Junior

[Akula]

Hey all,

 

Having polished off the last round of builds, I did my normal spring-time workshop clear out and tidy up, and discovered that I have a fairly good collection of offcuts and spare parts. What to do...

 

Gonna build a single-cut flat-top guitar. I've got nothing sized for a proper body blank so it's going to be a set of pine boards I picked up off the street a few years ago. I've got the offcut from the underneath of a neck-through blank to use, as well as a fresh slice of my Ironbark billet for the fretboard. I figure I'll use this opportunity to work on some things I've never done before, and work on some things I could be doing better, like set neck construction, proper inlays, finishing and fretwork etc. The only thing I should need to purchase is a truss rod!

Single cut build, 660mm scale length, two humbuckers, T-O-M bridge, set neck with a neck angle.

 

 

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

Knotless pine??? Guess it all goes to export from here as everything in the lumberyards seems to be knotted.

[woodfab]

Pine! Interesting, Why not?

 

[ShatnersBassoon]

I believe some of the early Fender prototypes were pine. Cool start!

[Bizman62]

Rick Kelly of Carmine Street Guitars, N.Y. uses pine. Unlike Fender who just took what was available at the lumberyard, Kelly uses salvaged old-growth pine.

[henrim]

Pine’s fine. Athough so soft that it’s impossible to do anything without some dings every here and there.

[ShatnersBassoon]

1 minute ago, henrim said:

Pine’s fine. Athough so soft that it’s impossible to do anything without some dings every here and there.

I would suggest a hard finish, if that is a concern anyway.

[Professor Woozle]

1 hour ago, Bizman62 said:

Rick Kelly of Carmine Street Guitars, N.Y. uses pine. Unlike Fender who just took what was available at the lumberyard, Kelly uses salvaged old-growth pine.

That's got me thinking about the potential of reclaimed railway sleepers!

[ShatnersBassoon]

2 minutes ago, Professor Woozle said:

That's got me thinking about the potential of reclaimed railway sleepers!

Nice username

Yeah, the thing about pine is that it’s so readily available! 

[henrim]

14 minutes ago, Professor Woozle said:

reclaimed railway sleepers!

Nowadays they use concrete in Finland. But the old ones were creosote treated wood. Not something I would like to work with. But the old rails are good for many things!

[ShatnersBassoon]

24 minutes ago, henrim said:

Nowadays they use concrete in Finland. But the old ones were creosote treated wood. Not something I would like to work with. But the old rails are good for many things!

Come to think of it, I always thought it was oak they used. But maybe that is a UK thing. 

[Bizman62]

9 hours ago, ShatnersBassoon said:

I always thought it was oak they used.

This little sidetrack woke up my curiosity so I found this: https://www.agicorailfasteners.com/news/what-wood-are-railway-sleepers-made-of.html saying

• Common track section and turnout track section: Elm, birch, oak, jarrah, karri, sal, mora, maple, azobé, poplar, larch, pine, Yunnan pine (a kind of Chinese pine), spruce, fir, hemlock and other broad-leaved tree species (poplar isn’t used as turnout sleeper).
• Bridge track section: Huashan pine (a kind of Chinese pine), larch, Yunnan pine (a kind of Chinese pine), spruce, fir, hemlock, koraiensis, etc. 

The common nominator seems to be availability, using a local wood that matches the criteria for strength and durability. That's most likely why we have used creosote treated pine here in Finland. Pine grows naturally almost all over the country so there's little transportation costs. Birch is almost as common but it tends to rot so the choice is clear.

[Akula]

20 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Knotless pine???

Not quite! There's one on the top and two on the back, but I reckon the top one will look quite musical! It's definitely not old-growth but it's proper dry. 

 

15 hours ago, henrim said:

Pine’s fine. Athough so soft that it’s impossible to do anything without some dings every here and there.

Ohh yes. When building with "proper" timber I always seem to end up with a few scratches and dings to sort out of by the time I get to the finishing phase, so this is a really good test of how well I can take care of a lump of wood while it's on the bench.

 

15 hours ago, ShatnersBassoon said:

Yeah, the thing about pine is that it’s so readily available! 

Literally found it on the street! Eight sticks, about two meters long each. Clearly they'd been in someone's garage for a while. I've built a workbench and two sets of shelves with the stock, this is the last of it.

 

 

Routed and sanded the sides of the body. I'm in dire need of a spindle sander (along with a drill press, planer thicknesser, etc), but I had this crazy idea to rig up my portable drill press to the underside of the bench and use a sanding drum in lieu of correct equipment. Worked damn well, I gotta say, although the drum got a bit clogged. Next refinement is to make a smooth melanine table for the workpiece to ride on, and rig up some kind of dust extraction to the shop vac.

 

Resawed a fretboard blank off my Ironbark billet. This is also reclaimed timber, and it does indeed have nails in it which I just cannot remove - every resaw is a risk of blade damage. Really tempted to just plane the four sides true and use the rest of it as the world's heaviest levelling beam! 

The lot of timber weighs in at 2080g. That's before pickups and electronics routing, and the mahogany neck is still oversized and not carved. But then there will be the added weight of hardware... Hoping neck dive doesn't become an issue here.

 

First question - inlays. I'll probably do some trapezoid fretboard markers, and I want to have a go at a "J" on the headstock. Regarding inlay material, I have three options of stock laying around the shop. First is maple timber, but I've head it can be a pain to glue without getting "streaky". Second is aluminium, which is attractive because I can polish it to a shine, but metal inlay might be a bit ambitious for my first attempt? Third, and safest, is 2mm acrylic sheet. Which one should I go for?

 

Second question - neck angle and tenon. The thickness of my pine body is 35mm, already quite thin. I have a mahogany neck with a 25mm thick stacked heel. I'm aware that most manufacturers cut the neck angle into the mortise, but this leaves me with very little body wood underneath the neck. Should I cut the neck heel and tenon thinner, I would have nothing to go through the pickup area, and end up with nothing more than a glued-in bolt-on heel, probably not a good idea. This illustrates my problem:

 

Now, say I plane an angle into the bottom of the tenon, and leave the mortise parallel with the top and bottom of the body. In my mind, this gives the most glue area to the joint, while leaving a good bit of body underneath the neck heel. 

Putting the angle in the tenon makes perfect sense to me, but I can't find many examples of people doing this. Is there something I haven't thought of?

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

2 hours ago, Akula said:

Putting the angle in the tenon makes perfect sense to me, but I can't find many examples of people doing this. Is there something I haven't thought of?

That was once asked in a Crimson video and Mr Crowe couldn't find any major issues with the idea. With a bolt-on neck changing it would be difficult but a set neck is intended to be permanently attached.

Then again, you don't need much surface to glue a neck. The neck pocket of a Strat is big enough for a glue joint. This pocket is 45-75 x 55 mm, 20 mm deep, and it doesn't seem to want to crack:

[Professor Woozle]

23 hours ago, ShatnersBassoon said:

Come to think of it, I always thought it was oak they used. But maybe that is a UK thing. 

Most of the ones I've had my hands on were creosoted pitch pine - the creosote doesn't seem to soak in all that far, but the creosoted parts make great kindling when chopped up. I think the core parts would be OK to work with but you'd need to make sure you cut away all the outer layers!

[Bizman62]

10 hours ago, Professor Woozle said:

the creosote doesn't seem to soak in all that far,

True! Back in the day I spent one weekend as a railroad worker for a narrow rail track and in order to change some of the sleepers we had to cut salvaged standard width ones a bit shorter. That involved chopping the surface off with axes before using the chainsaw as there was quite a lot of sand packed in the pores. But indeed the center didn't look like being treated.

[Akula]

Did the electronics cavity with a generic template. I'm gonna go for a steel cover, because I'm definitely not doing a pine one and anything else would look very strange indeed. Oh and the jack hole got very fuzzy - I'll probably cover that up with a rectangle plate.

 

The neck is going well. It's a three-piece mahogany, with Black Bean veneer in between laminates, scarf jointed and stacked heel. I had a tear-out incident on the headstock, so I planed it flat and glued on an offcut. It's a 3-by-3 headstock with an open-book shape, but I decided to offset the tuners and make it asymmetrical. 

 

Whipped up a mitre box for cutting fret slots. I've been meaning to do this for years, and I do mean years. Marking and cutting took about 30mins. 

 

And I also made up an acrylic depth stop. I had a plywood one for ages, but this one has angled slots and thumbscrews so I can adjust the depth easily. I cut the frets with the mitre box first, then I'll glue and radius, then re-cut the fret slots with the depth stop on the saw to ensure a round-bottomed slot underneath the fret tang.

 

On impulse, I decided that a square end to the fretboard would be boring, so I cut the same open-book shape into it. 

 

Fretboard glue up. 

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

That headstock looks yummy, I definitely have to do at least one asymmetric one! And mirroring the shape at the end of the fretboard sure looks something else.

And the mitre box is yet another example of homemade simple things that work just as well as a $500-ish pro tool milled out of a single block of pompousium, with unicorn oil lubricated bearings and other bells and whistles.

[ScottR]

I'm pretty sure what is named pine in Australia is a different tree that what is named pine in North America and Europe.

That said, I'm loving this! You found a guitar in the street.

SR

 

[Bizman62]

1 hour ago, ScottR said:

I'm pretty sure what is named pine in Australia is a different tree that what is named pine in North America and Europe.

That's what I've been thinking as well. At least it has grown much faster than ours. Only two growth rings on the side!!! Here the definition for high quality pine is about 1 mm per year, the southern lumber having grown on fields about 5-10 mm a year is called snot pine (literal translation) as it's soft like phlegm.

[Akula]

On 9/8/2023 at 1:45 AM, Bizman62 said:

That headstock looks yummy, I definitely have to do at least one asymmetric one! And mirroring the shape at the end of the fretboard sure looks something else.

And the mitre box is yet another example of homemade simple things that work just as well as a $500-ish pro tool milled out of a single block of pompousium, with unicorn oil lubricated bearings and other bells and whistles.

Cheers! Yeah that mitre box is about as simple as it gets. It does squeak a little bit, so I might add some bearings. Then of course I'll need some neo magnets to hold the blade against the bearings. And at that point I may as well add some threaded inserts and thumbwheels for a depth stop. Then I'll start making multiscales and have to re-think the whole thing!

Anyways, here's the headstock in it's final form:

 

On 9/8/2023 at 2:34 AM, ScottR said:

I'm pretty sure what is named pine in Australia is a different tree that what is named pine in North America and Europe.

That said, I'm loving this! You found a guitar in the street.

Most definitely. I'm no expert at identifying wood species, but this "pine" is a bit darker in colour to the shite we get from the local hardware stores, but it's just as soft and pliable. Very few growth rings, but the knots are smooth and stable and dry. And light! Currently the whole build is at 1.7kg.

 

 

Okay, inlays. I did a test piece, and I thought it went pretty well. The CA did bleed around a little bit, but I was fairly happy with it. First attempt at a non-circular inlay, hell yeah!

 

Then I descended to Inlay Hell.

 

First problem - the acrylic material is very slightly translucent, so the CA flooding the bottom of the inlay shows through, giving a kind of mottled appearance. This I could probably live with. Secondly, and more seriously, was the massive amounts of chipping and tear0ut while creating the recesses. I scored the lines with brand new scalpel blades, sharpened my chisels to a surgical degree, and went slowly and methodically, but this timber is so old and dry that I lost heaps of material around my crisp clean lines. I filled with dust and CA, but it sticks out. Very obvious.

 

I've two options here, the second swiftly following the first if it should fail. I'm going to attempt to route a 2mm channel around each inlay, and then inlay a piece of ebony or black acrylic into that slot. I'll be using a dremel, with a slotted template and lots of lube to stop the shaft of the bit overheating. If this fails, I'll tear off the fretboard and start again.

The whole point of this build was to try some new techniques that I've never done before. Inlays was one of them. I won't accept my own shoddy work.

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

1 hour ago, Akula said:

that mitre box is about as simple as it gets. It does squeak a little bit,

Some candlewax on the blade?

[woodfab]

Looking Good.

[Akula]

On 9/10/2023 at 11:25 PM, Bizman62 said:

Some candlewax on the blade?

Yep, that helps, but I think because the acrylic sides of the mitre box are not braced against anything they're just vibrating with each stroke. Candlewax is always a good idea though! I use that stuff on everything.

 

On 9/11/2023 at 6:09 AM, woodfab said:

Looking Good.

Thanks!

 

So I tested my idea of routing a binding channel for each inlay to hide the chip-out and CA staining... didn't work very well. On the test piece, I couldn't get a straight line by running the bit against a template, and the channel is still rounded at the bottom. To set the scene, I'm using a rotary tool with a gooseneck attachment. This will not do. My last-ditch effort for this fretboard will be to make a router base for my rotary tool, stick a router bit in the chuck, and completely route out the old inlays, before installing some slightly bigger ones. 

Here's an idea for preventing both chip-out and CA staining: maybe I'll just flood the whole fretboard with CA? Is that crazy? I figure it'll fill a lot of the open pores and hold the fibres together, sand to a high gloss finish, and give no contrast to the areas which will inevitably get CA bleed from gluing in the new inlays. That's my thoughts. Let me know if it's a dumb move.

 

Hoping to get back in the workshop over the weekend. 

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

2 hours ago, Akula said:

I think because the acrylic sides of the mitre box are not braced against anything they're just vibrating with each stroke

ahh yes, they're not too thick. Half an inch or at least 10 mm whichever unit you prefer should fix that issue but there's times when you just have to go with what you have. An exoskeleton of sorts might do the trick, retaining visibility while damping vibrations.

 

2 hours ago, Akula said:

maybe I'll just flood the whole fretboard with CA? Is that crazy? I figure it'll fill a lot of the open pores and hold the fibres together, sand to a high gloss finish, and give no contrast to the areas which will inevitably get CA bleed from gluing in the new inlays.

Didn't someone just do that on a recent build? Or was it someone at the course? Or some youtubist? Anyhow, CA can be used as a finish. But you'll have to have very good ventilation, rather a fume hood/closet so you won't breathe or get the vapours into your eyes. Even sanding and buffing should be done under similar shields. That stuff is nasty as hell!