Mattia

Routed the binding channels today - lovely and simple with the right tooling - then tried to bend some bindings and had them come out all messed up. And cracked at the waist. Tried bending the curly maple too fast, not hot enough, and too dry (no water at all), so I got out another bunch and they're currently sitting in the bender, cooling. I'll take them out tomorrow and get down to business. Probably glue the back binding in place before I go to work, if it goes quickly enough I'll do the top as well (with teflon strips) and spend the evening fitting the paua purfling around the top. Maybe.

Screws? Not bolts? Any reason? I've seen hanger bolts used successfully (screw portion in the neck heel, then bolt through the headblock, fastened with a nut). Also, you want the neck attached with the bolts hand-tight - a little snugger than just tight enough to keep things from moving around. You don't want to compress the wood. Also, as a rule, you need to tighten up the bolts when you restring the first time. String tension will compress some of the wood and things can loosen up a little bit. You need to bind, finish, polish the guitar with the neck off anyway.

No no, re-read a post or two up - these seal coats need sanding and a reapplication in some areas anyway, so I figured I'd protect the wood now, then route for binding (maple with black/maple/black side and back purflings, black/maple/black - paua -black/maple/black top), glue it with CA (this helps prevent any small drips and runs from making the wood look nasty/making a mess), route the shallow pocket for the adjustable neck joint, then apply the final sealer/filler coats.

The top, shellaced (super blonde, will add a coat of blonde for colour, I think) Gratuitous closeup of shellaced rosette. Shiny! The back after a single coat of Z-poxy finishing resin. Really love this stuff, and acoustics are so much easier to finish than electrics. None of that annoying end grain to deal with! Extra shot, guitar, indoors, perched on a glass, drying overnight. More work tomorrow, hope to spray on Saturday (weather permitting).

Right, a few piccies! Closed the box a while back, installed the graft, and today I got around to finish sanding the entire box and giving it a coat of sealer (shellac for the top) and grain fill/sealer (Z-poxy on back and sides) before I route the binding channels tomorrow evening and spend some quality time with a file and a bag of paua purfling strips (for the top). The idea was to protect everything from superglue drips that may occur when gluing binding. Will need to scuff sand these surfaces anyway and re-apply sealer/second coat of z-poxy for pore filling anyway, so I figured I'd protect the wood from glue and grubby fingers and get a leg up on the finishing process, which I hope to complete this weekend. Will be shaping the heel and fitting the neck joint before the next coats go on. Neck's probably getting an epoxy seal coat (even colour) and tru-oil on top of that. Anyway, enough yakking. Pictures! Gratuitous shot through the side sound hole: http://www.xs4all.nl/~mvalente/guitarpics6/ban/Ban08.jpg The guitar, avec side sound hole, in its pre-sealing stage, sanded to 220 grit with the festool ROS. Lovely smooth result:

Indeed. I have to say that Taylor is frighteningly consistent, though - in a good way. There are always a few guitars that shine, though. Law of averages. Build a lot to the same specs, some will come out fantastically, some will come out decently, a couple will be dogs. Nicest guitar I every played in a store (well, before that Lowden a few weeks ago, private reserve, so tempting to spend the 4000 euros.....) was a Taylor 414. Ovangkol back/sides, Sitka top, perfect balance, great strummer, great fingerpicker. I figure I'll just build until I get one or two I really, really like. In terms of shop bought stuff, I think solid topped instruments are a must, and quite frankly I've never found any acoustics in the sub 1000 dollar market segment that really spoke to me tonally.

The right tool for the right job, I say. I route the radius into my fingerboards, but plane the taper - as you say, it's very quick, quiet, and makes nice little curly shavings. Trimming off a bit here or there? Block plane. Or a chisel. Carve necks? Rasps, scraper. Sometimes a bit of sandpaper, may break out the inflatable drum sander for some heel work, but generally it's hand tools. Not wild on spokeshaves, probably because a number of my most recent necks have been laminates, which tend to tear out if the grain direciton isn't going the same way througout the piece.

Even later, but I'll have to say....Gotoh. Schaller's quality isn't quite what it was 10 years ago, I feel. Sperzel's a nice lightweight, quality tuner, but for 'traditional' looks, the nicest locking tuner is the Gotoh 510 magnum lock. Have a number of sets in XN finish, and they're simply gorgeous (with black schaller-style mini buttons). Not cheap, but very nice.

Finishing and buffing are made much easier, and scraping the finish off is hardly difficult. Old chisel used as a scraper works wonders.

PSW: why more isn't done with active pickups? I'd say the 'active' route currently being pursued is squarely the Piezo + various degrees of modeling technology route. Why? Cheaper and easier to manufacture than coils of wire around magnets, and digital processing means you've got a hell of a lot of tone shaping options. In terms of pickups, well, the electric guitar is relatively young, but fairly mature in terms of its tonal development. The 'standard' electric guitar sounds have been discovered, are loved by many a guitarist, and there's no particular desire among most of them to reinvent the wheel. The attempts in recent history (EMG, Steinberger) have all found their niche markets, but they're not huge markets. Personally, I like what a P-90 in a mahogany guitar pumping through a tube amp sounds like. It's lo-fi as anything, but that's hardly a bad thing. After all, that distortion many of us chase is not not named 'distortion' for nothing. We don't want pure, true sound out of our guitars most of the time. We have EMGs for the metalhead crowd (only a proportion of the guitarplaying public), as well as other active pickup companies that haven't managed to really penetrate the market. IMO higher gain is something you should be looking for in the other half of the 'electric guitar', ie the amplifier. Plenty of room for tweaking there. If I do? I'd rather pick up an acoustic. Although once again, some of the best amplification systems out there for those, these days, are a combination of piezos and modeling (DTAR Mama Bear, for example...)

This is one of the many reasons a drill press is not a suitable router replacement, and isn't great for drum sanding.

Epoxy will release with heat, moisture's unnecessary.

Epoxy releases quite easily with heat. It's the ideal glue for fingerboards - heat release, good ones are strong as hell, no moisture introduced into the joint, and no insane amounts of clamping pressure needed. You can get stuff that sets slowly, and take your time lining everything up perfectly. What's not to love? (other than, y'know, the messyness)

1/8" too much at the bridge means 1/16" too much at 12th fret. Whether or not you feel it's acceptable is up to you. To drop the string height one unit at twelfth, you need to drop the bridge height two units. And vice versa. Rule of similar triangles and all. See, geometry class was good for something!

Depends on your style. The tone you want. Love that classic rock edge that comes from vintage style passive pickups into a single channel tube amp? Don't get EMGs. Processed to all hell ultra high gain hi fi sound? By all means, go active. There are about a million options in between, too, so go play some guitars and figure out what sound you like. Personally, I like both, so I have both.

3/4" thick (if it's PERFECTLY straight and flat) is thick enough for almost any style of neck, from Fender (with glued on fingerboard) to scarfed.

We're in the acoustics section, Rich ;-) Yes, you have too much neck angle. I shoot for hitting the top of the bridge, or clearing it slightly, with the fret on.

Cuban's qausi unobtainable commercially, much like Rio rosewood. The odd set or pieces here and there, yes, but not in big board form like all the other mahoganies are still more or less available. You can find it, some of it even plantation grown (Blue Moon hardwoods or something, they have some), but I can't head down to the lumber yard and pick through the piles for the good bits. Which is how I get my mahogany normally.

For an electric? There's more overlap between species in terms of weight and tone than there are differences. Basically, the woods I consider 'mahogany' are: 1) The true mahoganies. Swietenia Macrophylla, Microphylla and Cubanesis. Big leaf (aka Honduran, these days), small leaf and cuban (which is gorgeous, hard to find, expensive, and best used for acoustics, where the differences between mahoganies are more noticeable). Medium weight, fine grain, work very nicely with hand and machine tools. A true pleasure. 2) The african varieties. 2a) Khaya (ivorensis, and other) species, bit pinker (in general), usually a bit lighter, coarser grain, more interlocked, slightly more annoying to plane smooth, broadly similar texture, weight, feel and sound, but varies greatly from piece to piece, as it's a name used for a number of species. Love it for bodies, more careful selection required for necks. 2b) The entandophragma species. Utile, or Sipo mahogany is medium weight, perhaps a bit heavier than Khaya, more towards the yellow/gold/brown than the pink, bit stiffer too. Great for bodies and necks. Then there's sapele, who's species name I forget, which is heavier, stiffer, stronger than all of the above (in general), has a slightly 'grayer' appearance (less warm, although lstill ooks great when finished) than all of the above. The african varieites often have ribbon stripe colour, some of them can have really wild figuring (google quilt sapele, for example). Sapele is a great neck wood, can be used for bodies, but is sometimes a touch on the heavy side. All of the above are in the same family (botanically), Meliciae (if I'm spelling it right), all work similarly, all sound similar, all are good tonewoods. I tend to use African varieites for bodies (cheaper, just as good sounding, easier to find quality, large pieces), honduran for necks (on acoustics, mostly) and back/side sets, sapele for necks and back/side sets.

Just checked the camera - I'm a moron, and don't have pics of the finalized bracing. Too excited about closing the darn box! I'll try to get some shots through the side sound hole sometime tomorrow. The final product has more dramatic tapers on the lower X legs (more even/flatter down to the ends), deeper tapers/feathering, pretty much all the braces are narrower in cross section (the X is only 7mm wide, all the other braces 6mm, except for the upper transverse which is 7 again, and that pic has a lower bout width, with the overhang, of easily 18"!), the tone bars are lower (max height 11-12mm, more pronounced taper towards the ends), the fingers are lower, narrower and more profiled (at least half the mass they have in the pics up there). Probably could've gone with more, but I want the guitar to be able to bear at least 12s, possibly 13s, and it is Cedar, not Spruce, so I'm not going to push quite so hard. As far as grafts go, I'm sticking to an even taper for this design; I sketched some curved grafts, but none looked quite 'right' in combination with the massive wedge going on - need to sit down and draw out some more options before deciding, and in part I'm on a tight schedule - this baby should be finished by early August. 2 more weeks. I do have that brass inlay kit (for PC style routers) which makes it dead easy to make nice matching parts for things with a single template. Will be using that.

Thanks for the replies. I agree that it would be complete overkill for a plastic binding, but I'll be bending some maple and cocobolo binding. That's why I want something like that... A combo of masking tape and clear packing tape has served me well for wooden bindings. Just make them nice and thin so they're easier to bend..

So your bandsaw is a direct drive with a VFD? Mine is just a pulley and belt system. Rich No, it's a standard pulley and belt system, but requires three-phase power, either 380v or 220v. Ergo, VFD converting 1 phase 220 to phase 220, with the added bonus of being able to control the speed continously.

I don't actually know what speed I run the blade at. It says '40' on my digital VSD doodad. Depending on the blade, I adjust a little upwards or downwards to compensate for any minimal tendency to resonate/vibrate. Basically, it's about as fast as it goes (above 40 and it doesn't seem to speed up much at all).

Right, that helps. Easy: use an adjustable truss rod unless you have very, very, very good reasons not to. A 'non adjustable truss rod' is just a bar of metal or CF or metal tubing used to stiffen a rod. You can't adjust it if the neck moves due to humidy or temperature shifts. You can't adjust it to suit different playing styles, different sets of strings, etc. You can't correct any unwanted movement. Regular rods: single action works well for most necks, but can only correct upbow. I build with CF in my necks, and have had two that didn't bow enough under string tension alone, so I'm glad I use dual action rods in my necks - they can adjust upbow AND backbow. Rarely ever have to adjust backbow (or a flat neck that needs more upbow), but it's nice to have the flexibility. Add the fact that there is no 'perfect releif', and that every player has his or her own preferences, and the case for an adjustable truss rod grows stronger.

Most decent hardware stores will carry fibreglass reinforced tape over here - some have it, some don't. My double-sided tape is basically like that stuff. Thing is, that's complete overkill for plastic binding. Get some clear packing tape - sticky enough, plenty strong, and superglue won't stick to it.