Akula

4 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

How about a full length dovetail groove, guess rather in the wood as a wooden slat inside the plastic might swell and crack the plastic.

Oh yes, to join the acrylic to the timber core I'm using a dado - the wings will extend into a groove in the neck. That will be glued with epoxy, and I think it will come out rather strong.

What concerns me is the joint between the all-acrylic sides, top, and back of the wings. That is a 90' butt joint with a surface area of 4mm in cross section. On the plus side, that cross section measures 700mm long in the length of the "sides", and the wings are a triangular shape which should add some geometric strength and resist twisting and popping open the glue joints 

Again, all an experiment. I'll let ya know how I go!

 - Jam

On 12/21/2023 at 12:02 PM, Crusader said:

If its worth mentioning, to me Weldon is just like SuperGlue but thicker and not quite as strong

I had some but it got punctured somehow and I was left with a hollow blue tube

Copy that! I'll take care of the tube. Yeah I'm interested to see just how strong it is - allegedly it softens the two plastics and "welds" them together, hence the name, but the surface area is something of concern.

It's a hard one, because essentially the glue joint will be akin to gluing the sides and top of an acoustic guitar but without the kerfing, and with acrylic sheet instead of wood. I'd love to reinforce the butt joint with some mechanical aid such as tiny machine screws, but that'll clash with the aesthetic of the design. 

It's all one big experiment.

Fretboard radiused, frets installed and dressed, neck carved, volute and heel carved, nut installed, bridge recessed and string through holes drilled. I could put strings on it right now and play it. I've made a very pointy stick!

I forgot to order string ferrules, and in this season it'll take ages to get them delivered. So I improvised - aluminium tubing hammered through the depth of the body then routed at a recess on the back. The tubes sit against the underside of the bridge, so they're not moving under tension. If anyone asks, I'll tell them it's the latest in groundbreaking tone-transfer technology.... or something like that.

 - Jam

13 hours ago, avengers63 said:

It's so "out there" that you are now you are obligated to make it into reality.

Haha! Yep. This build is like an inappropriate joke that pops into your head during a sincere moment, the kind of line that you shouldn't say out loud, but you just gotta do it!

I turned the maple into something more resembling the core of a guitar. I won't elaborate too much, as the processes here aren't much new. One thing that was a little sketchy - because of the width of the "body", I had to cut the profile of the neck right through about 100mm of hard maple, on a 10" bandsaw! That was slow.

Managed to get one more slice of Ironbark off my billet, so that became the fretboard. 

 - Jam

Dude! Thank you so much, that's really helpful. Yep, I'll hit the mold with paraffin and do a few test runs first. The experimental nature of this one keeps my brain on it's toes, that's for sure.

But while I'm waiting for the less traditional materials to arrive, I have the standard jobs to perform on this maple neck. Here's marking out.

 - Jam

Sweet. I just ordered some Weldon - every google search from Australia for Acrifix turned out results for Weldon. 

Does it stick to MDF? I'm hoping not... I'll be gluing my pieces and clamping them inside a mould. Almost like an acoustic guitar mould, but that comparison to my project is utterly blasphemous!

 - Jam

It's going to be different, that's for sure! 

Picked up my slab of Maple today. Its over 100mm wide - it has to be, so that the "wings" have something to bite into. 

Anyone used Weldon glue before? My experiments with gluing bits of acrylic together with epoxy were quite underwhelming, and my joins are really structural. Looks like acrylic cement properly melts the two parts together. Reminds me of making Airfix models when I was a kid.

School's out for summer. Hoping to spend the vast majority of next week out in the shop making sawdust... And acrylic chips.

And dead barbies.

 - Jam

https://luthierylabs.com/laboratory/templates-jigs/truss-rod-channel-jig/

I use something very similar. It's three pieces of plywood screwed and glued together to form a U-shaped channel. Then I use four bolts to anchor the neck in the middle of this channel, and run my router on the top. I can do the truss rod channel (or CF channels) on a square neck blank, or a shaped neck, and since the router runs on the top face of the neck itself, I could even do it after carving the neck.

 - Jam

On 12/2/2023 at 6:00 AM, Bizman62 said:

But think about all those shiny sparkles, spreading stainless steel shards all around your eyeballs!

Two weeks ago, I had to go to hospital where they dug a chunk of metal out of my eye. Not pleasant! No idea if it happened in the shop or at work - the doc said it had been there for several days and had even started to rust...

Very nice! 

Double sided tape with tape loops either end should hold pretty good. Get some 357 Gaff tape, that stuff holds entire concerts together. You can also route for a small length then re-tape past the part you've routed. That way you've got an indestructible tape at either end of the leverage, if that makes any sense. 

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

On 9/23/2023 at 4:10 AM, Bizman62 said:

You don't have wet bed sheets hanging around, do you?

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.

On 9/23/2023 at 4:10 AM, Bizman62 said:

The only way I've found out to to get an uniform colour is to flood the wood with dye. And rather alcohol based than water based as it seems to work with the resins better. The abovementioned table tops are deep dark, similar to the area on the lower bout right after the glue joint.

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

On 9/20/2023 at 4:38 AM, Andyjr1515 said:

I'll see if I can track down the right stuff on an Australian website.

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

On 9/14/2023 at 12:20 AM, Bizman62 said:

Anyhow, CA can be used as a finish. But you'll have to have very good ventilation, rather a fume hood/closet so you won't breathe or get the vapours into your eyes.

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

On 9/10/2023 at 11:25 PM, Bizman62 said:

Some candlewax on the blade?

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.

On 9/11/2023 at 6:09 AM, woodfab said:

Looking Good.

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

On 9/8/2023 at 1:45 AM, Bizman62 said:

That headstock looks yummy, I definitely have to do at least one asymmetric one! And mirroring the shape at the end of the fretboard sure looks something else.

And the mitre box is yet another example of homemade simple things that work just as well as a $500-ish pro tool milled out of a single block of pompousium, with unicorn oil lubricated bearings and other bells and whistles.

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:

On 9/8/2023 at 2:34 AM, ScottR said:

I'm pretty sure what is named pine in Australia is a different tree that what is named pine in North America and Europe.

That said, I'm loving this! You found a guitar in the street.

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

20 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Knotless pine???

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. 

15 hours ago, henrim said:

Pine’s fine. Athough so soft that it’s impossible to do anything without some dings every here and there.

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.

15 hours ago, ShatnersBassoon said:

Yeah, the thing about pine is that it’s so readily available! 

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