Doc

The three posts were because our firewall at work causes unreal problems. You can use any size shank that you can get a collet for. I use 1/4" , 1/2", 3/8" and 8mm in both Elu and Porter Cable routers. The 8mm bits are the ones that Leeigh sells for their dovetail jigs and I actually use a collet adapter. You get into trouble with speed wuith the big bits. Like to ones for raised panels. Stuff with a three inch diameter. This should be safe, and I wonder why your router says to not change shank sizes. What brand and model are you using? I use a lo tof European tools, like Elu and Lamello, and have no trouble finding bits and such. If you have any questions about using the collet, satety or otherwise, E-mail me. I'm not the world's best but I've been using them successfully for over twenty years and have already made most of the dumb mistakes that one can make.

Guys I beg to disagree. I do plenty of very accurate work with a 3 horse Elu plunge router and collets. I fabricate a lot of custom items using solid surface (Corion, Avonite,Etc) and that's how I cut out pretty much everything. With wood rough saw with a bandsaw and route with the collets. One of the advantages is that you never have a bearing pop off in the middle of a critical cut allowing the bit to sink in up to the nub on the end of the bit. That's one of my favorite feelings. Yeahhhhhhh. To calculate the offset that you need just set a compass to the witdth of the offset and trace around the edge of the edge of your drawing. Shrinks it just enough. The collet system is actually less of a headache to do internal cutouts like a pickup cavity. The difference in accuracy that you're looking at is less than the amount that that wood will move in the first two days of a weather change. Wood doesn't believe in hundred thousandth's of an inch. !/128's are just not necessary. Your kidding yourself if you think that you can work wood like you work metal. This may be heresy, but it is what I've come ot believe after a lot of beating on boards.

Guys I beg to disagree. I do plenty of very accurate work with a 3 horse Elu plunge router and collets. I fabricate a lot of custom items using solid surface (Corion, Avonite,Etc) and that's how I cut out pretty much everything. With wood rough saw with a bandsaw and route with the collets. One of the advantages is that you never have a bearing pop off in the middle of a critical cut allowing the bit to sink in up to the nub on the end of the bit. That's one of my favorite feelings. Yeahhhhhhh. To calculate the offset that you need just set a compass to the witdth of the offset and trace around the edge of the edge of your drawing. Shrinks it just enough. The collet system is actually less of a headache to do internal cutouts like a pickup cavity. The difference in accuracy that you're looking at is less than the amount that that wood will move in the first two days of a weather change. Wood doesn't believe in hundred thousandth's of an inch. !/128's are just not necessary. Your kidding yourself if you think that you can work wood like you work metal. This may be heresy, but it is what I've come ot believe after a lot of beating on boards.

Guys I beg to disagree. I do plenty of very accurate work with a 3 horse Elu plunge router and collets. I fabricate a lot of custom items using solid surface (Corion, Avonite,Etc) and that's how I cut out pretty much everything. With wood rough saw with a bandsaw and route with the collets. One of the advantages is that you never have a bearing pop off in the middle of a critical cut allowing the bit to sink in up to the nub on the end of the bit. That's one of my favorite feelings. Yeahhhhhhh. To calculate the offset that you need just set a compass to the witdth of the offset and trace around the edge of the edge of your drawing. Shrinks it just enough. The collet system is actually less of a headache to do internal cutouts like a pickup cavity. The difference in accuracy that you're looking at is less than the amount that that wood will move in the first two days of a weather change. Wood doesn't believe in hundred thousandth's of an inch. !/128's are just not necessary. Your kidding yourself if you think that you can work wood like you work metal. This may be heresy, but it is what I've come ot believe after a lot of beating on boards.

Hey guys, Clearcoat over primer is absolutely okay. Lacquer primer is usually just top coat with some stearates and pigment. I've probably got 75 pieces of furniture out there with tinted undercoat (primer) nad then water white lacquer over top. Everything From black to Chinese red.

I'll be nice here 'cause almost all of your questions are answered elsewhere. This also means I can be overbearing and opinionated. If you have a lacquer finish and aren't but so particular you can scuff sand, feather in any chips and shoot a coat or two of sealer. Then shoot your color coat and clear coat. Most of the time you'll be okay. And most of the time it will look okay. If this was a $20 pawn shop guitar that was only gonna be viewed in the light of a bar by drunk I didn't know I might do it this way. If I was gonna go out in public with decent lighting I'd take it down to the wood and follow the other forums. If you sand off the old finish you may or may not also take off the filler. Hard to say. So what? It's a small area and easy to re-fill. Go to Guitar RE-ranch and follow their tutorial. When you have problems or surprizes post them here.

Ryan, It sounds like you just need to be patient. I have been real interested in this stuff 'cause I am tired of fumes, and it would be nice to be able to do the finishing in my basement shop instead of the main shop with its clouds of sawdust and solid surfaces chips to creep into the final product and drive me crazy. I haven't seen an acrylic yet that hardened up in a reasonable time frame. Tis doesn't, unfortunately, appear to be any different. If it was cheaper I might but some and fool around with it, but at seventy five a gallon I'll wait.

Ryan, It sounds like you just need to be patient. I have been real interested in this stuff 'cause I am tired of fumes, and it would be nice to be able to do the finishing in my basement shop instead of the main shop with its clouds of sawdust and solid surfaces chips to creep into the final product and drive me crazy. I haven't seen an acrylic yet that hardened up in a reasonable time frame. Tis doesn't, unfortunately, appear to be any different. If it was cheaper I might but some and fool around with it, but at seventy five a gallon I'll wait.

Ryan, How long has it been since you finished putting the stuff on? How warm is the room that you are keeping it in?

Good morning, If someone wnated me to give them back the second one from the top and handed we a raw alder body I would: 1)Do all the sanding. 2)Stain it with a dye stain, Like Behlen Solar-Lux. Probably something in the maple or hickory range. Thinned out. Use multiple coats. 3)Seal it with lacquer sanding sealer. 4) adjust the color by tinting the sanding sealer and spraying a little color. 5) Clear sanding sealer. 6)Lacquer top coat. Stay away from M*nw*x types stains on alder if you can. They tend to get cloudy. This should be a piece of cake. Stop worrying.

I've used a whole bunch of Behlen filler. You may have some really open grained mahogony. You may have wiped off a little too much filler. You also could have used a couple of coats too few of the sealer. Things would look fine until they all settled down. How long did you wait to wipe off your filler.? How long did you let it dry? How many coats of sealer did you use and how much did you thin it? If it's not too much of a pain in the butt you can strip off the hardware, scuff sand it and recoat it with clear. One advantage of lacquer. Me , I kinda like the fact that it looks like it's made out of wood.

Once again guys, From a finisher's standpoint and terminology, poly and lacquer are two entirely different animals. Lacquer is a product that is thinned with lacquer thinner. It dries by evaporation. Each coat redissolves the previous layer and you get an absolute melding of the coats. It dries in about 15 minutes or so. Sanding sealer for lacquer has an additive that makes it easy to sand, but softer, so you use it to build your finish and then top it off with lacquer for durability. Polyurethane is a product that is thinned with mineral spirits,or water if it's an acrylic polyurethane. The coats dry by chemical reaction. The only intercoat adhesion is mechanical, so you have to do a good scuff sanding in between coats. They make sanding sealer for polys too. Shellac is a substance secreted by a southeast Asian beetle. Sort of a "beetle wax". Cleaned and refined to various grades it is a made into a finish by dissolving it in methyl alcohol. It actually performs similarly to lacquer, but is not either alcohol or water proof, so it isn't a good final finish for a guitar. It is a great sealer for oily woods and unwanted stains. It is the finish used to French polish furniture to a high gloss, and was the stock in trade for the furniture industy until lacquer came along in the 20th century. "Layering" dyes is tricky. It's better, in my opinion, to tint your sanding sealer and spray it. This is for lacquer type finishes. You can tint poluyurethane but it's a little trickier. My stock advice if you're only doing a guitar every once in a while is to use aerosol cans with the colors already in them, and then use rattlecan clear to top coat. Like Re-ranch or Stew-Mac. My feeling about polyurethane is that it's for homeowners to put on unfinished furniture and floor guys to put on hardwood floors. Hope this helps.

Get yourself a copy of this monts "Fine Woodworking " magazine (on a newstand near you) and read the cover article on glue. It tells you more than you ever wanted to know about adhesives and probably answer questions you didn't even know you had..

Hey again, What everyone has to figure out is what you like to do. If you like the process of doing this stuff and really aren't concerned with the time factor more power to you. I personally have always enjoyed coming up with jigs made out of "stone knives and bearskin rugs" (to quote the guy that taught me). I also enjoy having the right tool for the job, that someone smarter than me has made. I have got a shop with a whole bunch of professional grade power and hand tools, but I see work shown here that is much better than some of what I'm currently doing. It's being done in garages and closet sized spaces with little more than hand tools and intense dedication to craftsmanship. Finding the same thing from a cheaper source just makes sense when you're doing this for love and not for money, or even when you're doing it for money! I see a lot of stuff on the sites that sell to luthiers that I can get from woodworkingand industrial suppliers for a lot less. Just so you'll know, I started out as a professinal woodworker with a borrowed tablesaw, a hand drill, some screwdrivers,a couple of hammers, my great-grandfater's layout tools a couple of old handplanes and a couple of good chisels. And $300 in my pocket. Used one job to pay for the next and buy what I needed as I went along. Mostly bought clamps at first.

I've just never done enough small scale work to justify a Foredom, but boy are they nice. The guy I used to share a space with had one I agree that wide open is the way to run any of that stuff. Less chance of grabbing. I actually use a turn of the last century (1905) Stanley router plane to do some of the cutouts. I do a fair amount of large scale carving, ball and claw feet and such, so chisels are second nature for me. If I really get hooked on this corner of woodworking I will probably opt for one of the modified dental drills. They're air powered and you can get bits that cut a line almost too small to see. Great for inlaying metal lines. Really light weight. I love being a tool junkie. Oh, you can get some really smal 1/4" shank bits. Down to 1/16", but they burn really easily. The high speed stell ones actually work better tahn the carbide becouse of brittleness.

Hey guys, I'm 52. I started doning this stuff when I was 12. I worked for my grandfather, and my Dad had a small enclosed shop in his basement where I worked at nighton small stuff. I've done this stuff for a living up until seven years ago, and i still put in thirty or fourty hours a week. For the first Twenty five years i thought that I was bulletproof and invisible. I ddidn;t wear respirators and hardly wore a dust mask unless I was sanding Wengie or Walnut or something else really toxic. I practically bathed in lacquer thinner and the other neat solvents we use. Ahhh methylene di-cloride. Today I use a mask and a respirator. Why? Because I have almost no feeling in my fingers and toes because of a phenomenon called peripheral delamination. I have spots on both lungs that my doctor says are not happy spots. Not lethal yet but not what he likes to see. A lot of the nerve damage came from skin absorbtion from out of the air. I worked in an unventilated shop a lot at first. I have had a lot of the guys I've been working with for my professional career start to die off in the last couple of years. Pancreatic cancer, lung cancer. Heart disease that has a component of chemical exposure. Do yourrselfs a favor. Buy one of the beltpack forced air respirators. The folks who sell woodtuner's supplies, like Packard or Woodcraft or Rockler. sell 'em. Get the air moving with an explosion proof fan. Make a downdraft table for dsanding. The stuff we work on here is small enough that this is really feasable. I'm hopig tht by changing how I do things that I may have bought myself another twenty or thirty years of banging on boards. Do the same. It really bites trying to play the guitar with numb fingers.

The grain on ash is so open that you have to hose it down really aggressively to start to fill it in,however.... If your piece of ash isn't quite as grainy as you would like for it to be go to your local Giant home improvement store and buy one of the brass bristle "toothbrushes" that they sell for funiture stripping. Scrub the crap out of it with the grain. Do not over scrub and do not go against the grain. Wet the thing down with a damp sponge, let it dry, and give it a quick rub with your final grade of sandpaper. Stain or paint, seal, then fill and finish. This will give you a more open grain. We did a 600 square foot floor staining it alternating red and blue stripes, sealing it then filling it with white. The sample board didn't have the amount of grain we wanted so one of the Brits who worked for me came up with the brush idea. Said they use it over there to fake liming. Worked great. I'll do most anything for the right amount of money.

Clavin, What kind of router fo you use? I use a Bosch laminate trimmer and If I try to do it all with power I invariably wind up screwing something up. I'm the first to admit that I'm not even close to being in the same class as you are. I just find tht I am more succesful by doing about 95% of what I do with power tools and doing the final fit and finish stuff with the old reliable hand tools.

Anything with the Behlen name on it is as good as it gets. Their stuff pretty much sets the standard for custom funiture buiders. It also costs a bit more than most other stuff. Their "Jet Spray" brand rattlecans are great for shading. Like doing a tobacco burst. The canned lacquer (quarts and gallons) is just plain wonderful to work with if you have the patience to do it right. I'm in Richmond, Va. where the humidity stays at cigar humidor levels. I use a whole bunch of retarder. It does slow your cure time down, but it also makes it lay out like a dream. I use a Sicma HVLP gun to shoot and I hardly have any orange peel problems. Anyone who reads my posts knows that I use a ton of Deft, but when the customer has real money, or I'm doing a spec piece I grab Behlen. Their Solar-lux stain is also great. It's colorfast and dries to workability in about twenty minutes. No I don't get any kickbacks from them and I don't even get much of a discount.

Dyes and stains work fine on alder. But then, I dye and stain ash without a lot of trouble. A lot of it is in how you do your prep. I don't like to sand the wood with much finer than 180. I've found that getting it too smooth is as problematic as not getting it smooth enough. If you use the dyes that are referenced in the various other threads and take your time you should be okay. Alder does have the annoying tendency to develop fuzzy spots that just stain weird. Just part of being an organic material.

Alder is used these days by a lot of cabinet shops as faux cherry. Most of the time its going to turn at least a little red. You may need to darken it a bit to kill the red. I'm not sure what exactly blonde walnut would be 'cause I think of walnut as brunette. One thing about alder is that to my eye it always has a little bit of a cloudy look to it no matter how you finish it. I can tell it from cherry across the room. If you fill the pores the grain will still show. The grain is caused by the growth pattern of the tree. Variations in living conditions, mineral contents, etc. What you fill with grain filler is the open pores in the cell where the machining process has cut them open. Alder has sort of medium sized pores, as opposed to oak or ash which both have craters. You can stain it. let it dry (depends on what you use as a stain as to how long) and oil finish it. If you like a matte finish oil can serve as a top coat. Three or four coats. Read and follow the threads. Reading is good for you. Any other questions just ask.

Cut your outline with a knife, x-acto or otherwise. Route out the majority of the cavity with power. Clean off the last 1/16" or so with a chisel. I like to leave a 1/8" This leaves the walls perpendicular and allows you better control on the depth.

Agreed there Devon. Softwood has it's place in acoustics. I don't see any good use for it in a solid body electric.

Sorry to rain on ya'lls parade but there is no way that I want to be bending steel strings on glass and then sliding my little fingers rapidly back and forth. Just becuase we can do something and it looks neat does't make it a good idea. All it takes is one small chip and you're in for an extended period of not playing. It is also a pain to have to get the blood cleaned up using only your picking hand "cause you've got the other one wrapped up. Fretboards and necks flex. Glass doesn't particularly like to do this. Get a chip in an amorphous solid like glass, even a non-visible eensy tiny one, flex the board and you've got a self surgery kit. This just sounds like a recipe for disaster. I like the plexiglass idea a lot better even if the stuff does scuff.

There is no surface treatment that will make pine acceptable as far as hardness. You can put all of the paint that you want on it and the first time you bump it will create a crater. Around the shop we refer to it as "Poopwood" "cause that's about what it is as hard as. What is driving you to consider using softwood of any kind for instrument construction? You're setting yourself up for a number of frustrations. 1) It's just too soft. 2) It usually isn't dry enough to be stable long term. 3) It has the nasty habit of weeping resin out of the endgrain and knots which actually does force its way out through the finish. 4) It doesn't hold screws worth anything. Save your pennies and buy something that won't frustrate you.