Doc

By razor blade to score along the seam I mean an x-acto No11 type blade. Very very very carefully. Planing. The gaget that you run wood through to thickness it is a planer. The thing you run it over to flatten it is a joiner or jointer depending on where you live. Before we had electrical gagets that eat wood and fingers we had hand planes and hand jointer planes. The one I have is three feet long and I can flatten a board with it in no time flat. If I'm doing a bunch of wood I step over to the big Powermatic and save my forearms. You can flatten your fingerboard on the body by making a hand jointer. Take a piece of 1/2 inch by four inch aluminum metal. I've got a metal supplier in town who I've bought a bunch of stuff like this from. 6066 is a common grade. Used in all sorts of industrial applications. Stick sandpaper on it. Use super glue to stick a couple of wooden handles on the back. As long as you don't try to press too hard and just let the tool do the work this will flatten damn near anything and do as good a job as a $2000 power tool. Just slower. And sweatier. It also won't eat your fingers or grab and throw your guitar across the room.(Hmmmm how do I know that these things happen?) You can also stick your paper to a flat surface, like a table saw top and sand upside down. This will flatten stuff. Just remember to not rock the pressure back and forth. Stand in the middle of your stroke and keep your pressure uniform.

Don't blame the primer. One thing to remember with anythiing other than a lacquer type finish is that the bond between the coats is a mechanical reather than a solvent type bond. Lacquer redissolves the top of the undercoat and the stuff actually flows together. If you cut it and looked at it on end with a microscope there would be very little layering visible. Not so with stuff like paint or urethane. Before you strip everything, stop. Let the thing cure another couple of days. Take a sharp x-acto type knife and see if you are still getting lifting. A run is many times thicker than the finish. Paint cure by rection with oxygen, not evaporation, so the inside doesn't cure anywhere near as fast. You may only have to feather in the edges, scuff sand the whole puppy and recoat with your top coat. Some general rules of the road 1)Make very sure that whatever primer is bone dry. You will still be able to smell thinner even after a couple of weeks so this is no guage. Push our fingernail into it lightly and see how hard it is. 2)Scuff sand every square inch with a fine, not superfine, sandpaper. This puts thousands of teeny tiny scratches in the finish that the top coat can flow into and lock to. If you didn't sand it our real well and then tack cloth off the sanding dust this could have been your problem. 3) Check your can of finish and see what they recommend as a primer. Sometimes the best primer to use under a urethane is the same stuff thinned way down. A couple of coats. 4) As a general rule, and there are the odd exceptions, shellac will stick to almost anything and almost anything will stick to shellac. 5) I would make a test board. Take a piece of similar wood, or the same stuff if you've got it. About a square foot. Round one edge off so that you can see how an edge behaves, and finish the sucker just like your gonna do the guitar. Hope this helps

What kind of metal are you going to use? Different metals react differently. Some are easy to oxidize, like copper. Some are a toxic nightmre, like stainless.

Heat is heat guys. A heat gun is no worse than a heat blanket, if you use it right. Always take a razor knife of some kind a score the finish first. Gibson oversprays everything first and then scrapes the bindings clean so there is a good chance that if you cdon't cut it you'll pull some chips. Always start at the nut so you don't have to have as much heat on the body. They make some really thin bladed doo-dads called palette knives. These are sold at artist supply stores. They have a really really thin blade that is rounded on the end. They're great to work in the crack and lever things that are glued together apart and are pretty cheap. I'd take one, press it against the seam and hit the blade with the heat gun at the back away from the wood. It will heat up and you can work it in. Once you get it going replace it with a thin bladed butter knife. I had an honest to god luthier show me this trick and I use it on funiture all the time with good results. I pulled the bridge off of my 1965 Epiphone Texan flatop about a month ago with zero damage to the wood or finish and it took about 15 minutes.

These get redone all of the time. It's easier if you pull the frets first. Since it's already toast this is a slash and burn affair. Get out your deadly heat gun and just be very very careful near the finish. Take some aluminum tape, the three inch stuff that they have in the appliance section of Lowe's and put it on the sides of the neck Bend it out at a 45 degree angle and it will channel the heat away from the body if you keep the gun angled towards the head. Pro's use a heat blanket. You might ask your local repair guy what he would charge to just pull the sucker for you. There is also a solvent called "Deglue Goo" that will soften the glue and not screw up the finish. It seems to be mostly water cornstarch and vinegar but it dissolves glue.

As long as the solvents/thinners are compatible I don't see any reason why not. Furniture makers tint their fillers to all kinds of colors. Like a navy blue stain on oak and then fill with say a red filler. The big grain pores in oak or ash allow an interesting contrast. Take a small amount of your filler and do a test board. Make sure it will dry okay. That would be my main worry. Use neutral colored filler to start with. Also shoot the stuff with a top coat of finish on the test to make sure that that works too.

If I was goining to do this I would use colored finish. You still can get some bleed through unless you cut your channels deeper than the stain will penetrate. One way to skin this one would be to cut your v grooves. Stain the lightest color first. Seal it. Stain your darker colors in sequence sealing each. Use a semi-paste wood filler tinted to match one color or another to fill in your channels and develop a crisp edge, Seal and finish. Lots of work but it should work and look neat. If it works out post a picture 'cause it does suggset some interesting possibilities.

Some questions first. 1) What kind of finish are we talking about? Type and make. 2) How much did you have to thin it out each coat? Normally for a high gloss finish I start with 600, But it just depends on the amount of orange peel. You can rub out a finish with 6000 start to finish but it will take you forever and you'll have a bad case of Popeye's foreams when you're done. Since you're not doing this on anyone else's nickle or clock use the finest grit that you have the patience to use. What you're doing is leveling out the coats, then removing the scratches that this put in. The finer the grit the smaller the scratches that you have to remove.

If the shade is what you want, just dilute it down more with solvent. Way down. You can always layer multiple coats to get it dark enough. Remember that most dye stains have a quirk. The first coat tends to open the grain so that sucessive coats seem to darken more proportionately than the first coat.

I may be dead wrong, and anyone else please wade in, but the guys who I learned from told me to keep wax away from polyurethane. The water base finishes aren't true polys, but act like them. Part of your problem may be that the ones that I have used take a long time to cure all of the way. Like a month or more. They set up about 75% in normal time and the last 25% takes an excruciatingly long time to cure. This is because they just don't cure by evaporation of solvent, like lacquer or shellac, but mechanically like paint. This is why you have to absolutely scuff sand every square inch in between coats to ensure intercoat adhesion. I'd clean it off with varsol to get any wax off. Sand it, tack cloth it and then I'd shoot a good very careful coat. Make sure you don't have any opportunity for dust to get in it and leave it be. If you really need to rub it out you may have to settle for a satin finish.

For almost all of this stuff I'd use CA. I'm the first to admit that I screw up and have to re-do things. Epoxy has to be mechanically chisled out. CA can be disolved with acetone. To cut metal use a jeweler's scroll saw and make a"bird's mouth" support. Take a piece of half inch thick maple about three or four inches wide and about a foot long. Drill a 1/8 inch hole aabout an inch and a half or so from the bottom edge. Cut a narrow "V" shape that starts at the hole. Clamp the thing down to a bench so the "V" hangs over. Keep the blade in the hole while you're cutting. This supports the metal and helps keep the edges form curling down leaving a flat piece to inlay. I agree abaout the stainless just being way too hard to work with with normal hand tools. You really should have either laser or plasma cutters.

Beatiful job. Just goes to show that if you're careful and take your time you can get tough finish off with a minimum of damage. Just as an example, how long on the clock did it take you and what was the original finish? It would probably save some of the neo's some frustration if they have an idea of how fast the job should go in the hands of someone who really does know what they're doing with this stuff. There may be some differences in the formulation of stuff here and in the UK. I've had a number of guys from over your way work for me over the years and have always been curious about why so many of our techniques aren't used more by each other. I've adopted a bunch of their methods and some people here look at me funny when I describe them. Again, what works for you, works. I know that most of the yellow glue I use is more resistant to heat than the hide that I use. This is Behlen's. And the white is most resistant of all. I regularly pull hide glue joints apart with a heat gun and a butter knife. I work the blade into the joint, heat it with the gun and slowly lever it apart. This is mostly in furniture repair redoing a mistake, but it works great to pull off an acoustic bridge without screwing up the finish. Ditto with yellow, but the white can give me trouble. There is some stuff called "De-glue Goo" that dissolves any water soluble glue with no damage to the surrounding finsh and I resort to that with white and yellow because it does take a while to work. I know some folks who veneer with yellow glue by painting both sides, letting it dry then ironing it on. No me.

I agree about the 70 degrees. With lacquer, moving air is more important than temp for drying, but much below 70 and the solvents can act funny and it may not dry evenly. Same applies for over 90. Dries too fast. Also if you're using spray cans the nozzels can chill down enough to make them sputter. Bad. If you have to shoot in the cold make sure to get a fan on the surface. Set it back far enough so that it doesn't mess with the pattern or suck theo overspray into the motor (boom) and turn it on low. Turn it on before you spray so that any dust that's gonna get stirred up is gone by the time that you spray. This helps even out the drying. Also remember that this stuff is actually as explosive as the cans say. Remember no pilot lights or open flames. The fumes are heavier than air and spread like crazy.

I would wait for a little while after I'd wiped the thing down the first time to get the leftovers off. Rub it with your finger and see if it's almost completely dry. That's when you go at it. The nice thing about using burlap is that it is aggressive on the filler but soft enough to not mess up the finish. If naptha is working for you, it should be safe as long as you don't flood it. This is not an exact science. If you wait too long the stuff, as you have discovered, petrifies and you wind up working yourself to death. If you do it too fast or aggressively you pull out the filler. Just take your time and use really good light so you can judge what you're doing as you do it. To really see if you have gotten all of the haze off take a clean rag, wet it down with denatured alcohol and wipe a healthy wet coat on. It will make it look like it will with a coat of finish but should not affect either the filler or the finish. Look at it in the light and get down and bounce the light off of the surface. You should be able to see any problem areas. **It is always better to take off too much filler than to leave any excess on.** The whole reason to use a pate filler is to keep from having to use finish to fill the little pores. In time, if you just used laquer it would dry and shrink down. You want to just minimize the settling by putting something that dries hard as a rock in there. If you look at an old finish under a magnifying glass you will see that the grain has eventually shrunk in some no matter how good the finisher was. The reasons that polyester gets used are 1) it builds really fast and 2) it doesn't shrink much, so the filler stage isn't as critical. IMHO it still looks like plastic crap. Nothing beast a nitro lacquer finish. Post some pictures so we can see the end results! Good luck and happy trails.

I'd vote for the swamp ash, too. Cherry is heavy as lead, or maple. But it is really pretty if finished right. Bass is cheap and light but may be too soft for this. Poplar is also cheap and light. Remember that the lighter the wood the less the sustain (usually)

Fourty years ago three of us carved a full sized cigar store Indian for a Boy Scout project. Took forever but it does work. We used the regular burs. Looked great. The gaget you posted is related to a bunch of doodads that have been made to turn side grinders into carver;s. I think one was called an Excaliber. They will remove a lot of wood in a hurry. Sometimes a whole lot of wood. Sometimes a finger. I like the slow way better. Sagino ( I think that's the spelling) makes a tool the size of a Dremel that is an impact carver. Comes with a bunch of carving chisel type attachments and goes through even maple like a dream. Check the national mail order guys like Rockler.

For a really good one look at Lie Nielson's web site. Phenominal hand tools made the way tools used to be made. If you're shaping necks get a curved sole shaver. The size and config is a personal choice. Look at the old Stanley's for sale on eBay. I have some of those and some modern Kunz's (German made) in the drawer next to the LN's and use what feels best for each job. A lot of it is the skilll of the sharpener ane the cabinertmaker. They are pretty basic tools.

Knowledge is usually the result of experience and time. Ignorance comes free in 55 gallon drums. Heat guns are just one way to skin the kitty. They can be a good way.If you take your putty knife and round off the coners and dull the sharp edges you solve a lot of the problems. Remember that a lot of luthiers use hide glue. This stuff is heat activated so anything that's under stress will come apart unless careful. Yellow gue can too. Most modern finishes are a form of plastic. So is most binding and purfling. What softens one softens the other.Polyester is really flammable and does give off toxic fumes when it is heated or burned. Mostly nasty acids. Look at the MSDS for any of them. They warm against disposal by burning. There is no one right way to do this stuff, but there are a few hard and fast rules for any of them. Goggles, masks, ventilation and patience are the rule for every single one of them. Other than that it's what works for you. I have a half dozen different strippers, a half dozen different solvents, a heat gun and a bunch of sanders. Whatever works, works.

Thanks fotr the compliment guys. Here's what I would do. 1) make sure that everything is sanded perfectly. Any scratches will show. 2) Stain the puppy. Let it dry. Oil based stain should go 24 hours in a warm dry place. This is Minwax type stuff. If you're using a hotter solvent stain like Campbells's give it a couple of hours. To be safe let it sit overnight. 3) Shoot a "dust" coat over the whole thing and see what it does. I'd reccomend sanding sealer if you've got it. If you're going too fast it will go white on you so do the back first. If it looks good go ahead and shoot a very light coat on the whole thing. Wait until it is dry to touch and shoot a decent coat. Sand this out with 220 grit sandpaper. Use the grey kind cause it has a lubricating agent that keeps it from clogging. 4)Wipe it off with a clean uncontaminated dry rag.. 5)Look it over and make sure you didn't cut through anywhere. If you did don't worry, just reshoot it, and repeat three and four. 6) Wipe the nasty gooey gunk all over and leave a good skin on the body. Let it flash, this means let it haze over. This doesn't usually take too long. Like minutes not hours. Take some burlap and wipe against the grain Just take off the top not what's in the pores. You'll get a feel for how hard and long to go at it with a little experience. Look at it in reallly good light and make sure you haven't pulled too much off. If you have wait overnight and recoat it. When you hold it up to the light you shouldn't be able to see any dips down ino the pores. 7) Let if set up overnight and tomorrow when it has started to petrify wet a piece of burlap with solvent (use wht the can recommends as a thinner) and wipe with the grain. Get it really clean, I just rushed one and had to restrip it cause it ws cloudy when I top coated it. 8) Shoot a sealer coat. Again, I'd use ssanding sealer. Let it dry and shoot another. 9) look at it. If it looks like a decent finish then go to your top coat. If it looks like it needs more finish then hit itt again with the sealer. Remember to sand lightly and wipe down between coats. It is easier and faster to build with sealer than lacquer.Sanding sealer has stearates in it which make it less difficult to work with but softer. 10) when the sealer looks like a decently finshed ax go to your lacquer. 11) You should have to do a minimum of sanding in between coats. Just need to take care of any Murphy's that fall out of the air into your now mirror like finish.Keep building until you're happy with it. If you do a decent job of building with sealer you can probably get a No1 job with less than ten coats depending on how much you thin it out when shooting. 12) If you are an **** retentive like me give it about a couple of weeks and go at it with a buffer and polishing compound. 3M Finess it or Mauquire's are the ticket and what the pros use. If you've been very good you can get away with not rubbing it out, but it really does make it turn ito a slippery devil when you do. Take your time. Any effort to rush things quarrantees a screwed up mess. It does take a lot of clock time, but not that much work time. Lots of wait till tomorrow. Just be glad you're not doing a twelve foot by four foot conference table. A really good reference book is Bob Flexner's finishing book. I learned my chops from Bobberit Jackson, who was one of the best finishers who ever walked the planet, and left us this year before the SOB could answer all of MY questions. I hope this isn't flogging a dead horse. Feel free to disagree with me because ther are lots of differing opinions on this stuff. Happy finishing.

This is reallly great stuff if you take the time to do some test boards and get the hang of using them. They are really light fast and have very intense transparent color. They will raise the grain, so before you stain take a damp sponge and wet down all of the surface. Let it dry. Then sand it with fine 220 sandpaper. First sand at about a 45 degree angle, lightly to cut off the nibs and then sand parallel to get rid of the scratches that you just put in it. repeat and stain. If you start sanding with the grain the little buggers have a tendency to lie back down and pop up with the first coat of finish. Lee Valley is a really top notch supplier and you can pretty much trust anything that they sell.

I have to strip polyester, poyurethane and conversion varnish all of the time. Kleen Strip brand KS-3 cuts through all of these and epoxies to boot in no time. Actually in about fifteen minutes for the thickness laid down on guitars. Sanding is a great idea as long as you can stop exactly at the wood. You wind up having to deal with taking out the scratches from the coarse paper that you have to use to get through all of these lovely modern finishes leaves. If you want to sand finish off with a fine grit paper have at it, but this stuff is used because it is reistant to scratching. That and it builds really fast. REmeber, to get an even finish you need to do exactly the same thing to everything that shows. If you sand through anywhere you have to sand everywhere because the wood has aged,usually darkening, and you may also have stain that you will cut through. I don't want to sound like a know it all but I 've been building and refinishing furniture professionally since 1965 and do have a bit of experience with this stuff. Just trying to keep someone else from screwing up a nice axe the way I did when I started out.

I agree completly. If the dry fit isn't butt tight than you need to re-joint your boards. Glue is not filler. Sawdust in glue is a bad idea. It will guarantee a failure. You should only use about ten square pounds of pressure with your clamps

Whoops. Didn't mean to insult you. My family left Ireland in 1860, only we sailed west instead of east. I've had a couple of Brits working for me off and on so I have learned a bit about their ways and lack of decent toxins to work with. I never will understand warm beer.

I'll wade in here. Stay away from the heat guns with this one. Use a chemical stripper. Use a semi-paste. It stays where you put it. Brush on about a half a square foot at a time. Dont't mess with it, let it work. Watch your time and get a feel for how long it takes to eat down to the wood. Just do it a square at a time. Be careful around any purfling. If it's plastic you don't want any on it. Scrub it off with "00" steel wool in the direction of the grain. After you're done with the whole thing go back over with a light coat on the whole thing to even it out. Let it set for a little while and take it off with "0000" steel wool and light elbow grease. This should give you a clean slate to work with. Read your instructions, the funny stuff written on the can that we all usually ignore, and see if your particular brand needs to be neutralized with anything. Do this all in a well ventilated area, not a basement. Wear stripping gloves that are available at the same place that you get the stripper. Wear goggles. If you don't like toxic chemicals the citrus based strippers are a lot slower, but they do just as good a job and you don't have toxic waste dump in your yard issues. Let it sit for a day after you're done to thoroughly dry. I can strip one of these puppies in about an hour or so. Three hours with citrus.I can sand one in a whole lot more and I always make myself more work with the sandpaper method. Buy spray cans of finish from Reranch or someone similar. If you're doing a burst you can hide some of the repair by shading it the dark color. Hope this helps. Oh, I make funiture for a living.

If you're in a fairly large city with some decent cabinet makers suppliers look for an M.L. Campbell distributor. They make lacquers for the kitchen cabinet and furniture industries and will custom tint to pretty much any shade or color.