Juntunen Guitars

Don't use titebond for these guitars, use hot hide glue. Titebond doesn't release as easily as hot hide does if you need to repair something in the future. I'm not sure how old or how much this guitar is worth but older instruments were built using hot hide anyways and vintage instruments should be repaired using the glue they were built with in my opinion. If you do use titebond use titebond 1 like mentioned above, titebond 2 does not allow water movement so the wood can't move and the guitar will likely fracture again. Another perk to using hot hide glue is that it tacks up well right off the brush, titebond will slip and slide until it is down for a few minutes when it begins to set up but hot hide will hold pretty solidly right off the bat but your working time with hot hide is limited so you have to work fast, heat up the gluing surface with a hair dryer for a while first so the glue doesn't jell to quickly. It doesn't look like you will need to remove the back, just work some glue in it and use cam clamps on the very edges of the guitar to hold it down. You may have to have someone push on the inside edge so that the back will sit flush after the clamps are applied. As for the bridge set it on the top where it will be lined up right and mask off the top around it on the fingerboard side and the two edges. I use blue painters tape because its adhesive isn't as sticky as the tan masking tape so you have less of a chance for the tape to pull the finish off when you remove it but I still will stick it to my jeans a few times to remove some of the adhesive first just to be safe. Use about three layers to build up a little bit of a wall so the bridge won't slide around on you. The reason for the tape is because cam clamps don't apply pressure directly down but will pull what they are clamping inwards so the tape will help hold it in place. I use hide glue for bridge reglues too because chances are you will have to do one again at some point and I hate trying to pry off titebond glued bridges because they usually take parts of the top with them.

I found this guitar in a local guitar center for pretty cheap so I bought it with the intension of fixing it. I have most of the cracks figured out and are ready to be glued but this one I cant figure out what to do with. Is there any way of glueing this with as little of the crack being visible afterwards and how would I go about this? The two little sections that have raised above ther purfling can't be pushed down. I have been shaving off little by little with an xacto knife but they still won't push down, I even tried clamping them down with no help. Any ideas?

I just take a board from my lumber pile and start resawing on the bandsaw.

These are all I have on photobucket now for where it sits currently. I have a bunch more on my phone of the final sanding of the back, sides, and neck and a few other pictures of the build process. All it needs now is final voicing of the top and it's ready for the finishing stage. I'm not really liking haveing to wait until the end of april to start finishing though. It's taunting to have it just hanging on the wall as is. Fretwork time. Here I am leveling the frets, it's just a fret leveling bar from stewmac with P320 grit self adhesive sandpaper from Grizzly, I use that for leveling frets no higher grits are used. Then I use the diamond fret crowning tool from stewmac until there is a slight shiny line left over down the length of the fret. You want that there, don't completely round over the top of the fret. After that I use garnet 500 grit sandpaper from 3M to bring that shiny line in closer to the center so it's smaller and to get rid of the crowning scratches. I ran out of 500 grit during this and switched to 600 wet dry. I using this file from stewmac to round the ends of the frets, press really lightly while using this file. I used to just use a sanding sponge but decided to give this a try and it works better if you can get the touch for it, I screwed up a couple fret jobs my first couple times. After everything I use 0000 steel wool and polish the hell out of the fingerboard and frets until all scratches left over are gone. No pictures of the completely finished frets sorry. Just pictures from during the buffing step.

Let me know when you get the single coils done, I'd be interested in getting some for my strat.

What are you using the wood for? If it's for anything on an acoustic don't bother. Electrics would possibly work depending on where and how bad the splits are.

Looks amazing, I was not to sure on the carbon originally but you blended it in with the paint just right I think.Almost looks like the whole guitar is covered it and it's trying to get out from under the paint lol

Shaping the neck. Iused a saftey planer to get the back of the neck flat with a few thousandths to take off for final thickness. Normally I would make a shim for the nut so that the neck would have the right angle for the planer but the headcap was the right thickness for the shim so I didn't have to make one. Getting there.

And now for the last pictures of where it's at now. Fretted the board before glueing. Make sure you leave the two frets off that will be for the pins, I almost fretted the whole thing. Glueing the board on. This was a paint to get clamps in around the heel. Glued on and fretted.

I was only partially speaking to your post and mostly speaking to random posts of the last few years.I just want to get the truth out.I believe SS is the future for frets on high end guitars and I just think there is a lot of scuffing of feet and air kicking being done by the older boutique builder crowd on other sites and it leads to half truths being spread...All I want is for people to try it for themselves instead of accepting what they are told. But I do think fretting skills should be learned on nickel...and board prep should be carefully and accurately done. Nothing is more rewarding than knowing your fret job is going to last for years without needing to be touched I plan on using SS at some point soon for a full guitar, not just messing with scraps on small mock ups, but for what I am doing now I don't want to deal with it really. I'm still trying to perfect my fretting technique and fingerboard prep, one thing I have learned is that stewmac radius blocks are not perfectly accurate, I use them as a starting point then switch to their leveling bar and finish the board from there until I can't fit a .002" feeler guage inder it anywhere except on acoustics where I start a fallaway at the 9th fret and slowly taper it to the end where there should be .006"-.008" fallaway at the end.

Make sure you finish sand a maple neck to 180 grit only. Maple is so close pored that if it's much higher than 180 you may run into finish adhesion problems during the finishing process or over time. Mainly if you ever need to do a re-fret or anything that requires you to tape the fingerboard or neck, if it has bad adhesion you will just pull the lacquer right off with the tape. If you go the route of taping during the finishing process use the blue painters tape and stick to the table and lift it off a few times to make its stick a little weaker... Better safe than sorry trust me, been there done that, not fun.

Wes I wasn't trying to say SS frets were crap I was saying I didn't undersand why Parker glued frets on which RAD explained, I know virtually nothing about Parker Fly guitars except they are really light usually.

I use the Stewmac leveling bar, I think it's the 16 inch that I have not sure though. They work great, I'd rather buy from stewmac than something off ebay anyways, ebay may be cheaper but that doesn't mean it's better quality. Don't get the one for leveling with the strings on. It's just as easy to level with the strings off just be sure the neck is straight, it helps to use a dual action rod like the ones you can get from LMI or Allied so you can bend the neck into a back bow or up bow. this tool works wonders when fretting this way you can see if your fingerboard is straight from radiusing and you can see if the neck is straight.

Hows it sound? I've always liked Engls but never have heard one in person, I like the sounds I've heard online but again ... that's online (ie. youtube quality )

As far as I know you can color the wood the base color then spray on a sealer and use colored grain filler putty to get that kind of look in ash.

Don't glue the frets onto the top of the board like that, that's the only thing I've never understood that Parker does, I feel bad for anyone who has to refret that in the future and there is a huge window of error gluing them like that let alone to work with stainless steel frets to begin with isn't that fun anyways IMO. You can use any frets if you want to glue just clip the tang off and grid the bottom of the crown flat.

I like the inlay too, I've never tried inlaying like that before, actually the only inlays I have done have been dots so yeah no inlays ha. The pins was something I had seen a long time ago but never tried it, I never had an issue with gluing a fingerboard with nothing to pin it in place but figured I would try something new. This guitar has not dropped off the end of the earth, it seems most of the builds I put on here get halfway through and the thread gets buried or something comes up that I can't finish it. I have some more pictures to post for where it is at now but won't get them up until tomorrow or during the weekend. I have the back, sides and neck prep sanded to 220 grit, the top will get done later I still have a little bit of voicing to do while sanding it. Basically I have the guitar hanging in the class room with everyone elses but it will be there for about 6 weeks now until I am able to finish it.

To get the specialty tools to build an acoustic you will spend more than it would cost to buy a good one let alone the price of parts. The acoustic I am currently building was about $500 or so for parts alone and expect to spend close to $1000 for good tools that will get you by for the bare minimum unless you already have a good collection of tools from kayak building I don't really know what you use for those. If you still want to go for an acoustic I would look into this book it covers both steel string and classical building and is done almost entirely with hand tools, great beginners book. Most Cumpiano books are easy to understand as well. 14 and 12 fret body joints are just different ways of building, typically smaller bodies have 12 frets to the body like a Single O, some Gibson's even have 13 frets to the body. Don't use cedar for the sides, cedar is not a very strong wood and it would have to be pretty thick to work as sides not to mention cedar tops, even at the right thickness, can break under their own weight if held wrong. I would use the sapele for the back and sides and get some for a neck too. If you want to see what goes into an acoustic build you can check out my build thread I'm no proffesional but I've covered almost everything done to build it in that thread if you have questions shoot me a message or ask on the build thread.

Why not make a jig and plane the back thinner then chamber from the back and glue on a cap for the back instead of the top? That way you wouldn't see the chambers or just make covers out of the same wood and glue them in place after chambered? Unless you want to have the open chambers then go for it.

Looks great.

Bubinga makes nice back and side sets and makes real nice necks lams, I have never used it but I have seen great results from it. A guy I know is building an acoustic with it now. As to bamboo all I know of it is that it returns to the shape it was when it was cut very easily or it tries to return to the shape it was in when it was in the tree, I have heard of bow makers saying it's a good wood for recurves and low bows because of that. I have thought of playing around with it as brace wood on an acoustic but I'm a little nervous of its hardness compared to spruce.

Get gouging chisels, a violin maker I know says they are the best way to carve arch tops, they are nice for carving the tapers in brace stock as well. I'm excited to see the walnut on this when it's done.

Glued the neck on. I used hot hide glue for this because it will make a neck reset easier in the future and if it is ever left in a hot car it will be way easier to fix than if it was glued on with something like epoxy. With epoxy everything else would move and not the neck neck joint so you would end up causing more damage and I'd rather reglue a neck than repair cracks and do a neck reset, let alone take the epoxy off... The clamp I had on the heel slipped loose. I could have just filled the gap right be fore finishing and it would have been fine but I found that I could just push it down so I worked some glue in there and clamped it again. When I took the clamp off this morning there were no gaps thankfully. Centering the fingerboard. I do this by taping a center finding ruler on the centerline then using two rulers that are against the edge of the guitar to align the fingerboard. After that just drill two pilot holes for pinning the fingerboard in place. I clamp the board down before drilling so it does not move at all.

Inlay time! I have never done an inlay beyond a dot position marker so I wanted to challenge myself this time. So why not do my last name in script. I ended up making it all one piece and out of white ash. I just printed off the script and glued it to the wood. Cut out. Routed I used a dremel. And filling in the gaps.

Here is how I measure the angle. I knew that the angle had to be steep enough that there would be 11/64" of clearance over the bridge area. The angle should be that when you set a straight edge on the neck it will sit on top of the bridge. 11/64" is without the fingerboard and frets added.