Muzz

In cutting out the neck template I tried a new way of lining up a straight edge to run my router template bit along. I was going for 43 mm at the top and 56.5 mm at the bottom. I often find that when putting a straight edge on wood marked with a line, I cover up the pencil line and can't see where I am, so I placed blue tape triangles with the point right where I want to cut. Then lined the straight edge up with the points. Top end bottom

The painting process on a Frankenstein is great fun, I painted up a premade body a few years back for a friend, so satisfying pulling the tape off and seeing the design appear.

Headstock veneer

Making the headstock template, straight lines cut first, Rasp and sandpaper to take out the curves

20 frets! That's the new thing I have learnt today

My New Year's resolution was to cover one of my walls with hook, and myself with loop, and I'm sticking to it. Amazingly that MNC fuels my dust collector as well

Always good to have lots of grunt, I finished flattening the bottom of the fretboard Made some fuel for my sanding machine, mac n cheese and introduced these two to each other

Yep, the white binding is going to look schmicko against the blue top,

You have confirmed my thoughts that routers for guitar making are better off with AC rather than DC power I flattened the top of the headstock region today using a roll sheet of sand paper on a piece of 8 mm thick glass to get perfect flatness, a technique suggested to me by a forum member. The back still needs done, you can see the ridges at the sides where Plenty O' Fish 400 decided it was retirement time Here is the scratch plate and guts of the guitar I am probably going to swap the neck pick up for another rails humbucker

So cool to see that f hole cut by hand, real craftsmanship

Q. How many routers does a guitar maker need? A. Just one more I am looking at those mid size routers and they look good, has anyone tried a lithium battery router? Is there enough grunt? This one arrived at the click and collect store on Friday, the Plenty O' Fish 1200 I'll get used to it on the practise neck first, meanwhile lots of sanding has been done on the maple neck and a bit more to go.

First wing on

Yes, I like to shave small amounts of wood per pass and feel the router glide over the wood like a felt-footed pointer on a Ouji board, while mainataining a firm but non-tensed grip. For my old router the bolt on the clamp handle is made of soft pot metal (it should have been made out of hardened steel) it simply wore out, quite amazing that it lasted 13 years really. The router was a lovely gift from my family that brought me much joy, I will take a photo of it to keep the memory and then it will go to the great toolshed in the sky. I have this on order While that is on it's way I experimented on the practise neck with a glue I have not tried before the clamp police paid me a visit and issued me a ticket, I went to Bunnings in the afternoon to atone and bought two new F clamps and contemplated this rough old piece of rosewood for the fretboard, it has some nice majenta colour in it I got a lot of flattening done on it nearly there, you can see the area that is not yet making contact with the sandpaper, it's about the thickness of copy paper at this stage

Hahaha get trout of here, you guys are krilling me

Fantastic start, and lovely grain pattern

These certainly cheered me up, and in the interests of keeping the forum family friendly, lets just go with when I realised my router's clamp handle had become as useful as a one legged man in a butt kicking competition, I yelled at it oh you plenty of fish super interestingly another meaning of POF is probability of failure, I wonder if the POF 1200 is three times more likely to fail than the POF 400.

What a beautiful guitar, Queensland Maple is a lovely timber to make necks out of, the three different timbers here make a great combination.

I did end up getting a small step though in the pieces for an entirely different reason. , At first, with the exception of the tiny chip in the corner of that piece on the left, everything was going great Until the bit stopped making contact with the wood, the clamp handle that holds the depth of the plunge had reached the level of stripping on its bolt where it gave up holding the router down on its springs and the springs won the fight, the router rose up on the springs and I was routing air. This is the culprit with stripped threads, The same thing happened about 13 years ago, now if I could go back in time I would and I woul buy three replacement handles for $5 each on EBay when Bosch were still making them, instead of the one that I did. The router is called a POF I called that router something that has the acronym POF but I added another word at the end.

It's good to get a bit where the roller perfectly matches the blade, this one has been holding its shape for a while now, that's an important point about being careful using the roller on a cut you have made yourself. You can see a 2 mm section in the photo above at the top of the scarf where I used the first cut surface as a roller guide to reach the portion that the bit didn't reach on the first rout depth and small irregularities in the cut can get magnified this way as well, but I think I got away with it this time, Then I had to thickness thewood to make the wings, without a thicknesser. I taped a pice of pine down and then taped my 20 mm thick rock maple pieces to it. Double sided tape is thick and spongey and those pieces would habe wobbled under the router blade like that so they were stabilised by pieces of pine taped on either side and then two more pieces of scrap clamped on to stop the whole complex from wobbling. Sled on the top of the rails and I took 3 mm off the top before a mechanical failure occured

Today I double sided taped the headstock region to a flat edge and top offcut and ran along the edge with this bit It sqaured off all right

Looking good and sounding phat, awesome tone

Fantastic and positive use of the old skate board decks and the guitar looks so cool

G'Day Mate, for you and everyone here on the forum who has carved pieces of wood, joined them together, added strings and played a tune on the result here is another view of the Rubber of Affirmation, and for those of you who haven't take the affirmation anyway and add, "you can do it"

Glued up the scarf joint in the rock maple, next step is flattening and squaring off some of the headstock sides and making the wings.

Cool telies, they are binging the mojo, the Marauder pick up is going to sound phat in there, and those pick ups have a great look to them. I have this in the bridge posi, Yes, DW's Marauder looks like it has a custom pick guard with the humbucker added, his mother gave him that guitar as his first electric. Yes some single space humbucker rails (like the one above) can give a massive output for passive pickups and get close to the Metallica, pushing the preamp sound. The advantage with them is they will clean up nicely when they are turned down with the guitar volume, unlike EMG actives. Such a great surprise when you don't know what your guitar is going to sound like and you plug it in and boom Finished my plan today