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Yikes. You could try filling with those shellac sticks that you melt with a lighter and drip into the holes. Might work for some of the smaller ones. To temporarily stop the finish from sloughing off on your shirt, I would use shellac again. Not the sticks, from the can. CA glue might work, but it can be hard to do stuff later on. Shellac sticks to anything and anything sticks to shellac. Fill up the holes and french polish if you're industriously minded, probably come out looking almost new. My suggestions are probably conservative. Someone else might know some awesome tricks with CA glue and boat resin....

I know this one's been chewed over 'till there's nothing left but gristle, but I need convincing. I've been playing bass for years, but finally got my own electric guitar and my 'knee jerk' response is to pop in a preamp. Bass players are much more likely to have active circuitry in their axes than guitar players. If you think about it, basses need all the frequencies they can get, especially if you play using slapping and harmonics and shenanigans. A preamp makes good sense in a bass, I put one in one of my early handbuilds during the mid 70's. That axe sounded so good, a fan followed my band around for three years offering me more and more for it each time I saw him. Yes, I did finally relent. Asked him only the price of materials, cuz I'm so nice. Now here I am with my new guitar. It's a modified strat (grizzly kit) with vintage sounding low impedance (5.5k ish) alnico 5 mag pickups. I recently moved the middle pickup over by the bridge (slantbucker) and rewired it to get 13 combinations, 9 of which involve all three pickups. It really sounds great. So, why put a preamp in it if I'm happy, right? There's more. As primarily a bass and keyboard player, I don't have a real guitar amp. I was thinking to kill two birds with one stone and install some sort of overdrive or tube distortion circuit into the guitar that would also serve as a buffer. That way, I could play through one of my clean amps and get all the grit I want right in the guitar. I know, I know. That's what pedals are for. But, it seems to me that, with electric guitars, some sort of overdrive is an almost universal need. I could borrow some pedals from one of my shreddy friends to audition the sounds first. One even has one of those 'legendary' older 808 tube screamers that there are circuit boards available for. Is this a ridiculous idea?

Swede, I'm sorry to hijack the discussion into a non productive 'monkey wrench' area like that. Should have realized you had yer reasons!

Hah! The lights will dim! Gotta love that image. kpcrash, thanks for that. I've got a squire P leaning right over there than needs them cushions, now I know where to get 'em. Acousticraft, I'm going the opposite direction as you. I've been playing bass for years, but recently got me a guitar. Hell of a time figuring out that little jog from the G to B strings.....

It's really beautiful. Stains have solid pigments in them and might block some depth looking into the grain. I'd just use straight shellac, it really makes the grain 3D and hardens the surface a bit too. If you wanted color, I think dye first then shellac. I've used RIT fabric dye on quite a few wood projects with great results. Cheap and easy to find.

I recently finished building a big apple type strat that has 3/4" poplar boards 'butcher blocked' together with a flamed redwood front and poplar neck (!). The guitar is around 5 pounds and has unusually long acoustic sustain, almost twice that of my stock strat. OK, so there are other details. It has three CF rods, (inexpensive hobby store variety) embedded close to the three 'corners' of the neck. It also has a hand made single action truss mounted in the correct fashion, deep in the D and not touching anything other than at each end. The poplar and redwood both came from Homedepot and cost less than 15$ total. Ok, so I put a brazilian rosewood FB on it which is probably worth about $250. Hey, I had it lying around! I've built other guitars before this, but I wanted to try out some crazy stuff, like using poplar for a neck. The outcome was far better than expected. The guitar is in the hands of a proper shredder now, who likes it because it's light and has great tone and sustain. I think you'll make a fine guitar out of plywood, even the neck. If you're worried about CF costing a lot, try your local hobby store, or some hobby places online. Stewmac and LMI do charge too much. Also, people who makes kites use CF a lot, I bet they'd be a good place to look. A good thing to remember when thinking about the properties of any material and vibrations is, as an object is made stiffer, mass and internal damping interact less and less. If an object is infinitely stiff, your ear won't know whether it weighs an ounce or a ton. In fact, if an object can't flex, can it be said to be vibrating? Ouch, that hertz!

I made a few attempts with homemade radius blocks years ago, but gave them up. I'm sure my blocks were very accurate, but sanding is still sanding and it just doesn't flatten the wood anywhere near as accurately as my 22" jack plane. Those long aluminum radius blocks look like a disaster in the making to me. Anyone who has ever used a 6' aluminum level knows how easily they get tweaked with the littlest fall. It only takes me about a half an hour to plane a nice compound radius and the results are far more even than any machined FB I've seen yet. In short, I use the hand plane because it's flatter and more even than the sanding blocks. In fact, I would venture to say that it's flatter than any machine could make it as well. If you a bunch of people all doing the same thing, that doesn't guarantee that it's the best way.

Some very well known luthiers like W. Cumpiano have been building with yellow glue for about thirty years now. My problem with yellow glue is that I can hear it, especially when the joint is not close fitting. Of course, I'm a professional piano tuner and I can hear all sorts of useless stuff. Yellow glue dampens sound audibly for me. Formaldehyde resin and hot hyde glue are much better sounding and dry as hard as glass.

I recently rewired my strat so that it gets 13 different combinations, including all three coils in series. That sound is in no way dull! In fact it's one of my new favorite sounds. This scheme gives 9 different combinations that use all three coils, if I count right. I'll post some links to diagrams in a sec, but before I do I should add that my mod involved moving the middle pickup down next to the bridge so that the two together form a 'slant humbucker', or as I have apparently coined a new word (google only comes up with my posts so far, yup you heard it here first), Slantbucker. My wiring mod could easily be adapted without moving the middle pickup, but the problem with it is the 5 way switch is reconfigured to consider the guitar as having two pickups (one single, one slantbucker). A second DPDT on/on/on switch chooses between series, parallel and single coil on the slantbucker. The 5 way selects; Neck, Neck and Slantbucker in parallel, Neck and Slantbucker in series, Neck and Slantbucker in series out of phase, and Slantbucker alone. Like I said, you could easily wire this scheme up without moving the middle pickup, and I'm sure the sounds would be exellent. Only thing is, the switching might be confusing particularly to someone who doesn't normally play that axe. The upside of this scheme is that there are no 'dead spots' like you often get with complicated strat schemes that have a bunch of DPDT mini-toggles on your pickguard. Here's the link to the 5 position shooperswitch diagram http://www.guitarnuts.com/wiring/triffic/index.php This one wires the DPDT on/on/on http://www.guitarnuts.com/wiring/sw3.php

I recently finished a Grizzly kit nylon acoustic with french polish, which as you probably know is shellac. Violin makers often use oil varnishes, but even then I think they're very careful to seal the surface so that no oil penetrates, particularly into the soundboard because it dampens it and makes it sound dead. I think a hand rubbing type of oil finish (like the one you mention) would be very audible if you applied it to a soundboard, and I don't think you'd like the results. Shellac arguably gives wood the deepest looking grain of any finish known. Especially if you level the wood with a scraper instead of grinding it with sandpaper. French polishing is tricky, but mistakes are easy to fix, so you can get the hang of it as you go, even on a valuable axe. I think the results are beautiful and well worth the effort. Of course, I put on enough FP to make a level, shiney surface. But, you could easily stop after filling the pores. Also, I think that after you seal the wood with the shellac, you could oil the back, sides and neck with your oil (I know I've loved the feel of the hand rubbed oil electric necks I've checked out). Maybe finish off the soundboard with a few more coats of FP rubbed on...

Very cool. I was thinking about doing something similar, but I was going to make the entire pickguard out of three layers of dark/light/dark wood veneer. I don't have a vacuum bag setup, but I was musing that such thin veneers as would make a pickguard might be clamped effectively in a low tech vacuum setup, like maybe just stuffing the 'sandwich' into a gallon freezer ziplock and sucking the air out. You might not even need any vacuum at all, maybe just two pieces of flat plywood and a couple bricks.

30k! Wow thats hot. I remember I had a dimarzio model G bass pickup once, it was fairly hot. Can't remember exactly but I think it was around 10k. It balanced nicely with a dimarzio J model in the bridge position though.

I just finished modding my strat so that the middle coil is moved down next to the bridge, like a slant humbucker. At first, I was worried about the pickup direction because I would have had to saw off one of the tabs on the bottom bobbin to get the two coils to lay next to each other. I posted a question about it on another forum, and a helpful luthier told me that it didn't make a difference which way the pickup was oriented. Sure enough, he was right. But, that's for single coils. I have a feeling it's the same for humbuckers too. I would just wire it up and if it sounds out of phase, you'll know it and it'll be an easy fix.

My bandmates and I did many experiments with pickup placement back in the mid '70s. The first and most obvious thing is that pickups on commercial guitars are placed where they look good, not where they sound best. Pickup placement is simple. For the most treble response you need a pickup as close to the bridge as it can fit, for the most bass, you need the pickup to be as close to the neck as it can go. The more contrasting sounds you have to work with, the happier you'll be. One of the first mods I did was to fit a jazz bass pickup into a P bass. After moving it around above the strings it was obvious that the best sound was hard up against the bridge, so I cut off the two screw lobes on the bridge side and moved the pickup as close as it would go. Done the same thing on two other P basses since, owners love it.