Doc

Just a suggestion: First use a cove bit to cut the outer, lower 1/4 round part. Next take a flat scraper and grind the roundover profile for the top edge into it. Use the scraper to do the roundover. You might be able to gt a bearing guided roundover bit to do it. The other alternative is to use a shaper and get a set of blades ground. If you're planning on doing more guitars with this same profile it would be worth it. Just one and the router/shaper is more cost efficent. LRH is a good source for oddball shaped router bits. Look at their site.

What you've got there is intended for use under polyurethane only. In all probability one oftwo things will happen, or maybe both. The lacquer won't adhere decently or it will make the sealer scruch up to what is called a typewriter finish, for those of you old enough to remember typewriters. Bad bad things both. Get some regular lacquer based sanding sealer.

How are you applying the filler? I don't use epoxy grain filler, but sometimes with regular grain filler you have to force the nasty goop into the pores. Use a plastic squeegee of some sort.

Do yourself a favor and buy this months Fine Woodworking magazine. It has an article on oil finishing that pretty much covers what to do when and how.

One of the reasons to use Belens is that it hardly has any wax or any bug parts or bark in it, where a lot of the generic stuff has all of the above. It's a good idea to filter any finish before you use it .

I've done a fair amount of French polishing over the last thirty years. I use olive oil which is what most European polishers have used for the last couple of hundred years or so. I think that a six pound cut is way to heavy. I don't even use a one pound cut to polish. I do use a little heavier, two or three pound cut for the ground coat. I'd find a supplier for Behlen's shellac and use the grade appropriate for your desired end color. You don't mix the oil directly with the shellac. I have a small bottle with a cork in it. I've cut about an 1/8" v shaped notch in it and drizzle just a touch of the oil directly on the surface while I'm working. Look up back issues of Fine Woodworking magazine. They've run some really great illustrated articles on how to do this type of finishing. Also google the web and search this site. There are a couple of good, easy to follow tutorials.

How do you know what they're doing when you're not in the shop?

You should be getting curly shavings not dust. I sharpen my scrapers first with a fine mill file. I use a Veritas jig so that I get an absolute 90 degree angle. I then use diamond plates up to about a 1200 grit on the face and all of the edges. I check it with a pocket microscope and then turn my hook with a burnisher. It is as important to have the face dressed as it is the edges. You can return a burr a couple of times before you need to redress all the way if you do it right the first time. Its a lot like a chisel or plane. The first time you use a properly sharpened one is a real eye opening exprience.

Before you jump in with anything try staining it and see what happens. If the stain takes great. If it doesn't get some stripper. Formby's is good for this one because it's one of the weakest on the market and it's really hard to screw up with it. Do remember to read the instructiolns and see if you need to neutralize it before staining and finishing.

Years ago I finished all of my furniture with shellac and varnish. I switched to lacquer in the 70's for the same reason that most folks seem to be enamored with polys and such. Speed and ease of application. Varnish takes a good 24 hours in between coats to cure and while it's tacky it's a dust magnet. The only drawback to shellac is that it is not totally waterproof (sweat will eat into it). I can finish with it almost as fast as lacquer. You can tint it and it will certainly go over most dyes. French polishing is labour intensive but boy does it shine. Super blonde grade is almost colorless and doesn't tend to yellow very repidly. Nothing feels as good as a properly applied and rubbed out shellac and varnish finish, but it will take about three times as long and is twice as much work as lacquer and stacks up worse against polyurethanes and polyesters. All this said I'm sticking with lacquer for 99% of what I do with the occasiional French polish for my purist customers with large budgets.

Both of the Defts. rattlecan and gallon can are modified nitrocellulose lacquer. The gallon can kind has lots of retarder because it's a brushing grade lacquer and this lets it self level. No nitro type finish is going to be as hard as a catalyzed finish whether you're talking poly or Butyl lacquer. On the other hand nitro is less brittle and if you're doing a hollow body or acoustic it is better for tone, according to a whole bunch of folks. Try using the rattlecans and follow the light bulb oven suggestion. I've got a twenty five year old refinish on an Epiphone that has held up really well, and turned a really great "old nitro" gold color.

When you sharpen your scraper how fine a stone do you use for your final dressing before you burnish the hook? On straight grained cosistant hardness wood you can get away with more than on squiggly ash. Ashh is worse than some burls. I used a scraper for years and thought I was getting a good clean edge until I ran into someone who was unbelievably compulsive. What do your shavings look like? Are you getting curls or dust or something in between? Dig up some of the old Fine Woodworking articles on sharpening scrapers. I've also got a $10 Radio Shack mini microscope I use to check my blades when working and when sharpening. It helps a bunch.

I've got a box rigged with a ground fault breaker. Cost me about $25.00 total and it has kept my bacon from getting fried on jobsites a bunch of times. A few years back I drilled into a wall that "has absolutely nothing inside, honest" and hit a nicely grounded cold water pipe. The main breaker didn't budge, my GFI did. Trust a GFI. They react fast enough that you don't get any burn whatsoever. I've had most of my shops in abandoned industrial plants and the power is always ancient and scary. I play at home on concrete floors so I'm cautious even though the wiring is good. I borrowed a friends wireless rig just for grins and the room I use at home has got so much interference that I'm inclined to just stay hard wired. The picture was a big help. I feel better about my mediocre electronic skills. I guess I just have to get used to stuffing ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound sack using a soldering iron and a screwdriver.

I'll ask again, Do you want to strip it to the wood or just take off the blue? The chemical they talk about is methylene chloride based paint stripper in one form or another. The citrus based strippers are great but take a lot longer to work. A whole lot longer. Both types will take it down to the wood.

If you hit google there are a bunch of sites dedicated to antique tools and their care and restoation. A good hand plane with all its parts in decent shape (all relative) isn't hard to turn into a good working tool. A crap plane in excellent shape is a bear to tune and work with. I recently picked up a really abused Stanley No6 for $5 US. The blade cost me another 35 and it took me about three hours to completely tweak it out. It takes off curls of wood that you can almost see through with little effort. Stanley, Bailey, names like that are usually worth it if there are no broken parts. You Brits had a bunch of small toolmakers that produced decent stuff. Missing parts are readily available, but can cost more than a new plane. For eye candy visit the Lie-neilson toolworks site. Remember that his planes today cost about the same thing that a first class Stanley did at the turn of the 19th century, in woodworkers dollars. Fine Woodworking magazine has run numerous articles on how to rework and tune planes. And finally, its not hard to make a wooden plane. JAmes Krenov's books talk about doing this. All you need is a blade. There truly is no comparison to a surface left by a sharp blade and one fuzzed up by the finest sandpaper available.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish? If you want to strip it clean lacquer thinner will take off lacquer, but furniture stripper will do it faster. There is probably no good way to just take off the top coat and save the underneath. Lacquer thinner won't mess up wood most of the time. Neither will furniture stripper unless you leave it on an forget about it.

Thanks for the input. I guess I'll hit Radio Shack on the way home tomorrow and get some tubing. The junction block is a great idea. I go back to when all amps were tube amps and actually had a guy in one of the bands I played with get zapped by faulty wiring. Maybe I don't really need to ground the bridge after all.

I'm going to guess that what's happening is that you have a pretty wet piece of pine and a dry piece of hardwood. The pine is drying and shrinking and the cracks are forming because you did a good job of gluing the top on. The hardwood is stable and not shriking, thus cracks. I can't give you any help with this. I think that it's just going to crack and eventually stabilize and stop cracking any more.

Okay guys, I've put together a walnut tele knockoff and I'm mostly happy with it. Black binding, coffee colored stain with a dead flat oil finish. Made my share of beginners errors but it plays about B+ and it looks pretty damn good for a beginner. Now for the wiring. I know that the hot pointy end of a soldering iron is the one that you don't hold on to, right? I'm used to wiring 3 phase woodworking hulks, not eensy tiny little wires and doo-dads, so here are some dumb questions. What do you cover the various splices with? Do you just use electrical tape after soldering or is there something more aesthetic and insulative? I've got two GFS humbuckers with 2 wires. (damn short little wires!) Also a regular 3 position tele switch, 2-250 audio taper pots and a .022 cap. I'm going to follow the Seymore duncan scheme for similar stuff and the diagram that came with the switch. Grounding. Where is the best place to connect all of the various grounds to? I figure I've got two pickups to ground, a cap and a bridge. Do they all go to the same place and then jump it to the socket or is there a better system? The diagrams just show "ground" and don't really say where. Do you just let force hold the ground to the bridge or do you need to solder it? I've read a bunch of books and the tutorials and I can't find anywhere where anyone has posted an actual photo for dense guys like me to see what it's supposed to look like inside the beast. My mosrite is not an electronic work of art and the Saga I put together isn't either. I'd like to do this so a) it works and it's not embarrassing when I have to get someone who knows what they're doing to help me get rid of the inevitable newbie hums. 'Preciate any help on this. I'm really itchy to get this sucker up and hummin.

I hope this helps: 1) do a search on refinishing on this site. 2) If that's a water based wood filler throw it away. It'll just make a mess. 3) Why are you using polyurethane? Go back to Lowe's or Home Depot and get a couple of cans of Deft. Gloss or satin.Do a search on this site for "Deft". It's a much better instrument finish. Looks better, sounds better too. The other frequent posts will tell you why you don't really want to use floor finish for your guitar. Deft is actually easier to get a professional looking result form than any poly I've ever seen.

Never apologize to anyone about where you're working out of or what you're using to do the work as long as it works for you. The most important tools are your head and your hands. That said, what do you think about the bandsaw. Have you had any problems with it and did you have any problems with the setup? My shop partner died on me and his wife had to sell off his tools one money so I couldn't get anything. I got spoiled with his big 20" Parks bandsaw. I have an Inca 10.5 which is great for accurate work but only resaws 5.5". I'm looking at the Grizzly with the 6" extension block and would like to know how yours has fared. I have a couple of pieces of Grizzly stuff and some have been wonderful and some have been boat anchors with electric chords attached. I've got a 3hp shaper that I use only as a last resort.

I'm one of those "antique guys". Tea is good for darkening light woods a little. Not wengie. Darker woods like cherry and mahogany respond to a saturated solution of potassium di-chromate. It burns them much darker overnight. You can get this stuff at any chemical supply house. It's relatively safe to work with. I've never tried it on wengie, don't see too many pieces of wengie furniture. I'll look around the shop and see if I have any and I'll try it out and post my results. Ammonia fumes will darken oak and related high tannin content wood. Rusty water will turn the oak family black.

Wait and see what the converter plug is. it may allow you to plug right into a 60hz 220 outlet.

As long as laquer won't pull the base coat, you can intomb the sharpie stuff with many many dust coats of lacquer making sure that they're all dry in between. Once you have a good multicoat foundation you can hose it down for build.

It says it comes with a converter. I sure hope it does. 50 cycle machines will not run on 60 cycle juice unless my memories of Physics 101 are wrong. I'm assuming that this is some sort of adapter that acts like a wall wart. Bosch hasn't made green tools since forever!!! I'm pretty sure, may be wrong here, that they've been blue for maybe 20 or 25 years.