what you would see in the instructional series A Master Class In Acoustic Guitar Making.

Why use a circular shape.....??? Because most folks use them to sand the top and back of the rims by putting abrasive paper on them.
Tom

Precisely. You can't use the dish as a sanding guide of its not larger than the guitar by a significant amount.

There are alternatives if you're strapped for resources or funds to acquire a premade dish. I've seen methods where a sanding board with a curved sanding surface is used, much in the same manner as the sanding disk. A second sanding board is used for the upper bout where the fretboard extension is to be because that area needs to be dead flat to simplify arriving at the proper neck angle, else there will be a "hump" in the fretboard above the 14th fret. As for use as a guide to gluing drowned radiused braces, there's also the stacked (or is it fanned?) deck of index card trick to approximate the radius.

I've borrowed a friend's radius dishes but I may try the methods I outlined above just to see.

i find it better to buy them rather then make. although i have had one (bought from lmi) warp on me because the material was pretty wimpy. it's been replaced by a real nice dish from blues creek. made very well and about 2x as heavy as the one i bought from lmi and only a couple of bucks more made by somebody in utah? (i forgot) and done right.

on the topic of dishes, how many use a convex dish for bridge work? i find them really handy.

It was mostly a rhetorical question to instigate thought. ;-) I know there are merits to the dish, one of them includes expedience of manufacturing process as you suggest. I have chosen to fit my tops in the same fashion as the Spaniards fit their backs - by planing the edges of the sides to fit. It is persnickety work the first couple times, but can be very quick after a little bit of experience with the process.

....lol!...i know what a shop is and I've made some unbelievable messes in mine......i had fun making the messes...cleaning them up not so much...but....MDF dust is some of the nastiest particulate on the planet and i'd rather pay a chunk of dough than create it...but hey its your mess....have at it.....