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  1. Today
  2. The green tint coat did wonders to bring out the color. Also, I'm glad the initial green/sandback on the limba vastly improved with the clear coat. It faded way back to become a subtle undertone.
  3. Wow. 8 months. I didn't realize it'd been that long. I stopped working on this one because I'm a little terrified that I might have screwed up the shell binding. I'm afraid I left it too proud, and when I sand it flat I'll go right through the pretty part. So fear led to inaction. In the meantime.... (Beverly Hillbillies theme) Tax man said "Boy, I'm gonna take your dough!" So we're loading up the truck and moving to Tupelo. Mississippi, that is. Elvis's home, low taxes. We just can't afford to live in Illinois any longer. Wifey works out of the home, and I drive linehaul for FedEx, so I can work almost anywhere. Property taxes are about 15% of what we're paying here. Cost of living is about 25% below us, gas is $1/gal less, and you get a lot more bang for your housing buck. Once we're fully moved in and the shop is set up, I've dedicated myself to getting over my self doubt and finishing up this one, the Kelly, the StraTele, the church guitar, and the Aelita. It prolly won't be until the Fall. We're hoping to put our house up for same May1 and be in Tupelo a couple of weeks after. Our realtor is confident that with the upgrades wifey made to the interior, it'll sell for top dollar and give her a $50K profit over what she paid for it. In any event, I'm likely to continue to be mostly absent for the next few months.
  4. Yesterday
  5. People - just a friendly reminder that, as per the rules detailed in the first post of this page: With regards to voting in the monthly competition, we need more than one entry for that month to have a contest. If we get a second entry before March 30th we will upload the voting post, where members have the opportunity to vote for their preferred entry for GOTM March. However, if there is not a second entry by that time, because we do not allow automatic winners at the end of the month f no-one else contests, the first entrant (in this case @lowatter) will be contacted and asked if they would like their entry automatically carried over as the first contestant in GOTM April, or whether they would prefer GOTM April starts afresh with no entries. They can then chose to re-submit their entry if they wish. Thanks.
  6. Another week of twists and turns, I guess all newbie builders can look at me as an example of what not to do. So my previous obsession with epoxy was solely to have it as a stain protector, because I went in for a pretty big surgery last week, and didn't know when I'd get back to it (open hamstring repair and sciatic nerve scar tissue removal). While in bed, I really wanted to keep working, so I picked my butt up and kept going on crutches, but when I went back to sand the epoxy, it gummed up like crazy, so I sanded everything off, and started over. The color actually turned out quite nice for the top. The main issue now is the body. So everything I've read online says that the majority of stain attempts to basswood will probably fail... I tried to be cute and used some preconditioner thinking it would go well. It absolutely did not, some areas were super dark, others super light. I tried to sand the darkness out to no avail, so I tried to match the dark areas with some diluted Angelus black. Now this is what I have... I am genuinely contemplating giving up on the stain and just going in with black spray. I wanted a dark walnut, but looks like I'm gonna have to give up on it.
  7. Did I enter my tele in the right section for the March GOTM consideration? I don't see any other entries.
  8. Entrants have the entire month to enter a build, at the end of the month you will be able to vote.
  9. Last week
  10. From "Oh shit!" to "Oh wow! - at least in this spot" is my preferred method, requiring going back for fixing a scratch left from two-three grits earlier. Gentle wipes with frequently cleaned abrasive repeated a million times, that's the best tutorial about fine sanding from me.
  11. The ones I've bought have always had the padding but the ones you tighten with the screw tend to lose the protective caps. The top covers split and the rotating caps wear from the inside as the 'bearing' doesn't rotate too smoothly.
  12. I resorted to using ones with plastic pads on them. They are soft hardish and don't seem to mark anything. I'll keep your advice in mind though, as I will be shopping for clamps soon. I need "deeper" ones to glue the top to the body. Talking about glueing, I went in tonight for a short session: I wanted to put the headstock laminate on to be able to start on the neck building proper next time. Queue some handplaning on the scarf (I'm doing the "second method" for the scarf joint, I think it's much nicer to look at). Look at those shaaavviiinnnggssss Yep, looks like the joint is good - macro shot time: One laminate prepared in position: Now glued in and waiting in its corner... After trying a few different locating pins method, I think the toothpick works best for me. So that's the takeaway for tonight. (Also, I used a tad too much glue. But better than too little!). Now I have to route the channels, prepare the fretboard and try to figure out how I am going to glue the top on the body. Pretty excited to move forward with this!
  13. If it was a guitar for me then I might experiment but in this case it's for someone else and the checks went all the way down to bare wood and came from screwing the hardware down therefore I felt the paint wasn't bonded to the wood so I felt stripping it was the best option here.
  14. Hope you manage to get it sorted, with the top looking as wonderful as it was before! I think I'd have been experimenting with solvents like xylene to try and get the original finish to uncheck ...
  15. Thanks for the replies guys. I really appreciate it as always! I’ve figured out that part of the issue is simply because I wasn’t getting rid of some of the scratches from previous grits. I also hadn’t properly got rid of a few imperfections in the epoxy. Back to 600 grit and working my way up! Using only wet sanding now, as I have a feeling I was pushing material around that had been in bedded in to the sandpaper and causing the more undesirable type of scratches. Maybe I was using too much pressure, so working on close to zero now. Also, I’m going to do a different sanding direction on each grit now, so I can gauge my progress a lot better.
  16. There are many many finishing methods that produce amazing results. These days, I'm finding it difficult to find the time to type a few sentences, so I don't know how soon one could expect a tutorial. One thing I can and will do, is answer any questions you may have about the method you want to use......providing that I actually know anything about that method, of course. One thing most of them have in common is careful sanding. Plain old boring sanding can make all the difference between "oh wow!" and "oh shit!" SR
  17. What he said. You guys should write a tutorial, for me the finish part is the most confusing one and it's really hard to find good and trustworth ressources. A lot of people claim "yeah do whatever it will work out!" but I found it to be pretty far from the truth.
  18. The next issue in this design is the fillets around the body's top and bottom edges. The fillet module in GH is limited! The limitation comes from the guitar shape I feed it but after months of trying and testing other ways... (like sub-d conversions)... Which yielded nice but uncontrolable mesh shapes - not the kind of 3D object my cam likes... I started from scratch (at least 5-7 times, and today... I found an amazing way to do this! Note that Im not 'drawing' any lines in the 3D design part of Rhino to achieve this. It's all logical script like operations on points, lines in space with parameters I can dial randomly or at will or based on any formula, script etc. The three versions are based on a model where the line point/divisions went un-aligned to each other and yielded some really interesting results. Behind is the new version with "variable generative aligned divisions". I hope to do a lot more later. First I have to resolve some non-aligned points giving me messy lofts/skinning... But it does look like a good start!
  19. All strategies are ready. This is 2 weeks before I started... Note the center pins to flip perfectly - the result didn't disapoint. In the end all that matered was that the block was straight along the bottom line. This wood was irregular trapezoid in shape - but at least I had a straight edge from the bottom. Once the center holes were done, it was easy to flip and the holes, cut line matched perfectly. Well, almost... I changed the direction of the cuts for the flip since I saw the result.
  20. So a month has passed since last update, Apologies as things evolved a lot... Got more wood and a pickguard blank... Remodeled a lot of the scripts to improve speed and overall easy the setups. Finally figured out how to center, flip the board also.
  21. The micro-mesh cloth is probably more useable than the pads - you can get mixed grade packs on ebay/amazon. I usually go for the 3600 to 12000 packs. I wouldn't be without them - one of the best abrasive developments I've ever come across. The cloth versions (I use the 6" x 3" but other sizes are available) means you can used them with sanding blocks, cork blocks, radius blocks or just with your fingers. They are fully washable, can be used wet or dry, last an absolute age and are the tops!
  22. I tend to do the same to prevent marks on the surface. But as you said there'll be another layer to hide them. Let me suggest you a workaround combining the best of both worlds: Attach cork pads to the clamps! For the upper jaw of the F you can simply glue that on the iron (after having cleaned the glue squeezeout remains off, that is). For the round rotating parts you may want a big larger diameter pads which should become sturdy enough using 3-6 mm thick plywood (Nordic Birch) under the cork.
  23. Many thanks @ScottR and @Bizman62 for the detailed 'how and why' run through of the process here. Consider all techniques as stolen and expect my next build shinier Seriously, this is great info, y'all
  24. Glad to see you again! When clicking the 'Next unread topic' link it opened somewhere in the middle of the page, showing your headstock and body design, seeing them felt like coming home from a journey. Is it really almost a year since your last update? Man does time fly!
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