Doc

American Eagle, if I remember right , used to be a fixture at tool shows, Their reputation puts them in a class with Amana or Freud. I got one of their straight cutters years ago as a sample and I remember it as a good pro quality bit. I get really good pricing on Amana, Ridge Tool, and Velapec so that's what I use.

Just my 2 cents here, but you have to have something other than just the shank of the router bit to bear against the template and the cavity once you're past the template. That router bit is zinging alosn at a pretty good clip and will butn the crap out of whatever it bears against. The bit that is being sidcussed, I believe, has a bearing on the middle portion of the bit. This keeps things cool and unburnt. You can use the bit you have linked to if you use a template guide attached to your router base. This is how I do almost all of my router work, and have for better than twenty years. It is also easier on your router and bits if you use a Forstner bit to rough out the cavity first.

If you do a traditional French polish with shellac, oil and pumice you don't need to use grain filler. Google French polish. There are a couple of sites for this old but useful technique. I had an English finisher who worked with me who got amazing results this way. It's also great aerobic exercise.

I built a kitchen last summer and used lacewood for the face frames. It stained about as easily as oak. I've used a lot of it and have never had much trouble with staining. If you're getting too dark a result you either need to thin down your stain, use a less heavy hand applying it, or both. The ground wood willl get dark but the rays, these are the "fish scales", should stay a lot lighter. You can also hit it with really fine sandpaper or Scothbrite and tanke some of the color back out of the rays.

Verho. Don't feel too bad. I've been around for a while and I'm rapidly losing interest in this forum because of the juvenile combatative attitude that a lot of the children here have. Nitro will not go over poly and give you a finish to be proud of if it works at all. Strip it to the wood and start over. I am less careful with glue lines. I've refiished literally thousands (yes thousands) of pieces of furniture and as long as you don't submerge your piece in caustics and leave it there for hours you should have no trouble. That said, The caustic stripers are the fastest way to go but the chemicals are nasty. The citrus based strippers are a ot slower but do a very good job, especially on something as small as a guitar. Poly is a pain ion the butt to strip and I reach for the marine grade stripper. I also have no feeling left in the ends of my fingers from chemical exposure. Strip it, sand it. and follow the tutorials here and at Re-Ranch. There are some good posts on the pros and cons of various grain fillers.

Do yourself a favor and go to the Taunton Press website. They are running a sale on their "how to sharpen" book for about $28.00. This was written by Tom Lie-Neilson and is the best book I've ever seen on the subject. Well worth the bucks.

I haven't used this stuff, but I've put down a lot of waterborn and if I don't shoot it I've gotten the best results with cheap disposable foam brushes. No hairs, fewer laps marks and just a better job. Don't try to clean them, just pitch them.

The secret to making shellac hold up is to put a good coat of paste wax on it after it cures. This makes it much more water and sweat resistant. Nothing will make it alcohol resistant, so keep the beer and martinis away.

If that is a veneered face don't even think about steaming it. You'll screw up the glue and wind up with more of a mess than you started with. Those are some citation dents. The only way that I know of to take care of them without serious work is to use burn in shellac sticks. Even then they'll still show. Leave th beast be what it is: a used EPI. Fix 'em when you feel ilke re-doing the whole thing.

My personal preference would be to use lacquer. It dries faster. It's easier to rub out. It's a whole lot easier to fix a scratch or chip. I think that it looks better than poly. Especially if you're planning on building it up. Look for some spray cans of Deft. Cheap, easy to use. Almost colorless.

The Minwax acrylic poly is a widely available nearly crystal clear finish that will go over most enamel. It comes in rattlecans and regular brush grade. There are plenty of "water white" lacquers available some which will go over paint and some which won't. They are all dead clear and stay that way. Look in your yellow pages for a cabinet makers supply company and ask for their advice. My supplier stocks rattlecans of the stuff. You might look into a cheap spray rig. I've got a gravity feed HVLP gun that cost me about $35.00 at an automotive paint shop, and while it's certainly not as good as my $400.00 Binks it does the job in a pinch. I use it when I've got colored finish to shoot at the same time I'm shooting clear to save clean-up time.

Thanks for the directions guys. This appears to be a simple product that is charging you for coonvenience and a brand name. All this stuff is is boiled linseed oil and solvent with "other oils" added. My guess is that the other oils are a little tung oil. The solvent is probably mineral spirits. You can mix up your own for a lot less, and it is truly not rocket science. A quart of boiled linseed oil should cost about $10. I've got a quart of Behr tung oil on the desk here that is old as the hills and cost me $12. Fine Woodworking has run scads of articles on this typr of finishing. Check their website at Taunton press and look for back issues. When I oil finish I use straight Tung oil. I get great results and frequently wind up top coating with nitro for durability or gloss, with few or no problems.

There are a lot of funiture makers who hate the finshing part who use a mixture of oil, polyurethane and solvent. The percentages are done by trial and error. Oil finish is never going to harden up like a film finish. It is not lacquer or polyurethane. It isn't intended to be. It gives a nice flat to semi flat relatively protective coating tha is subject to scratching and water spotting, but is easy to apply and easy to repair. It will darken in time and is the most water permeable of any furniture type wood finish. If you want to have the look of polyurethane there is no reason that you can't go directly over the oil. Try mixing a little of the oil with some poly and try it on a test board. If that hardens you have absolutely nothing to worry about. I don't know diddly about Tru-oil brand other than what I've seen here. Has anyone got a link to a site that sells or makes it?

I have a half an idea of what might be going on here. When I ran a refinishing shop I kept getting some pieces that a "really nice little old man" nad redone about ten years or more earlier. They had a wierd look to them and were the devil to refinish. Stain took unevenly and laquer acted funny. After about my tenth piece of serioiusly underbidding because the stuff was just such a pain in the butt I went looking for the guy. I eventually tracked down his daughter, because he had died.(this is why I was geting the work instead of him) It turns out that in the fifties and sixties when real finishing supplies were starting to get hard to get, because there weren't all that many serious woodworkers anymore all kinds of stuff was being touted as substitutes for things like tung oil, varnish and shellac. This guy had, no joke, a 55 gallon drum of Havoline 90 weight that he used to "bring out the color." He then hit it with a couple of coats of shellac, cheapo pre-mixed Bull's-eye brand, and a coat or two of Pratt and Lambert "38" varnish. He then rubbed the whole concoction out with pumice and more 90wt. This produced a pretty decent looking finish, but it never hardened the way it should, didn't last as long as the same process without the oil, and produced a hateful mess for any poor sucker trying to redo his refinishing. I haven't heard of anyone pushing this type of stuff for thirty years, because there is just too much good appropriate product available today. This is a direct result of the explosion in top quality woodworking being done today. Witness the number of you guys on this site alone. Twenty five years ago there were only a handful of semi-pro and amateur luthiers. Custom furniture makers were far fewer in number and quality. Today there are more than you can count and the work that I see exhibited on this site and others can hardly be called only amateur. I am constantly amazed at what is produced in basements and garages without the use of bells and whistles. If you want to use an oil finish go for tung or boiled linseed. Leave the auto stuff in the car. You need something that will polymerize when it's exposed to oxygen.

You need to do some basic research on sharpening. Go over to the Lie-neilson site and look around. They also sell a couple of cheap books on the subject. There in no easy simple quick foolproof way to sharpen tools. It's a basic cabinet maker's skill that everyone seems to want to get around doing. It isn't rocket science. There are ways that take less money up front, like "scary sharp", but they all require patience and a good eye. Laping the back refers to getting the back of a plane or chisel blade dead flat. I do this by coating the back with a blue magic marker made for this and working it on a stone until it's all gone. Then I do it again and if it's right it rubs off with a couple of strokes. I still use a combination of diamond water stones, oil stones and a leather strop. I get a mirror finish and a razor edge. I use 600 sandpaer on a plate to touch up and then strop while I'm working.

Compatible can means a bunch of things. 1) the base solvents don't like each other. Trying to coat mineral spirit based stain, like Minwax, with lacquer before all of the stain solvent has completely evaporated is an oil and water type incompatibility. 2) Sometimes even if they are basically the same the degree of "hotness" of the solvents may cause trouble. Example: shoot non-spray can Deft over nearly any other lacquer and it will crincle and bubble. It has drying retarders so that it can be brushed and thus acts funny over other lacquers. 3) Shoot lacquer over latex paint. It will usually crinkle right up and look like crap. 4) Some finishes simply won't bind to others. I could go on for pages. To get really good results you gotta bite the bullet and spend the clams.

What may have happened is that he just rewired the motor from 110 to 220. A lot of motors have this ability. Look at the wiring diagram that is either on the body of the motor or on the cover plate and see if it's a dual duty motor. I've switched a bunch back and forth and have never hurt myself or set anything on fire to date.

Also if your bit bogs down because you're asking the router to do more than it can you'll burn. Keep using the light passes and you'll be okay. Keep the bit clean. When pitch builds up at all it heats up the bit and dulls the edge.Get some of the commercial bit and blade cleaner. Don't use the cheap alternatives that someone here is sure to recommend. Oven cleaner is expecially bad.It weakens the braze that holds the carbide on. Learned that the hard way. I use Boesheild spray lubricant. I think it's called T-9. It doesn't react with finish and it gives me about three times the life of an untreated bit.

I think that a lot of your problems are related to 1)cheap paint and 2) using stuff that isn't quite compatible. Just wait until the first time you even halfway whack your gitfiddle and a giant chip pops off 'caus of bonding problems.. If you don't want to go the Re-ranch route go to your local automotive paint supply store and get a couple of cans of touch up. It won't save you much over the Re-Ranch but a buck is a buck. At least price out the Re-Ranch, and figure what your time and wasted cheapo paint is worth.

This is one of those things that if you have the slightest doubt about, don't do it. Learn on 110m not 220 110 can kill you if the conditions are right. 220 will kill you unless you're damn lucky. For this type of thing, ask around and find and electricain who needs a quick cash job on an evening after his regular work. Ask anyone you know who works in construction. I've ridden ambulances off and on since I was a medic in the service, and I've seen one too many screw ups with 220.

That's a great, cheap effective jig. It can be used to make more than one thing. This is a good thing. I'm always amazed at guys worrying about minute variations in size when working in wood. There are limits in the precison that you really need because the darn stuff expands and contracts like crazy. If it didn't look so good and sound so good there are all kinds of more stable things than wood to do this stuff with. Ovation guitars with plastic bodies look like crap (I think) and sound only slightly better, but boy are they stable and precise. MDF is much more dimensionally stable than regular wood, unless you dump your coffee or Coke on it or throw it in the pool. At least the furniture grade is. You can also shoot a couple of coats of sanding sealer on it , or paint it with glue size. That's why most of the furniture makers that I know who use a lot of veneer use it as a substrate. I have twenty year old jigs made from MDF that are still the same size as when I made them, and Richmond has a humidity of about 85%. To glue up the pieces parts all you need are some stiff cauls and everything will line up just dandy. If you're really worried about diminsional movement in a jig that you're going to be using by hand, bum some Corian scraps from a coutertop shop and rout 'em and fuse them together.

First Question: You say you're clear coating over paint. What exactly are you using? The guys here will tell you that I'm old school and set in my ways but my experience has taught me that i prefer to use the same stuff all of the way through. Not a different type of clear caot. You may be having problems 'cause you're using homeowner crap to try to get pro results. I would suggest going to Guitar Re-Ranch, reading their tutorials and even buying some of their stuff. I am real partial to nitrocellulose lacquer. I've used damn near everything at one time or another, but it's what I like.

I've never heard of anyone reacting to thhis stuff after it's cured. They probably wouldn't sell it for residential use if this was even a minor problem.

I've used the acrylic Minwax on floors and a few odd finishing jobs that had to be done in place with customers who didn't want the toxic fumes from solvent based stuff. The only drawbacks to the stuff, from my experience anyhow, are: 1) If you try to build it really thick it tends to get a little bit of a blue haze. This is nowhere near as bad as early water based finishes, but it is still there. Just a quirk of water based finishes. 2) It doesn't dry as hard as solvent based finishes. This is relative. It dries hard enough to walk on. I have a floor I did for a customer that is their main entrance. It's maple (a guitar wood) with a parquet border made of walnut (another guitar wood), red oak (a bad guitar wood) and Honduras mahogany ( a really good guitar wood). It's high gloss and has been walked on for four years and still looks pretty damn good. Obey the recoat times religeously. Make sure that you scuff sand every little nook and cranny. It will perform almost identically to solvent based poly in the long run.

I agree about the corrugated vs smooth sole. I don't notice a bit of difference. i own some of both. Same size, same plane different sole. I rub a little candle wax on mine and plane away. I have read that it was a marketing idea. This usually means something thought up to sell stuff to people who actually work and know what they're doing by people who don't do either. Yeah I'm cynical. You can wait and run all over everywhere and hope that you stumble on a good No7 that has escaped notice by all of the tool collecting and dealing vultures, or you can go ahead and pay a fair price for a tool in hand. I used to hit the yard sales and flea markets scavenging for deals. I now spend the same time in my shop woodworking and pay someone else to dig through boxes of skillets and junk to find the stuff and bring it to me. Your choice.