bghk6581

Last night, I glued up some walnut veneer to go under the bubinga top. You can barely see the glue line. I need to sand off some of the leftover glue. The top came out nicely. Still gotta clean it up later today. I wet the top a little to see what it would look like after it is oiled.

Today, I worked on the top. Its a two piece bubinga top that I had to cut down the middle using a table saw, then handsaw the rest. I then planed it down to about 3/8". In order to stop the middle of the two pieces of bubinga to stop bucking inward, I had to use a block of my Indian rosewood(future neck) to stabilize the joint.

Finished with the headstock for the day. I still have to sharpen the sides and finish shaping the cap.

Some new pics from today: I thinned out the headstock to about 1/2" and then carved out the sides where the bubinga isn't on and lowered that part another 1/4" Here is a contrast from the unfinished on the left and the carved on the right: I thought that the knot would go away but you can see in this pic a little remained. I can fix that later.

Would you have a better experience with wenge if you were just making a guitar with a wenge top or neck? I am planning on making a guitar with a wenge top and I'm not sure if I will have a tough time with it. Did you have to wear long sleeves and gloves when dealing with wenge? No. No. No. Is that to many NOs? No I think neck, fretboard, whatever Wenge is always poisonous and the splinters always become septic. Wenge for accent lines is not really a problem. Anywhere you use Wenge and you have to sand it into a shape of level it it sucks. Quartersawn is the easiest to deal with because the soft grain and the hard grain are very close together. On a carved(or even flat) flatsawn top it is a pain. You must use a block to sand it. Scrapers, planes, chainsaws tend to make ripples by removing more soft grain and less hard grain. For example the neck on the V has riftsawn edges (no comments from the peanut gallery). I could not use a spokeshave or a scraper or even a razorblade on the neck. I had to shape it with wide rasps and sanding blocks. Everytime I touched it with a scraper the soft grain would tear out. It sands well though. I didn't wear long sleeves but I always wore a mask and safety goggles (not glasses). It seems to only irritate the respiratory system and the eyes. I made a mistake one day and did some light sanding on a fretboard with no mask and had a really bad night... sinuses filled up and took a day to get over it. I ended up sanding the thing with mineral spirits almost all the time. Used dust collection for the DA sander. Vacuumed up all the dust as soon as I was finished. Now this is an extreme case since the whole guitar is Wenge. I love the sound so much I am planning an all Wenge SS... I am crazy I was planning on resawing a 1" piece of flatsawn wenge and use a planer to plane it to about 3/8" for the top of my next guitar. Will the planer cause alot of tearout?

Enough room? You think its too thick or too thin? I'm going to use Sperzel tuners and I have another guitar that has a headstock that is going to be the same thickness that this one will be. It will probably be around 1/2-3/4" thick headstock. The bubinga cap and headstock will be thinner when I finish. Not referring to the thickness of the headtsock, although you should keep that in check. I'm referring to the mount of room to line up the tuners along the sides of the headstock. Have you drawn it out to determine whether it will fit? Yeah I should have enough room. If not I'll adjust the sides when I'm fitting the tuners.

Would you have a better experience with wenge if you were just making a guitar with a wenge top or neck? I am planning on making a guitar with a wenge top and I'm not sure if I will have a tough time with it. Did you have to wear long sleeves and gloves when dealing with wenge?

Enough room? You think its too thick or too thin? I'm going to use Sperzel tuners and I have another guitar that has a headstock that is going to be the same thickness that this one will be. It will probably be around 1/2-3/4" thick headstock. The bubinga cap and headstock will be thinner when I finish.

I clamped the neck to the body just to see how it would look as a whole. Closeups of the side of the headstock. Both the bubinga cap and sides of headstock should be smaller. I'm not sure as to what thickness I'm going to make the cap. Maybe 1/8".

I had some divets and tearouts when I used my router to edge the body after I rough cut it. I gotta fix those this week.

Hey guys. Even though this is my first post, I've been reading through the forums for quite awhile. I posted these pics in another forum, but I only got one reply. The specs of this guitar are: '58 Flying V body Custom 3x3 headstock inspired by the KL headstock 24.75 scale length honduras mahogany 2 piece neck and 2 piece body bubinga top, control cavity cover, and headstock cap pao ferro 22 fret fretboard with gaboon ebony binding and no inlays black hardware EMG 60/81 Graphtech nut Here is my progress so far of my build. My inspiration of the headstock came from a Ken Lawrence explorer that was made for James Hetfield of Metallica. This one however has my own twist. to it I'm not sure which wood I'm going to use for the fretboard. The top two is pao ferro and the bottom two is gaboon ebony. One of the ebony has a couple of small knots in it so I might just use it for binding. Here is the wood for the body. Honduran mahogany for both body and neck. The headstock will have a bubinga cap and also the body will have a bubinga top. I'm debating on whether the top should be 1/4" or 3/8". Don't mind the knot there on the side. It should be gone once I lower the headstock thickness around the bubinga cap I still have to resaw the bubinga for the top. I might try Scatter's method I saw him do of using a table saw to cut the sides and use a hand saw to finish the rest.