My Second Build - Spruce Telecaster

[D_W]

And the back, plus one more of the body hanging in varnish. 

Unfortunately, the thin more vintage look that I was hoping to get with varnish didn't materialize. It looks like lacquer, but isn't as hard.. 

Since the varnish is sticky, when I can't get a body in the sun, it ends up in the far reaches / storage area of the basement to make sure no kids can touch it. 

Not sure if summer would be better, because there's more birds, and probably would get bird crap. 

After the varnish was finally dried (it does at least build fast if you can stand waiting between coats), I hit it with #0000 steel wool and then waxed it with carnauba wax and a buff - the pliability makes it so that you can skip steps when finishing the surface - it can be burnished. 

No clue if it will eventually ever get fully hard. It's no longer sticky like uncured varnish, but it doesn't have the same super hard quality that nitro lacquer does. Carnauba wax sounds dumb, but I figured that it would make a wax barrier that made it harder to feel the sticky. All of these decisions were done on the fly, I'm just experimenting. Lacquer would've been smarter. Commercial varnishes like epifanes (true varnish, not urethanes like "behlen's table top varnish" (which isn't varnish at this point) have driers in them and do dry hard - I used that on my first guitar, but the turpentine/pine/dammar/flax oil varnish is much easier to work with. Epifanes is really sticky and smells like an oil refinery. The house made stuff smells like pine sol. 

[D_W]

3 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

How about getting one of those UV sun tanning lamps? Supposedly you might find one of those 60's 300W "alpine sun" lamps next to free in a garage sale.

I think one of those might work, but not sure how well. Cardboard with foil, or white background could reflect some of the waves onto the back of a blank. The solution I saw most people using was a deliberately made box that had light tubes from end to end and on all sides. 

I did see some listings looking for tanning lamps, but nothing local that still worked. One article I read advised they can be a fire hazard, but I doubt that they'd be such a thing for me - probably an instance of one person out of 1000 putting one against something and starting a fire. Nothing was quite easy enough for me to get a sure solution, click on it and have it delivered, though (except two UV aquarium lamps, which could probably dry a body in 5 days). 

[ScottR]

3 hours ago, D_W said:

I clean enough of the bench off for my needs at any given time, and brush the shavings onto the floor to be cleaned up and burned later.

Man after mine own heart.

SR

[ScottR]

By the way, here is the link to the build by hand I mentioned earlier. I'm not sure it is done yet, but the quality of hand work is exquisite.

SR

[D_W]

1 hour ago, ScottR said:

By the way, here is the link to the build by hand I mentioned earlier. I'm not sure it is done yet, but the quality of hand work is exquisite.

SR

Thanks, Looks good to me!! I like how the poster said the router plane and chisel are the ad-hoc method. I came to the same thing, but without relying on the reference surface on the side. Instead, I just mark the truss rod channel with two lines and do my best to mortise between them with a chisel. If you get a big enough pile of things (I'd be embarrassed to admit how many chisels I have), you can start modifying or dedicating tools to certain tasks. So, I have a small sash mortise chisel that's about as wide as the blue truss rods on ebay.  

I am a lot faster with hand tools than I would be if I had just gotten into them, and aside from the outside of the templates and binding channel, I think I'm going to phase them out. However, a good power tool builder with a batch of ten guitars would blow me away because making one in progression with hand tools is about 15% of the time that it would take to make ten. If you could get a good power tool setup, you could really make time on a batch (I'm keeping all of my guitars, though, so that would present a problem. Always felt like that with power tools, A bit or a guide short of what I wanted to do and all of the effort would've been better making ten of something than one - some people enjoy that setup. I enjoy modifying a tool to do the work - there's no right or wrong as far as I know. 

What's hard with hand tools is looking at a pile of 300 board feet of wood and doing something like building a bench or ten kitchen cabinets with M/T doors when you want to build something else. That's where roughing work with power tools really shines. My power tool selection is now down to really nothing accurate (everything that requires any accuracy is completed by hand), but I keep a lunchbox planer around for the rare instances when someone asks me to build the kinds of things that go in a house. If I didn't have kids, though, I would do all of those completely by hand - I don't find interest in exercising much, but I could be convinced to dimension lumber for an hour and a half per day if I didn't have kids. The kids own 75% of the time I'm not at work, though, so I keep the lunch box planer around and I have a TS that hangs on the wall (which is a good indication of how heavy duty or capable it isn't, but it comes in handy from time to time). 

In terms of time spent, I think even a dewalt 734 used properly is probably a recipe to thickness boards (assuming they get hand planed the last 100th of an inch to remove anything) is five times faster than by hand. But it's a different experience. Dust collection with hand tools for me is after the job is done and not during, and often with a leaf blower/vac because the chips are too rigid and thick to go through a 2 1/4" (or whatever the size) shop vac hose.