DrummerDude

Thanks guys. I checked out the PVA/wood dust mixture this morning and it has lost almost 1/2 of it's initial volume. Jon was right - it has shrunk. Seems that I will use epoxy instead of PVA after all. I have used epoxy/wood dust before and it gets rock hard (my router bit sparks when it hits the epoxy) but I am avoiding this mixture because it is such a HELL to work with. It is hard to mix epoxy with the hardener, even harder to mix it with the wood dust, it is a biatch to apply it and a PITA to clean the excess. Sticky stuff indeed. Alas, life is not fair and seems that I will have to use it anyway. But before I do this, I will check if they carry that plastic wood at the mall. And I will do another test on scrap to see how my wood putty behaves. It's a Dutch product that I have never used before. Maybe it will be OK to just use it and don't bother with those mixtures. Will see after the scrap wood tests. Here is a small photo update. I roughly cut out the area around the neck pocket. Left some wood just in case. As you can see from the markers I put, the jigsaw's blade wobbled too much at different sides while I was cutting out the overall body shape and even though I was strictly following the line on the facial side, the blade cut out the wood in a wobbly way underneath it. So now I will have to correct those irregularities. First I will glue small wood pieces and then use a filler (epoxy, wood putty, plastic wood, whatever turns out to work best). The other side of the body is OK and only needs to be routed flush.

So true. This goes for all materials. A solid piece of steel would move too if you mill off or cut a piece of it. Materials have inner tensions that will get released towadrds the weakest point.

Alright Jon, will use epoxy then. By the way, would PVA shrink immediately or would it shrink in the long run? Oh, Muzz, we were posting at the same time and I didn't see your post. Maybe I would try your stuff too. I have saw dust with only a few real chips and shavings in it. If color is the only issue, that's not a problem. The guitar will be painted in a solid jet black color that will be hiding everything underneath it. I just made a PVA+saw dust mixture in a 2:3 proportion (2 glue, 3 saw dust) I applied the paste to a scrap wood piece. Will see how it behaves tomorrow.

OK, I will try the PVA+wood chips mixture on scrap wood and see if ti behaves alright. I have seen people using it for filling parquet gaps and it worked without shrinking or cracking. Will not use the wood putty that I got from the mall.

do you even need to grain fill that? i looks very closed grained enough that you dont have to. Nope, I don't think that the body needs grain filler. But I do think that its sides need putty. There are large jagged irregularities and even pits where I have cut out the shape using my jigsaw. Those need to be filled with putty.

Thanks for the comments. The neck heel does not get clenched inside the pocket and does not require brute force to get in but rather fits tightly and snugly, still without any effort. Paint in the neck pocket is not an issue - I will not spray any grain filler or paint inside the neck pocket anyway. Hate it when people do that. About the sound of beech - frankly, I don't know. Some claim it sounds like maple, because it is very hard, heavy and rigid, others say it's in the "middle" of the tonal range (Alder?). I will just build this guitar and judge the tone when it's finished. I did some work today. Will post photos when I'm completely done. Do you think that a self-made putty out of PVA glue and wood chips would be a better choice for filling rather large irregularities over the store-bought putty that I have?

Holy cow, this is one awesome guitar! It's been awhile since a killer guitar like this has been shown on PG. The materials used here are beyond top quality. Not to mention the cleanness and precision of the work. It looks killer with the trans black but I loved the natural color the most - it was just blindingly cool: so clean and pure. I LOVE this shot: A high gloss transparent finish over that fresh maple would have been just mind-blowing. Especially some high gloss finish that does not alter the natural color and does not add a yellowish tint. Please, post this in the Guitar of The Month competition thread. You have a voter here and I'm sure that it's going to grab the prize.

Updates from today. Glued the small piece for the tip of the upper horn: Then I elongated the neck pocket towards the bridge because it turned out that I have miscalculated and misplaced it the first time and it was 1,5 cm backwards. I also cleaned the smoked wood just for the sake of good looks. http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/1556/s5002577ty8.jpg After the glue was set, I cut out the tip of the upper horn: http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/2663/s5002578af6.jpg To be continued.

OK, the saga continues. I started routing. My router bit was pretty damn dull and worn out, so it kinda "smoked" the wood a bit but it's not a big deal. I will sand the pocket clean for the cosmetic's sake. http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/5023/s5002563sn4.jpg After I was done with the neck pocket, I cut off the excess wood on the front to test-fit the neck. http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/1755/s5002568sn6.jpg And the neck fitted in like a charm. As tight as a barely legal teen girl. It turned out to be a Perfect Fit. http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/7959/s5002567oy8.jpg On the photo below, I am holding the guitar by the neck to test the neck pocket tightness. The body didn't slip out, of course. At the same time the fit is not too tight and it does not require any supernatural force to push the neck heel into the pocket. it is just right. http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/6526/s5002570ls8.jpg To be continued.

Remember THIS thread where I was building a Jackson Randy Rhoads copy out of spruce? Forget about it. I started it all over again, this time using beech. And I have my long awaited BC Rich neck now, thanks to a very kind boy from the forum. The glued beech blanks: The initial cut out of the shape left some around the neck pocket - I like to have a wide base for my router guides to step on): Then I used wooden peg fasteners to add extra strength to the construction. Just out of paranoia - these are really not necessary but if they do not help, they won't do any harm either. I will have to glue this extra piece for the tip of the upper horn. Hope it will not screw up the sound and the sustain. :D Then I put it all together and made a mock-up guitar just to see if things are going good. At present I have two minor problems - the tuner keys that I already have don't fit in the BC Rich headstock holes. The holes are 8mm in diameter while the tuners are 10mm. I have two choices - buy new, thinner keys, or widen the holes in the headstock to make them 10mm. Then the bridge. I will be using a Fender-style hardtail for this guitar. Need a black one, made of steel. Found a couple modestly priced hardtails that were in black too, but they were all made of Zink and with a rather gay "modern" design. Yuck! To be continued...

You're kidding, right? .... right? I was kidding about baptizing my guitar in blood. I'm afraid I was not kidding about the injury, though. No stitches - I used some Super Glue / Epoxy mixture. Added some PVA too - made sure there were no any gaps between the two sliced surfaces in my finger. We, morons, never go to the doctor and always look for a fast shortcut because we ignore what medicine has to say about stab wounds. At the end, we would do things our way, no matter what the doctor advised. By the way, truth is that this was caused by a broken glass.

I just cut my finger to the bone because I was in a hurry again and used a drill bit for tightening the drill's shaft. It snapped in my hand and cut me pretty bad. Cool - the guitar is baptized in blood. How metal is that? Anyway, the guitar is going great so far and no matter what you say about people not getting too impressed by hand made guitars, I will do my best to score on a very special chick using this guitar.

Why did I use this scum's services? Easy - because he's the only one in town. I live in the middle of nowhere and, believe me, my guitarbuilding life is much harder that you can ever imagine. All I have is will and passion. The rest is troublesome stuff like driving for miles just to be able to buy a good rasp.

See, i do drink beer too. but I am not drunk 99% of my time. Plus the guy is not running his own business. He works for a woodworking company and occasionally charges random victims for small jobs. Using the equipment, materials and electricity that the company owner is paying for, of course. He is kind of running his own small private business inside of his daily job.

It doesnt quite work like that - 90% couldnt give a crap and will think you are strange when you could have just brought a nice shiny new one!! That goes for men and women. If the handmade guitar looks handmade, and badly handmade at that - then no-one will be impressed. Not even us weirdos that like handmade guitars!! You bad and cynical man, you just killed my dream.

By "precious" I didn't mean its money value. Beech, just like pine, is pretty plentiful here, yes. But not in its steam dried form of existence. They sell raw beams for construction work (for supporting the concrete molds and stuff like that) and, of course, it is not dried. I had to go to a small village 70 kilometers away where this lumber yard was to find this piece of kiln/steam dried beech. Cool thing is that I caught a viper there, but that's another story.

The beer man was not doing me a favor. We agreed about a small cash payment (I guess he calculated the payment as being equal to two bottles of beer). Actually, I insisted really hard on paying him (not that he was about to refuse) because I knew that if it was all for free, he would screw it up, not taking his itme. Unfortunately, he didn't do the job even under an agreement that I will be paying him. Plus he gave me bull about the gap being perfectly OK and the glue filling it up and all that stuff... Should I pay him for screwing up my wood? Or should I bring the wood back to him and make him do it all over again, so he would charge me twice? And I have a gut feeling that his drunken hands won't do it right even after 100 tries. Nothing to worry about - I didn't screw the guy by not paying him for his 1 minute of lousy work. Actually he screwed me up by ruining My Precious Wood.

I didn't ignore anything - I learned a lot from this thread thanks to you, guys. Now I know what is best to do in future, but at present, I really don't have the time and patience to go through all this handwork again. Six months of waiting really discouraged me and I am in a childish hurry to finish everything up and to start scoring on chicks by showing off my new hand-built guitar. To be honest, I was 80% sure that i will be forced to use epoxy anyway because I knew from the very beginning that I don't have the time to learn how to do any precise squaring handwork. But, as I stated above, I do like to ask for people's opinion, no matter what the situation is and take under consideration any possibility that may appear. For example - in the other thread there were plenty of good advices on how to do the squaring by hand. But after all I brought the blank to a carpenter because I knew that this would be the best thing to do in my present situation from the very beginning. This didn't stop me from asking and learning new things that I will be using in future. And thanks Satan (or whoever), I learned a lesson from this experience: Find a couple of weeks of free time and learn to use your hand tools and NEVER trust beer drinking lowlifes to do your job.

@vildskud, thank you for this very thorough answer, man. It's a tutorial by itself. I will pracise those techniques when I get the chance to. Meanwhile, since it's been like 6 months or so since the day I started and my guitar is not even close to ready, I glued the pieces using epoxy. If everything is OK, the epoxy will harden the way I want it to (really keep my fingers crossed about the right epoxy to hardener propotion being right because I had troubles with this before). @fryovanni, The moisture is below 6%. This is what the old woman at the wood yard told me. They dry the lumber there. Have their own kilns, steam dryers and all. The carpenter did the squaring 2 days ago. I checked the pieces while I was there and pointed out the small gap. He said: "It's OK, the glue will fill it up" I like to ask even for the smallest and neglectable details and even about things that I already know, so I came to ask here, on the forum, and asked about the gap. Apparently, it turned out that the glue will not fill it up after all. I guess the confusion comes from the fact that the guy is using elastic, gummy, resin-like glue for his joints. Maybe his glue indeed does fill the gaps. I tried to explain that I will be building a guitar and not some chair and that I will be using regular PVA glue, but he just stared at me and looked like he was ready to cut my throat with a portable bandsaw. I guess he didn't like me much because I interrupted his beer drinking trip. He was talking to the hop god when I broke his meditation. NOT good...

Yeah, a carpenter (and a very experienced one too) did that. I told him that I will pay him after I glue the pieces together and bring the body back to him for evening. I will never go back to this guy, of course. He screwed My Awesome Body Blanks and caused me a whole lot of trouble. I don't pay for trouble. Nope.

Thanks. It is going to be a painted body, sure (jet black to be more precise). Guess, there is no beauty in transparent finish on beech anyway. The sandpaper idea appeared to me but then I remembered the ruined headstock on one of my other guitars. Tried to square its parts the sandpaper way and ended up with a bad joint. Will try to find a tutorial and learn how squaring is done by a hand planer. But it is skill, not info that I lack.

Thanks guys. If 0,5 mm is too much for using PVA glue, then I will just use epoxy for joining the body parts together. Have no time to learn how to precisely use a hand planer and make the parts match with no gap in between them. I also doubt that I can do this without screwing anything else up. @zyonsdream, I've already tried to flip the blanks in many different positions, tried as many combinations as possible. Alas, no matter how I position them, there's always a gap in some part of the joint. Abut the extra piece: yes, I will use one of the leftovers, of course. It is not what extra piece to use and where to get it from the real issue here. It is which way to go - with or without an extra piece. An extra piece would mean one more joint line. Ie.e. possible troubles. On the other hand, aligning the body at an angle seems awkward to me. @guitar2005, This is very interesting what you say about the body grain and sound of the guitar. More info on this is welcome! Thanks!

Therefore the obvious answer is that they are not square...just because the ran it on a jointer, doesn't mean it's gonna be perfect. Invest in a hand plane, learn to use it. I do have a hand plane. Several of them, including a power hand plane. Problem is that I don't know how to use it to make the joints better than the joints a professional machine has made. Any tips or tricks? And most importantly: what is an acceptable gap size between two wood surfaces that are about to be PVA glued? I may be OK to go with that 0,5 mm gap.

OK, ignore this part. Let's indeed focus on the joints and on the 0,5mm gap that is between the two "squared" surfaces.

OK guys, I got the blank from THIS thread squared by a carpenter on a power planer and thicknesser machine. He also cut the blank in three pieces that I intend to glue and make my future guitar body out of. First problem: Even though the blanks were squared on a machine, there is still a gap. I mean, when I put the blanks next to each other, there is a slight gap in between them. It is maybe 0,5 mm or something or maybe even less, but still a freaking gap. I wanted to use PVA glue this time and not epoxy but it seems that with the gap present, this will not be possible and I will have to use good old epoxy again, like I did on the pine body. Or am I wrong? Is a gap of 0,5 mm neglectible? Should I rely on the fact that the clamps will squeeze the gap an make the two wood surfaces meet each other or is it a no-no? Second problem (or more like a dilemma): OR Which way would be better and what issues may appear if I choose either of them? And last but not least: Should I put veneer as a top? I know that if I use PVA glue to join the three basic parts, there will be a huge chance that my finish will crack with time at the joint lines because the parts will start to "creep". So, I guess a thin veneer top would be necessary. But what if I use epoxy? Epoxy, unlike PVA, does not creep and gets rock-hard, so I guess it will make the use of a top unnecessary. What would you advice me on these three issues? Thanks!