avengers63

Everyone is gone for a week! I get to work on whatever I want, wherever I want, for as long as I want! So first up today is playing with the finish. This is what I had them add black pigment to. It SAYS it's "triple thick". I'd thin it down by 50% normally, so let's do 1/3 finish to 2/3 water and see what happens. Hello, Mr. Test Piece! I'm gonna give it several coats and see how it goes. Even the un-thinned stuff has a blue-ish tinge to it, so I'm anticipating needing to dye the wood black first. As this is water based, I could mix up some strong black dye and put it directly into the finish. This IS a complete experiment, so whatever works is what we go with.

That natural "binding" is well executed. Well done, sir.

I haven't had much of an opportunity to play with it much. My personal big test will be how well it can resaw the lumber. My old one could do about 6.75", but the blade drift on the bottom side was horrible. With over 10 years of trying, I simply could NOT adjust it out. This one has a 12" resaw height, but we'll see what I can do in practice. If I can get 7" reliably, I'll be happy (that's what she said). But I'll tell ya what already made me all giggidy...... It's 2HP. That's a powerful bandsaw. When I turn it on. it takes about 5 seconds to power up to full speed. The damn thing has to rev up! Tim Allen would be proud.

So remember how I previously said that this thread has become my default "what's going on" thread? Well, we did a thing..... My old bandsaw had some major issues. Despite living in the 19th largest market in the USA with a population over 3M, there is NOWHERE in the St Louis area to get a bandsaw repaired. Wifey insisted that I get this one. Seriously... she wouldn't let me even consider getting a lesser tool just to get me through. She even started to get a little mad at me for balking. She is better than I deserve, and I love her with my desperately. Freight was $500. We live 235 miles, or 3:40 away from their main location in MO, It's just more cost effective to spend the day borrowing a pickup and driving there. So Saturday we made a day of it, drove there, spent $2700 on a kick-ass bandsaw, oscillating spindle sander, mobile cart, and a new table saw for her. I'm REALLY excited to have a professional tool for a change. Were it not the most used saw in my garage, I doubt we'd have gone this direction. As it's a base around which all else rotates, it's important enough to go all out for. Seriously.... I don't deserve this woman.

Thanks, y'all! This starts my day off with a belly laugh.

I've been putting off doing the end cap for a while. I'm just not in any way comfortable with what needs to be done to do the job. BUT..... this is what I signed up for. It's to be bound chechen to match the binding, so the firstthing I did was take a little cutoff piece from the side of the neck and plane it down as thin as the planer would go. THIS is why I tend to not throw away anything. Then I bound it. Laying out where it goes. As this is basically freehand, I scored the lines pretty deep with an x-acto. From there, I routed out to the depth of the binding. Despite trying to file it down, there's no plausible way for me to really get the cavity flat, so epoxy it is! I gave it about an hour before trimming the ends. I won't even try to get it flush for a few days. The epoxy might be dry enough to not be workable and hold the piece in, but it's a far cry from being cured.

Just a neck pocket. Nothing special. Next up for the body is laying down some water-based lacquer I had the store add black into. Hopefully it'll be only transparent enough to see some grain through the finish. It it ends up completely opaque, that's fine too. I'm changing directions on the neck. I WAS going to have a black limba neck with the cherry fretboard. But mahogany/limba would be a very dark tone. No balance. Instead I'm either gonna make a cherry or maple neck. But that ain't gonna happen for a bit. My bandsaw completely died on me and there are NO repair shops in the whole of the St Louis metro area. We have a 3 million total population, but -zero- places to get shop tools repaired. THAT is a huge pile of bullshit. On the good side, wifey is going to let me get the last bandsaw I'll ever buy. It'll either be a Rikon or a Grizzly, depending on how all the shipping, possible financing, and various other financial considerations pan out.

First shape I see in the Millennium Falcon. That's a hellofa piece of burl to use as a table top. I can appreciate the opulence of it. I've been wanting to make a neck from gabon ebony purely for the extravagance, but there's no way I can justify the cost. Also, it's about damn time you smoothed it out! I was starting to wonder if you were planning on leaving all gouged up.

I most certainly did NOT replace the nut. While the whole thing was an upgrade project, you still don't fix what ain't broke. I can almost guarantee that the product listing on Sweetwater will have the nut size. THAT BEING SAID..... I have my own thoughts on the nut. A whole pile of voodoo and marketing is focused on the nut. I think it's entirely un-necessary. Once you fret the string, the nut material, along with whatever supposed tonal characteristics it may or may nor possess, are no longer part of the equation. Tonally, the nut ONLY matters on an open string, period. Now, there may be some benefits of a graphite nut if you are heavy on the whammy and don't lock the strings. But as I almost exclusively play without a trem, it has no bearing on me at all. These reasons are why I make all of my necks with a zero fret. My nuts are nothing more than a string alignment guide. Take this all for what it's worth.

Without any color, walnut & maple are a great visual combination. Tonally, the maple will compliment the maple as well. As a woodworker, I LOVE working with walnut. It just takes to being shaped like it was made for it.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00L3AY4DU/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

So I got a hellofalot done today, though it's only related to the build. I had previously discussed in this thread the possible merits of using a gigantic table roundover bit to shape the back of the neck. As it was done here, it only seems right to show y'all what I've done here as well. I made a jig so that I can SAFELY use the giant roundover bit The base is a 12" wide piece of 3/4" plywood. There is a riser/platform of sorts for the neck to be clamped to via 3 toggle clamps. The main piece is tapered to the same shape as the neck itself. The neck then sits on it flush so that the bearing can go below the neck and still have something to ride against. The bottom of the router has a 1/4" sheet of 12"x12" plexiglass screwed to it, It will run along 2 tails that run along either side of the neck, ensuring both safe operation and consistent depth. The whole thing only cost me about $40 out of pocket To do a test run, I found a piece of yellow pine that was about as flatsawn as you can ever hope for to use as a guinne pig. Since it's flat sawn, you know what I'm thinking, 'cuz you're thinking it too. So I routed a truss rod channel, albeit a tad off center, and roughed out a pointy RIN neck blank. The test run went as it should have, pointing out a couple of improvements to be made in the design.. I marked a line across the plexiglass and cut it off close to flush with the edge of the router base. I did it at an angle intentionally. This left the handles square with the jug for proper control, and left the widest part of the plexi to have as much available to run the rails as possible. Seeing the results on the heel area of the tester, I marked a line on the rails for the now flat back of the plexi to stop. This will give me about 1" of space to transition the neck into the heel, which I have measured out to the standard 3". Years ago, I had bought a neck on eBay, The f/b has since come unglued, but i still have it lying around. I basically never throe anything away. Just holding it on the pine test neck...... This thing feels REALLY good. It feels a hellofalot better than it should, considering I've done -zero- additional shaping to it whatsoever, This is stupid and a table roundover bit should NOT have worked so well. I was so pleased with the results, I went ahead and did one of the necks I've been fiddling around with. Yes, there's still a lot to do with files, rasps, and sanding. But it doesn't seem right that it should be this easy. It feels like cheating a little bit. This is a SERIOUS game changer for me. It's kind of ironic. When I first started this over 15 years ago, I was just terrified to make a neck for fear of screwing it up (which is absurdly easy to do) and make the whole thing unplayable.

It's a multi-step process that needed no insignificant investment of time and product. 1) The blank has to be dimensioned. You want to make it a little long, but we're looking at 3" wide, at least 22" long, and 1/4" thick. This often means the piece of lumber is resawn & planed. The benefit of resawing means I can get at least 2 fretboard blanks from the lumber, assuming it's at least 3/4" to begin with. 2) I bought a 12" radius router bit on Amazon. I did a test & demo of hit here somewhere. I have no idea where it's hiding. The end result was that it does all the heavy lifting as far as raduising the board, but it absolutely needs some finishing up with a radius block. You also can't slot the fretboard first as the bit will grab the fret stots and chip out pretty easily. As the but sits vertical in the router table, I had to make a box to attach the fretboard to with double sided carpet tape. It's a simple jig, but the job can't be done without it. 3) To cut the fret slots, a slotting template is an absolute must. In the past, I was using a fret saw & miter box I bought on eBay. Later, I was blessed by a member of this board with a fret slotting setup consisting of a small benchtop table saw, a fretting saw blade ,and an intricate jig using the slotting template that REALLY makes the job easy. The whole process isn't difficult, but it's pretty involved. It only made sense to assembly line a pile of them. Switching tools and setting them up is what takes the longest, so it's just more time-efficient to have done 10 of them at once.

Nothing too interesting to report today. At least not with this build. Tangentially, I had a LOT going on in the High End Build. Here it's just rounding over the body. I didn't even sand it. I don't think I'm gonna do a forearm bevel. It seem like they should go hand-in-hand with a belly cut, which I'm not comfortable even trying given the size of that cavity route.

I couldn't put my finger on it when you started this thread. It reminds me of a tulip in full bloom.

https://www.richlite.com/fretboards https://www.richlite.com/partialsheets

2-piece spanish cedar neck blank for a drop headstock. The original piece of SC was just a little too narrow for a 1-piece blank, but was the perfect length. I figured it'd look better re-gluing it as a 2-piece rather than putting a mall extension on the end of the headstock. I can use it for either the pointy headstock or the banana. As you might guess, the pointy headstock has now chipped out on the ends twice, so leaving notes for myself is always a good idea. I've been wanting a spanish cedar neck for a while. It sounds so good for classical guitars that it just HAS to be good as an electric neck. I'm anticipating a warm tone, somewhere in the walnut-mahogany-limba range. I actually want a SC body, but I can't find it locally in 6/4 stock. As I post these two pictures, I realize you can't see hardly anything of the actual neck blank. Seems like an obvious error in hindsight.

More ugly bits. But it's so much better than losing pieces.

I you want to go in a different direction... I've been wanting a Duncan Quarter Pound strat set for a coupe of years. If money isn't an issue, I'd bet that Fralin's split blades are awesome. In a COMPLETELY different direction, 3 Charlie Christian's would be interesting. https://www.seymourduncan.com/single-product/quarter-pound-strat https://www.fralinpickups.com/product/strat-split-blade/ https://www.mojopickups.co.uk/product-category/pickups/charlie-christian/

I got the f/b routed to the 9th fret. There's starting to be a lot of loose pieces sitting just waiting to be scattered to the winds. With a plausible possibility of catastrophe looking in the near future, I thought it best to start epoxying them into place so as to avoid an avoidable bout of losing my religion. This is going to be so badass when it's all done!

If the finish itself holds the color, it can start to become semi-opaque, becoming a little bit of a see-through colored barrier. This will help obscure the grail while still letting it show through. If you just dye/stain the wood and put clear over it, you won't obscure anything. If you go to the paint department of your local hardware store, they can tint a can of water based poly to literally any color they have the codes for. I've done this before. As it's water based, you can thin it down for spraying without issue. This will also dilute the pigmentation, allowing more of the grain to show through. Just remember that the rich brown of the sapele will be a strong undertone to whatever color you might choose. EG: green will become an earthy pine/olive/sage. Also - I really dig the vibe of these things. Were it me, I'd go with at least 3 different pup combinations: 2 HB, 2 P90, and 2 singles. The 4th maybe something odd, like some of the oddball reproductions from this guy - https://www.mojopickups.co.uk/product-category/pickups/

I haven't been able to be in the garage for several weeks. My old man back is telling me I REALLY overdid it today. I'll be paying for this for a few days. I DID, however, get a lot done. There was aside projects and a jug that I'm not posting about, but the Aelita moved forward. As the body template is a one-off, I had no problem carving it up to make a template for the ridiculous amount of electronics that are on that pickguard. From there, it's the boring tedium of hogging out an absolutely gigantic cavity. My iinitial swiss cheese-ing with a 1/2" bit went just a bit too deep. I'm not routing any deeper just to hide it.

That goes along with "right tool for the job". Poplar may blow for carving, but it's fantastic for your basic slab or beveled edge body that's getting painted. I haven't fully decided if it's gonna be used for a Jackson Kelly or a guitar version of a Rickenbacker 4000

Little by little. I can only put in MAYBE an hour after work, and then only if there's nothing else pressing that needs my attention. But any progress is still progress. Also, I bought 10 BF of 8/4 poplar. Folks like to shit on poplar as a tone wood. I find it a fairly neutral tone. It isn't terribly attractive, but that shouldn't be the determining factor. It's inexpensive, works very well, and takes dye, stain, and paint like a champ. For me, the only drawback is that the dust gives me dry heaves.

Isn't it just amazing! And all 7 sheets were only about $27. I'm looking forward to playing with colored dyes on some cutoff scrap and seeing what kind of sandback effects can be discovered, just like we do with quilted maple. In other news, the actual build resumes. It ain't much to start with, but ya gotta start somewhere. As the whole thing has a consistent line down the edge of the fretboard, it only made sense to lay out that line first. Thank God for a t-square or things like this would be a lot harder than they need to be. As the line is consistent throughout the pattern, I'm gonna route the line down the length of both sides first, then fill in all the leafy details.