sdshirtman

This came out super nice Scott. I wish I would have thought of the signature on the volute. So cool. You're going to start finding it hard to top yourself if you keep putting stuff like this out. Well done sir. This will surely command my vote for GOTM.

So heres a nice screw up. I almost didn't post but decided to post it as a sort of tutorial to show how I fixed it. Yesterday I was finish sanding these just before I dyed them. Each one had one small depression in the top that I was going to steam out using a soldering gun. My gun was up to temp and I soaked a small rag with water and went about the relatively simple task. What I didnt notice and see was the set screw for securing the tip to the gun resting on the top. It left a nice deep black burn mark right in the center of the guitar. Why couldn't this of happened on my spalt body? Here's a little recreation. Many expletives were shouted and I had a small meltdown moment. A nicely figured top I was leaving a natural finish on ruined in three seconds of careless oversight. I had to step back and be done for the day. (Scotch to the rescue.) I started experimenting on some scraps the next morning. The only thing I could come up with was to graft a piece of matching wood. The question was how. I tried cutting out a square/diamond shape but it was too difficult to match up and ended up looking like total crap. Not going to work. I needed something that was more or less un-noticeable. I decided to try and take a small oval shaped chunk out a matching piece and glue it into the void I would cut out from where the burn mark on the body was. Here's one of the practice pieces. The lower oval piece was one I had cut too deeply and it left an obvious horse shoe shape under it The pencil circle is the acceptable graft. So heres is my fix explained The only way this would work is if the grain matches almost exactly. Here I'm measuring the grain width with calipers. And measuring against the grain of a piece of scap. This is a good reason to keep your off cuts. Without this matching piece this wouldnt have worked well. Its hard to see in this picture but after I found a suitable grain line to graft from I used a little naptha to allow me to see where the figure was running through both pieces. I wanted to match this as accurately as possible. That means the figure lines too. Otherwise there would be a noticeable gap in that spot after it was dyed. And the marked figure line from the donor. With both marked I had something that looked like this. Using a very sharp number 7/9 gouge and a block to let me duplicate the correct angle I take a piece out by cutting half way in from each side. This demonstrates the block to get the angle close. The cut angle is obviously important in matching the two pieces together. Not the actual piece I used, but this is what the piece from the donor should look like. And removing the burn section. Its very worth noting that this is a little backwards. I started with removing the burn first. Then I took a slightly larger piece from the donor. Having a slightly larger donor piece is IMPORTANT. This gave me room to sand flat when dry. Otherwise I might end up with a depression. If any of you try this I'd advise practicing several times on scraps first. This took me a few tries to get right. Once you have these steps complete its just a matter of gluing the piece in. I used a fat dab of stainable elmers wood glue. Cover in wax paper and clamp tightly. Here is what it looks like after gluing. And here is the final result after sanding flat. In the first picture you can sort of see how the figure lines match. Its not perfect and never will be. But its close enough that it shouldn't ever be noticed unless I were to point it out directly. You have to look pretty hard to see it. I've asked a few people to find it and they couldn't. We'll see what it looks like after its dyed. For now it looks like top saved and crisis averted.

I cant believe its been a month since My last post. Life has had me on the run the last month. I had my daughter graduate HS and we had a tons of friends and family out for the occasion. Her 18th birthday a week after that. She got a car that took me a week of searching to find. Scratch another weekend. Spend the next weekend with a friend who is moving away. That ate a lot of weekend build time. I have free weekends in front of me so maybe I can get these done soon. Thanks for the previous comments. I did do some experimenting with the boiling water trick. Great tip. Appreciated and thank you. Bringing these up to date. The spalted one has been bound with two ply to mirror the neck binding. Neck on the spalt is glued up and blended in. Still needs the bridge installed and a nut cut and grain fill, but then its ready for clear coat. I had originally planned for a chrome bridge and tuners for this one. But after some contemplation and a lot of badgering from a friend of mine and my wife I've decided to go all black on this one. Kind of cliche but I think it works better which is why everyone else prolly does it. Opinions? That meant ordering new hardware. The Pigtail bridge I had planned on using doesn't come in black but the Tone Pros wrap around version does! It was actually a little cheaper and came with locking studs. I think the Pigtail came first but it makes makes you wonder if there was ever a lawsuit between these two. They are almost identical. I like the saddles on the Tone pros a little better. I tried to get this customized by having nickel/chrome saddles on it but no dice. And unfortunately the saddles only come pre notched. If anyone knows of any saddles that will drop into these let me know. The one with the cocobolo binding has a pretty thick top and thus a thick carve on it. When I did the recesses they came out little deeper than I thought they would be. I ended up re-contouring this one a bit to try and make these appear a little shallower. Worked out better in the end. Colors. I want to leave a natural top on this one. I'm thinking it needs just a small amount of pop so I did some tests with a weak mixture of med brown applied to a pre-wet surface. This looks close but its still just a little dark to me. I just want to slightly enhance the figure. . The spalt is getting clear coated which leaves the one bound in cream in question. I was thinking red but It clashes with the blue green inlays. In an effort to mimic the inlay I did some experimenting with direct dyed dark blue with a sand back then shot with tinted green lacquer over it. I thought that might preserve the blue a bit. In the end it didnt look the way I wanted. I'm also not a huge fan of green guitars anyways and I dont think many others are either. I've decided I'm going to do a blue burst on this one. Simple and classic.

Pat yourself on the back because that came out great Scott. String that bad boy up and post a few more pics.

That's one hell of a cool way to sign a guitar Scott. How long did that take you to pull off?

And a few bonus neck carve pics that show the veneer I put on the back of the headstock for the one getting the cocobolo treatment. Thanks for looking. Carry on....

Its time to bind these and one of these is getting the cocobolo treatment. Cocobolo's kinda brittle and I knew this was going to be a pain but theres no turning back now. I made all this from a nice 36" chunk of cocobolo I have so I got to break out and play with my newly acquired drum sander. It took all of 15 min to make them. I dont know how I got along without a drum sander. http://www.jobsinmotion.com/jobs/-/J3G4126XL74MVNZH3X6?IPath=JEHRNRA&siteid=cb_emailrec_US&emailversion=CB_1_hr&clicktype=recemail&utm_source=CB&utm_medium=CB_Recommendations&utm_campaign=Email I cracked a lot of these pieces trying to get them to bend properly. This is two of a bunch I screwed up in the process. One of the problems was how tall the two pieces for the inner horns were and the extreme curve I needed to put on it. Since cocobolo is so oily it doesn't accept water so I couldn't get the steam that helps it along. I even tried soaking this stuff over night to see of I could saturate it but no dice. In this process of trying to saturate the binding strips I came up with a simple solution. Put a cork in one end of a piece of PVS pipe and fill with water. Use a small spring clamp to keep the pieces from falling in. Durp. I finally got I piece I could use. The rest of the less tall stock bent much easier.

Nice vision with the one with the hole. Most people would have passed right by that piece. Not sure I would have went with the divots but it seems to work and never the less makes for a very cool end result. Thanks for posting. Enter in GOTM?

Nice dodge on the blush. This ones going to be a stunner.

<<-- jealous. That's a hell of a steal. Congrats. Care to elaborate how you got it?

I really like the clean lines and naked simplicity of your builds. This one is no different. Very nice.

Looking good. Solid choice on replacing the steak knife handle. Are you going to polish the brackets when finished?

My method is probably as crude as yours. I'll have to add pickup ring tutorial to the never ending list of things I have to do but probably will never will. Lol? But in a simple nut shell here it is verbally. I split a 1" thick billet in half on the band saw. I then cut the pieces to size using a table saw sled with a vertical toggle clamp mounted on it to hold the pieces in place. After this part check the pieces to make sure they are perfectly square. I then mounted the pieces onto my router sled bed using double sided tape to cut the angle into it. If memory serves I think it was around 3 degrees. Its what ever the stock Gibson rings are. I checked this with a digital angle cube. There are some pictures of this from my previous builds. I then lay out where my holes are going to be drilled including the inside radius of the four corners of the inside using a square ruler. Once this is done I drill out all the holes. From there I put it on a scroll saw and connect the 4 radius holes to cut out the center. Make sure to leave yourself some meat to sand the insides down to spec. From there its just a matter of carefully sanding the insides flat and into spec. I made a set of three different sized sanding blocks with radiused edges matching the radius of the inside corners. The trick here is to cut your sand paper and attach it to the block just shy of the radius so you wont sand into it the radius. I'll note that the counter sinks were done slowly by hand. I sand all the edges and corners with 220 then move into higher grits and finish with steel wool. Let me know if thats hard to follow. Thank you very much She doesnt call herself that yet. Between running a full time business and doing this in the evenings and every weekend I think I've worked every day for about 8 weeks straight. So wether she knows it or not she is one. On the tru-oil and cocobolo. I did run into some funky curing problems. After 24 hrs they still weren't completely dry. I rubbed off what was left of the uncured oil with a rag and buffed it out. That left a nice shine on them. Always learning right? Since I'm on here again today I'll add this from this weekend. I found an incredible piece of spalted maple with some nice flame on it a few months back. Against warnings from a few others I decided to do a carve top with it. For for what it is this piece seemed stable enough to pull a carve top off. This piece actually had a decent tap tone in its raw form instead of the a dull thud like you'd guess a piece of spalt would have. If it didn't, I dont think I would have used it. Whats the point of building a dead sounding guitar right? I started by soaking it with some wood hardener. It drank up a good 3/4 of a bottle before it was saturated. From there I treated it like any other piece of maple until it came to carving it. I ran into trouble trying to use a DA on it. As you'd guess the softer parts would sand quicker than the harder parts leaving ripples. I got around this by using a lot of custom made sanding blocks and methodically taking my time. This carve took me almost double what a normal piece would take. After I got this down pretty close to its final form I sanded it down with 120 and gave it another good soaking of wood hardener. Thats where I am now - waiting a few days for it to cure nice and hard. Then I'll sand it down again and route the binding channel. I still haven't decided how to tackle gluing the binding on. Here it is during shaping. You can see from the shaving that it wasnt too deteriorated. And then with a good soaking of hardener. Best of both worlds? (ignore the brush hairs. Those will sand out) Part of me really wants to try and pop the flame out a bit more but given the piece I think thats going to be impossible.

Fair enough Scott. I'm a lot further than than shown so I'll do truncated picture catch up. Backs getting carved. I'll dial this in all the way after my necks are glued in. My grinder and DA are becomings closer friend of mine. I did find another use for the new smaller #7 gouge I just picked up. I dont like having to get out a smaller router bit just to do the corners of my pickup routes. The new gouge fits the bill perfectly. A good time saver for me. Back carves mostly done. I'll finish up when I glue the necks. I'll be doing a lot more of these magnetic truss covers moving forward so I made a simple template to help speed things up. Again these are time consuming and I can use any time saver I can utilize. The first few of these I made were cut out on a scroll saw with a 45 degree angle. This time some of the laminates I did just tore apart using this method regardless of the speed and feed. I had to resort to a gentler method. A block cut at a 45 degree angle, a popsicle stick with some double sided tape and a rounded block with sand paper does the trick quite readily without destroying the truss covers. One in maple, one in cream abs and one with .030 white abs to match the board with block inlays. The new template worked very well. They snapped right into the intended position although there were a few tricks I used to insure that that I'm not divulging. On the board with maple binding. These look cool new but I've seen that they have a tendency to soak up nastiness from your fingers over time and discolor. To thwart this I taped off the maple binding and gave them a few coats of tru-oil to seal them up on top before I installed frets. Once dry a few strokes with some steel wool took down the gloss. The sides will get lacquer. This should seal them up keep from griming up for a while. And last for today. (my computer has 7% left) I told myself I wasnt going to ever make another set of wood pickup rings again but one of these builds is screaming for a set. I was just going to buy some pre made ones but everything I found out there were either flat or the color was off and very pricey. So I said screw it and ended up just biting the bullet and making another set. Two actually. I'll save the other set for a future build or sell em on ebay. These were pretty time consuming to do by hand. I'd say a good 5+ hrs from start to finish from a nice billet of cocobolo. The entire time I was working on them all that I was thinking about was how these could be done soo much faster with a CNC machine. Someday right? I'm very happy with the final result though. Once in context on the build it will be time well spent. My last two sets I finished in lacquer. These are just getting a light coat of tru-oil. I think they will wear much better that way plus I dont think the cocobolo really needs it. This installment still doesn't bring these builds up to their current state. I'll bring this thread up to speed soon enough. Today I finished up the front carves and will be binding them asap. I'll post more pics soon. Till then . . .

Some of the pics pop out a bit more than the last you posted. Is it me or is it just the camera? Either way it looks great. Look like a pretty productive weekend Scott. Thats looking pretty damn cool. Cant wait to see the final color.

OK play time in Florida is over. I want some progress pics!

Says the man with the CNC! A few more progress pics for you guys. I'm shooting fora little better consistency on my carves for this model so I made me some carve templates. Here they are finished. Now I have to get some bigger template bits for this. Honestly I'm wondering if it will save me any time at all. My freehanded method seems quicker and is reasonable accurate. We'll see as I'm going to put these to use this weekend.

Will do. All I've done so far are some tests when I was buying but those were promising. I'll put it through some paces this weekend and report bak.

Ironic that after the last post I scored this. I've been looking for one of these at a decent price for months. I finally found one this weekend. Apparently the previous owner just passed away and it was being liquidated by his son in law. I came with the optional in/out feed tables too. And he threw in 3 stocked boxes of paper for it. No flattening on that slab of aluminum!

I love that stage. Looking good.

OK next installment. I want the bottom on my fretboards as flat as possible to insure a good mating surface and to make sure there are no gaps between the binding and the neck. Pictures are kinda self explanatory. Double sided tape for the board and a piece of 120 grit paper stuck to a flat surface should do it. These boards looked nice and flat when I started. Looks can be deceiving. Almost there. This edge would have left an unsightly gap when glued up. Finished and ready to glue up. Das it for today.

I'd send it back and order the blade from stew mac. It doesn't need the stiffeners.

Thank you thank you. Dr. Walker is my general physician that I see for minor aches and pains. When I really want to get to the bottom of what ails me I go see my specialist - Dr. Laphroaig. But he's a specialist and thus, kind of pricey. I have high hopes for the cocobolo too Scott. Binding the pickup rings in maple is a pretty novel idea. I hadn't thought of that. Just goes to show you how we all see differently from our minds eye. On this one I think I'm leaving the body natural and am going to make the rings from cocobolo. The body is going to get cocobolo binding. I'm thinking this will offset the fretboard and tie it all in. Its going to be interesting though. I've done some bending tests and cocobolo is a bitch to shape. One of the problems is that its pretty impervious to water and steam which is a key part of the bending process. I've consulted with Dr. Talisker before . He's a pretty good doctor. I get the critical thing a lot. I think being ultra critical of your own work pushes you a bit further than you thought you could achieve. In a million years I'll never achieve perfection, but I aim for it even though I know I wont hit it. It could be considered a character flaw by some. I think I have emailed Doug before. I have to follow up again. I've actually emailed several people on several different forums about doing CNC inlay. Its the way to go I think. I like doing it, but its so damn time consuming. These boards took me around 35 hrs for all three which is far too long. I use a combination of the scary sharp method to start with which is less than ideal on gouges, but its what I can afford. I mark the edge with a sharpie so I know I'm getting the correct angle. I use a slip stone at the end just to remove the burr on the concave side then I hand strop with leather and compound. Pretty much all my gouges are from pfeil. The steel they use is pretty decent and I can go a really long time without having to re-hone. I just strop it a few strokes on the leather before I start and get to it. What I'd really like is a nice used tormek. But wouldnt we all? _________________ So check this out. I'm browsing craigslist Tuesday night and I find this huge antique book press for sale. I spoke to this nice lady selling it the next day and she said it had been sitting out side for years and was pretty rusty. I asked her if it still worked and she said she couldn't budge the wheel and was frozen. Bummer. It was also in Newport beach which is about 120 miles from me. But as luck would have it my best friend was going up to newport yesterday for a meeting at the Newport yacht club and said he'd go check it out and pick it up for me if he thought it could be salvaged. He ended up picking it up because he managed to get the wheel to move about a half of an inch with a hammer. But it was still pretty frozen. So I gave the threads a nice soaking in PB penetrating oil and let it sit over night. This morning I gave it some more TLC and broke the screw loose. It needs a little bit of cleaning up but It now works as it has for the last 100 years or so. So new tool day! I think this will be perfect for clamping tops during glue up.

With all the natural woof finishes around here its nice to see something like this. Nice job.

Thx Scott. I twitched a lot afterwards. Had to see Dr. John Walker afterwards. I've been saving the cocobolo board for something special. That ones getting matching rings and binding. Last build I routed my truss rod recess and didnt like the result as much as when I hand carved it. So I went out and bought a smaller gouge and I'm back to doing it by hand. Better result and lots quicker and more enjoyable. You've seen pics like this in my previous builds but here are a few shots of the headstock binding being installed. This headstock goes with the cocobolo board. (Obviously)