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Dreadnought Acoustic


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The first stages of the finishing are started :)

Ref my thread in the 'Finishing and Inlays' section, I am going to try out egg white as the clear sealer / filler.  I suspect it will be OK as a sealer, but no better than, say, Birchwood Casey Clear Sealer & Filler, for filling (ie not very good at all!).  I'll do a bit more later on the other thread but first impressions:

  • Easy to apply
  • Quick drying
  • Cheap
  • Pretty much odourless
  • Easy to clean brushes / cloths / pots
  • Dries to a fragile and thin, but - on first impressions - fully set, finish.  This might mean that, if it is capable of filling anything except the grain, it doesn't do the long-term continued sinking that the polymerised oils or similar suffer from.

This was it after a couple of coats:

UW3srNRl.jpg

 

zzgtY1ul.jpg

 

While it was drying, I shaped the headstock and drilled the tuner holes:

Ayn7JTrl.jpg

 

 

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44 minutes ago, Prostheta said:

...Yes...it's actually SUNNY! .  

I know....here in the middle of the UK.  Unbelievable!  I thought it was a UFO at first and it scared the cat for sure.  I passed some young parents down the street saying to their toddlers, "...it's called the SUN.  It's like the RAIN, but not so wet...."

The sun is a mythological character from the Kalevala. Don't try and convince me otherwise! 

Well here its actually raining. The sun has taken up permanent residence and has been beating down relentlessly for months with no respite. We have only seen a break over the last 10 days! Now of course with everything so dry the rain is causing havoc washing away topsoil causing potholes in roads etc.

Great guitar and especially your method of gluing the bindings. We used to use a similar method when applying veneer sheets to foam cores for making radio glider wings.

Have you looked at Trevor Gores neck joint method? It is a double tenon bolted in both planes.

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We're back to dull, grey and drizzle.  Phew!  For a couple of days there I thought that dreadful spring season might be coming :lol:

I'll look up that neck joint, @KeithHowell - sounds interesting for future projects!

The egg white is looking very promising, @Prostheta. It dries rock hard...surprisingly so...but remains very thin.  As I suspected, it's not great for gap filling although I'm still experimenting.  I've done some tidying up first thing of missed gaps and lumps but I reckon by tomorrow it will be smooth enough and hard enough to start the varnish coats.

Someone I was talking to last night said that they used to use egg white in the early Middle Ages and beyond as 'tempura' to harden and prepare the plaster surface before painting murals.  Makes sense and, in some ways, a similar requirement to grain filling given the absorbency of untreated plaster.

Edited by Andyjr1515
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My understanding is that egg albumin is simply a colourless variant on things like protein glues such as hide, casein, etc. that requires minimal preparation to use. I suspect that as a grain filler, the wood will wick excess moisture that the amino acids cannot bind to from the egg white, leaving behind a tightly-bound stable chains. The sawdust acts as the filler whilst the proteins add structure. I hate to use the term "binder" since it's a bit simplistic. Nonetheless, it's probably closer to the mark than anything else. Chemistry has never been my strong suit, however readily-accessible and safe to use products are always a welcome thing in finishing.

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9 hours ago, Prostheta said:

My understanding is that egg albumin is simply a colourless variant on things like protein glues such as hide, casein, etc. that requires minimal preparation to use. I suspect that as a grain filler, the wood will wick excess moisture that the amino acids cannot bind to from the egg white, leaving behind a tightly-bound stable chains. The sawdust acts as the filler whilst the proteins add structure. I hate to use the term "binder" since it's a bit simplistic. Nonetheless, it's probably closer to the mark than anything else. Chemistry has never been my strong suit, however readily-accessible and safe to use products are always a welcome thing in finishing.

Sounds complicated good to me :)

In summary, I'm very pleased indeed with this.  And it's tough!  Not impossibly tough-to-the-point-you-wish-you-hadn't-bothered epoxy-kind-of-tough, but tough enough that when you sand even the soft spruce, for a long while you are pretty much polishing the sealed surface rather than cutting through straight down to the wood.

I've done what is probably the last coat of egg white before the first coats of varnish so, while that is drying, I've been cutting my moniker swifts.

Like many others, I use a jewellers saw and very simple slotted mdf board to cut them out:

P7zytq5l.jpg

...and here they are - three for the headstock and one for the heel block:

XXBaHkjl.jpg 

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Well I got to wondering about it because there is a lot of debate on how to prep the albumen. I'd heard of people whipping it, refrigerating it overnight. The lot. Egg white is 9/10 water so I see that as the major problem. I wonder if dehydrated egg whites could be part of a simple admixture....adding iron oxide, copper powder, etc. would be interesting for effect....

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23 hours ago, Prostheta said:

Well I got to wondering about it because there is a lot of debate on how to prep the albumen. I'd heard of people whipping it, refrigerating it overnight. The lot. Egg white is 9/10 water so I see that as the major problem. I wonder if dehydrated egg whites could be part of a simple admixture....adding iron oxide, copper powder, etc. would be interesting for effect....

Yes - it's a bit of an enigma.  When you apply it, other than a slight whiff of egg, it just smells like wet wood.  And it soaks in like water.  But once the first coat has dried and been fine-sanded, it doesn't keep raising the grain as you would expect it to.  I'm really pleased how it seems to have turned out.  After two days, it's completely ready for the gloss coats...

I've also done the bit that tells me that the end is in sight...the inlays.  Normal stuff:

Tracing round the inlay:

rs0TwEDl.jpg

Dremel routing the chamber:

 

Edited by Andyjr1515
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OK - egg white has my vote.  After the easiest and most convenient grain filling I can remember, this is 'the reflection test' after one very thin coat of wiped-on varnish (and before you ask - this isn't still wet, it is after it is touch dry) :

zZ2NEzYl.jpg

I maybe overly optimistic, but I reckon a couple of days and the body will be fully varnished....

 

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3 hours ago, Prostheta said:

What I am curious about is "which part of the white"? When I do poached eggs, I separate the thinner runny white that isn't attached to the yolk using a slotted spoon. That's the spidery stuff. The white that does stay is thicker.

Yes - it's the thinner runny stuff.  You don't want the stringy bits that hold the yolk in place inside the egg (can't remember my biology classes to what they are called...)  You basically want the stuff you would make meringue out of.

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The final varnishing of the body is ongoing (wipe-on thinned polyurethane varnish as normal) so while the various coats are drying, it's time to make some more progress with the other bits.

As I have said, this is a surprise birthday present so I don't have the opportunity to take the neck profile shapes from his own present acoustic.  However, he's played my OM and was pretty complimentary about the feel, so I'll start off with a similar size and shape.  I prefer to do the final tweaks when it's fully strung up (and probably once it's been passed to it's new owner) but I'll get it close enough to just need a bit of scraping / sanding to his ideal later.

I therefore used a profile gauge to take the profiles of my OM:

TAakgc3l.jpg   

 

Because I go by feel as much as by measurement, I temporarily stuck the fretboard on with 2-sided tape:

OVxQZACl.jpg

 

Then started off with a medium fine rasp to rough shape at the 1st and 9th fret positions:

bzy3aGil.jpg

 

....and joined the two up with a spokeshave:

Z0btQPAl.jpg

 

As I neared the target, I switched to the safer cabinet scrapers.  To be honest, with a neck as small as this, and in the relatively soft mahogany, I could have just used scrapers and skipped the spokeshave:

JRogLRBl.jpg

 

Then chisels and the ridiculously good but tiny Ibis plane to start getting the headstock and heel transitions:

KhjLQ9ml.jpg 

 

Also cut out the teardrop scratchplate and gave it an initial Z-poxy coat - our vocalist gets very enthusiastic with his guitar-pick strumming :rolleyes::

0YCkfqzl.jpg  

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That's a very nice looking guitar Andy. The backwood pickguard is a nice touch. Does it have any dampening effect on the spruce, or does it pretty much act the same as a tortoise shell guard?

I was thinking about this build and your egg whites this weekend. I had a little bit of tear out in some zebra wood around some holes drilled for dowels and made a wood filler out of sanding dust and a water based sanding sealer. It dried very nearly the same color as the wood and did a bang up job filling pores. I wondered how your egg whites would react with some sanding dust mixed in as a thickener and used as a pore filler? It didn't appear to darken the wood it was on as you used it.

SR

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