soapbarstrat

YouTube Demo Tele built from old Hollow Core Door. Neck is off a Behringer Strat. The sound exceeds my expectations

We had one guy on here have his ideas stolen to the point the damn thief made an instructional DVD, even using the guys photos, and was selling them on eBay. This is going way back, but that doesn’t make much difference I guess. trust no one as far as “holding back”.. if you ain’t paying them for access to their knowledge, no reason to complain.

On new frets with a freshly leveled board, There’s barely anything to recrown. 800 grit is my most coarse grit that I begin the leveling with (I’m using the 3M gold, which cuts like 600 grit of many other brands). The file is used very little and very carefully, or it will do damage. Quite different than how I treat old frets.

Have yet to own a crowing file, because of the restrictions of common mismatch of size to fret ratio, or whatever. I feel that if major recrowning is required, I prefer to replace the frets. I’ve been told that the further into the fret you go, the softer the metal gets. Or a good compromise is to not recrown to a half circle, but a larger flatter radius instead. This will spread the load of future string to fret contact. It can make the note sound a bit more slurred, but that’s actually preferable on many guitars. I heard Eric Johnson likes his Strat frets like that. Paul Reed Smith once said he likes flattish frets on his own personal guitars.

Some lighter fluids apparently have small amounts of oil added.

A fret will affect the tone, same as a nut. A refret almost always sounds more “hi fi” than the previous frets for all kinds of reasons (neck now allowed to be adjusted more straight, glue, more precise crown peak, ...)

Ever since I saw Perry Ormsby using a Workmate many years ago, I always kind of wanted one, but not enough to actually pay for one I remember not long ago, somewhere on the Internet somebody else was showing theirs, at which point I said I was waiting to find a free one. They said they doubt I’d ever get a decent one for free. Well, a few days ago, someone on the next street had one out for the trash. was it perfect when I first got it? Hell no. The top had a bunch of paint on it. Part of it had been assembled incorrectly and a pin had gone missing. I reassembled the two incorrectly installed legs. Now I had one of the pins in it’s proper location. And it turned out the missing pin was down inside the other hollow leg. I carefully reinstalled it using a vise. I also tightened all the loose bolts, especially the ones that were making the vise movement kind of sloppy. Applying some grease to the threads allows it to work while the parts are together more firmly. I got this thing tweaked real good. Recently got the red vise at a local estate auction for $14.75 (I made the little StewMac magnet )

Yes, a kickbacked piece of wood has whacked the fingers right off peoples hands. So freakin fast, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. I once asked Rick Turner what he thinks is the number one cause of saw accidents. He said, “smoking a joint on their break”.

Finally refurbished this damn thing. Wanted to keep a lot of the antique mojo. I guess I’m pretty satisfied with the results. Did most of the work with a wire wheel on a drill, just brushing it quickly across the surface to turn back time on the aging but not make it look too new. The metal bench stop is marked C.E.STEARNS & CO. SYRACUSE NY. on the bottom (forgot to take photo while I had it removed) Probably from the 1920’s. The lower ratchet parallel bar on the vise is rare. The bottom of the legs could use repair work, but I want to use the bench a while first, to try to get an idea of any height adjustment I might need to make when repairing the legs.

I recently found this on the side of the road less than a mile from my house. It’s got some old time mojo for sure. The vise is awesome! Holds large pieces of wood surprisingly firm.

Thanks. Almost 10 years since I last posted here. The place seems awfully foreign.

Pretty sure I just recently saw one on the side of a Gordon Smith Les Paul where it was slightly curved. Now, did they bend that curve into a stock Strat jack plate? I’d like to know.

Not a big glove user, but I have a box of Harbor Fright light blue Nitrile gloves. They are not very tough. Often I'll tear a hole in one finger after some moderate use. Instead of throwing the glove away, I'll keep it around to cut the fingers off to slip one over another glove that I've worn a hole through. I also have a handful of dark blue nitrile gloves that were a free sample. Can't remember the place that gave 'em away, but they seem to be tougher than the HF ones. I use gloves as little as possible, 'cause they make my hands sweat and that's worse than 75% of the grime I can wash off my hands easily enough.

You can often find those mats ripped to shreds in the dumpter behind the coroner's building. They put them on the table when they *try* to perform an autopsy on zombies.

My neck reads 2.247" at the widest part of the heel. That's why I won't put the neck on a Fender Body I have. I'd have to widen the neck pocket.

I've had what I assume is a N1 Nuno neck for about 5 years. One important thing about it, is it fits in a longer neck pocket than a typical Fender. If your body also has a longer neck pocket than normal, you might want to point that out, so a buyer doesn't complain that the scale length of their Fender heel type neck caused them to have to throw a filler block at the end of the pocket to keep the scale length proper.

It is done both ways. The thick 70's Fender poly sprayed over the frets is about as undesirable as it gets for me. Finish before fretting looks better to me, but it's a real bitch to keep from scuffing up that finish when finalizing fret ends. Not impossible though. Even face paced factories like Ibanez have somehow managed to do it quite well.

Have serious doubts about shimming with leather. Wood scraps for shims are not hard to find ! Try to make some friends who have some CLAMPS !!!! You can really make a cheap guitar very un-repair worthy by slathering glue into seperated joints and then not clamping properly. Really no fun, having to do major surgery to remove dried glue from improperly clamped parts, in order to redo properly.

Be glad there isn't any one guitarist that stood/stands way above the others, otherwise the instrument would be already dead, or close to it. They all kept the instrument alive. Even the one-hit wonders. Even if you do find just a couple really great, how can you stand to listen to them over and over ? I can't do that. Would be like having to take a short-cut through the Sistine Chapel every morning on the way to the office and getting a little fed up with Michelangelo's work.

Is it Finland where the people are so shy, the Government has to help Men and Women meet each other ? Pretty sure I saw something on TV about it quite a while back. In that case, I suppose anyone there with something to sell might be real shy too. Maybe every store has a " please go away " sign on the door. LOL I'd probably fit right in there.

Google : ' router mat '

Old chewing gum pryed off the bottom of movie theatre seats. So I like to re-use stuff. Try not to hate me for it.

Stewmac has expensive and cheap 14" radius floyd copies. I'm really wondering about their new cheap one, 'cause you can buy just the nut for around $16.00. But if it's soft metal that the strings can wear grooves in (like I've seen on lower end guitars) it ain't worth it (at least not to me). That would be something if it's tough hardened steel like the expensive ones.

How about how the OP couldn't handle the fact that it's not something you can do at home (plus not on an already shaped neck), and so, interpreted every single post as being against how the big boys actually do it.

I would go single action adjustable on an electric. But if you insist on hollow tube, you could leave it hollow and see how the neck holds up that way and if it doesn't, you can do that trick they do on hollow tube Martins, where they clamp the neck into a back-bow (neck removed from body) and put a heavy coat of high quality epoxy on a graphite bar and shove that all the way into the hollow tube. Leave neck back-bow clamped over-night while epoxy cures. I have an old electric with a non adjustable T-rod. Damn thing has way too much relief, and I never feel like dealing with all the extra hassle in trying to fix it.