Junior

[Akula]

On 9/14/2023 at 12:20 AM, Bizman62 said:

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.

And this is the exact reason why, after careful thought, I decided not to use CA any more than I have to. Having closed enough of my work-related wounds with the stuff, I can live without any more of my skin getting stuck together!

 

So I re-did my inlays, this time rectangular, and slightly bigger. I removed the old ones carefully, routed to a flat depth, then started chiselling to the scored lines. My lord, I was sooo careful, and I still managed to get huge amounts of chip-out.

 

I think where I'd previously filled chip-out with CA and dust, the glue had bled into the dry fibres of wood, so even the sharpest chisel just pulled out long splinters from my fretboard. It was at this point that the guitar nearly ended up in Sydney Harbour. I really hate it when I suck at stuff!

Well, if you can't fix your mistakes, hide them. I flooded the edges of all the inlays (even the good ones) with a mix of epoxy, sawdust, black stain, and grain filler, packed it down nice and tight, and sanded it back flush the next day. It came out almost like a "burst" around each inlay.

 

Then I stained the whole fretboard black a few times, really rubbing that stain into the huge open pores.

 

And when that dried, I sanded back to leave a hazy black chatoyance, with the pores (and chip-out) completely black. The mistakes are still there, granted, but this last-ditch effort saved the fretboard and neck. Purpose of this build was to learn, and I have definitely learned to be much more careful with inlay work, especially when dealing with 200-year-old fretboard timber. Don't ever practice on your client's guitars - build one for yourself out of pine first! 

 

I did the pickup routes, mortise route, drilled a few wiring holes, and then glued the neck to the body. The two parts have "mated", mate, and what a cathartic process it was.

 

....What colour should I make it? I'm thinking red. Cherry red. Thoughts?

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

That fretboard became classy after all, well done with the fixing!

Cherry red? A dark chocolatey is yummy in my liking but there's so many other shades of it: https://icolorpalette.com/color/cherry-red

Not too long ago my younger one moved to her own apartment, needing some furniture. So I took her old table top which was just a pine board and sanded all the crayon and water colour off, then flooded it with dark cherry red dye. She loved it. Then she found out that a TV table is needed. There was another pine top table with shorter legs originating from a sofa table, having served in the children's room and looking like it. So the orbital sander was needed again. Unfortunately the cherry red dye was running out but mixing crimson red with black and maybe drops of some other like amber gave a close enough result to match with the other one, they now stand side by side.

[Andyjr1515]

That really is coming along very nicely indeed!

With stains - and particularly reds - the colour will be massively affected by the underlying wood colour @Akula

The best cherry red I managed (for the shade I was looking for) was using red calligraphy ink but that was on mahogany.  I used it too with a figured maple top and that was splendid too but a quite different shade - much redder and less of the blue tinge.  If you do try it out on some scrap, make  sure you go for calligraphy ink - it is designed for documents that need to be legible after hundreds of years...and so won't fade in the same way that some standard pen inks might.

Canon cameras are notoriously poor at capturing reds, but these two shots are pretty close to how they came out:

The one on mahogany:

 

And on figured maple:

 

To my eye, the mahogany one is blue-tinted red and the maple one is closer to a red red.

Then again, there's cherry red and there's cherry red so neither of the above might be anywhere near what you define as cherry red

 

By the way, ref fading of some inks, I see both of these relatively regularly - both were made pre-2016 and both hang on walls next to windows when they are not being played...and they both still pretty much look like this colour-wise.

 

 

[Akula]

Thanks for the advice both of you.

 

My source for stains is currently the local hardware store, colloquially known down under as Bunnings. They carry the Feat Watson "Prooftint" line, and I've got a small collection of bottles in my store.  Here's a test piece with their "Mahogany" and "Cedar" mixed together. 

 

Rather uninspiring. The cedar is much redder, the mahogany is strangely purple. I do plan on giving it a quick wipe of poly tomorrow morning, as this is just stained on raw timber and thus giving a matt appearance - oh, and phone cameras have a much worse colour representation than Canon! 

As for calligraphy ink, is something like this what you're thinking?

 

I'm very tempted to try a burst from red to black, but I've never attempted this before, and my process is wipe-on not spray. 

I'll think upon it.

 

 - Jam

[Andyjr1515]

35 minutes ago, Akula said:

As for calligraphy ink, is something like this what you're thinking?

No - it's not that.  I'll see if I can track down the right stuff on an Australian website.

[Andyjr1515]

If the link works, it's this:

https://www.amazon.com.au/Winsor-Newton-Calligraphy-Bottle-Indian/dp/B004GS3ZYA/ref=sr_1_13?crid=36UC2WYASYBNM&keywords=Red%2BPermanent%2BCalligraphy%2BInk&qid=1695149180&sprefix=red%2Bpermanent%2Bcalligraphy%2Bink%2Caps%2C232&sr=8-13&th=1

Shout if the link doesn't work and I'll tell you the Amazon.com.au search words to use

[Akula]

On 9/20/2023 at 4:38 AM, Andyjr1515 said:

I'll see if I can track down the right stuff on an Australian website.

Thanks for that. Turns out that product is available at the major office supplier's store here! By the time I'd seen your reply, I'd already stained the guitar using what I've got, and put on a top coat or two. I'll keep this in my back pocket for another build.

 

Quick photo before I get into finishing discussion - here's the thing on the scales, After dropping hardware and electronics into it, I reckon it'll be a bee's over 2kg, and quite lovely for playing live. 

 

Onto finishing. I grain filled and sanded to my heart's content, but there's a point when working with fence-posts as body timber where it's time to just whack some stain and poly onboard. It's pine, and there's no point trying to hide that fact. Here's just after staining.

 

And here's with wet poly.

 

I've put half a dozen coats on by now, using the wipe-on poly method. Dust is still a huge issue for me, and still less of an issue than spraying. While at the hardware store, my hand hovered momentarily over the shellac, but I decided that I would try that route on another build in the near future. 

 

Gotta say, this Stanley vice is pretty good at holding guitars at strange angles while applying finishing products, thanks to the ball joint.

 

Guess I'd better order some tuners. I've got the bridge, a black tune-o-matic, tailpiece, knobs, straplocks... And some Epiphone "humbuckers" which appear to only have two wires instead of four. Might have to get some nicer pickups, probably active since my scientific mind places actives far above passives in almost every way. I haven't got a slotted nut lying around, but I do have a bone blank, so perhaps this will be my time to shape and cut a nut from scratch for the first time. Also need to craft an electronics cover, truss rod cover, and rectangular jack plate. Plenty to keep me busy while this finish gets built up and cured. 

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

1 hour ago, Akula said:

Dust is still a huge issue for me,

You don't have wet bed sheets hanging around, do you?

 

1 hour ago, Akula said:

It's pine, and there's no point trying to hide that fact.

The only way I've found out to to get an uniform colour is to flood the wood with dye. And rather alcohol based than water based as it seems to work with the resins better. The abovementioned table tops are deep dark, similar to the area on the lower bout right after the glue joint.

[Akula]

On 9/23/2023 at 4:10 AM, Bizman62 said:

You don't have wet bed sheets hanging around, do you?

I did give that a go, I think you suggested that on my last Tele build and it makes good sense.  It may have helped a bit, but in my small workshop the hindrance it created was too great, so I didn't attempt again. Honestly, I found the best thing for dust control was to enter the shed, wipe a coat, and leave without disturbing the eons of dust within it's walls. Doesn't work so great when I have other projects going on in there, but right now I'm working eight days a week, so one ten-minute trip to the shed once a day is all I get, and it's working pretty good.

 

On 9/23/2023 at 4:10 AM, Bizman62 said:

The only way I've found out to to get an uniform colour is to flood the wood with dye. And rather alcohol based than water based as it seems to work with the resins better. The abovementioned table tops are deep dark, similar to the area on the lower bout right after the glue joint.

Yep, I got a good few wet coats of stain on there before wiping off. In theory, as I understand, the stain will block the fibres of the wood, so classically when we're dealing with figured timbers it's actually not advised. In this case it worked well! There's zero figure in this pine. The dark features seem to have absorbed a lot more dye than the red bits, but if I strived for even coverage I might have tried a sanding sealer.

I'm happy with the colour. It's a hell of a chunk of wood, and imagining it would look like a fine alder strat would be misguiding to myself. I'm quite pleased with this little build so far.

Ten coats of poly done, about another dozen to go.

Still haven't ordered those tuners yet.

 

 - Jam

[Akula]

Righto, varnish has cured, time to move on this build. 

I wet-sanded to level the finish, very lightly so as to not cut through that last layer. Hot tip - I go for a slightly less thinned and therefore thicker final coat, if that makes any sense. Given that dust is my nemesis when it comes to clear-coat finishes, the last coat seems to envelope and drown any dust, and anything still poking up after the cure time gets knocked down by a wet-sand. Yeah, the dust is still there, entombed like a Jurassic mosquito, but dust tends to be very small and hard to see, yet very easy to feel if not levelled. Then I hit it with Meguiars polish until I can see myself. Apologies for the terribly lit photos.

 

Happy with the colour, and the finish quality. I've spent the last two builds working on my process for clear-coating in my current workshop, and I think it's passable for my own personal instruments. I have a line on a guy who does spray jobs professionally, and I'd gladly flick paying clients' guitars to him in order to guarantee happiness.

 

Installed the tail and bridge posts, then spent the rest of the arvo making some steel parts. Here be a pickguard, cavity cover, engraved truss rod cover, and a jack plate, all fashioned from 1.5mm steel sheet. I put an old sheet of sandpaper on the orbital sander and purposely "swirlied" the metal. 

 

I ordered the tuners, finally. Left on the todo: make a nut, engrave the cavity cover, get some pickup mounting rings, do the dreaded electronics, and assemble the thing. If I can do that over the weekend, it'll be six weeks to the day since I glued the body blank!

 

 - Jam