unclej

i place a straight edge along the left side of the neck where it's in the pocket. take a white grease pencil and draw a line along the straight edge beside where the bridge is going to be installed. do the same on the right side of the neck. that will give you two marks to measure between to get your left/right center. to make sure that the pocket is square to the neck i'll put a straight edge along the bottom of the neck pickup and draw a line intersecting your left line and your right line. measure down an equal distance on both and draw a line between those two marks and you'll have square line to route your pocket from. good luck

well i tried four different types of printed product with pretty good results. i was using a brush on lacquer sanding sealer as a first coat just like i would with fabric. first i tried a glossy color poster and it worked great. next a page out of a magazine also with good results. i tried a piece of newspaper and while the ink stayed fast it made the paper translucent so you could see the print on the reverse. the only real problem that i ran into was with an ink jet copy. the lacquer definitely made the ink run and smear. i'll bet that if you used a coat or two of spray lacquer as your sealant even that would work well. if memeory serves me a simple white elmer's type glue was all you needed for decopage. i use wood glue for fabrich and i imagine either would work equally well. after that i would probably use the sanding sealer and build up two or three coats to smooth out the edes of the paper. then top coat buff and play. good luck which ever way you go.

i too have been thinking about this. i'm heading for the workshop this afternoon to work on another fabric project and i'll take a regular glossy poster and try a coat or two of lacquer sanding sealer on it to see if it makes it bleed or anything. i'll let you all know later.

the quick and easy is to push wooden toothpicks into the holes and cut them flush. as many as it takes to pretty much fill the hole and then flood the hole with superglue. if any of the holes happen to correspond or come close to the mounting holes of the guitar you're putting it on the screws will hold properly in the filled hole. toothpicks are our friends.

www.allparts.com good folks to do business with and reasonably priced.

ditto vladdrac..it is beautiful. i've used spalted maple and spalted pecan on several guitars but never thought of shooting a burst on it. it looks great! with all the work you've put into this one you're probably gonna have to sleep with it for a while.

unclej, any chance you could give me a detailed walk through of how you did the black burst? I'm about to do something like that myself... brian's tutorial could probably do it better but i'll try. your material is trimmed flush with the edge of the guitar and you really build up the sealer at those edges so that when you shoot it there's a smooth transition from the fabric to the sides of the guitar. i shot the black after i had applied a couple of coats of clear. then i followed brian's directions. you cut a template of the guitar out of poster board first. then you push map pins through the template around the perimiter, say every two to three inches. you then set it on the body. the pins keep it about 1/2" off the body. you then weight the template down a little so that the spray doesn't lift it off. when you're shooting it you have to keep your spray angled down rather than shooting in a straight line toward the side of the guitar. you don't want too much overspray under the template. turn the guitar over. i sat mine up on a couple of wood blocks so that the fresh paint didn't touch anything. do the same thing from the back. after the black dries you can continue with your clear coats. here's a link to brian's tutorial. he's got pictures and everything so it may make more sense. good luck! http://www.projectguitar.com/tut/mat.htm edited to say that one day i'll actually learn how to use the quote function.

bill, i assume you're wanting to know the scale so that you know where to place the bridge. rather than worrying about exact scale placement just place the bridge an inch or so past the center of the head toward the tailpiece. tighten your strings to proper tuning then check your intonation at the number twelve fret just like you would on a guitar. if the strings are sharp slide the bridge toward the tailpiece. if they're flat toward the neck. you can actually cant the bridge a bit one way or the other to compensate for say the #1 string is a little out when the #5 is perfect. i hope that helps..in fact i really hope that's why you asked.

joej...the black sunburst goes all the way around the guitar both front and back. the sharp edge that you see on the right is the pickguard. it covers a bit of the black sunburst on that side.

i don't know a lot about gauges and such but i buy radio shack's smallest multi-strand wire and it works fine. it comes with red, black and green insulation and is pre-packaged with a spool of each for just a couple of bucks. hope this helps a little.

thanks maiden69. it's causing a bit of a stir in my store. i guess nobody in my part of texas has ever seen anything quite like it. vladdrac. i don't have any pictures of the process but i'll pm you with the details. it was actually pretty easy. and i'll sent you a larger pic that you should be able to zoom in on.

man what a wonderful chunk of wood! the figure is outstanding and you obviously did a great job with it. congrats.

hey vladdrac..here's a couple of pics for you. hope they help some. http://www.villagephotos.com/pubbrowse.asp?folder_id=1062390 my first thought on putting the material behind a clear pick guard is how would you attach it without the adhesive showing? if you've already thought that out i'd love to hear your solution for other projects. the way i did it was just like doing the body. i roughed up the pick guard then glued the fabric down with wood glue. when that dried i trimmed the fabric leaving a quarter inch or so to fold under and then glued that. then i just basically followed the tutorial starting with brush on sanding sealer until the fabric grain no longer showed and then shot clear coats of lacquer til finished.

thanks mdw. the knobs are a simulated ivory from allparts in houston, texas. if you haven't tried them they're a great bunch of guys with a full line of hardware and supplies at reasonable prices. hmmnn..wonder if i should charge them for the advertisement?

thanks maestro..i appreciate it.

if you decide to sand it down and try again minwax makes a product to prep wood to accept stain easily. can't remember the exact name but it's something simple like wood prep. just brush it on, let it soak in, wipe it off and stain. that being said, i've only used it on cabinet and trim work. never a guitar but there's no reason that it shouldn't work. just another alternative. good luck.

well, i'm going to try one more time to post pictures of my latest project. http://www.villagephotos.com/pubbrowse.asp?folder_id=1060875 assuming that you can actually get to the pics from here i'll describe her a bit. the body is solid walnut with an hand rubbed oil finish. the inlay on the body and headstock consists of 16 different species of local and exotic woods. there are approximately 175 individual pieces hand cut and sanded and then glued into the channel routed into the body. the outline is binding material. the black "grout" around the pieces is super glue and crushed stone. from the top: gotoh locking tuners because there was a six month wait for the schallers that i usually use. the birdseye maple on maple neck is from usa custom guitar. the pickups are from dimarzio. bridge=paf fred, middle=virtual vintage blues, bridge=paf joe. each pup is controled (sp?) by an on/off/on toggle. the neck is on/off/coil tap, the middle is on/off/out of phase and the bridge is parallel/off/series. the bridge is by abm and i've decided that i like it more than the the schaller's that i usually use when i can get them. hope you like her. she plays like a dream and has more voices than you can shake a banjo at.

after reading brian calvert's tutorial on material finishing i decided to try it. i found some great fabric that was a lot like his lizard motif only this was parrots. i got the body finished out to my satisfaction but the guitar is a strat copy and the strat style pick guard covered 90% of the parrots on the front so i decided to fabric the pick guard too. i was concerned about the lacquer reacting with the pick guard material so i dabbed some on the back and it didn't effect it at all. i glued the fabric to the pick guard making sure that the pattern matched the pattern on the front of the guitar and proceeded just as i did for the guitar. it worked great! i was a little worried about the lacquer curing out too brittle but after a week it's still flexible and doesn't crack. i mounted the electronics and installed the whole thing on the guitar and it looks great.

thanks, i'll try again wednsday.

i use stewmac's radius blocks in my shop all the time and never found the need to use adhesive at all. you can just hand hold a quarter sheet of sandpaper and radius away. one little tip though. if you're sanding new frets to match the radius of the neck fold a quarter inch or so of the paper up over the front edge of the block so that it doesn't catch on the frets and tear. if you're radiusing a fretboard there's no need.

i'm sure that the bit and sanding will work fine but i wasn't suggesting that you actually use a router. using a router bit chucked into your drill press should give you the same control that you'd have with a forshner bit and eliminate a lot of hand sanding. i'll try it tomorrow on a piece of scrap let you know how it turns out.

well she's finally done and i have to say that she turned out just like i invisioned. of course i just tried to upload the link to the pics and that didn't work so you still can't see her....fragglesnaffinfrackin... would someone please explain what this error message means before i shoot my computer. i thought i was following the instructions for posting a link to my pics but apparantly i'm not. Sorry, dynamic pages in the tags are not allowed

good work man...bet she sounds great!

nice find there..i have a small collection of kays and silvertones. i reset the neck on one silvertone so that i could actually chord it and the rest of them i've pretty much set up to play slide or dobro style. i have one "old kraftsman", 60's vintage that i put a standard humbucker in and play slide on it and it kicks butt. a neck reset will probably cost you a couple hundred if you have a pro do it. i'm not sure but that one's probably out of the 60's. looks like someone played the devil out of it.

the project i just finished had a walnut body which can be pretty bright so i put a couple of dimarzio pafs in the neck and bridge position and a virtual vintage blues in the middle. sounds absolutely great and looks even better.