Kenny

well, i would go with filing the fret down, stewmac.com sells good files for that

however, dont try to sand it

or better yet

take this to a guitar tech

UPDATE!

i resawed my block of redwood today, and its a somewhat bitter sweet story. i payed 120 for this block, so i expected to get a beautiful peice of wood, and possibly two tops. heres my story

i was planning it to get it ready for the band saw and i made a horrible discovery....the checks were very deep. so i had a tough choice to make. give up the beautiful figure on this wood (WHICH I LOVE!) and get another for no cost to me, or cut the wood thick, and avoid the checks

i went with the latter of the two adn resawed my wood

i only got 3 peices out of the whole billet...here are the choices for a top

- Choice A (my favorite, becuase the tops big enough where i could avoid the knots, i like the clean look)

- Choice B (good flame, but there are knots i cant avoid here )

- these are the cracks i avoided :-p you can also see the beautiful figure!

now how am i going to carve the top :-p. thats another problem to work out!, and what am i gonna do about those damn bindings!

Jmrentis - i just got kicked out of the woodshop i was using at the school so its going to be difficult to find a place to work hahaha, where do you do your working?

i had also emailed Dean Zelenski of dean guitars about the finish on the guitar i posted on page 1

and this is what he said

"You have to do a combinatiion of watered down black stain on the wood and also toning it by spraying black stain.

If you take it slow and thin out the stain, you will have best control.

Dean Z"

so looks lke we have an answer

i was looking at andy depaule's inlay blanks, i like the very black black pearl, and maybe a ligther gold MOP for the "kaye" logo

here is what i was thinking for a binding. a creamier more maple colored purfling on the top of the bdoy with an ebony binding..

i wanted to die the bubinga stringers black aswell. i really wanted a black and maple theme going but im not sure how i would pull it off. becuase i have a very good idea for the neck joint. but....i only want it a two tone guitar.

or just keep it clean with ebony/maple/ebony/maple bindings (so the black doesnt comepete witht he black fretboard binding) i think it has potential, i just need to work it out so that i keep things clean on this build.

dont want it to be tooo gaudy

Jmrentis - also Th&h lets you keep 7 feet of the board :-p, they have some nice figured maple sometimes, good exotics. i found very nice peices at rockler from time to time. and ive heard about that latin import store, but since i dont have a car ATM it would be difficult to do :-p

Jmrentis, where in sandiego do you go to get your wood

mostly i drive up to Th&h in mirimar, sometiems to rockler in clairemont. i bought thsi wood from oregon, and its upsetting becuase its very old redwood :X! im debating what to do, i might just carve top with some sort of ebony binding that has maple accents so it doesnt compete with the neck binding. mostly im lazy which is why i dont want to do ebony inlays, but i guess its worth the effort since im taking the time to do this anyways!

also, the guy who i bought the wood from seems very knowladgeable, and he said that once i resaw the wood, i will end up probly having 2 surfaces that are stable and steadfast. we will see, either way its win win since i can get a nother beautiful peice of wood from him for next to nothing now.

aswell as this i emailed Dean zelenski of dean guitars and asked him about his finish. me and him have been aquainted before and i am good friends with one of his endorsees, michael angelo batio

so we will see what he says, since he did the finish i am about to copy :-p

Kenny

this is a beautiful guitar

its heart warming to see someone giving to a great cause,

i myself lost my godfather to cancer (he would help me with my guitars since i was 16, 2 years ago) so its great seing you make a difference!

if i were religious id say god bless, but you deserve good things towards you

it look slike a cool idea but make sure you do test the finish schedule first.. not sure how a direct stain on redwood will come out since it can be very thirsty wood. I think it might be much safer to do tinted lacquer. I am guessing the dean is just tinted lacquer.. anyway, you will see what works best when you do the test pieces

wez - this is what im thinking im going to take the scrap peices i get from resawing tommorrow and do differnt scheduals.

1 - black stain to darken the flames and then a grey to get rid of the red after sand back

2 - black stain then tinted laquer

3 - tinted lacquer

but im not sure, since i had some checks start to appear on the top and sides of my wood. i talked to the guy i bought it from and he said he can give me a full refund if i want, or i can try to resaw it and if im not happy i can get a credit towards another purchace

here are some pics of the checks to accent the worst ones...

Side cracks

the one im really worried about!

this ones outside of where id be cutting, might make a good area to test on

I really like the body shape, and the inlays looked good. Which pickups are you going to use?

im thikning seymour duncans but im not sure which ones

an air norton on the neck for sure and a ver yhigh output on the bridge

xanthus - shes a bute :-p im going to try both methods on some scrap and see whcich it comes out best, i took the picture on the rong side of the billet, the figure on the other side is much better

Komodo - my original design had an ebony freboard w/ maple bindings and maple bindings on the body, but it looked too black and there was no contrast. plus cutting maple veneers gets tricky when you hit the corners of the trapezoid

im going to get a lotta ebony dust and a little epoxy to do the inlays.

i played with the block idea, i did each one parralell to the nearest frets and to the edge of the fretboards, but it didnt have the same effect. i like the kinda sharp edges of the trapazoids since it ties a little into the bridge treble horn and headstock

also my reasoning for the thin waist and light upper horn was to give an almost feminine appearence to the guitar body. soft and gentle, then get more aggresive on the ornaments

and yes, im dying the redwood black and i guess grey, i dont knwo how im gonna do it, but my billit is very large so i have lotsa test wood. i want it to come out like this

we'll see

i love the negative space of the white maple <3

and as far as the body shape goes

i love curvy women, so i always say encorperate your loves to your art

here are pictures of the woods to be used. the piece of maple on the far left is possibly for the fingerboard, ebony for the accents.

the walnut/mahagony laminates are for the body. one is flipped over.

also the Redwood is dry so the figure doesnt show very well, but trust me, its STUNNING!

P.S. Comment on my design/ wood choices!! I WANT FEEDBACK!

hello, i have lots of family in cochobamba, bolivia

i wouldnt try to build it, i would just go ahead and order a little sanding station.

i think it looks bad on the cad but the rendering i did it looked kinda cool

i like new takes on old ideas

the whole thing im trying to do with this guitar is its a LP but with my twist

i really dont like dots... on any guitar

well, i know you guys dont like concept drawings at all, but here is my design for a 7 string lp style, (im still working on string spacing for nut aswell as saddle placment

LEFT: i used to peice of redwood i had to do the render

RIGHT: scale cad drawing that i will make a template out of

Curly Redwood im using

Wood

body wings - Mahagony/walnut/redwood

Neck laminate - Maple/bubinga/maple/bubinga/maple

Heavily flamed redwood top

Alembic style headstock joint

Maple fretboard bound in ebony gaboom

maple (figured?) pickup covers

Maple/ebony gaboon bridge

maple turned knobs

other specs

27" - 25" fanned frets ( the strings will have slightly differnt scale lengths becuase the edges of the fretboard have the even length, but no worries)

the fan is measured on the taper using calulus and is mapped to the nanometer

slightly chambered body

48.72mm nut at highest point

perpendicular 12th fret.

stewmac wide graphtech saddles

Kaye headstock design

THANKS TO ERIK or all the help with the cad, couldnt'a done it without you, i loved your design for the bridge so i adapted it for something on my project

Criticism? comment? i want to hear what you have to think

Kenny

take a head on picture

render it into cad (I LOVE ACDSEE canvas) and then do the placment on there

well, this is what i think

my first guitar had a nut width of 43, and it felt fine. its more of a modern size, found on most ibanez wizard necks.

you could always take the board off, retaper the neck for your new nut width and string spacing (to the edges) and then make a new board. but thats a lotta work

ithink your fine at 42.

I'm gonna make a solid body, 6 string guitar. It'll be my first guitar of any kind that I'll be making. Say I were to get a book (assume it is a good one) on this, and carefully follow all the steps, how good can I expect my guitar to turn out? How did yours turn out? Did it meet your expectations?? etc. I'm very mechanically inclined, and good with woodworking, so I know I can do everything I have to do. The thing is that I'll take on projects that take proffesionals years to master, and I think it's gonna turn out perfect. They never turn out perfect, either because I don't have experience with it or I just lose interest in it before I'm done. I know there are a lot of variables that contribute to how good/bad it is, but if I do a decent job, use the right materials, etc, how good should I expect it to be?

well, im 17 years old, ive played guitar since i was 13 thats my only qualification. when i started building i had just turned 16.

i had NO wood working experiance. just a good brain. im ok at math.

here is my first guitar.

Neck joint/neck work

My first crummy inlay (its a bird! not a palm tree!)

She looks best from the behind

im surprised it turned out as well as it did. if your good with wood working id say the only thing you need to wory about is fretting. thats what got me. other than that the rest is very easy!!! and can be done with simple brainpower and good explination. now if you take your time planning it out, and have a good CAD program (i LOVE acdsee canvas v11) you can be spot on accurate and expect a very professional job

for my first build i had none of the above and it still playes very nicely. i did use a fretpress, and coulnt reach fret 17 on, ill fix it later (probly not ) so beware of that.

so in conclusion if a 16 year old with no experiance can im sure you could do 20x better! and id say what i did wasnt HALF bad.

hope this helps

Kenny

well, i need to figure out the shape of my fretboard, but for that i really need the string spread on a 7 string

does anyone have this info?

well, i have a concept guitar drawn and i want to stain the redwood top black like This dean guitar

the problem is i want to use a mahagony/walnut/redwood lamination for the wings and a maple/bubinga/maple/bubinga/maple lamination for the thru neck

the problem im thinking i will encounter is how do these woods stain?

i want an over all black guitar but with the grain to still show through.

sorry if this is unclear, i can post pictures of the blanks if this would help ( i dont have the redwood top yet)

hey drak on the tele you posted what is the blue in the wood?

it sounds pretty good! i have just a crappy clean sample of it up in some finger exercises on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ALQuAHC9cA, simply clean channel

thank you

what about for the the wood on the top of the wings, i was thinking a very nice flamed redwood, what are your your opinions?

well whats up guys! this is my first post in this section and its regarding my second project.

my first design was an RG style through neck, i used solid bubinga wings and bubinga stringers in the neck and LOVE the sound so i thought i would use it again

onto the new guitar. i like the mocking bird shape, how it flows but i didnt like the stub of a left horn. i also didnt like the drastic angle of the eagle. so i thought to make a variation of my liking

i already have the wings glued up, the mahagony and walnut that is, and the neck black glued up aswell. here is the basic design

there are 3 layers to the wings, mahagony/walnut(about 1/4 inch of the stuff) /curly bubinga (up for negotiation)

the curly bubinga is a maybe i havent glued it to the wing blanks yet. im thinking maybe redwood or flamed or quilted maple? i would do a burst finish

what are your guys' ideas on the body design?

+1 thats how i fix my problems epoxy and wood dust is always a solid choice i really like the contour aswell, gives it a mab1 look and i like it a lot the fholes are a nice touch

id imagine that its angled since i dont see any string retainers

a good angle is 13 degrees and im pretty sure that thats an industry standard

It looks like a promising build..

somewhat reminds me of THIS guitar.

michael angelo batios 29 fret ritz rocket