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My Second Build Attempt


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Hello everyone.

I've been chomping at the bit to build another guitar since my inaugural build. Not to be redundant but my second project is similar to my first with a few tweaks. I'm very happy with my first but I made some mistakes that I'd like to correct this time around. I'm also going to make this one with a maple top and try my hand at a carve.

I spent a lot of time trying to come up with something different and original but it proved harder than I thought. I ended up taking lines from several of my favorite designs and trying to merge them together. As you can see in my mock up some of my inspiration was one of guitarnut's builds (with his permission) and obviously a prs shape with a slightly deeper cut away and a rounder body.

For the neck I thought of doing a mahogany set neck but ultimately decided to save that for a future build. This one is going to be a bolt on. I'm also going to try my hand at some inlay on this also.

A good friend wanted to build him one also so I'm going to do two almost identical builds.

So here is the mock up I did. Not photoshop but it suits my needs for now.

I havent decided on which color I'm going to do yet. As far as the head stock design I kind of settled on this. I wanted to do something original but tasteful but found it a difficult task. I also learned that form usually follows function on headstocks. I wanted to do a 3/3 and its kind of derived from an iceman. At least thats how it started. I must have gone through dozens of roughs to get that far.

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Going to do mahogany body w maple top. Maple laminated neck and ebony fretboard and head plate with maple binding on the neck and headstock and maple pickup rings for contrast.

I was thinking of maple binding on the body but decided to just do faux binding.

This time I used my planer to thin down the laminate strips. My manual says not to plane thinner than 1/4" but I was able to get down to 1/8th which saved me some time and kept me from using a safety planer.

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Last time I did this I used WAY too much glue and made an absolute mess. This time I cut some notches into a plastic scraper to spread my glue like you do tile adhesive and it worked very well. I also followed some advice I read here and used a wet rag to clean up the squeeze out before it dried.

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Another problem I had last time was all my laminate strips sliding all over the place while I was clamping them up. This time I was a little more prepared and used some smaller clamps on the ends to keep them from sliding until my main clamps were tight.

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And the finished blank trued up on my new 4" bench jointer. It was so much easier to do with a power tool.

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Looking good :D Nice choice of woods for this project. The only suggestion I would make is use more clamps on your neck glue up. When I glue up a 30" long laminated neck I use a minimum of 15 clamps.

Thanks for the info. I've read a lot of different opinions on the subject of clamping. I probably could have used a few more but at the time thats what I had. Since this pic was taken bought a few more.

It actually came out very solid. No gaps anywhere.

Hers a few more pics.

I got my plans printed out and made my templates.

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The tops that I bought for these have been sitting in my garage for 5 months and in the process they slightly warped. I tried a bunch of things including wetting the concave side with water and laying the concave side down in the damp grass and letting it sit in the sun. Didnt work so a tried wetting them down and clamping them to a 3/4" thick flat piece of aluminum I have and letting it sit for 2 weeks.

Didnt help. I have a planer but that wouldnt work. What I needed was a large jointer.

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The next logical thing to do was to construct the router planing sled I has already planned on doing which came out nicely.

I used some beefy extruded aluminum to minimize any deflection. I used PTFE tape on the contact surfaces so it would glide smoothly.

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No pics but I used this to flatten out the tops and the body mahogany. I went out and bought a 1.25" mortising bit and It worked great.

I glued up my body blanks. My friend and I bought our mahogany from a place in San Diego called Frost hardwood but we did so on two separate occasions.

When I bought mine they had some beautiful dark mahogany but when we bought his they were out of the darker stuff (African I believe) and all they had was this lighter stuff. Because his blank was narrower we would have to make his body a 3 piece.

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The three piece clamped up in the back. If you look at the darker piece of mahogany on the right you can see I was playing with the idea of gluing in a maple stringer. I decided not to because I was thinking about how I would be able to stain the mahogany and leave the maple stringer a natural color. Simple tape it off I thought? I was worried about potential complications so I left it off. if anyone would like to offer advice on how this should be tackled I'm all ears because I'd like to try it in a future build.

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One of the tops ready to cut out.

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I'll post some more progress pics soon.

Edited by sdshirtman
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I really like your design. I was thinking that it looked a bit familiar, and then you mentioned guitarnut (I can't recall if he ever finished that one). I'm having the same warping problem on some maple I'm trying to join; working on it all day and finally got frustrated and called it a day.

For what it's worth, I like the tobacco bust in the mockups.

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Very nice design.

You guys in San Diego have great hardwood stores. It's one of the things I miss about San Diego.

Thx. I found/use Frost because its a half mile from my shop in Miramar. If you know of some other good sources for wood in San Diego let me know. Frost usually has quite a selection of really nice stuff but they pretty much dont carry any figured woods.

I really like your design. I was thinking that it looked a bit familiar, and then you mentioned guitarnut (I can't recall if he ever finished that one). I'm having the same warping problem on some maple I'm trying to join; working on it all day and finally got frustrated and called it a day.

For what it's worth, I like the tobacco bust in the mockups.

Thx. I like the tobacco too but I'm still up in the air a bit. I'd like to try it because its a classic color and I haven't every tried one on maple. At the same time part of me thinks tobacco bursts are too common. Maybe its because they're its so damn cool.

Now that is a chunk of aluminum!

Yeah it's pretty big. Its 30" x 20". An engineer friend gave it to me. It used to be a base for some big medical laser gizmo and its been ground dead flat on one side so its pretty handie to have around. Its heavy as hell and must weigh 40 pounds.

Here are a few more pictures. Cutting out the tops and bodies. I cut in a line about an 1/8th inch away from the actual cut line to give myself a safety zone when I'm glueing up.

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Once I got the tops and bottoms cut I stacked them up and started rethinking how thick of a body I was about to create so I decided to reduce the mahogany thickness by about 3/8th so I put it back on the sled.

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A cake knife works great to help unstick the two sided tape i use to attach the wood to the router sled.

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Next comes the electronics cavity route before I glue up.

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I hogged out the cavity with a forstner bit then set put it on the router table.

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Here is the finished route. Above it you can see the pile of spool clamps I made. Stewmac sells 6 of these for $26 bucks plus shipping.

I used a 4' x 1.25" dowel, some 5.5" machine bolts, some wing nuts and a package of cork I got from the craft store and they work just as well. I made 22 of them for about $35 bucks and an hour and a half of my time. Thats about 3 bucks cheaper per clamp than Stewmac.

These are going to make sure my edges have no gaps during my glue up.

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Edited by sdshirtman
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Here is a clip of the router jig in action and more pics.

My link

Glued up the top using the new spool clamps.

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I cut pretty far away from the edges to give myself some room for error but I'm thinking a little too much so I'm going to have to route this is several passes to avoid any potential tear out.

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I took my time with this and avoided any tear out so far.

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Switched bits for the reverse side then routed the back round over.

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I'm happy so far.

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Next I'm going to cut the neck out and install the truss rods I got from allied luther after waiting for a month for the new stock to come in.

Edited by sdshirtman
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i would have wanted a bit more clamping pressue in the centre of the bodies. it will probably be alright with the thickness of wood you are using but i tend to use a large clamping caul made from kitchen countertop and a few bigger clamps that reach deeper into the body - more pressue, spread out more evenly

i also made about 30 spool clamps a few years ago - so useful!

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i would have wanted a bit more clamping pressue in the centre of the bodies. it will probably be alright with the thickness of wood you are using but i tend to use a large clamping caul made from kitchen countertop and a few bigger clamps that reach deeper into the body - more pressue, spread out more evenly

i also made about 30 spool clamps a few years ago - so useful!

Wez - Does your caul have a curve or is it flat? Can you show us a picture? Thx!

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I got the necks cut out this weekend and it went pretty smoothly but I have a silly question.

Once I got them cut out I flattened the backs to spec with the router sled.

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One of my blanks was a little thinner than I wanted so I had to alter the neck angle from 14.5 degrees to 12.5 degrees to keep it a one piece. I'm hoping it wont be a big deal because its done now.

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Then to cut my truss rod slot. On my first build I did this after I cut the neck shape out and it complicated things quite a bit. So this time I'm doing it the easy way BEFORE I cut the neck shape out.

To do this I started to use the plastic table fence that came with my router for the first time and found out its absolutely worthless So I used a piece of mahogany I had that had been run through my jointer. It worked much better. I know this is probably rudimentary stuff for some of you experienced builders but I'm still learning.

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I need some reaffirmation on this because I'm having a hard time finding a definitive answer. On my first build I used a hotrod truss with the two round rods so this wasnt an issue but this is my first time using a truss rod with the one rod and a flat piece of steel welded on one side.

Its kind of embarrassing but I have these in backwards and these should go in with the flat steel side up correct?

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These are fantastic builds for what you call "rudimentary stuff" but that is what it is all about. Building by the numbers guarantees an instrument 10x better than just "winging it". Top marks sir! I'm following this thread for definite.

Hot Rods. It is academic as to which way they are mounted really. The rod is dual action, so all you're doing is reversing the action of the rod. I would go with whatever suits your design better, and in this case I would say "adjuster down" like you have it. Looks great.

Personally I really dig spoke wheel adjusters for heel-side adjustment and am considering making a bunch of brass wheels on a lathe to use on DIY single-action rods. I digress.

Edited by Prostheta
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Thx. I found/use Frost because its a half mile from my shop in Miramar. If you know of some other good sources for wood in San Diego let me know. Frost usually has quite a selection of really nice stuff but they pretty much dont carry any figured woods.

Didn't see this earlier. You have to check out this place if you haven't already. Their stock will blow your mind. It's up in Carlsbad, but worth the drive.

http://www.anexotichardwood.com/

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I stand corrected. I thought I was looking at those horrendously massive Stewmac Hot Rods there. :D

Much better!

Yeah, I'm about done with hot rods too... they work well but just take too deep of a slot. I'm sticking with All Parts rods... and when I'm out of those I'm going to give the Allied rods a chance.

sdshirtman... those guitars are looking good!

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Thanks for the positive responses and for the clarification on which way is up on the truss rods. I got these from Allied but I had to wait quite a while as they were out of them and on back order. I just like how much thinner they are and dont really want to take a chance of going through the back of the neck while shaping it. I've seen a couple recent threads here on that lately.

I think I'm almost running into a wall until my parts get here. I ordered them this morning and I can still hear my wallet screaming. It came out to just a tad over $900 from stewmac and I haven't picked out pickups yet or purchased any finishing supplies. But the $900 does include a few new tools like a precision router base and a pair of those sleek looking Schroeder stop tail bridges @ $108 per. You'd think for that price you'd get the mounting studs but nope, you have to buy those separate. I'm still second guessing why I didnt just do TOM bridges on these.

Those Schroeders better look pretty damn cool on there when its finished.

Edited by sdshirtman
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Thx. I found/use Frost because its a half mile from my shop in Miramar. If you know of some other good sources for wood in San Diego let me know. Frost usually has quite a selection of really nice stuff but they pretty much dont carry any figured woods.

Didn't see this earlier. You have to check out this place if you haven't already. Their stock will blow your mind. It's up in Carlsbad, but worth the drive.

http://www.anexotichardwood.com/

I checked out thier website today and it looks pretty cool. Next time I'm over there I'll be stopping by. Thanks for the heads up.

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While I was waiting for my parts to arrive I got my TR installed.

The way I installed these was unnecessary but I had time to kill so why not. Here are some unnecessary pics of the process.

I cut this using a small gouge then went on to fitting a piece of 1/4" maple over the TR nut.

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Sanded the small radius with a drill bit.

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Before I glued this piece in I took a small piece of folded over card stock and used it as a temporary shim over the nut.

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Set up my sander to make some this strips of 1/4 walnut.

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I glued the strip of walnut over the truss. This insures I wont have any problems with glue fouling my truss.

You can see here how the shim gave a nice gap over the TR nut. I used a japanese saw to cut off the excess wood here.

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And here is the finished truss install.

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Edited by sdshirtman
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