Doc

I've got a razor saw already with three different blades so that's taken care of.

I'm going to get a Gurien style crowning file. LMII seems to have a good price and their service is tops. I'm also going to get a rounded triangular file from them.

Thanks for the tip about Warmouth. That's about $30 difference and a buck is a buck. I'll pick up a set.

I'm going to use Corion for nuts only because I've got leftovers from countertop jobs in about thirty different patterns, so I can play aroung with it for free and learn what I'm doing.

I don't have any experience with their bandsaws, but if they're like their tablesaws they are as good as they get. I had a 10" sliding panel table saw and it's one of the few machines i've ever owned that I had

1)absolutely no mecanical trouble that I didn't cause.

2) no trouble getting parts for when I screwed up and

3) no suggestions for anything that I would have liked done differently except for the cost, size, and weight of the sucker.

When I downsized the shop and went back to graduate school I sold it to a local high school theatre shop where it has seen heavy use by heathen teenagers for ten years on top of the fifteen I had it. I'm over there fairly often and the thing is still a phenominal workhorse in daily use.

I'm not sure in wood working that there is anything such as overkill with machines.

Shop space money and electricity are the only limitations.

I'd agree with the last statement.

I mostly build furniture and have for a pretty long time. I was trained with mostly hand tools and can joint an edge with a hand plane, and on a good day it is cleaner than a jointer.

I picked up my first hand plane in 1964, and it took me a couple of years to get any good with it.

Most of the time I use an 8" Powermatic jointer. It's lots faster and does a suberb job even on a bad day, which I have more and more frequently these days it seems.

You can thickness the sized boards that we use here with a router jig and save the bucks for something else. I think Setch has posted plans for one in the past.

The little Wagner Saf-t-plane will do most of the stuff that's done around here if you have a decent drill press.

If you really want to go to a power thicknesser, I'd say save your money and get a drum sander first. They're slower than a planer but produce less tearout with figured wood. I have both in the shop and use the planer to get within 1/8" or so and then run it through the sander.

There are plans for building your own drum sander out there. Fine Woodworking has run a couple of different ones in the past and has ads for kits.

What I'd do ?

Buy your self a good 6" or better jointer first. It's the hardest part to fake.

Get a sander next.

Get the planer last.

There are two things that affect the cure time of finishes that cure by evaporation.

One is temperature. If you hang the axe in an air conditioned damp basement it will take forever. Get it in a warm room. The warmer the better.

The other is moving air. If you put a small fan directly on it it will cure a lot faster.

The last one can be argued but I have done a bunch of fiddling with this over the years and I've found that a fan really speeds up the cure time. When you are doing woodworking for a living and have to get a table top shot out, rubbed out and delivered so that you can keep the lights on you learn some tricks.

To speed it up a lot you can put a couple of infra reds on it along with a fan. You can get heat lamp bulbs at you local homeowner's warehouse.

Great choice.

It machines really nicely.

I've worked with it for over fourty years and I've found a huge variation in weight density and appearance board to board.

Its weight isn't usually much different than mahogany.

It isn't nearly as hard as most maple, but it's lots harder than poplar.

Watch the sawdust. a lot of people react to it. Itchy swollen red eyes. Nasal passage irritation. wear a dust mask and goggles for the dusty parts or the process.

I built a single cutaway earlier this year. Finished the back and sides with high gloss lacquer and oil finished the face. Looks great both ways. You will need to stain it to get to that nice reddish brown color. When it's first milled it's usually a brown with grey tones to it.

Mills will steam it to make the heart color bleed into the sap wood. This degrades to color and workability a lot so be careful and pick your board.

I bought an 8 foot long 13" wide piece of 8/4 raw for about 4.80 a bft. Compared to everything else at the yard, including maple, this was a steal.

I used Behlen solar lux stain, American walnut with a little hickory and light red mahogany thrown in.

The grain is at least as open as most mahogany so you probably will have to use a filler if you want that dipped in glass look. Use one that's tinted to a bit darker than your final color.

Just a plug for a favorite source here: Fine Woodworking this month has a cover article on wipe on finishes that comes close to being gospel. Do yourself a favor and pick it up and read it.

i was shocked because they rated Minwax's tung oil poly tops for a lot of reasons that seem to make sense. In the past they have made serious fun of minwax as a top of the line finish.

I've finally gotten around to building my own neck instead of cheating and buying one. I'm to the point of making a nut and doing a fret job.

I've got literally tons of solid surface scraps so that's what I'm going to use. I need some advice on what file to get for working the nut slots, and also what files to get to do the fret work.

I've made a "planer' to level the frets out of 8/4 maple that uses stick on sandpaper. and I made a side flush and bevel gaget that uses a file.

Stew- mac and LMII sell a wide variety of files at a wide variety of prices and I don't mind dropping some money, but I'd like some input from folks who have actually done a bunch of frets and nuts.

Maybe I've missed it but nobody has asked "why the heck did this happen?" I've got a suspician that the mahogany wasn't dried enough in the first place and maybe would have cracked somewhere along the line even without the oven torture routine. Rustle up a moisture meter from somewhere and check the stuff you're building with.

I'd have a long term concern with stability here. The glue line holding the face to the back seems great. You've squished the two back pieces back together but the stress is still there and I'll take a small wager that this will open up again no matter what glue you use. My attack would have been to lay in a really thin piecs of wood from the same stuff that cracked, scrape it level and smooth and finish over it. This is how guys like Don Teeter repair old stuff and all you did with the oven was accelerate the aging process.

Don't take this as gospel, it's just my opinion.

First hit the search key and read what has been posted here since time immemorial.

Dents and dings can be raised by steaming them. Use a wet cloth and a clothes iron..

This is a soft hardwood. Every little sanding scratch will show. Start sanding with about 120 and jump up about 30 for each step. (150, 180, .......) don't skip over any. When you get to where your're happy. stop. I go to about 220 or so with poplar.

Stain it. Look at it and cuss about the little spots you've missed. Fix 'em. Spray it with sanding sealer. Sand. Spray. Sand. Keep going until you're happy. Spray lacquer.

Follow the tutorials that you've searched and read about.

Post your confusions and questions.

I've had a lot of cordless drills starting when the little suckers first came on the market.

Batteries have always cost more tahn you think that they should.

The current ones hold a lot more charge, charge faster and last longer by a long shot than the early ones did.

I still use a Milwaukee corded drill in the shop most of the time. I never have "damn why is it dying now!!!!" issues this way. I hardly ever take it out of the truck on a job site. The cordless ones just are a whole lot more convientent when outlets are an issue.

My opinion on what I've had the best luck with? Bosch. You can get a factory recon at your local real tool distributor, not the homeowner's warehouse, for about $99 for a 14 volt with two batteries.

If you want tot get the best and don't care about price, Festool demolishes anything on the market for duability and ergonomics. That said, I can't justify the expense since I've stopped doing cabinetmaking full time.

My old shop partner took the other road and bought the orange Chinese made disposables for $49 at the weekend tool sales that go from fairground to conference center these days. He used to but the things 4 and 5 at a time and just pitch them when they died.

I take the other tact and tend to but my tools as infrequently as possible. I but a lot of Bosch stuff.

I have a Wagner that I inherited from my old shop partner that is older than most of the guys who post on this site.

It is not a heavy dusty tool but if you use it for what it was intended (nails are not on the recommended list) it can be a real life saver.

Someone who needs to plane down an occasional heavily figured not huge piece of wood and who doesn't have a really good planer or drum sander can do just fine with one of these.

Every real hardware store used to sell them and Constntine's, when they were around, sold a ton of them mail order.

I've gotten a double cutaway body about 90% done. I vacuum laminated a piece of really figured cherry that I found in the regular wood bin of a cabinet suppliers to a piece of 6/4 walnut. Came out preety neat.

I'm going to show my relative ignorance on some of theis stuff.

What kind of bridges are suiatable for through body stringing? I made a walnut telecaster knockoff and trough strung it. The sustain is wonderful. I'd like to keep the same physics working for me, but the strat hardtail bridge I used from Guitar Fetish, the GFS guys, is sorta boring. What other configurations work. Can you just use the holes in the body to bend the strings? It would seem like that would cause long term problems as the stings cut through the wood.

As a plug, so far I've been really happy with the stuff from Guitar Fetish. The prices are low enough that building a couple more is sort of a no-brainer. I've got more figured wood than I know what to do with from the years I ran the shop full time. $100.00 buys a whole lot of stuff from them. They also ship pretty fast and their e-mails are literate if there's any questions.

For a while I was gluing up teak and a few other nasty oily woods. We found that Borden's plastic resin glue was hard to compete with for a long term stable bond in difficult applications.

The reason the different lacquers have different sheens is an additive called flattener.

This is the clear goop that's on the bottom of a gallon can. When it dries it looks just like chalk. If you scoop out aliitle on a stick and let it dry you'll see.

You can get flat lacquer, clear or colored, or you can buy flattener and add it yourself to any gloss lacquer and produce it yourself.

Here's a idea.

Make a template. Put two or three inch wide "skies" on the bottom that are just a scootch thicker than your fingerboard and a little further apart than the width of the fingerboard. Clamp in place and rout away.

Can someone send me a link for the tool we're talking about above. I haven't seen anything like it down here and it seems pretty interesting?

Watco is an oil finish that come in tinted colors.

I'm pretty sure the hardware blimp hangers sell the stuff.

If you can't find that, oil works over most stain if you give the stain time to dry.

Maybe I'm a little overboard with safty but there is no way anyone in my shop is going to chuck a pattern bit in a light weight 30000 rpm router like a rotozip and stay employed.

Feel free to try it if you want to.

Check the rpm rating on the bit that you're looking at, and diamonds to dollars it's not rated for that kind of speed. That's why a lot of routers are variable speed. Match the speed to the bit.

Some time I'll post some shots of my left arm so that you can see what happens when a shank fails and the bit sails out of the workpiece and dances around the shop. After it climbs up the inside of your arm. Happens so fast it doesn't even hurt. For about a minute.

But yourself a Porter-Cable or other router desgined to do this kind of work.

This tool, in my opinion, is not safe to use for routing neck or pickup cavities. It could be used for inlay cavity routing, but nothing else. Do not chuck up a regular router bit and try to remove anything resembling a large chunk of wood.

This is just my opinion. Remember, I've been doing this stuff day in and day out for over twenty five years. I've already made plenty of dumb mistakes. Take advantage of that.

Anything that Kreg has put out does whart they say it will and more. I've talked to the owner a couple of times at shows and h'e the kind of guy you want to see make it because he really does produce things that do what he says, not just what his markets claim. I have a big box of stuff that looked like a good idea at the time. None of his stuff is in it. His pocket screw stuff is a lifesaver on commercial cabinet construction.

Old Delta stuff lets you see how far the industry fell during the 70's, 80's and 90's. I've got a Delta 5hp 3phase made right before the green junk came out of Delta/Rockwell. You really appreciate real horsepwer when you're bevel ripping a sheet of 1 1/8" material and it just goes through with no binding and burning. The new stuff, to give it its due is better, and the pricing is astonishing. I paid more, withour adjusting for inflation, for the tolls I bought in the 70's than I'm paying now. You newbies have no idea how good you've actually got it today economically.

The original maker called that thing a "Rotozip". The first advertised use was for cutting out the holes in drywall after you had hung it, not before.

I've had one and used it for making cutouts in countertop backsplashes for years. It uses self piloted bits and relys on its speed to do the work. It will cut through darn near any construction material. It sails through plastic laminate and solid surface.

I'd recommend sticking with a Dremel or a Foredom for the kind of stuff that gets kicked around here.

Chlorox bleach, if you give it time to work will neutralize dyes and stains, except for Mixwax type spirit stains. Those usually take sandpaper or scrapers.

Oxalic acid, which is sold as wood bleach will kill a lot of stains. Again, not most spirit stains.

Kleen Strip makes a two part peroxide bleach that is sold at home centers that will sometimes work on spirit stains and will kill most others.

At the risk of incurring sneering, I was picking up some tri-m-ite sandpaper the other day and the automotive paint distributor that I buy from had a Chinese made kit for $99.00. It has three guns just like the three bears. A big one, a medium one and a cute little touch up gun. Also a cleaning kit, three cups, and all the break down tools plus two regulators. It's all gravity feed HVLP. These are not the quality of a Sata and they don't pretent to be. I have used them for four or five projects and they work just fine. If you shoot all the time, buy the good stuff. If you don't and want to get started with something that can do the job check out your auto paint distributor. They are probably marketed under a bunch of names. Most of this stuff is.

Again, these are not $500.00 guns and won't hold up like them. Parts are probably mythical at best. Who cares for $33.00 a gun?

A friend of mine once told me that art and sex are similar. You start out doing it for love. Then you go to friends. Then you do it for money. It's all okay as long as you realize what you are.

I see pieces of furniture that the customer busted my whatevers over before they would accept it and pay me. Picked every little detail to death. They now look like they were in a chainsaw rugby match.

Spent darn near fourty hours once French polishing a high gloss shellac finish on a small table. Delivered it on Friday. Monday it was back in the shop with a martini glass ring that went all the way to the wood.

Van Gogh hardly sold any of his paintings and thus controlled their treatment. Died broke. I've sold damn near everything I've built for the last 40 years. I'm not broke.

Yet.

There's a line from a song "Motzart never ever made a lot of money and that what I keep tellin' my wife." Can't remember who wrote it but there's some truth to it.

The factory boys catch some flack from folks like us but they've learned their lessons well. I like the "cake and eat it too" line.

Save yourself some more grief. The 77 isn't intended to glue down anything much tougher than paper. 3M makes a spray contact adhesive which is intended for stuff like veneer. I don't remember the number right off hand but it should be right next to it on the glue isle.

Remember too, you had glue bleed through problems with your first try. It works in both directions. If you use the same open pored veneer you are likely to have problems with the finish bleeding back through to the glue and reacting. If you use a sovent based finish put your first sealer coats on very lightly and let them dry until they are bone dry and have almost no smell. The quick dry stuff skins over quickly and the solvents are literally forced down through the whole set up. I've had veneer bubble up weeks after I finished and delvered the job. That's why I quit using contact cement to veneer.

Try a sample board using the yellow glue and iron technique I posted earlier.

I'm not trying to be a know it all here but I have done a lot of complicated veneering over the last twenty years and I've made most every mistake that can be made at one time or another.

Do yourself a favor and get the PC.

My personal experience with the Dewalts is that the switch goes if you happen to drop the sander. Something I'm not proud of but I have been known to step on the chord and launch the sucker off of my bench.

I have two PC Quicksand radom orbitals that have been put through the mill for the last five years and are still gettin' it.

First, I'm very opinionated about tools. I did this stuff professionally for 20 some years and have little patience with disposable unreliable tools.

I'm really cheap and expect them to last forever and continue to work well the whole time.

Some of the aformentioned brands, in my experience, will die at the most inopportune times and leave you walking. My experience with customer service and parts availability with most of the Japanese based firms has been nothing but negative with non-existant support, endless backorders, and pricing designed to pursuade you to buy new rather than repair.

Random orbital is the way to go. Air driven, as in Dynabrade, are the absolute best ,but expensive. Like $200.00

I have used a whole lot of sanders, and if I was going to only get one on a tight budget I'd get a Porter-Cable random orbital. In my opinon it's the best most durable electric sander on the market for the budget minded.

The absolute best electric IMHO is Festool. They are pricey but they are over engineered. they fit your hand, and they have thought out all of the bugs that plague everyone else. When you pick one up and use it you immediately know that somewhere a woodworker had a lot to do with the design. The dust collection system that they use gets almost every speck of sawdust, which makes the paper last longer, and cuts down on the swirl problem..

The Makita palm sander, if you don't mind being gouged for the retainer clips when they go after about 100 hours of use, is good to clean up any remaining swirls that an RO can leave. I know folks who also use them to rub out finish, but since I do this wet, I don't. I just hand sand the final wood steps and hand rub out my finishes with a sanding block.

If you're going to do a lot of this stuff eventually you should consider an air powered Dynabrade. They're light, produce beautiful results, and last forever. The price has come down. Look at Klingspore's site. They have a line made for them by dynabrade.