Akula

Following this keenly. "Plywood" is such a broad term. One of my favourite guitars had a radiata pine ply body, good pickups and maple neck. Played it to the death and built a new mahogany body for it last year. Used to get a lot of compliments on it's sound - the plywood construction was quite the secret. But Baltic Birch is a much better material all round, and I'm really keen to see how the neck comes together. - Jam

Righto, varnish has cured, time to move on this build. I wet-sanded to level the finish, very lightly so as to not cut through that last layer. Hot tip - I go for a slightly less thinned and therefore thicker final coat, if that makes any sense. Given that dust is my nemesis when it comes to clear-coat finishes, the last coat seems to envelope and drown any dust, and anything still poking up after the cure time gets knocked down by a wet-sand. Yeah, the dust is still there, entombed like a Jurassic mosquito, but dust tends to be very small and hard to see, yet very easy to feel if not levelled. Then I hit it with Meguiars polish until I can see myself. Apologies for the terribly lit photos. Happy with the colour, and the finish quality. I've spent the last two builds working on my process for clear-coating in my current workshop, and I think it's passable for my own personal instruments. I have a line on a guy who does spray jobs professionally, and I'd gladly flick paying clients' guitars to him in order to guarantee happiness. Installed the tail and bridge posts, then spent the rest of the arvo making some steel parts. Here be a pickguard, cavity cover, engraved truss rod cover, and a jack plate, all fashioned from 1.5mm steel sheet. I put an old sheet of sandpaper on the orbital sander and purposely "swirlied" the metal. I ordered the tuners, finally. Left on the todo: make a nut, engrave the cavity cover, get some pickup mounting rings, do the dreaded electronics, and assemble the thing. If I can do that over the weekend, it'll be six weeks to the day since I glued the body blank! - Jam

I did give that a go, I think you suggested that on my last Tele build and it makes good sense. It may have helped a bit, but in my small workshop the hindrance it created was too great, so I didn't attempt again. Honestly, I found the best thing for dust control was to enter the shed, wipe a coat, and leave without disturbing the eons of dust within it's walls. Doesn't work so great when I have other projects going on in there, but right now I'm working eight days a week, so one ten-minute trip to the shed once a day is all I get, and it's working pretty good. Yep, I got a good few wet coats of stain on there before wiping off. In theory, as I understand, the stain will block the fibres of the wood, so classically when we're dealing with figured timbers it's actually not advised. In this case it worked well! There's zero figure in this pine. The dark features seem to have absorbed a lot more dye than the red bits, but if I strived for even coverage I might have tried a sanding sealer. I'm happy with the colour. It's a hell of a chunk of wood, and imagining it would look like a fine alder strat would be misguiding to myself. I'm quite pleased with this little build so far. Ten coats of poly done, about another dozen to go. Still haven't ordered those tuners yet. - Jam

Thanks for that. Turns out that product is available at the major office supplier's store here! By the time I'd seen your reply, I'd already stained the guitar using what I've got, and put on a top coat or two. I'll keep this in my back pocket for another build. Quick photo before I get into finishing discussion - here's the thing on the scales, After dropping hardware and electronics into it, I reckon it'll be a bee's over 2kg, and quite lovely for playing live. Onto finishing. I grain filled and sanded to my heart's content, but there's a point when working with fence-posts as body timber where it's time to just whack some stain and poly onboard. It's pine, and there's no point trying to hide that fact. Here's just after staining. And here's with wet poly. I've put half a dozen coats on by now, using the wipe-on poly method. Dust is still a huge issue for me, and still less of an issue than spraying. While at the hardware store, my hand hovered momentarily over the shellac, but I decided that I would try that route on another build in the near future. Gotta say, this Stanley vice is pretty good at holding guitars at strange angles while applying finishing products, thanks to the ball joint. Guess I'd better order some tuners. I've got the bridge, a black tune-o-matic, tailpiece, knobs, straplocks... And some Epiphone "humbuckers" which appear to only have two wires instead of four. Might have to get some nicer pickups, probably active since my scientific mind places actives far above passives in almost every way. I haven't got a slotted nut lying around, but I do have a bone blank, so perhaps this will be my time to shape and cut a nut from scratch for the first time. Also need to craft an electronics cover, truss rod cover, and rectangular jack plate. Plenty to keep me busy while this finish gets built up and cured. - Jam

Thanks for the advice both of you. My source for stains is currently the local hardware store, colloquially known down under as Bunnings. They carry the Feat Watson "Prooftint" line, and I've got a small collection of bottles in my store. Here's a test piece with their "Mahogany" and "Cedar" mixed together. Rather uninspiring. The cedar is much redder, the mahogany is strangely purple. I do plan on giving it a quick wipe of poly tomorrow morning, as this is just stained on raw timber and thus giving a matt appearance - oh, and phone cameras have a much worse colour representation than Canon! As for calligraphy ink, is something like this what you're thinking? I'm very tempted to try a burst from red to black, but I've never attempted this before, and my process is wipe-on not spray. I'll think upon it. - Jam

And this is the exact reason why, after careful thought, I decided not to use CA any more than I have to. Having closed enough of my work-related wounds with the stuff, I can live without any more of my skin getting stuck together! So I re-did my inlays, this time rectangular, and slightly bigger. I removed the old ones carefully, routed to a flat depth, then started chiselling to the scored lines. My lord, I was sooo careful, and I still managed to get huge amounts of chip-out. I think where I'd previously filled chip-out with CA and dust, the glue had bled into the dry fibres of wood, so even the sharpest chisel just pulled out long splinters from my fretboard. It was at this point that the guitar nearly ended up in Sydney Harbour. I really hate it when I suck at stuff! Well, if you can't fix your mistakes, hide them. I flooded the edges of all the inlays (even the good ones) with a mix of epoxy, sawdust, black stain, and grain filler, packed it down nice and tight, and sanded it back flush the next day. It came out almost like a "burst" around each inlay. Then I stained the whole fretboard black a few times, really rubbing that stain into the huge open pores. And when that dried, I sanded back to leave a hazy black chatoyance, with the pores (and chip-out) completely black. The mistakes are still there, granted, but this last-ditch effort saved the fretboard and neck. Purpose of this build was to learn, and I have definitely learned to be much more careful with inlay work, especially when dealing with 200-year-old fretboard timber. Don't ever practice on your client's guitars - build one for yourself out of pine first! I did the pickup routes, mortise route, drilled a few wiring holes, and then glued the neck to the body. The two parts have "mated", mate, and what a cathartic process it was. ....What colour should I make it? I'm thinking red. Cherry red. Thoughts? - Jam

Yep, that helps, but I think because the acrylic sides of the mitre box are not braced against anything they're just vibrating with each stroke. Candlewax is always a good idea though! I use that stuff on everything. Thanks! So I tested my idea of routing a binding channel for each inlay to hide the chip-out and CA staining... didn't work very well. On the test piece, I couldn't get a straight line by running the bit against a template, and the channel is still rounded at the bottom. To set the scene, I'm using a rotary tool with a gooseneck attachment. This will not do. My last-ditch effort for this fretboard will be to make a router base for my rotary tool, stick a router bit in the chuck, and completely route out the old inlays, before installing some slightly bigger ones. Here's an idea for preventing both chip-out and CA staining: maybe I'll just flood the whole fretboard with CA? Is that crazy? I figure it'll fill a lot of the open pores and hold the fibres together, sand to a high gloss finish, and give no contrast to the areas which will inevitably get CA bleed from gluing in the new inlays. That's my thoughts. Let me know if it's a dumb move. Hoping to get back in the workshop over the weekend. - Jam

Cheers! Yeah that mitre box is about as simple as it gets. It does squeak a little bit, so I might add some bearings. Then of course I'll need some neo magnets to hold the blade against the bearings. And at that point I may as well add some threaded inserts and thumbwheels for a depth stop. Then I'll start making multiscales and have to re-think the whole thing! Anyways, here's the headstock in it's final form: Most definitely. I'm no expert at identifying wood species, but this "pine" is a bit darker in colour to the shite we get from the local hardware stores, but it's just as soft and pliable. Very few growth rings, but the knots are smooth and stable and dry. And light! Currently the whole build is at 1.7kg. Okay, inlays. I did a test piece, and I thought it went pretty well. The CA did bleed around a little bit, but I was fairly happy with it. First attempt at a non-circular inlay, hell yeah! Then I descended to Inlay Hell. First problem - the acrylic material is very slightly translucent, so the CA flooding the bottom of the inlay shows through, giving a kind of mottled appearance. This I could probably live with. Secondly, and more seriously, was the massive amounts of chipping and tear0ut while creating the recesses. I scored the lines with brand new scalpel blades, sharpened my chisels to a surgical degree, and went slowly and methodically, but this timber is so old and dry that I lost heaps of material around my crisp clean lines. I filled with dust and CA, but it sticks out. Very obvious. I've two options here, the second swiftly following the first if it should fail. I'm going to attempt to route a 2mm channel around each inlay, and then inlay a piece of ebony or black acrylic into that slot. I'll be using a dremel, with a slotted template and lots of lube to stop the shaft of the bit overheating. If this fails, I'll tear off the fretboard and start again. The whole point of this build was to try some new techniques that I've never done before. Inlays was one of them. I won't accept my own shoddy work. - Jam

Did the electronics cavity with a generic template. I'm gonna go for a steel cover, because I'm definitely not doing a pine one and anything else would look very strange indeed. Oh and the jack hole got very fuzzy - I'll probably cover that up with a rectangle plate. The neck is going well. It's a three-piece mahogany, with Black Bean veneer in between laminates, scarf jointed and stacked heel. I had a tear-out incident on the headstock, so I planed it flat and glued on an offcut. It's a 3-by-3 headstock with an open-book shape, but I decided to offset the tuners and make it asymmetrical. Whipped up a mitre box for cutting fret slots. I've been meaning to do this for years, and I do mean years. Marking and cutting took about 30mins. And I also made up an acrylic depth stop. I had a plywood one for ages, but this one has angled slots and thumbscrews so I can adjust the depth easily. I cut the frets with the mitre box first, then I'll glue and radius, then re-cut the fret slots with the depth stop on the saw to ensure a round-bottomed slot underneath the fret tang. On impulse, I decided that a square end to the fretboard would be boring, so I cut the same open-book shape into it. Fretboard glue up. - Jam

Not quite! There's one on the top and two on the back, but I reckon the top one will look quite musical! It's definitely not old-growth but it's proper dry. Ohh yes. When building with "proper" timber I always seem to end up with a few scratches and dings to sort out of by the time I get to the finishing phase, so this is a really good test of how well I can take care of a lump of wood while it's on the bench. Literally found it on the street! Eight sticks, about two meters long each. Clearly they'd been in someone's garage for a while. I've built a workbench and two sets of shelves with the stock, this is the last of it. Routed and sanded the sides of the body. I'm in dire need of a spindle sander (along with a drill press, planer thicknesser, etc), but I had this crazy idea to rig up my portable drill press to the underside of the bench and use a sanding drum in lieu of correct equipment. Worked damn well, I gotta say, although the drum got a bit clogged. Next refinement is to make a smooth melanine table for the workpiece to ride on, and rig up some kind of dust extraction to the shop vac. Resawed a fretboard blank off my Ironbark billet. This is also reclaimed timber, and it does indeed have nails in it which I just cannot remove - every resaw is a risk of blade damage. Really tempted to just plane the four sides true and use the rest of it as the world's heaviest levelling beam! The lot of timber weighs in at 2080g. That's before pickups and electronics routing, and the mahogany neck is still oversized and not carved. But then there will be the added weight of hardware... Hoping neck dive doesn't become an issue here. First question - inlays. I'll probably do some trapezoid fretboard markers, and I want to have a go at a "J" on the headstock. Regarding inlay material, I have three options of stock laying around the shop. First is maple timber, but I've head it can be a pain to glue without getting "streaky". Second is aluminium, which is attractive because I can polish it to a shine, but metal inlay might be a bit ambitious for my first attempt? Third, and safest, is 2mm acrylic sheet. Which one should I go for? Second question - neck angle and tenon. The thickness of my pine body is 35mm, already quite thin. I have a mahogany neck with a 25mm thick stacked heel. I'm aware that most manufacturers cut the neck angle into the mortise, but this leaves me with very little body wood underneath the neck. Should I cut the neck heel and tenon thinner, I would have nothing to go through the pickup area, and end up with nothing more than a glued-in bolt-on heel, probably not a good idea. This illustrates my problem: Now, say I plane an angle into the bottom of the tenon, and leave the mortise parallel with the top and bottom of the body. In my mind, this gives the most glue area to the joint, while leaving a good bit of body underneath the neck heel. Putting the angle in the tenon makes perfect sense to me, but I can't find many examples of people doing this. Is there something I haven't thought of? - Jam

Hey all, Having polished off the last round of builds, I did my normal spring-time workshop clear out and tidy up, and discovered that I have a fairly good collection of offcuts and spare parts. What to do... Gonna build a single-cut flat-top guitar. I've got nothing sized for a proper body blank so it's going to be a set of pine boards I picked up off the street a few years ago. I've got the offcut from the underneath of a neck-through blank to use, as well as a fresh slice of my Ironbark billet for the fretboard. I figure I'll use this opportunity to work on some things I've never done before, and work on some things I could be doing better, like set neck construction, proper inlays, finishing and fretwork etc. The only thing I should need to purchase is a truss rod! Single cut build, 660mm scale length, two humbuckers, T-O-M bridge, set neck with a neck angle. - Jam

Fret levelling done. Very little fret end dressing required, because I shaped them before installation. Just levelling, crowning, polishing, and setup. Oh and the nut got cut properly, too. Action's low enough that I'd be unashamed to show it to my mates at work, and we literally build concerts for a living. One oddity. Fret 16 came out high, and fret 15 buzzes out to the same note. Very strange, didn't get munched down by the levelling beam, and I must've missed it with the fret rocker, but now it's got strings on (the truest straight edge) I re-checked with the rocker, and yep, it's high! So must've I been when I levelled. And nope, I didn't over-crown the frets either side, it's just one high fret, by a measurement known as a bees-dick. Easy fix for tomorrow. Just strange, s'all. - Jam

Got the two pointy ones shipped off today. They both got a test assembly with strings, but I've left the electronics and fret levelling for after the guitars have been sprayed by the client's spray-dude. The Warlock shape has a BC Rich neck which I've refretted for the client last year with stainless steel frets, so I'm fairly confident that those frets are still pretty true and level. Honestly, it was a very confronting experience, having my work finished by a third party. Every single thing will be noticed by another professional, which is harrowing. The biggest issue I had was the aforementioned scraper tear-out but any marks I couldn't sand out entirely got flooded with grain filler anyways. So the spray shop will see those defects, but the finished product will be flat as a pancake and shiny as hell. I packaged them up on the kitchen table and took a drive to deliver in person. \ The Tele is done, too. I let the poly cure for eleven days, then this morning I took a trip to the auto shop and got a bottle of compound. Got stuck into polishing for about an hour, then rubbed in some wax for the why-not's. Drilled for hardware, installed it, and soldered the electronics. I bought a bunch of Dupont cables last year for $0.40 a cable, much cheaper than the EMG branded ones, but I couldn't get their solderless pots and bus for a decent price, so I ended up soldering one end of everything anyways. God I hate soldering. I've got two amplifier projects sitting on the bench at the moment, schematics all drawn up, components installed on perfboard, but I just can't get them to work. Crazy, understanding electronics but not being able to solder. Like being a writer but being unable to hold a freaking pen. Anyways, I need to fret level and lower the nut slots, but the thing's pretty much done. Photo taken indoors at night-time, hence the terrible lighting. I'll get some good shots tomorrow! - Jam

How's that U-Beaut Hard Shellac go for you? I've considered using it a few times but never took the jump - it's gotta be better than the "French Polish In A Bottle" crap from Bunnings, right? - Jam

Yep, I agree, it's a feature of polyurethane finishes. I do intend to do a nitro finish on another build very soon. Good theory, but when sanding with a flat block it doesn't make much difference which direction you're going. Sanding without a block, yep I think it would definitely help, but sanding anything without a block tends to make for a less than flat surface. Anyhoo, my 20 coats have been reached, and the guitar is now hanging up to cure for at least a week before I start polishing and buffing. Still sanding the other two. They really just need to get sanded up to a decent level, grain filled, then off to the third party spray shop they go! - Jam

I use a scalpel, or even better a marking knife to mark fret slots. The line is about as thin and accurate as you can get, and when it comes to actually cutting the slots the saw follows the knife cut quite well. Of course there's no erasing and re-marking, so you have to get it right straight away. Another option is to print out on paper a grid of accurate fret lines, stick it down to the fretboard, and saw straight through that. Great build. I'm following keenly! - Jam

I'm considering using a foam brush. The internet tells me that's a good way of avoiding these wipe-marks left by a rag ball, but I'm skeptical. I'll give it a go tomorrow and see how it goes. Yes please! I'm onto my second day of experience using proper scrapers, and I'd like to be more learned before my next batch of builds. One thing I've noticed about this mahogany I'm using: it almost changes grain direction for patches. So I'll be scraped down the grain on a carve, and suddenly hit a patch which won't scrape glassy-smooth unless I flip the scraper around and go the other way. Is that my dodgy technique, or just a funky bit of wood? I'm making sure to keep my angle and pressure consistent as can be. Interesting idea! I'll suggest to the wife that we need new bedsheets, and then I'll nick the old ones - I've been doing that for years, every time my band needs a new backdrop I sand with the grain, for no other reason that if scratches happen to still be visible they will just blend into the grain direction unless a very close look is taken. I apply in the same direction. No, not really like TruOil - the poly goes tacky within about a minute, so it really is one shot at glory. If you miss an area upon application, it's best to wait until the next coat as opposed to touching it up on the same run, because your application brush or rag will just drag the surrounding finish. I've done a few guitars with this process, but none with the amount of forethought and experimentation as this one, nor as many coats. So I went back to 600-grit and level sanded. The waves went away, not quite entirely but it's much better. During sanding I noticed a part where the arm carve meets the top getting a touch lighter in colour than the rest of the finish, and stopped immediately. I seem to have cut through a few more layers of poly there, which means my level-sanding before finishing was incomplete. Damn! I'll grab a photo of it tomorrow, but it's not so bad as it may seem. Again, being a personal instrument, I'm a little more lax with the final quality, which is an astonishingly bad habit to get into, but I'm also a musician who's instruments tend to relic themselves within a few years instead of decades. If it were a client's instrument, as the other two guitars on the bench are, it would be a case of sanding back to bare wood and refinishing, and my apologies for the two week delay. Speaking of the other two builds - I had a productive day making control cavity covers, drilling holes and gluing little magnets into them, delicate tasks like installing Floyd Rose nuts, and scraping carves. Tomorrow looks like sanding, filler, sanding, and more sanding! - Jam

Ouch! One way of thinking is that it's just a good exercise for plug-cutting and fitting? Also, the guitar is 1" thick? Awesome! - Jam

Great idea! It does mean chemicals and a finely-cut mask, but the results look killer! I carved the Bich and Warlock in two sessions - one for roughing in the shapes with the angle grinder, then the client came over and had a good look, and the next day I removed a bit more material with the grinder before carrying on with scrapers. I try never to do an entire carve in one session, as I am mentally scarred from a build about a decade ago where I removed too much material and created a small window into the electronics cavity. I doubt I would ever get that silly again, but the two-day carve process does allow me to take a good look with fresh eyes. I'm impressed with these scrapers. I've only before had the discomfort of the disposable razor-blade sorts, so this is my first time burnishing and using proper scrapers. I am very pleasantly impressed. Burnishing took a while to get the hang of, but now they're sharp I can take off curls of wood in a single stroke which would have taken minutes with sandpaper. Want to take less off? Easy, just press down lighter. And it leaves a much nicer surface than sanding, although I shall be grain-filling and sanding after the fact. Easy to see here - the parts which are ugly from the angle grinder, and the parts which I have scraped. The T-type is way into the finishing phase now. As is recommended, I'm wet-sanding in between coats to flatten any wipe marks, and remove some of those dust-nuggets. Dust is a huge problem for me, as the workshop is pretty small. I've been applying coats outside in the garden, but in the inner city suburbs there's just as much dust in the air. My lungs just shrivelled at the thought. But I digress. The wet-sanding between coats seems to be keeping the dust under control. Seeing my shiny guitar turn matt and dull every time I do it is quite harrowing, though. I'm still getting some waves. I figure either the levelling in between coats isn't going quite level enough, or the face of the timber wasn't flat enough to begin with and I just couldn't see it without the shininess of the finish. I started levelling with 600, then after a few coats I went up to 800. now I'm up to 1200 grit. The theory of this was that once it's flat it'll stay mostly flat, but clearly I was incorrect with this assumption. The "waves" are clearly seen in this next photo - I swear my ears are not usually that large! The benefit of the wipe-on poly method is that if you don't get it perfect at first, it's fairly easy to rectify and carry on. I'm up to coat number 12, and the plan for tomorrow is to sand it dead-level and continue. I reckon 20 coats is a good number. - Jam

I wholeheartedly agree! As a former chef, if somebody can't make a batter, roux, or cook a chicken breast without drying it out to the texture of sand, then they should pay or marry somebody who can to cook for them. Pancake batter is what I was meaning to say. So here's a dry photo, taken under the light of a Sydney winter's day. I've been obsessed with Danish Oil for the last five or six builds, and as a result I haven't done a wipe-on poly finish for about three years now. Strange - the first coat took nearly 24hrs to dry, but the second coat went hard enough in six hours. I'm still waiting until tomorrow before I sand and apply another coat. There's been no runs or lumps yet, but there's always a small level of dust and crap that gets stuck to the thing as it's drying. I'm hoping the dark colour masks this to some extent. Ahh, isn't finishing such fun? In other news, I carved the Bich's neck today, and failed to take any photos of it, just video for Instagram. Here's some blurry stills from the vids. I take a rasp and knock the edges off the square neck at 45 degrees, until I reach the dimensions provided by my neck profile print-outs, measured with a contour gauge. Then I half that angle in both directions, then knock off those edges again, and again, etc, until I've got a fairly accurate shape. Then I crack out the bastard file, always loved that name, and remove the rasp marks. Then comes the 80-grit sandpaper, then 120, then 180, until the neck is looking and feeling smooth. Volutes are handled with a sanding drum. I used to do this with half-round files, but a drum just makes this so much quicker. Neck heel got blended into the body with a 5" grinder and flap disc, but the finer parts are again done with a sanding drum. I may have to try out my new scrapers to get really finicky in the tight areas, but for now it's looking pretty comfortable. Last thing for today - I engraved my logo onto the battery compartment cover for the Tele. It's cold-rolled steel flat bar, and it's old and rusted and pitted and dented, so the engraving bit kind of bounced off the surface quite a lot. I'm still trying to find a reliable laser engraving service in Sydney that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, but what I've got here definitely fits the road-warrior aesthetic of the Tele. - Jam

Got the fretboard glued onto the Bich, slotted, radiused and polished up to a thousand. I also installed the frets, don't have a photo of that stage. Both the Warlock and the Bich are in need of carves for their tops, guts, cutaways, and neck heels. I've ordered a set of scrapers as I think they'll help me get a better carve finish than I have previously achieved. The tele, meanwhile, got it's neck carved. Having run out of major geometry tasks to complete with that build, I went straight for grain filling and sanding. I'm using Timbermate filler mixed with a splash of water to make a pancake-mix sort of texture. Apply, dry, sand, and repeat, three times. Ended up sanding to 400 with a block, then stained it black with Prooftint dyes. Here it is with one coat of black: Then a "Japan Black", followed by another plain black coat. This I sanded to 600 with dry paper - it clogged a heap, but I didn't dare wet-sand with either metho or water for fear of disturbing the stain or the grain filler. Upon scraping the binding, I discovered that it had cracked somewhere along the way! What a bummer. I'm using ABS binding glued in with CA, and it was totally intact before the stain, so I'm wondering if there could be some strange reaction between the stain and the binding? Anyways, I'm living with it. If this were a client's guitar it would mean removing the binding and going again with a different material, but I'm fairly easy with the way this Tele is going aesthetically - it's going to be a punk rock road machine, so it'll get aged quite fast over the next few years. Having researched quite extensively the best way to set up for spraying poly, I decided against it. Electric spray guns seem to work alright if you get a good one for good money, at which point you might as well just get a compressor and spray gun. The PPE involved in safely doing this can add up quickly, too. Then there's the environment for spraying, in both senses of the word - I have no space for a spray booth, and although I could use the "big spray booth", outdoors, I have to consider that I have a small garden in a tight residential area where my neighbours may be inhaling the shite that I've protected myself from, along with their kids, pets, plants, trees... So I went for wipe-on poly. I bought some decent polyurethane this time around, and thinned it with turps. We all know never to trust a photo taken while wet, but this is looking rather tasty. - Jam

Yep, exactly. Easiest way to make this jig: Take a 12mm sheet of plywood and sticky-tape it down to your drill press table. Now take a 3mm drill bit and drill down into it. Then glue a 3mm dowel into the hole. You now have a locating pin at exactly the same position as the drill bit of your press. Of course you'd need to have drilled the six holes on one side of the guitar to avoid having to move the sticky-taped plywood base - but the proper way to make a reusable jig is to make a plywood base which fits perfectly over the top of your press table with no wiggle-room, or to have it's own locators to position it back in the same spot every time. It'll save a lot of time when it comes to these string-through jobs, especially if you intend on cranking out multiple guitars. All of this, by the way, is wasted on me - I have no room for a drill press, so I do it the hard way every time, haha. - Jam

Great work on the inlaid string though holes! There's a technique for using a drill press with a locator pin on the baseplate, very clever as it allows you to drill six holes halfway through the body, then flip the thing over and drill six holes from the other side to match up halfway through. All drill bits will wander in timber, but drilling a 3mm diameter hole through 25mm of wood may only wander a fraction of a mil and join up pretty good with it's partner tunnelling from the other side. Drill the same 3mm hole through the full 50mm of wood, and you'll be out by a couple of mil, and definitely see the "wonky". Love the choice of timbers for this build. - Jam

Quick question to all, concerning finishing equipment. I've done plenty of Danish oil finishes, and I've had great times with mixing it with wipe-on poly to bolster it a little bit, but my last personal build has been on the stage for about a year now and it's showing some good battle-rash already. Perhaps it's time I grew up in the world and started shooting polyurethane finishes like the rest of the big boys and girls. I don't have a dust-free environment, I have a 3x2m shed as my workshop. I could shoot outside, then move instruments inside the shop for drying. Reckon that would still attract an ungodly amount of dust? Secondly, I'm looking at electric spray guns as an option for delivery. They're about half the cost of a compressor setup, but more importantly, I doubt I have the space for a 20L compressor in the shop. Has anyone had luck with these little electric guns? Or is a compressor and gun the only way to go? - Jam PS. Luckily, the two BC builds are going off to a spray shop. The client has his own dude who refinishes all his guitars, so all I've got to do there is grain fill and sand, then very carefully deliver them! Easy life.

I've got all the parts and hardware labelled up so I don't accidentally put the wrong tuners on the wrong guitar! I also write up design briefs for each guitar so I don't mix up specifications. Besides that, I write to-do lists for each guitar, helps me remember where I'm at with the procedure. I get maybe two quiet patches throughout the year where I can build - my job takes me to unsociable hours, so building after work or on these mythical "weekends" I hear of just becomes impossible. No, if I've got a moment to build guitars, I'm going to take on as many projects as I can for the time! Aahaha! Those were the days. I restarted my habit during the first lockdowns of 2020, and I had zero tools and zero money - I was building guitars out of pine shelves. Three years later, I've got a proper workshop again, and it was easy enough to remember my teenage builds and figure out how to use a router again. The rest is just muscle memory. Thanks dude, means a lot. For perspective, these builds will make 13 successful projects in three years! Put some inlays in the Tele neck. I hammered 2mm mother of pearl dots into sections of 4mm aluminium tube and glued them into the fretboard with CA. This photo is really ugly, there's even a bunch of dust packed in the fret slots from radius sanding... Shows off my ultra-thin fretboard though, 4mm thick in the middle. Sanded up to 1000 grit, and whacked in some stainless steel frets, dressed in semi-hemi style using a bench grinder. I'm enjoying this technique of dressing the fret ends before installing - I have to make sure the frets are ever so slightly less wide than the fretboard so I don't get sprout, but it seems to work out faster than cutting flush after installing and then dressing. Side dots, not pictured here, are 2mm aluminium tube, but I couldn't find any 1mm mother of pearl to go inside them. I routed the Bich for it's Floyd Rose hardtail bridge. It's the Jackson model bridge, it sits on three posts, the third being under the fine tuners and allows adjustment of the angle. I'd never even heard of a fixed floyd before starting this build, so it's all new to me. - Jam