Houdini

Hey PunkRockerLuke I noticed you are from muscatine, I used to live in Nichols and went to high school in West Liberty for a year, just wondering how everyone survived the tornadoes. On the topic at hand, a good quality auto spray paint such as duplicolor would be good for a guitar. As a million other posts on this forum suggest, there are all types of ways to apply it. You should search all of the other posts to see how to prepare your wood and how to apply the paint properly. You can have the best most expensive paint in the world, but if you don't prepare the wood right, the guitar will look horrible. I and many others on this forum know this from first hand experience. So, for a low tech, cheap (by cheap I mean you don't have to buy spray equipment, the paint will still cost you a few bucks a can) solution, go to an auto store such as Auto Zone or O'Reillys (I think Wal-Mart even sells it) and buy some quality lacquer paint. It works great for guitars and is probably the most forgiving. The only drawback it that it takes forever to cure.

Wet curing wood sounds interesting. I have never heard of that, I guess they use salt water to dry out the wood???, kind of like using a brine solution to cure meat. I don't know too much about violins, all I know is that you cant beat a good sounding Stradivarius, or down here in Oklahoma a great sounding fiddle!

If anyone is interested, there is a program on the history channel today and later tonight (2 Apr 06) that is called the "Ice Age." What does this have to do with instrumets? Well, there is a segment about halfway through the program that talks about how the mini ice age that occured a few centuries ago may have led to the unmached quality of sound and tone that is produced by Stradivarius violins. It goes into how the ice age affected the wood that Stradivarius used and talks about growth rings amongst other things. May be of interest to someone. Check your local listings for times of the program. It will probably be repeated several times through out the week, so you may be able to record it and just fast forward to the Stradivarius violin section. This section comes on right after the program talks about the Irish potato famine.

To add on to what mattia said, you can easily make a jig out of a 2 inch block of wood. Take a block of wood (approx 2 inch thick and 6 inches long, or whatever the distance is between the two outmost tuners plus a little bit extra) and make sure that it is squared up on all sides. Then attach a fence to your drill press, if you dont have a fence, just clamp down a straight edge. Measure out how far apart your tuner holes will be and mark that on the wood. Then you just easily slide a squared side of the wood along the straight edge and drill holes at the appropriate spacing. This should line them up perfectly. To use the jig, clamp or tape it (with double sided tape) to your headstock, lining up the tuner holes where you want them to be. Then take a hand drill or a drill press and a good quality bit (preferebly a brad point since they make clean holes) and use the jig as a guide to guide the bit straight. You should end up with all of your tuner holes in line. To improve the quality of the jig, you can buy drill bushings like mattia was talking about.

Here is a great website that I have been looking at for Stanley Planes: http://www.hyperkitten.com/tools/stanley_bench_plane/dating/ Has all types of goodies about stanley planes.

I tried sandpaper on the bottom of the nut, and it worked like a champ. Gave me an exact fit. All I did was cut a piece of narrow sandpaper with a razorblade the size of the nut. In this case 1/8" and glued it to the bottom of the nut with a few drops of superglue, then used it as a sanding block. When I was done, I just peeled off the sandpaper. Why didn't I think of this before, it would have saved so much frustration. Thanks for the inputs guys.

Thanks for the help guys. I just thought of another idea as well. Glue a pice of sandpaper to the bottom of the nut and use the nut as a sanding block to square the bottom of the slot. Thanks for the help.

I can't seem to find anything on the forum about seating a new nut into a new fingerboard. I've built the neck for my new tele and am in the process of cutting the slot in the fingerboard to fit a 1/8" nut. The problem is that I can't get the nut to fit squarely on the bottom. When I put the nut in the slot, you can still see light between the fingerboard and the bottom of the nut. My guess is that the bottom of the nut slot is not perfectly square and instead of having perfect right angles there are little round edges that prevent seating the nut properly. I have tried a small file and razor blades in order to try and square up the slot, but to no avail. The fingerboard is already attached to the neck, so I guess trying to run a sawblade through it is out of the question. Anybody have any ideas, or should I bite the bullet and buy a stewmac nut seating file. Anyone used one of these before?

Just a reply to what mledbetter was saying. Minwax sells both a sanding sealer for various oil based finishes in a yellow can as well as sealer for acrylic based finishes. If you use acrylic based auto paint for the body I would suggest the acrylic based sanding sealer. This stuff is in a black can and is relatively new so all hardware stores may not carry it yet, but you can get in online and probably have lowes or home depot order it for you on their next shipment from minwax for no shipping????

I was searching through veneer on Ebay and came accross Waterfall Bubinga. I've never seen it before, but talk about beautiful wood. Here's the link: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...8187386321&rd=1 This link is for 156 square feet which is a little much, but I thought I would throw it out and maybe someone would use it as an Idea for a guitar top.

Yeah, I bought the glue a few months ago. Thanks for the help guys, I guess I will just have to build a bigger coat on it.

Yea, my joins were pretty good and I used plenty of glue, I'm just scratching my head trying to figure out if the glue could shrink that much after it dried, or if the lacquer somehow was eating it away. When I prepared the surface of the wood before lacquering, it was nice and smooth. It wasn't until I started painting that a groove appeared where the glue line was.

My mistake, I thought it was Elmers glue, but I looked at the bottle again and it is titebond.

I want to see if anyone else has this problem. I used standard elmers wood glue to glue up the blanks for a tele body I am making. When I finish the body with lacquer based paint and finish (i.e. Krylon acrylic paint/lacquer) it seems to eat away the glue. The reason I am saying this is because when I start to wet sand the guitar, the join line always seems to reappear and feels like a little groove in the guitar despite having been sanded flat before finishing. Is my problem that the glue is dissolving, or is there a better glue to use besides standard wood glue?

I'm thinking about using my lathe as a buffing machine and was wondering if anyone here has tried it and had good results. I'm trying to figure out if there are attachments available for a reasonable price (the ones I've seen are $90 for that I might as well just by a buffer)or if there is a good way to make my own. I couldn't find any thing using the search function about this, so I thought I would start a new topic. Maybe someone will have a revelation and come up with some good ideas. On another note, how would you compare buffing with a buffing wheel to a random orbital sander buffing pad?