avengers63

You have your carving, I have my scrollsaw inlays.  IIRC, the jealousy & respect flowed both ways.

In the earlier stages, I was seeing the roots as some animal humping a rock. 

The headstock has wings and has been surface jointed. The ebony headplates have been planed down as much as is necessary. There are some minor imperfections on the surface of all three pieces, but they are all outside the area of the headstock, so perfection there is unnecessary.

I'm finally starting on the massive inlay for the back. The first thing I needed to do was cut apart the major pieces of the picture. In the 1st pic, the pieces are just laid out together. The cut apart pieces are all taped together into place properly.

This thing is f'ing HUGE. I'll freely admit that I'm more than a little intimidated by the sheer scope of it. But we are not to shy away from doing hard things. It's the challenges we overcome which make us grow. I'm not sure I can pull this off to my satisfaction. But we'll find out, now won't we.   

So I no longer have any cove bits. This is quite irritating. 

While looking at the box stores we have here to see if they have any in stock or if I'll have to order them and wait till next week, I came across a raised panel bit 

As I was thinking of doing a preliminary rough-out for a guitar carve, this immediately got my mind racing at the possibilities....

Binding looks great when it's done, but I do not care for the process. It's not difficult... I just don't like it.

For the carve, I'm going to start it with a few different sizes of cove bits. This SHOULD set the edge and start the carve, greatly facilitating the actual carve. Or I could completely monkey up the entire thing. Either will be an adventure.

To those 7 of you who are following this build, I'd like y'all's opinion. Both of these vibrato systems will produce essentially the same result. The question is which do you think would LOOK better? The Tiesco style or the Les Trem?

I talked to DePaul inlays today on the way home. The inlay set is out of stock, so they had to make one. It'll prolly be here by the end of September. Good thing I'm not in a hurry.

Also, I've been thinking all week about making a travelling backpacker type acoustic. It ought to be a really fast and easy thing to knock out. Because I clearly don't have enough things going on at once with far too little time to get anything done on any of them.

8 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Thanks for showing your neck profiling router bit! I've often been wondering if something like that could be used. Now I know!

Go check out p3 of my High End Build thread. I did a couple of experiments with large molding bits.

Also, I'm dutifully taking notes on how I want to approach doing mine. Looking at this jig, I'm wondering if clamping it to the edge of my router table would get it done. WWhen I did my experiments, I clamped it down flat. I'll have to play with it and some scrap lumber.

I got the  truss rod channel routed and the headstock wings glued on. I was WANTING to plane down the headstock plates also, but the one had the runners glued on crooked, and the other's runner exploded in the planer. Maybe next weekend.

On 8/15/2022 at 3:38 PM, ScottR said:

I thought it would be a good way to see the country when I was in my early twenties. Now having dealt with Houston traffic for 21 years, there's no way I'd want to deal with that in a big rig.

Or even my Jeep.

SR

The thing is.... you don't get to see any part of the country that's worth seeing. You see the highways and warehouses. That's IT. You're not in town long enough to do anything but get unloaded or swap trailers and then head out to the next shipper. If your wheels ain't rollin', you ain't earnin'.  It sounds good, but the whole "seeing the country" thing just ain't the way it is. Like so many other things in life. sigh

11 hours ago, ScottR said:

 I know Walmart went from whatever they were paying to 100k a year plus signing bonus to fill their ranks..

I've been selling stuff to them for 40years, but that still makes me consider a lifestyle change.

SR

WM is the absolute industry leader for pay & benefits. I've talked with several of their drivers, and they've all said the same thing. They treat their drivers better than anyone out there as far as compensation is concerned. The major drawback are that they have a pile of nit-picky rules that don't really accomplish anything, and they have to wear a uniform. But for 1/3 more pay, I think I could adapt. The only reason I'm not working for them right now is that I don't have enough experience. After we move and the house is paid off, my current plan is to try and get on as the nearest WM Distribution Center. 

And you don't want this lifestyle. Living in the cab is borderline inhumane. I'm seriously counting the days until I can bump down to a home daily gig and get my life back.

1 hour ago, ScottR said:

You have been due a few nice breaks.....good on you!

MAN but you ain't lyin'!!!!!!  2019 & 20 were as bad as I've ever had it. I was beyond low & desperate there for a bit. Now I'm blowing close to $1K on a fancy build. just because I can. It can all change in a big-ass hurry.

And yes, the trucking industry is is DIRE need across the board. It's definitely an employee's market right now. 3 years ago when I got my class A CDL, entry pay was about $0.45-0.50/mile and no sign on bonus. Now if they're not offering $0.65/mi and $5K sign on, they're not getting applications. FWIW: The average for a 5-day driver is 2000-2200 miles/week. A 6-day driver adds another 600 miles. You do the math and see where the industry is.

It's when these screw-ups happen, and they happen quite often, that we find out what we're capable of. That patch was well executed. Good job.

I've had the bearing slip on me before. We prolly all have. I learned to use a bit of plastic tubing on the shaft, just under the bearing, to make sure nothing wobbles out of place.

Nervous about how this will turn out....

But it all worked out fine.

I routed down pretty deep for the binding channel. I'm definitely foing to have to do some epoxy fill. On one side - it's just a $108 Chinese kit that I'm screwing with. On the other side, I know I can do better than this. 

The chanel is pretty low, so there's plenty of room to carve the top. Not that I really wanted to. Or like carving it. Or that this kit is worthy of that much work.  But I did this to myself.

On 8/8/2022 at 11:34 AM, ScottR said:

GO FOR IT!!!

SR

I got too many in the works right now. Being on the road M-F, I only get Saturday to work on anything. That's just not enough, but it is what it is. On the positive, I'm banking close to $2K/month. We're going to be moving in the Spring. When that happens, I'll be able to completely pay off the house in less than 2 years, AND max out a couple of Roth IRAs. The life really sucks now, but there's a healthy payoff.

Back to guitar news.....

I put stringers on the headplates so I can put them through the planer

The headstock center is in the clamps. From here, the wings get glued on, then the headplate.

I ordered the fretboard and headstock inlays today. Just over $200, but DAMN are they sexy! So it was time to prep the fretboard. It's a nice dark piece of ebony. This radius bit.....  I REALLY wish I had this 15 years ago.

No, I didn't do this. But now I want to. And I could totally pull it off. Talk about lutherie as art.....

Drop top after gluing

drop top after planing

It revealed that the center piece is cocobolo. Still kind of a shame to "waste" it like this.

body planed down an amount equal to the thickness of the top

There isn't much left for a bottom bearing to follow, so it's prudent to make a rubbing so that I can make a template from it if needed

in the clamps

you gotta be f'ing kidding me.....

The top was rough cut before gluing it on so that I could actually get it centered. It moved a bit in the process. Then, when trimming it to the body, I followed into the jack hole. 

Well shit.

The only option now is to carve the top a bit and bind it. Bit first, I have to finish cussing. 

Scarf accent is out of the clamps. I would have put the headstock on, but it's just too damn hot right now. We're supposed to have about a 105 heat index. Also, I blew my wad for heat tolerance on the kit bash. 

I COULD be working on the inlay, but someone decided to use the work table as a place to pile their crap.

We took a weekend off to go on our honeymoon. We were married in the heights of C19 insanity, so a honeymoon was out of the question at that time, so we did it now. We had a 3-day weekend in Memphis. I actually got to play Scotty Moore's guitar - the one he used on all those early Elvis recordings at Sun Studio. WAY kewl.

Today I split and flattened the remaining pistachio burl. It came up to 3/16" under 1/2", so I'm mounting it on what will be a pinstripe of Spanish cedar. Why did I use SC? Was it because of the beautiful tonal properties it'll add? was it because of the wonderful color the pinstripe will have? NO! It's because it was handy and already the right thickness! Screw your tone voodoo.

The center piece was chosen for a similar reason. I needed something that was dark, about 1/2" thick, and fit the size I needed. What I found was  some flatsawn (useless) cocobolo that had turned dead black under whatever finish I had put on it years ago. When it's planed down it'll come back to life, but since I'm NOT going to attempt to seal in the oils at all, it'll turn black again over time, which is exactly what I want.

It seems more than a little decadent taking a $106 Chinese basswood kit guitar and not only throwing pickup upgrade at it but jazzing up the top with burl and cocobolo. It also seems like a little bit of a waste of resources. This leads us back to the decadence. 

Anyway, I can't offer a pic right now because of the clamping cauls. I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

Having a 2"+ diameter bit hanging that far out of the collet......  my gut says that's a bad idea. Maybe I'm wrong, and I probably am, but just the idea of it makes my butthole clench up.

How do you propose to keep the neck clamped down?

2 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Now this is turning more exciting!

And then it fights back. SHOCKER!

I thought I measured the depth of the forearm contour at 1/4". So this afternoon I cut off a pair of +/- 5/16" fillets from the burl and planed them down to 1/4".

The actual depth is 1/2".

2 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Thanks for sharing! I have several times wondered if such a roundover bit and a hand router could be used for shaping the neck. The slow speed is something I had not thought of! But I had thought about getting the thickness right by shimming the nut end as well as the steadiness by using rails on the table to support the router base.

We're all on the same side here! I'm positive that setting up a dedicated jig would be a hellofalot more safe than the rigged-up BS I do. But I'm crap at making jigs. If you come up with something useful, be sure to tell us about it.

14 hours ago, JGTay said:

Had his wife do the job...

My wife COULD have done it! She's very industrious and loves power tools. 

Akula had some of it - low RPM, slow & steady passes, a good firm grip, taking smaller passes instead of the whole thing in one swipe. The biggest part was how I clamped it down. My initial thought was have about half of it hanging off the edge of the table. This seemed ripe for badness, and THIS is why I brought in the wife. She advised, and rightly so, to clamp it down along the table edge. I held one end tightly with a f-clamp and braced the other end so that it didn't move but wasn't actually held down. After that, it was just slow passes at the lowest speed available that didn't try to take it all at once. 

So I was looking around for a neck profile bit. It seems that there's only one person in the world who makes them. He's in Australia. With shipping, it's over $80. That's a big nope for me.

A little more digging led me to table edge bits. I found a couple that were <$25/ea, so I popped on them.  Even if they don't work out, they're likely to be more useful later than a dedicated neck profile bit. One of them looks pretty close to a neck profile. The other is just a big chamfer bit. I thought it'd be fun to rough out one of those necks that have the 3 flat surfaces - I can't remember the name for them - just to see how it feels in my hand.

I prepped a couple of slices from a douglas fir 4x4 I have left over. This got me wondering if douglas fir would work as a neck. It's certainly strong enough. But the hard rings might not make it the easiest thing to carve smoothly.

Anyway...

I calculated the thickness of the fretboard, truss rod, and about 1/8" of beat under the t/r and came up to +/- 3/4". I roughed out the fretboard radius with a bit I already have (it's SUCH a time saver!). This would simulate the entire thickness, minus the frets.

I then trimmed them up and routed them to the neck taper.

This next bit is when I realized I had forgotten to take something into account. These bits are HUGE. They're meant to go around the edge of a table, not along a 3" wide stick. To make matters worse, they're too big for the router table. There's no way to tighten down the collet because the damn things are just too big. So I put one in another router. It doesn't look healthy. This could easily be one of the most dangerous things I've ever done.

So I called in wifey for additional brain power. She doesn't think like I do because she doesn't do this, so she has an outsider's perspective. Outside the box is VERY useful when you don't want to lose bits of your body. She was a great help in mitigating the risks.

So the round bit looked like this when it was done...

and the chamfer looked like this...

I'm flabbergasted at the results. I took the sander with a 100g disk and just smoothed out the tooling marks and softened up the sharp edges... that's it. I can say with absolute certainty that the round one is playable with little more than a some finesse sanding. The chamfered neck would need a little more meat taken off of the "thumb side" of the neck, but that's be an easy fix.

This is insane! Had I only known about these 15 years ago! 

I was finally able to get a little done on this today. The s/c routes were expanded to accommodate a normal s/c base plate.

Also, all of the pickup covers and rings DON'T F'ING FIT. The covers are too small to go over the bobbins, the opening in the s/c rings are too small, AND none of the screw holes line up. 

In other news, wifey just doesn't have the time to paint the body for me. So I'm thinking of putting lipstick on a pig and dress this thing up a bit. I've had this piece of oddball burl lying around for at least a decade. I'm REALLY thinking about bookmatching a couple of slices into a drop top, planing the top of the body down a little to match the thickness, then just dyeing the rest of the body black. The burl isn't wide enough to cover the body, so I'm thinking fill the center with just anything dyed black. Nearly all of the real estate of the filler is the pickups anyway, and there's nothing beyond the trem, so anything put there will be lost anyway. 

Aaaaaaand it's a neck blank. 

I also got a couple of ebony headplates. One will obviously go on the face of the headstock and match the ebony f/b. The other is being contemplated as a scarf joint accent. I'm also thinking about a limba scarf accent. I'll prolly end up going with the limba, just for consistency.