komodo

Tiny progress. Also ordered ton of blades.

I’ve got a big stash, from multiple sources. StewMac pearl is good maybe not inexpensive. Allied has great stuff but maybe not the whitest. I bought a large amount off Ebay that was silvery with lots of figure but of varying thickness. I’ve just gone through what I had and pulled an excess pile I’m about to list on Ebay. Probably 6-7oz for $100-120. @ScottR That does sound similar. I could just carefully apply tape and do the same thing. If I use paper, I’m going to use the old brewers trick of applying labels to bottles. Paint the back with milk, apply. Milk is essentially glue.

Definitely a zen state, until you break a blade, or drop a delicate piece. It actually all goes pretty quickly. I’ve been thinking a lot about the next scribing stage. There are several ways to do it. Don’t love the usual glue down and scribe, it’s too dense and too many thin bits. I’ve made up a way in my head that I’ve never heard of, but may try. Lightly glue down a thin white layer of paper, maybe a print of the board from Illustrator with a ghost placement. Then set each cut pearl piece in place one at a time, hold it while I trace with a fine Sharpie. Then, I’d have a super clear area to route, right through the paper. I can even fill it in with pencil to really be clear of the excavation areas It’s very easy to get confused. Need thin paper and thin glue that won’t gum bits but stays put.

Do you keep all of these? Have you sold any? I’m sure everyone gets this, as it’s the very first thing anyone asks when I show them something I’ve built: “so are you gonna sell it?” It always weirds me out that would be their first thought.

Three down. I should probably make a real time video cutting out each piece and make @ScottR watch it. Tips: Procut lube is great. Beeswax works good too and maybe even lasts longer, but Procut is more slippery.

Damn Scott, brutal. lmao Besides shaping the board, I've been doing some experiments with Japanese surface burn technique Shao Sugi Ban to get a nice black finish on the ash body. It gets close, but some embers can continue to burn deep in the pores and take out chunks of wood. If it was presoaked or I dumped water on it, that could be minimized. But I have a better idea. I've done ebonizing on oak quite a bit using ferric solutions, but ash doesn't have the same tannin content for the reaction. But, you can soak the wood first in a tannin solution, in this case a quebracho bark tea, and then do the ferric solution. After that, I'll probably use some form of hardwax oil and be done. It will probably be the easiest guitar finish ever, and the blackest black with none of the blue tint you get from dyes.

Considering we are headed to good weather, I’d only be spraying the back, I’ve currently got all the time in the world, and I’m fully into another build . . . my patience is OK right at the moment. lol

Why last words? Nitro has to be the most forgiving, it just burns into the last.

This one is dry enough. Started with level sanding, it all looks good except I either didn’t get the ash on the back filled enough or I need to level sand more. If it’s even showing then it shrank or wasn’t flat. But I also sprayed really thick as usual so there may be enough to level out. It’s only the back so I could keep sanding to find out. If I hit wood I could just spray again. IDK The rangemaster build was a smashing success. It’s WAY better than I thought it would be. It gets you 90% of the way to Boston / Queen with a great almost cocked wah sound. Tons of harmonics.

Fret board cut to size and rough radius. I’m aiming for a compound 16”-20”. Truss rod from Allied, I sprung for the wood sleeve this time.

We blew them up with firecrackers.

Puzzle begins.

Wow thanks for the kind words Norris. I only use the Adobe suite, but thats because its our industry standard in the design world, and free for me.

Sure, I use Adobe Illustrator. Mostly as I'm a graphic designer by trade and use the full Adobe suite every day. It's not an octopus anymore, it;s the unknowable, shall not be named, ancient evil of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu. The center bit was grabbed from the web, I had it a long time ago to use for a custom bottle cap design for one of my beers. The original design was the octopus, but realizing that I wanted the Lovecraft / Cthulhu, it was a good fit and better than I would've done. It was vector art, so after I brought it into Illustrator, it wasn't hard to make the tentacles, as single lines to get the adjustment just right. Then, apply a brush to them and adjust the point size of the line as desired, Once, I had it nailed, then create outlines of the paths and combine everything so it was a shape.

My thinking is that if I were to flood the fret slots with very thin CA, it may enter the end grain and stabilize the slot edges some. Using it as a finish later on larger surfaces, may have a stabilizing effect instead of just oil finish. Thinking out loud here. I've seen whole guitars finished with CA before.

I wonder if anyone has ever flooded / finished a fretboard with CA to "stabilize" it and make it less chip prone? Doing it right now would probably be the best time as it's before all the inlay cutting. How deep would thin CA go?

Well you certainly have the wood. Will you dye the top blood red? Can't wait to see this one.

Slots. Final scale is 25.5” - 27.5”

My large slab of fret board ebony was still roughsawn and had wax ends. After surfacing on the planer to prep it for slots, I discovered that it’s a thing of beauty end to end. Not the jet black I might have preferred originally, but you couldn’t pry this out of my hands now for anything.

Welcome! With no neck tilt (assumed) put lots of attention to neck pocket depth and neck height above the body. That will largely determine action and playability.

Whelp, our campus maker labs are totally locked down. So, commenced to staring at design printed 100%, chucked a 1/32” bit onto Dremel and pretend routed some elegant tentacle swirls. Mapped out pieces, and cuts. Approximately 65 pieces. I can span frets and cut after, or use the fret slot as a stopping place for a piece. The benefit of spanning is the more natural curves, harder to do with multiple pieces. The only real limitation it my raw stock sizes. Boy I’d love to route and fill with crushed stone, but cutting is actually not hard. Just a lot of cutting. The hardest part here would be scribing each piece. I’m tempted to do a super accurate route, see how it goes, then do super accurate cutting. Hard think inserted here.

Exactly. The fixes I was referring to would be something like - cutting just inside the line, but then you make a little boo boo outside the line. If I was doing the stonedust/CA method, then the "inlay" is now has that boo boo. I'd have to use a sheet of teflon and dam the mistake, fill the gap with ebony powder and CA to fill, sand after dry. Could get hairy fast. @Prostheta You are right, I need to make sure frets are at width, do a final scaling, re-adjust the length of the tentacles, then print it at 100% and lay it on the table. Then, start the long process of deciding which areas will be individual pieces, cutting it apart into those individual pieces, matching the cutouts to raw pearl stock I have, and numbering them. Basically setting up a game plan. The thing is, I have to decide my process first. For pearl, you cut the pearl piece, affix it to the fret board, scribe around it, then excavate. I can't excavate, see how it goes, then decide to cut pearl. For what it's worth, I just bought 1/2 pound of pearl slab from Allied as well as a long truss rod. What I think I'll do is print out, lay it on the table and stare at it. Then lay the Dremel tool on it with my smallest chucked bit and fake trace around it to see if my balls shrivel up or not.

As mentioned in earlier posts, it depends on the method. If I cut pearl, the only issues are sheer scale and the thin bits. The rest is actually easy, it’s just methodical and time consuming. No guesstimate as I’m working full time, this is side stuff and I have another guitar to finish. I could do it in a week or so if I really focused. The other way is excavate perfectly, fill with stone and CA. If the excavation went perfectly, It would basically be done. No telling how many ‘fixes’ I’d have to do, and I’m not even sure how I’d do that accurately. But this way would save ALL of the pearl cutting, which is considerable. There may also be some hybrid method, just not sure yet. Leaning towards the second way.

Always sir. Every single process in this madness is considered that way. In RC airplanes, they call that "flying two mistakes high". For me it won't exactly be uncharted territory, but it will absolutely be crazyville. And, since we are ALL already there . . .no problem!