Side Bending

Once I had assembled my make-shift side bender out of some pipe and a heat gun it was time to bend the sides. The wood I used for the sides of my guitar was African mahogany as it is quite easy to work with and relatively inexpensive (£26 or $43.75 for the back and sides).

Before bending, the wood had to be thinned down from 5mm to about 2.5mm. I did this using a combination of hand planes, scrapers and sandpaper however if you have one a thickness sander would be much quicker and probably more accurate too.

When buying hand tools such as planes it's generally a good idea to avoid the budget variations. Instead spend a little bit more money on midrange tools. I found that Stanley and Record planes seemed to work very well and had the right quality to price ratio for my application.

To remove most of the material I used a Record smoothing plane (no.4 I think). This worked well and cost about £30/ $50.53.

I haven't got any pictures of the actual bending process however a good video to watch if you would like to learn how before you start bending is O'Brien Guitar's video on the subject. It might also be a good idea to have a go on a few test pieces too before starting to bend on the actual guitar sides. This will give you a good idea of what the wood's characteristics are and may avoid unnecessary cracking etc. when bending the real thing.

The bending iron - read about it here.