sdshirtman

I finally decided on multi-layered binding but I have a problem on my hands I could use some help with. I bought some cream and white binding from Allparts for laminating. I decided on .6 cream, .2 blk, .2crm, .2blk. Using acetone for the bonding agent the .6 cream laminated to the .2 black just fine. When I went to laminate the next layer of .2 cream to the .2 black the acetone wouldn't bond the two together. So I took some clippings from both the .2 black and cream and soaked them in some acetone for a few hours. They didnt melt at all so they are obviously not ABS. I'm stopped dead in my tracks because of this and I'm a little annoyed to say the least. Allparts doesn't say its not abs but it doesn't say it is either. Because of the thin size I'm thinking that it's only going to be used for laminates. I just took it for granted it was abs and would laminate with acetone just fine. So I guess my question is what direction to go next. Can anyone tell me what glue I can use to laminate this stuff? I was thinking CA glue but I'm afraid that with the brittle nature of CA glue that the binding will de-laminate when I start installing and bending it around the guitar. Am I just SOL on this and have to source out different ABS binding. At this point my neck is already bound with this color cream so I'm committed to using the .6 allparts cream. Any advice anyone?

The problem deft has is it doesn't get as hard as it should. If you're doing the rattle can route I've heard Mohawk or behlen lacquers work very well. Or you can look at reranch.

Are you doing this with a gun or rattle cans? I'd recommend not using any deft lacquer on your guitar.

I really like the bottom one and how the lines flow. Are you using a dunlop straplock on that?

Thank you. I tried to route everything with the tightest tolerances as I was capable of. Someday I'll want to do this on maple and when I do the ebony dust and black dye trick wont be able to hide my mistakes. I did have to go buy the smaller collet. They raped me for 9 bucks for that damn thing. Some people say you cant feel a difference between ebony and rosewood but I sure can. To me nothing else feels like it. At least what I've had the chance to play. So what happened that you got sidelined? I hope you start a thread on what ever it is you decide to do.

I finally got everything on my fretboard routed out. When I started I thought I could route this all out with a .032 bur. I found out its kind of like trying to empty a bathtub with a spoon so I acquired a 1/8" bit for hogging out the larger parts. I also finally got a chance to try out the smaller dental bits Govtmule sent me last year. (Thanks Govtmule!) I used them to sharpen up the edges and they also came in handy for the corners. I epoxied everything in and leveled the board. I tried some of the 3M 7X paper Scott mentioned in his thread on this. This stuff really does last quite a while and doesnt clog. It took one piece of 80 grit to sand the radius in. I just ran a vacuum over the sheet and it was like new. I could probably do another board with that piece. So heres a closeup of the inlay after sanding up to 600 grit on the un-dyed board. I thought of leaving it as is with the grey streaks but I ended up slathering it in black dye. I do love jet black ebony fretboards. Somehow even when wearing latex gloves I still always manage to get some of this stuff on myself. Next was my first shot at plastic binding. For some reason I was expecting this to be a little more difficult than it was. It was much easier than I thought it would be once I started. I used CA glue for the sides and a bit of binding paste for the end and miters. My camera wasn't cooperating with me today so all I have are these shots. I'm happy with the results.

If I'm ever in your neck of the woods I'll take you up on the beer. Where was it that you reside again? The SM dremel router base I bought has a cool little nozzle built into it so you can hook up to a fishpump so that doesnt happen. Thank you but it aint done yet. I underestimated its difficulty level and Its taken much more work than I expected it would. I lost count of the time into it so far but a conservative estimate is at least 25 hours so far. I finally got them glued down last night and will be rediusing the board today. I'm crossing my fingers nothing goes afoul. I have high hopes though.

Certainly a battle royal this month.

I hear ya. I agree being terrified of your tools is bad to a point. Take my saying my router scares me as me having a tremendous amount of respect for it. I know if I screw up its going to have some very serious consequences. I really like my fingers and I take every precaution to avoid that. I do try and keep a firm grip on my piece. I'm constantly thinking about and anticipating a potential kickback and where my hand will be if it happens and where the piece will potentially go. I always wear a dust mask, eye protection as well as ear muffs to boot Not trying to hijack your thread either curtisa but I think safety is always worth discussing. Great thread by the way.

Thx. I did the air blow thing and cleaned it before I started but didn't do the wax treatment. I'll give it a coating next time I use it. I thought maybe the other avatar might be a little pretentious so I nixed it. The one there now is a tiki I carved a few years ago. it now resides in the backyard to scare the boogieman away. The fretsaw blade is awesome Scott. Once I got it set up it took about 3 min to cut all the slots. I'm glad I opted for that method over the manual slotting jig. Heres a few more progress pics with a little more detail of how I'm tackling the inlay. I bought a precut inlay set from luthiersupply.com. Before I did I called them about the sizing which is their website doesn't have. The owner emailed me back a 100% scale pdf of the inlay plans they use so I could check it against my own plans for fit. Unfortunately when I did the set I wanted was designed to be used with a longer scale neck and the pieces for the upper frets wouldn't fit properly. They said they could do a special order based off of plans I sent them but it would take at least 6 weeks, so I just opted to buy what they had and figured I could sand the tops down a bit. When I received the inlay I did a small test on one piece using 120 grit paper. Shell is harder that you'd guess and It didnt work very well. It bacame apparent to me I was going to have to get a little more methodical than just sanding down the tops to fit. I started by taking the pdf they sent me and converting it to vectors in illustrator so I could measure it accurately against my plans I already had drawn up in illustrator. From there is was a matter of making a template that I could cut out and super glue onto the pieces so I knew exactly how much to cut them down. From here it was the tedious task if cutting out the pieces from the paper template and glueing them one at a time to each piece. All pieces were numbered so I wouldn't get confused. This all took what seemed like forever. The left piece of the 12th fret marker set should have been pure white MOP but was apparently cut from a piece of gold MOP and flipped over. So thinking that when that piece was sanded down for the radius that the gold could start to show I decided to cut a new one out. I also cut a new center piece for one of the gold pieces that didnt quite match the rest. The front The back I decided to buy an ounce of each color MOP when I bought the precut set from luthiersupply. Which came in handy. An oz of this is about half the price as stewmac and LMI. The MOP was 15 bucks and the gold was $20. Heres what I received. Its .060 thick too. Not too shabby. Once I got all the pieces cut down I started in with positioning them on the board. Since these are kind of an odd shape on top I decided to play with it on the computer and once again made some paper templates so I could position these exactly where I wanted them. I traced them with a pencil and would up with this. Next step was to place the pieces on the board and secure them so I could scribe around the edges with a sharp exact o blade. I have Larry Robinsons "The art of inlay" and in it it says to use model airplane cement or Duco cement to tack your pieces to the board for scribing. That **** takes forever to cure so I opted to use a smaller than a pin head sized drop of med CA glue instead. Here are all the pieces tacked in place and ready to scribe. So in using the CA glue in place of model airplane cement I figured I could just flood around each piece with some acetone when I was finished scribing and the CA glue would release with some ease. Not the case. Fret by fret I soaked each piece with acetone using a large hypo needle to keep it flooded and they weren't budging. Five minutes, then ten minutes, and they still weren't releasing. I was starting to get a little freaked out thinking I had just waisted a huge amount of my time and a fair amount of money. Being a relative noobie to this whole inlay thing I referred back to the book. Larry says you can use a razor blade and gently slip it under the side to help pry the pieces off so thats what I tried. I was afraid of snapping them in half while prying them off but after about fifteen minutes of soaking in acetone and gently prying with a razor blade they started to pop off the board. In retrospect it was kind of comical. Laying all this out gives me an entirely new appreciation for something like madhatters king of diamonds build. So anyways heres the board after scribing with some talcum powder rubbed into the voids. Stay tuned for the next installment where I comically try and rout all this stuff out with a 0.032 tapered router bit. >

My router scares the crap out of me more that any other tool I own. I'm in Searl's camp. I try to cut super close to the template so I'm only routing off a sixteenth or so of material. Following that method I've never really had any serious tearout yet. Watching Chris's vid and how he was holding that body made me uneasy. I try and keep my hands as far away from that blade as possible while still having a grip on the piece. Some poor guy just posted over on the luthier talk forum that he just screwed up a digit pretty badly on his router and it was his first build. Oh and thanks for suggesting we google "router accident'. I just did and I'm going to be even more nervous when I use my router now.

Definitely a one of a kind top. Cant wait to see it with a finish over it.

Dont have my camera with mebut here's a minor update with the pics I do have at work with me. I built a very simple sled for my fretsaw blade that I bought last year. This is the first time I've had a chance to try it out. The trickiest part was making the rails fit in the channel and having them tight enough to not have any side to side play and at the same time not be so tight that they don't glide smoothly. I wasn't thinking about my nut when I cut the truss rod channel and routed all the way past the ledge. Heres my fix. Took a scrap piece of mahogany and drilled a hole. Cut it in half and started sanding till it fit. I think next time I'm just going to use a gouge again. Crappy pic but the fretboard is slotted and trimmed for binding. After a lot of contemplating on whether to do milti-ply binding on the fretboard or not I decided on a single piece of cream. I'm still contemplating whether I should do multi ply on the body or just match the fretboard. Decisions decisions decisions. Anyways these were taken over a week ago. I worked on the inlay all last weekend and I still dont even have all the routing done. I'll post some pics soon but let me just say now I know why people like do one piece block inlays.

After RAD's comment on the new volute I had to go look up the last one and compare. I'd have to concur. I like the lines on this one a little better. Nice and crisp. Has the thought of an inlay on the back of the volute ever crossed your mind?

Tonto fix letter.

With so many builders in the world and the fact that a headstock has to follow a basic function over form I'm not surprised that something like this doesnt happen more often. Didnt Fender and Gibson both drew inspiration and derived their headstock designs from existing designs from older 1800's European designs? Again like Bob said its damn hard to come up with an original headstock that hasn't been done before. I for one spent an ungodly amount of time coming up with my design which I think is reasonably unique. I wouldn't be surprised if someday I see an example of something similar that pre-dates my design. Wasn't it Picasso that said "Good artist copy but great artists steal? <---(that outta add fuel to the fire. )

Amen brother. Skipping the PRS style cutout on the lower horn does preserve the lines of your design. And they are very nice lines indeed. I wonder if you'll miss it when you play it. SR I havent uses any cocobolo yet but I plan to on one of my next builds. I have that stunner piece I posted somewhere around here and I have another matching piece I cut down into binding. So one of these days. Thats funny. Just checked my statement and they left off the "H". I'm not sure it would be worth it but PM sent.

More progress this weekend. Saturday started out with a trip down to Exotic Hardwoods in Carlsbad CA. If you live close enough to visit there I highly recommend it. Here is a sample shot of one of the ends of the isles they have. Sick stuff. I went down to see if I could find another special piece of cocobolo for the fretboard and headplate for this one as I want to save the piece I have for a different build. They had two fairly large boxes of fingerboards. One cocobolo and the other was what they called Mexican kingwood. So I sat there for an hour on the floor and went through every single piece. It was really hard to see the pieces clearly because they were all rough sawn and coated in waxy stuff but I finally narrowed it down to these pieces. Took em home and threw them on the planer to see what I got. Although beautiful they're not really what I was hoping for. I'm contemplating putting them up for sale here as I can't return em. So this one will be getting an ebony fretboard. --------------------------------------- Onto the carve. The top on this isn't as thick as I wanted to I'm taking down quite a bit on the edges. And after some freehand router action we have steps. This time around I decided to get a little more aggressive taking this down to a shape I wanted so I broke out the grinder with a 60grit wheel. You can screw things up pretty easily with one of these but I've logged in quite a few hours with one in my hand carving tiki's in a previous life so I felt pretty comfortable using it. I'm really glad I did too. I easily probably shaved off 2-3 hours by doing so. I use mine in conjunction with a router speed controller which allows you to ramp it down to a controllable speed. I wouldn't use one without that little gizmo. Nothing more relaxing than carving old school. And the results. The recurves have to be dialed in a bit with a scraper but here is the general shape. I skipped the PRS type cutout on the lower horn on this one and I'm liking it better. Over all it took 4 hours to get here from a flat top vs. 8 or 9 hours last build. Amazing what some good tools and a little bit of past experience will do. I should have my binding in this week so I hope to get busy with some inlay and my fretboard next week. Thanks for lookin.

Looking great. That headplate is really beautiful. I can almost picture you with a grass reed hanging out of your mouth while you whittle away at that headstock which by the way, I really like.

Thanks. I'm hoping. I can see it both ways but I tend to agree with you. Here is one of the few examples I can find. http://www.electricguitardiscount.com/images/12624_Gibson_Custom_CS-356_Lemonburst_CS103593_3.jpg Didnt get the fretboard in till this last Friday so that option was out. . Still waiting on binding from allparts so it looks like the fretboard will have to wait till next weekend.

I just saw this arrive on the GOTM page. You sir are a beast. I love this and hats off to you for a beautiful guitar. I thought Searls Clancy Star was a shoe in for July but now that you've thrown this into the mix I'm going to have a problem voting. This build just oozes class. Did I mention I love this? Just wow.

This ones moving along at decent pace although I haven't been talking that many pics. I got my neck angle cut. I had to change the angle from 14 degrees to 12.5 because of material constraints. Truss channel done. Last build I glued a piece of wood over the channel after I routed and installed. This time I tried to work around that. I also decided that rather than use hand tools I'd throw it on the drill press for the recess around the truss nut. Measured several times and went at it. You can never measure enough. About 1/2 inch from completing this recess I met some resistance. Thinking it was the bit at a weird angle I kept going. Then I realized my chuck had been chewing into the headstock and left some nasty marks about 1/4 deep. Live and learn. I plugged it with a piece of scrap. It will be hidden with a laminate and binding. Still humbling though. A lot of this stuff is just repetitive and mimicking my last build so I wont post the pics but here is the truss installed. I think I'm going to streamline this up and skip the filler strip this time. Been there done that and I dont see a huge benefit besides looking nice to me. I got a little ahead of myself and roughed out the neck thickness. Me wearing the neck pocket. I'd be lost without my workmate. I was going to set up the router to get a super accurate cut on the neck tenon then decided to just cut the damn thing with a pull saw. And here's where it sets after a full saturday of work. Besides the top carve I'm kind of stuck now. I could do the recesses for the pup ears I suppose. I've been avoiding it due to funds but I have to order parts and binding now. I had the budget until my daughter had to have all four of her wisdom teeth removed last week. You can take a guess at what that cost. Even with insurance. Anyways. After some research I think I'm going to get the cream binding from Allparts. From what I've read the stew mac cream is kind of pink. I'm thinking of doing a multi ply binding of Cream /Blk/Crm/Blk/crm. The only place I can find an example on a lemon burst is on a 335. What do you guys think? I was going to laminate the smaller strips before installing but I've heard its easier to bend around curves if you install all layers at the same time. Any tips on the multi ply?

That bridge is pretty cool. I take it no neck angle is needed?

Yay we have pictures! Cant believe I missed this thread before now. This is shaping up to be a stunner. Hats off on the electronics cavity sans template.

Looks like someone needs to pony up 3 bucks for more bandwitd this month