ADFinlayson

@RonMay Yep a couple of drops to fill the gaps is a good idea, especially between the underside of crown and the binding, last thing you want is a gap at the fret ends Jeff, as tempting as it is, there will be no custom inlays at the 12 we're going for a repair sympathetic to the condition

Ah I see, I misread, 60 euros, well there is a degree of getting what you pay for. In this case, Pete (les paul owner) paid just shy of £300 for a refret. He did tell me the name of the luthier that did the work but I won't name and shame because that's not me and I've only heard one side of the story. Pete will no doubt tell his students who it was that rescued it so that's enough for me. Besides, I've got to successfully rescue it yet.

Christ, 600 euros for that butchery! I can't imagine why A refret would turn into a refinish, refinishing is the last thing I would want to do to a guitar.

ha first world problems, not having to worry about efficiency of space I have also been thinking about wood storage for I move workshops as I'm fed up with having it stacked in my office, unless I end up with a really big office that is (which I doubt). I figured these free standing units are probably the best bang for my buck at £150, I see a lot of woodworkers using them, even seen a couple of acoustic builders using them as workbenches. They're 1920t x 1830w x 610d so deep enough for tops and body blanks, neck blanks would either have to be stickered across or be poking out probably unstickered. When I considered that timber from my local yard to build my workbench cost £200 PAR, and I actually had to make the thing, these things seem like a bargain.

I think he just whacks the contrast way up when he takes photos of the tops to bring out the curl. The bottom one for a SG2000 build I'm doing for a friend which will be red with a dark burst, the other one is not spoken for yet but I've got loads of quilt and next to no flame so it will get used for something - a couple of people are teasing about prs style builds so it will no doubt end up as one of my usual kind of builds. Def going to be building myself something in the near future though. I've got a load of parts and a set of PRS pups in a box behind me that are screaming to go in something and I haven't build myself a guitar for ages That's a nice space you've got there. is that a double garage that you've built an interior in? Most houses in the UK come with 5.5 x 2.5m garages, I'm always jealous of just how much foot print the average house in the U.S has compared to here.

Ordered a couple of carve tops for 2021 builds, that's as close as I've been to guitar building for the last few weeks. Apart from that, I tidied my house and showed some prospective buyers round. God I need to move

Starting with premade templates will save you a lot of time and take out a lot of the guess work, even if you only use the neck and pocket template for a j-bass etc, no reason not to use those as a base and design your own body and/or headstock. I do that occasionally because someone will want the design of one guitar, but thescale/neck taper of another guitar. e.g I made a flying V for a mate a couple of years ago but he wanted a PRS cu24 neck and electronics. having a set of templates makes designing on paper a lot easier too! I made a 1 piece black limba neckthrough bass for a friend of mine, finished it in the summer. So far it has been perfectly stable but you're always going to be safer making a bass from laminates. Also, there is no shame in getting a pre-slotted fretboard blank, I did that for my first neck build to negate the risk of inaccurate fret slots.

So my old teacher got in touch with me a couple of months ago, apparently he'd been following my builds on my facebook page taught me from about 97 - 2005. He had a 1990 cherry custom, gold hardware. Stunning les paul and I always wanted one - it had that plays itself action that some les pauls do, well out of price range of a teenager though. Anyway he got in touch because he had recently taken it to a luthier for a refret. The guy had it for months and went off the radar, when he finally got it back it looks like this. So he asked if there was anything could do to make it playable again. My initial stance was that I don't really do repairs so he got in touch with a few other luthiers. No one wanted to touch it, even my most trusted repair man wasn't interested so I told him to bring it round so I can have a proper look He paid for a premium refret and it's had the binding sawn through, file marks all over the neck and binding, only about half of the frets are actually down so levelled to the point that the high ones had almost no crown, razor sharp fret ends and well it's just unplayable. It's also covered in new dents, nasty ones - apparently the bloke and an accident in his shop and a load of cases fell on him including this one... A couple of inlays have been sanded through too. So I've said I'll make it playable for him. We did talk about binding replacement and replacing warn inlays but it feels like going to far, this guitar has either been used for lessons or gigged practically every day for 30 years which is why the neck has no lacquer on it Headstock is still in one piece though So I started by whipping the dreadful frets out, yeah.. more like 2 hours of carefully lifting out with a soldering iron because they were epoxied in. There were no extra chips, but in places there were these thick lines, of epoxy between the board and the high frets, so I carefully removed what I could with a sharp chisel, then spot sanded all the dodgy high areas because I want to do as little of levelling the fretboard as possible given that 19 and 21st inlays have already been sanded through. The 12th fret inlay looks to be paper thin and the dark ebony is showing through it. Once I got all the frets out, I had the neck pickup out to be nosey. Tenon does not reach the neck pickup route on this one and to my amazement, look how thin the top is. The break angle isn't as extreme as my mate Ollie's black beauty either so there were clearly some major design changes between the BB from 1987 and this from 1990. I cleaned as much of the glue and crud as I could off the binding then made some new binding/acetone putty mix. I've never tried that before so this was a live experiment, it really works! The original binding is white under nitro and has 30 years of yellowing so I need to do something with colour matching, however the previous butcher sanded all of the finish off the freboard binding so it's currently almost white (I did get some white and ivory coloured binding to get the closest match but this binding was clearly white originally) I let the acetone soften up the binding for a good hour or so, then filled all the fret slots using a cocktail stick to push it in the gap. Once filled it was pretty hard again within half an hour but I left it over night. Then I carefully went at it with a razor to remove the excess (again, so there is minimal sanding of the fretboard). You can see here what I mean about the wafer thin 12th inlay. Now you can see the side I've scraped and the one I haven't. There are a couple of spots on the sides that will require an extra application, but it was at this point I realised I'm in business with this method. I'm going to get the top of the binding perfectly level prior to fret installation, but not going to go mad getting the binding level on the sides until the frets are in so I can file everything level at once to minimise material loss.

That piezo sounds excellent, I missed that in your build thread, a nice little twist

Forgot about this, absolute classic

Sorry I haven't got any builds that close to completion.

Ziricote at the lumber yard Fancy selling me a neck blank Scott?

Jointing the figured stuff was my first thought with that thing, looked pretty cool until I saw the price.

Ah I'm afraid you do, ziricote is native to central america, the guy I buy from is in North Carolina, I bet you pay a lot less for it than I do!

So jealous of the fact that you lot over the pond can just bimble down to your local yard and pick up highly figured maple when I have to import it for hundreds

I've been buying rolls of Mirka paper lately, I used to buy sheets of 3m which are on par with the Mirka in terms of quality but A4 sheets of 3m is hellishly expensive, so £35/roll for Mirka seems the most cost effective way to buy it, although tear jerking when you need to buy a few grits at once. I'm planning to build a giant toilet roll holder for them, I'll keep that away from the toilet though!

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that's a bit tasty

Got my colour problem sorted after the above blunder. Scuffed it all back a bit with a scotch pad and gave it another stain then a light coat of lacquer all over to seal the colour. Didn't bother filming any of the spraying because I was worried about runs or missing stuff. It's a PITA trying to film spraying because I'm worrying about what the camera can see, putting the camera in the right place meant getting the sun in my eyes and missing stuff. Once it had some lacquer on it, I used my walnut colour filler and wiped that on and straight off. Close up after filling grian - It didn't come out quite as custardy as I was going for but the white stain just wasn't penetrating the wood well enough. I could have gone over it with white again and sprayed over it for the right colour but I could see the finish flaking off in no time. Got my control covers fitted too So far red has had 4 coats and yellow's had 2, hopefully I'll be able to fire a load more on later this week, eager to play those p90s

Thanks chaps, really happy with the red one, colour has come out like a nice vintage cherry. I should have done a second coat of filler though so I'm def going to need a few more coats of lacquer before I can level it off. The yellow one is fighting me a bit - I got it stained and really happy with the colour At this point I was thinking about spraying a couple of really thin coats to seal then grainfill afterwards with a brown filler, but figured as I'm only spraying the body and headstock, filling the grain after sealing will cause staining issues on the neck. So I decided to to use the same method as the red only with yellow filler. But wiping off the excess filler as eradicated my nice stain job So I've wiped it back fairly brutally in the hope that I can apply some more of the pale yellow stain after the filler has dried. If it doesn't take then I'm going to have to sand back to bare and try again.

Been a while since working on these but just got on to finishing. Hopefully I'll get the yellow one done before the weather turns

This has got me thinking of the early prs bright switch, you could always swap out your bridge volume for a push pull and use that in conjunction with your cap to give you a switchable tone.

If you dropped that guitar in my lap, I'd have no idea what to do with it but even so, I think it's fucking epic Jeff, coolest build I've seen in my time on PG

A one-piece guitar get's a kudos from me, hats off

Good save, I couldn't see what you'd done at all until I scrolled up and saw the progress. Looking forward to seeing it progress.