Preparing and Joining the Top and Back Wood

With the rib structure essentially complete, the next step is to prepare the wood for the top and back plates.  The two plates are prepared in the same manner.  First, the quarter sawn wedge of wood is cut into two wedges on the bandsaw:

Then, the faces and edges of the two wedges are cleaned up so that they fit together roughly as shown:

With the wedges roughed out, an oversized (and square) template is traced onto the wood and cutout on the bandsaw. This creates a cutout in the center of each plate that will be used for clamping.

After cutting, the top and back wood look as follows:

Then comes the tricky part – using a large jointer plane to create a perfect joint between the two wedges of each plate.  This requires good technique with a well tuned and sharpened plane.

The gluing edges of the plates are then warmed with a heat gun, hot hide glue is applied liberally, and the plates are clamped as follows and left overnight to dry: