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Buter

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Everything posted by Buter

  1. Thanks Scott Those hand planes cleaned up nicely. Good reference, but not too sure it's gonna work for my needs. I might give it a shot on the smaller drill press table and see how she turns out. No, haven't pranged the little birdie yet. Being kicked off the current bird in September so I'll have to learn a new one, which will provide plenty of pranging opportunity! Will take a few months before I can spend any time in the workshop due to the course and having to work full time for 3months afterwards, but that's alright because I feel like I'm pretty much back at the bottom of the learning curve again and I can use the time to refresh my guitar building knowledge. Yeah, I traded the cold, wet and windy little island for a hot, humid and beautiful little island. Takes a wee bit longer to get to work, but the quality of life at home now is beyond compare. Cheers! Buter
  2. Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be in your company again and I will soon be rejoining the ranks of those who waste countless hours making guitars that you just can't find in a store. Getting to the point... I've just liberated some older Delta and Craftsman machinery that will get me started on a new project in a few months. The machines have been dormant for a while, but they all work fine, just a bit of rust on the beds/tables. Nothing too serious, but I'm wondering how best to clean em up without saturating them with oil that will later mess up the finishing process. I'm also wondering how to keep the rust at bay because this is how far the machines are from saltwater (that cord is plugged into the bandsaw): Thanks in advance for your advice! Cheers Buter ps - nice to see they put you to work, Scotty!
  3. Wasting no time making good use of your jointer, I see. B
  4. You two are so cute... Wes - are the allparts rods the same size as the LMI ones? I have to admit they are my tr of choice, but only because I ordered a few of them along with a big order ages ago and I haven't found anything I like better yet. I don't like paying any more than I have to for quality parts, so I might give the allparts rods a go if I can ever manage to get back to building. Cheers B
  5. ... then switch to the LMI rods which are just as good and require much less wood to be routed away. You can get decent quality, inexpensive router bits from MLCS. B
  6. I wouldn't want a flat fingerboard. If you can build a guitar, you can make a radius block to radius your fb. There should be a few tutorials on the homepage of this very site. You can also buy radius blocks from smaller parts companies that aren't overpriced - it's only a block of wood after all. If you have a router, you can easily make a jig to radius your board as well. B
  7. The first one is for learning, mate, and it sounds like you already have. As Mike said, it is looking pretty good so far. Don't use Poplar for your templates if you intend on keeping them for future builds, use a material that won't move around like MDF, ply or some man made composite. Next time you do a neck through keep your side wing cut-offs to use as clamping cauls, it will make clamping the thing up infinitely easier and produce a better result. I'll disagree with Mike and say that making some templates will be of great benefit on future builds. I like the shape, good luck with the rest of the build. Buter
  8. Aahhh... I've been waiting for this one since you finished the one for Hook. I can't see all of the pics due to hotel interweb - but I've seen enough... Please go into detail when you carve the back of the headstock. Cheers Scotty. Buter
  9. My technique is very similar except I use a vac bag instead of clamps. 15 psi is magic. B
  10. You're not wrong. When you are making a neck from scratch, you will have a perfectly flat board and levelled frets (in theory). When under string tension, the neck will obviously develop a bow which can then be eliminated, with the desired relief left in place, with adjustment of the truss rod. Since you started with a flat board and returned to a flat board, you have no need for a neck jig when building a new neck. I think that the neck jig is an excellent tool for a repair shop, where you do not get to dictate what condition the neck is in when you begin to work on it. IMO, repair work is a different skill set to building guitars from scratch. Repair work is certainly no less important than building but a greater knowledge of how many different manufacturers construct their instruments is required before you can even begin to be a good repair tech. To build good guitars, you only need to know how you build them. Cheers Buter
  11. And the award for the fewest clamps ever used to attach a fretboard on this forum goes to...
  12. Welcome You can do wonders with this stuff. Cheers Buter
  13. Ah, someone else who builds as fast as me! lookin good, Mike. B
  14. Personally, I would use your body template to make a new body template but without a neck pocket. After you make your neck with the dimensions that you want, not dimensions that are dictated to you by the maker of the body template, use your actual neck to set up your router guides to rout the neck pocket. For my money, that would be the easiest and best way to get a snug fit. Just a thought. Cheers Buter
  15. Should read - 'before sanding I spent just over an hour matching up the grain patterns on the top and bottom pieces' Should really say - 'Here I have offset the top join and the body join by about 3.5mm to avoid sympathetic resonation and increase sustain'. We love to increase sustain. No pressure, but I think that this is going to be a very nice guitar when you're done, so don't screw it up! Cheers Buter
  16. The 'best' method will be the one that works best for you and will always be debated by those with different chosen methods. By far, the most standard way of doing fb dots is to inlay the dots into your flat board and then radius with a sanding jig. The dots will not suffer in appearance; when you work your way up through finer grits you'll polish them just like you do the board. You mention compound radius and jig in your post - are you radiusing with a router? If so, you may suffer from chipping the Paua with your router bit. I've never tried it (and probably wouldn't) so I'm not the best to respond. Others? If I were to try it, I think I would radius the board with the router jig, inlay the dots, sand flush and then polish as normal. Don't see why that wouldn't work, but, again, I ain't done it. Yeah... you don't really wanna do that. I'm not really sure what you're on about re the 12th fret and the drop off. If you are doing a compound radius and keeping a constant thickness on your fb edge, the board will get flatter as you move from nut to bridge, requiring you to remove less wood to achieve your radius. If you are worried about tear out on your fb, don't use a router to do the radiusing, a radius block will work just fine. If I were doing a figured fb, that's what I would use anyway. Best of luck. Cheers Buter
  17. +1 Dean I would not be able to use that top for a guitar. Childish, I know, but true. Good luck on your build, JJ. Cheers Buter
  18. All great stuff. I'm really just trying to figure out whether the extra effort of a neck through is justified. I hate to say it, but I think that I had more fun building the set neck than I did the other neck throughs. From my experience so far, the set neck is sounding the best (granted, the set neck is the last one I built and I'm assuming that I've got a bit better at building the things). What I'm trying to avoid is building any particular style of guitar simply because they are supposed to be better. I really enjoy building and, like quite a few on here, I'd like to make it a profitable venture at some point. This is why I'm doing loads of builds and trying different ideas out now so that I know what works, what doesn't and what doesn't matter. My workshop is littered with guitars that went wrong either by design or building technique. It ain't about how to attach the neck. I'm just trying to see if the reasons we use to decide what kind of neck attachment we use are valid or if we are just trying to convince ourselves that our chosen method is the best. I would never do a bolt on neck. But look at Huf's guitars, they are pretty much without fault - stunning instruments. I'm assuming that they sound good or he wouldn't have been able to have carried on for 15 years making guitars that people want to buy. He has tried other methods and settled on bolt ons for reasons that suit him. I'm just thinking out loud now, so I'll stop. Cheers Buter. PS - I'm down next to the lake, Huf. Heavy snowfall forecast overnight so I might be enjoying your country for a few days. Where are you in relation to Geneva?
  19. Thanks for the replies, guys. It was actually that little side conversation in you mini LP thread that got me thinking, Wes. Great points, Huf. You're right, there's a lot more to a quality guitar than the neck join, but that's really the only aspect I was considering in this little discussion. I believe that I will be switching to mainly set neck guitars. I found that I spent more time building and less time thinking on the set neck than I ever did on a neck through, allowing me to finish the guitar much quicker. I still have all my templates and know how if I want to build a neck through, so no harm done, really. Cheers Buter
  20. I've made a few guitars now and all but one are neck through construction. The reasons I decided to make neck throughs were the standard arguments - better sustain, little or no heel and the classic 'the best guitars are neck through' idea that had been beat into my head by friends, magazines and websites. Until I made my set neck walnut LP, which was made purely to use up some offcuts, I believed that the extra effort of a neck through was worth it for the reasons above. Now I'm not so sure. I have noticed no difference in sustain, the set neck rings just as long as the others. As an experiment, I decided to make the guitar as comfortable as possible and sculpt the heel until I liked how it felt, not caring how much wood I removed - it feels great and shows no signs of being unstable even though most of us would have thought the joint would have failed because I took so much wood away. The common argument you hear regarding sustain is that 'the machine heads and the bridge are mounted to a single piece of wood with no glue joints so sustain is increased' or something very similar. This sounds fine in theory, however, most neck throughs are laminated for stability and aesthetics. My necks have all been five piece necks, so there are 4 glue lines running the length of the neck. Why should these glue joints be considered different to the glue joint in the neck pocket? So how valid are the arguments that we use to justify the extra effort? If anyone can provide any solid reasons why a neck through is any better than a set neck, I'd love to hear them. Cheers Buter
  21. Draw it full scale and find out! Sorry, it had to be done. This is all supposed do be fun, so don't take it too seriously. Good luck however you do it. Cheers Buter
  22. OK. I got ya now. Not what I was originally thinking, but certainly viable. Since I posted the questions I've been out in my new utility room and wetroom putting a coat of primer on the new plaster (loads of fun at 1 am) and thinking about using a thickened epoxy to form a perfect pocket for a set neck. I think that if you use a high density filler you would get a join that was only second to a through neck (trying not to start the bolt vs. set vs. through argument). I dunno. If the front of the neck pocket is perpendicular to the centerline and used as a pivot point you could be on to a winner. You would just need to ensure that your neck angle was equal to or greater than the angle routed in the body for the neck join (if only I could find some kind of formula to calculate a required neck angle...). As you said, though, you've got the tools out to do the job, may as well just rout the correct angle in the neck pocket in the first place. Definitely a good technique for fine tuning/fook up fixing, though. Cheers Buter
  23. Slow down there, fella. Rewind just a bit. This neck setting technique of yours, can you try rewording it so my feeble mind can understand it, please? As near as I can tell you're using epoxy as an adhesive and using it to form a wedge to give you the exact angle you want. Am I correct? I'm seeing how this can work, and liking it. Please go over the moving the body nearer the table edge to give you the angle you want as that is the part that is slightly confusing me. Does adding the weight not throw everything out of whack and give you a mis-set neck? Neck angle clamping jig... Classic! I normally only make neck through guitars but, as you all know, you end up with a massive offcut. I've got loads of offcuts that need to become guitar necks (and one that is going to become another neck through for playing while I'm in my office). In fact, in the pup ring thread, the LP I posted has a neck made from the offcut of the other guitar I posted. Cheers Buter
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