johnuk

It goes to show, even an expensive guitar has to fall to it's enviroment! I don't usually play standing up, but, just recently, while I was sitting down, the rear strap lock's screw just slide straight out of the body of my Ibanez JS10th. This seems to be a continuing problem with Ibanez's Luthite guitars, I think they need to have a look at the drill sizes they're choosing. There was almost no grip on the threads of the screw. It looks like the guy's who chose the drill sizes haven't cleared the holes out before testing the screw's fit, as there was a bit of machining dust in the screw's thread. I wanted to know what the best idea would be to resurface the screw thread again; I need to repack the hole. The guitar is made from Luthite, a type of plastic. So I REALLY don't want to risk using any form of Cyno glue, as it'll probably haze or blemish the plastic surrounding it. I also doubt that packing wood into the hole using PVC to bind it will stick to the surface either. My only thought is to put a few drops of slow curing epoxy into the hole and then reinsert the screw, letting it set in place. I have enough trouble using a screw driver around the guitar, so a hand drill armed with a razor sharp bit spinning 3000 times a minute would be asking for it. So, I could really use any advice from the guys here who've had to do this themselves! Best wishes, John

I remember see something on a Trade Secrets program about this. The guy mixed Talcum powdered with something, Naptha perhaps, to form a really thick goo. Then he painted it all over the stained area and let it dry solid. The stuff just brakes away like a powder once it's dry, but it seemed to work really well. I think the Talcum powder helps soak up the oil. Putting a bit of gentle pressure on it probably wouldn't hurt. You can buy Talc from almost superstore. It's in the section where all the girly stuff is usually. Not that I er... spend... erm... much time around there...

I have a Peterson VS-2 Strobe tuner for sale in the UK or Europe. The tuner is brand new and still in it's crispy clean box, unused. Please email me if you're be interested. My best wishes, John johnhe-uk@supanet.com

Thanks for the ideas. I'll give it a go!

Well, yeah! I shouldn't have touched the guitar... but I did anyway! I have a Fender Squire lying around which is not only third hand, but has been thru a number of modifications and was looking for sad about it's self. So I am fitting a brand new original FR I've had lying around for months and some other new bits I have spare to make it a fun guitar to play about the house. I'm not trying to create a work of art by any means. I am am trying to think of a way I can fill the horrible cavities. I remember seeing a thread similar to this on here some time last year. I don't want to have a pickguard, so I need to fill in the electronics cavity and leave a space where I want the bridge pickup to go. A bit like EVH first home made Kramer guitars - I can think of a way to do this but I thought I'd ask you to make sure I wasn't doing anything seriously unnecessary. Although I have new parts lying around to put in the guitar, I don't want to spend a lot of time with it or any particularly large amount of money - it's destiny is as a beta guitar. My first idea was to mix up some two part resin and just pour it into the cavity, perhaps adding some lumps of spare mahogany to remove some of the volume, and save cost. Then I began wondering if perhaps there was something else I could use. Epoxy never seems to dry past being rubbery, so that's not going to work. But I read something about cement / plaster based moulding materials. Like I say, it's nothing major, it's a cheap guitar and I'm only fixing it up because I have the parts spare. I have to say though, whatever the answer is, I'd really prefer it didn't involve any routing. The pourable resin has the beautiful aspect to it that I can just mix it, pour it and leave it to set up, then sand it flat. But it's about $25 for a bottle each of the parts, and it's tricky to find in the UK. Any ideas? Many thanks! John

That's sounds like such an easier idea! I fully understand what you're describing. The main problem was the rate I could join the boards, so the simplicity of the wedge idea is an ultimate extra. I really appreciate your help! John

This isn't strictly guitar related, but it's close enough... I wanted to use some wide Mahogany boards for something but the widest the planks come is 6". After machine planing they end up at about 145mm wide and 18mm thick. I would be using roughly 800mm lengths of this timber to form boards around 435mm wide; so about three of the planks would be lying side by side. I understand how to glue using Titeboard but I am kind of stuck on how I should go about joining the piece together. Sash clamping is the most obvious option. But I may need to produce a number of these boards within a certain time frame and buying tens and tens of sash clamps that can open over 400mm is going to cost quite a lot in itself. Also, this method is far too time consuming and labour intensive for the number of boards that will need clamping. Can anyone think of an ingenious method for clamping, or squeezing the boards, on mass? I thought that one idea might be to produce something similar to a mitre box with a removable side. It could even be put together from metal I guess. Some sort of grill would support the boards to keep them level; this would stop them gluing themselves to the jig. I also thought it would help if another system applies pressure to their other sides to keep them level with each other and ensure none have caught on something and stuck slightly out of alignment. The box would have an internal width of something just under 435mm so when the side was closed it would squeeze the pieces together. That's just an idea anyway. Is there anything already available for doing this kind of thing? I know it is, or at least was, quite common place for carpenters who were laying floors from such planks to do something similar. Surely out of all those carpenters, one must have already thought of a solution to it other than sash clamps? Ideally the clamp would be able to hold two or three boards at a time. I figured I could achieve that by using machined spacers between each board, since, by the time they're glued, they're not going to fit back thru the automatic plane. Thanks for any help with this! John

I used to weld gates and railings together for this guy I ended up working with after my work experience at school. We were MIG welding it so we had the amps up fairly high and I recall a number of times watching gates I could barely lift, jump off the supports as I started to weld. We would connect the earths to metal stands and then rest the gate lying down on them. I also found out very quickly they would tack weld themselves onto the supports. Soon after I opted to loosen them with a hammer before trying to pick them up. When I left that place I had a sun tan to die for and a burn in my leg that's taken the last year to heal over. Welding... such fun!

He he he he. That would be quite nasty. I think Francium is actually radioactive as well! So the guitar would probably glow in the dark too. Believe it or not, which I bet many of you won't, you can actually weld things like magnesium castings. They have such a big mass and high thermal conductivity that the heat is spread out all over them very easily, before it can cause it to ignite. Group 1 metals burn in water beautifully, Magnesium's extra electron means you need to use steam to make it react, again, thermal conductivity and mass come into play.

We have a video about how to make your own bows. It's been a while since I watched it, but I think I remember seeing them steaming the timber so they could form it into a compound shape. I'm pretty sure it was bows, but it might have been something else. The steaming thing they did it in was an all over method, rather than applied at a point. They left it in there steaming for hours and then bent it by applying some pressure to it, rather than the wood just bending with human force alone. I think they might have also used pressurised steam... do you have a pressure cooker? See if there's anything around your house you could put the top it while it is steamed, like a water tank. A big polysytrene box off a Hi-Fi or something like that would work great I would guess. The heat from the steam would be contained very well. I think in the US they even sell big polysytrene boxes like this as coolers for drinks at things like BBQ's. I've never seen them like that here in the UK, we have them lined in plastic instead, which is probably the same as in the US now as well.

I asked a similar question a while back. A lot of guitars have something in the region of a 2 - 3mm gap at the body where the neck looks as if it's sitting out of the body. I must stress, 1 - 3mm of neck material, not including the finger board, this adds a bit more on as well. The neck can be practically level in this case because most floating bridges, like the Floyd Rose, can be lowered right down into their cavities. Due to the very way in which something like a Tune-o-matic is designed, to sit on top of the body, that no longer is the case. Although... now I'm wondering if you could perhaps route a pocket and recess a fixed bridge into the body as well...

That's a cool idea Derek, and I thought about it earlier. But really it's going to be far so much work that it probably outweighs the cost of just buying a new piece, since I haven't done too much work on it so far. I can always use this wood to test my hand out at things before doing them on the next piece. I've heard of a few guitar companies making parts from aluminium. Fender made some Tele and Strat models with cast hollow bodies and them had them anodised, I think in some fairly compex patterns like flags, but I might be wrong. They had problems with them because the necks would expand too much as they warmed up and pull the guitar slightly out of tune. That's something I'd like to check up on though, I'm sure there must be some way to over come it; other than just detuning your guitar slightly to start with. I would love to make a guitar from metal because I'm so much better with it than I am with wood!!! I found a type of aluminium which is blown into a foam. I thought it would be an interesting material to fill the cavity inside the body of a guitar with as it's about the only form of metal which recreates the cellular nature of wood in some way. A solid chunk of magnesium the same size as a guitar body is somewhere between 400 - 700 pounds, but it's also incredibly light. A shell would cost much less I would assume.

Thanks Derek & Danno, I'm going to take a guess now, you were using Tite Bond Derek? Now I'm going to have to spend five weeks finding somewhere that sells this stuff locally! Danno, I think you may also have a point! How many of you guys building guitar necks have had to plane twists or bows out of your timber before? I always pictured making the neck as being more founded in cutting the profile and shaving it down to shape rather than hand planing out 1mm worth fo twist, curve or bow. I still think instrument building seems to belong in the realms of accuracy used in metal working! If only I could find a light weight metal that that doesn't expand or contract with heat changes and is also tonally beautiful... hmmmm... John

Having a longer neck also makes it easier to make a positioning error in moving your hands. Plus he has the neck at waist level where he can't see his finger on it too clearly. I just thought it was funkier than watching Vai tap some scale for 3 minutes.