avengers63

Mostly cleaned up & wet with mineral spirits. The only thing left on the top is the fabric on the left of the control cavity cover, a piece of the outline of her scarf that y'all prolly can't notice, and the cavity cover itself.

Also, this was a complete shit show. I'm not sorry I did it, but I ain't never  doing anything like this on an acoustic back again. Which is not to say I'll not do any more goofy/extravagant inlay work in the future, just not on a thin piece like an acoustic back/top.

This means I'm DEFINITELY going to do something like this, hopefully this year. With 3 P90s

I just found a dream guitar on Reverb that I can't afford. Oh baby, some to daddy! You KNOW I'll treat you right....

FACE!!!!!!!!!

When we finally get temperatures good enough, and it looks like we're gonna have several days of it, I'll finally close the box.

"Don't fire 'till you see the whites of their eyes!" 

I got half of her eyes in powdered MOP and her lips in some sort of crushed red stone. Hopefully it'll look bright enough to pass for red lipstick. Her nipples ended up a LOT darker than I wanted.

This thing is so ugly with all the cleanup that still needs to be done. It's gonna take a LONG time with a cabinet scraper.

If it's supposed to be bookmatched for a drop top, I'd go ahead and split it. If it's mild, I'd prolly fill them with the same color epoxy I'd be dyeing the top. If it's like an ant farm in there, leaving the quilt plain and filling them with colored epoxy could lead to interesting results. Or it could be garish and hideous. In any event, you already have the wood, so ya might as well see what you can (or cant) do with it.'

I can only put so much in at once. The fumes from the CA starts to burn my eyes.

Also, the nipple isn't noticeably lighter than the areola. I'm gonna have to route it back out and mix it with a little crushed mother of pearl.

Today I managed to rout out all the lines I cut into it with the scroll saw and draw in a bunch of detail I'll your out maybe tomorrow.

And she has nipples. Because I'm still a child sometimes.

Roughed-in but not cleaned up. This stage of any process always looks like shit. 

6 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

I just realized my post could be understood in several ways. My intention was to argue against lazy manufacturers and vendors who don't have samples. Of course they can sell more stuff when each customer buys all the options. But how many potential customers are turned away because they can't figure out what to choose and won't pay for the full set?

I actually got where you were going with it. I just took it in a different direction. I bought my crushed stone on-line (shocker!!!). This place DOES have samples, though it's a crap-shoot whether they're in stock for that stone or not. Whether I bought some random samples and played with them or I bought full bags, I'm paying shipping either way. While I'm not sparing any expense on this build, I also don't want to be foolish about it, so I made the value judgment and ended up buying the wrong thing. I'm not really upset about it at all - I don't know what I'm doing and I made the wrong 50/50 call. Life goes on. 

2 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Thanks for sharing that piece of knowledge. Way too often finding the right stuff requires buying all the stuff that's available and testing by yourself, at your very own expense. How hard can it be to just make some samples and tell the exact measurements?

All I can say is that I did all the on-line research I could find about how to do crushed stone inlay into wood. They all basically said the same thing, so I bought some stone and went for it. My mistake was in misjudging what size grind I'd need, and what the end result would be. Other than that, you're dead on - sometimes we gotta buy all the options and see what works for us. In other words, fuck around and find out.

WELL THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!!!!!!!

I was using the wrong stuff. making it much harder than necessary.

When purchasing crushed stone for inlay, there are generally 3 textures available: coarse, medium, and fine. coarse is tiny pebbles. Medium is about the size of grains of sand. Fine is basically powder.

For the black outline material, I bought medium/sand. I've been having a hard time with it because the sand is just barely smaller than the channel I'm routing. Yu can see why this would become a PITA is record time. This made me put off doing it because it was hard to do and took forever.  I ordered some more because I didn't think I'd have enough to do all the outlining I'm gonna do. Instead of medium, I ordered fine. This stuff filled in the channels like magic!

So as usual, I just made it harder on myself than necessary. This is not a new experience, but I AM fairly tired of it.

FWIW: The side of her face from the nose down, and most of the outline of her right arm is with the sand. It probably took me a half hour to get in there right and dribble the glue in. All the rest of it was done today with the powder. It was only about 20min. When you use the right stuff.......

To hell with it. I am just gonna make my own. 

I've just been making more work for myself for years anyway. I make a LOT of 6IL headstocks. Just about all of my headstocks are tiltback/scarf. They're just plain more work than necessary. I end up screwing with the scarf joint for 2-3 days because I never made the proper jigs. There's absolutely NO reason all of the 6IL headstocks can't be a 1-piece neck and just use string retainers. Work smart, not hard... dumbass.

I actually had to make the first plan twice. I always use a zero fret, and I didn't add the 3/16" extra to take the zero & nut into account.

I use a 43mm nut. Yes, the tuner holes would be a big plus.

Yes, I absolutely CAN make the template. I don't want to. It's a pure value judgment. I'd rather pay someone to run me off a copy than to spend the hours needed to do it myself.

I saw this and thought of you

Does anyone have a full sized template of a hockey stick neck? I've been looking all over, and they don't exist at a reasonable price, IF they can be found at all. I was hoping someone here would have one they'd be willing to run off a copy of for me. Of course, I'd pay for the MDF & shipping. Also, if anyone has a good pointy headstock template also, that'd be fantastic.

6 hours ago, Prostheta said:

What'd I miss?

Looks like you missed 9 months of me screwing around and poorly making a bent side monstrosity

That last one was supposed to be posted yesterday. When I went to talk today, that one showed up as not having been sent. Oh well.

So no progress on the inlay. BUT...... I got a new job today. I'll be home daily instead of being out for 5 days solid. The pay is a little less, but the benefit of being home daily is worth it.

In celebration, I bought myself some lumber. A piece of white limba that can easily make 2 necks, a piece of African mahogany that will make 2 bodies, a piece of 3a flamed maple that I can get 2 drop tops from once it's bookmatched, and a big piece of bloodwood. They didn't have any smaller pieces of bloodwood, so once I get the one neck from it that I'm wanting, I'll have a LOT left over. Wifey was a little annoyed that I put the cart before the horse on the celebration, seeing as I haven't started yet, but she also understands.

I've been jonesing for a reverse headstock hockey stick neck. I'm thinking the bloodwood will do nicely for that. Match it up with a BW fretboard and MOP dots and it'll look pretty slick.

Making inlay channels today. Waifu helped me out with the face. There's no way in hell I'd have drawn it in right. 

So two things here...

1) The coarse crushed stone is highly resistant to sanding it flat. As it is coarse, once it's sanded flat (a most laborious undertaking), there are voids between the stones. I'll prolly fill them in with C/A.

2) As a result of #1, coarse crushed stone is right on the edge of not being worth the effort.

3) I'm waaaaaaay too invested in this whole thing to let this sumbitch beat me now. "Right on the edge" just means "mule headed John" has to step in and beat this mo-fo into submission. The family is best served to give me a wide berth while I figure this thing out.

Side note - the pencil lines are where I'm going to route out a line and backfill with black powdered stone. The powder is a hellofalot more forgiving than the sand-like stone.

After sanding down the big ass inlay where it was sitting a little bit proud, I sanded through the first layer on her shoulder, exposing the glue in a particularly ugly manner.. Fortunately, I have an easy solution - rout it out with the dremmel and put another piece in. That's how I'm putting in her doo-rag and the gold crap around her torso. So that's the plan for today. Pics are likely to come later.

On a different note, do you remember me mentioning the secret project involving 1966 Hofner HBs, wenge, and Mary kay White?  Well.......

.....I fucked it up. I/m not good with the wiring in the first place, but this one is particularly bad. This thing has fought me through assembly every single step of the way. Seriously - there's not one single aspect that I haven't had at least one problem with. By the time I got to test the wiring and it was all kinds of wrong, I just gave up. I'm just gonna take it to a shop and pay for them to sort it out.

Northern ash Jazzmaster body (heavy as hell, but has a nasty mid-range growl)

wenge neck & fretboard with big-ass headstock, abalone dots

Wilkinson tuners, Fender JM bridge, unlabeled JM vibrato

Japanese humbuckers stamped "1966" on the back, thought to be Hofner. Right angle 3-position switch, 1meg dime sized pots because I couldn't find 1meg quarter sized pots with a short shaft, goofy looking chicken-head knobs, and a pink mother-of-toilet-seat pickguard.

It's a crying shame I can't get it to work right.

Mostly cleaned up, but there's a LOOOOONG way to go 

Girlfriend is still pretty ugly without the mask. I need to sand her down, get rid of all of the various adhesive, glue, and tape residue, and even out the edges. From there I can put in the bits that never made it into the mix, like her doo-rag and the metal bra thing that is half falling off. THEN I can get to the crushed stone inlay. I'm even toying with the idea of using some dyes & sandback to get more depth in the image. For reference, here's the original piece again:

And just in case anyone is wondering, no, I have no intentions of putting anything into the halo. Making increasingly smaller circles that all fit in right and getting them in there without FUBARing the whole thing..... not even gonna try it.

I took her out of the clamps several hours shy of the 24 I usually like to go. This is because 1) I know the glue is cured enough to not let go, and 2) with it being such a large, flat piece that was covered in wax paper, there would not only be a LOT of squeeze out I couldn't (didn't want to) attend to yesterday, but a big chunk of it would be either still gummy ot still gooey. In either case, I'd be able to get a bunch of it off before it dried. Some of it is peeling right off with just a little encouragement from a sharp chisel. Other bits... not so much.

In the end, girlfriend is still pretty rough around the edges. Fortunately, I already have a plan for what type and how much makeup she needs before taking her out on a date.

I'm gonna let it all finish air drying before I peel the picture off and sand it.