Well, kinda. This morning I went down to the Mega-Lo Hardware and got some supplies to carry me through to the end of this project...namely some wood filler, a chisel, some new jigsaw blades (maybe this will cure my fear of the jigsaw), and a few other things that I'll detail below.
This morning I took the pedal steel off of the hurdy gurdy. It looked like this:
Note the overhang -- the soundboard (top) and bottom of the instrument were provided slightly oversized -- maybe three-quarters of an inch at most. This is helpful, because, as I've tediously relayed, the instrument is not a perfect teardrop shape. Now, the instructions to this kit are pretty good, for the most part. But it suggests that, if you don't have a router, you can take care of the overhang with course sandpaper.
Now, even you have all the time in the world and sandpaper grittier than a David Mamet screenplay, I don't know if you could eliminate a three-quarter inch overhang just by sanding it. Well, you could, but it would be a ridiculous amount of work. I pondered it for a while -- use the jigsaw? Circular saw? I wasn't gonna sand it endlessly. My solution was to use a hand-held router -- really a lino cutter, with a wood-cutting bit.
I'd never used this router before, but it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of starting with the top -- I should have started with the bottom, as I made some errors and had to learn to control the device, and the results of my novice hand are more visible, since they are on top. There are some pock-marks made by the router...I tell myself it adds to the folksy quality of the instrument.
Here's how the first pass with the router looked. Yikes:
I then went over it with some sandpaper -- first with an electric sander, then by hand. I got it down to something reasonably smooth, if a little, um, folksy...then I glued the peghead on. Here's where we're at:
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