Mattia

Z-poxy Finishing Resin is lovely to work with and sand, gives you a nice amber hue if you leave it on the surface (as epoxies go...prefer it to paste or waterbased fillers, personally), and the big boys like System3 and West Systems have suitable epoxies (clearcoat and the like, UV inhibited and designed to look good).

I wouldn't call laminated wood 'plywood' by definition; plywood implies cross-grain lamination, which means the longitudinal and lateral stiffness is more uniform across the piece. I wouldn't want that kind of plywood in, say, a guitar neck, where I want my strength coming from the longitudinal fibers, and don't see any advantage to having end grain facing front or back (the horrors of sanding that level, too...). Also, don't know about you, but my plywood doesn't ring out very nicely when tapped. Probably because of the the combination of glue and many thin layers. It's very stiff, though. Where I use lamianted (cross-grain) wood these days is in acoustic guitar heel and tailblocks, where it offers crack resistance and greater dimensional stability (I use thick lamiantes, 1/8" thick or thicker). Mostly, though, I don't like working with plywood. It's not a pleasant material to handle (end grain), the thickness is predetermined (sanding through layers can look a touch funky), it's more expensive than most solid woods, and the tonal benefits are dubious at best. It's a great structural material that I do use for certain applications, and I do laminate quite a lot. But rarely cross-grain.

You should be able to find a 3M cartridge respirator (with vapour cartridges and spare P2 dust filters to go over that, prevent the dust from getting into the cartridges) from any decent paint supplies place. In terms of finishing, unless you have an explosion-proof fan setup, spray outdoors, with a respirator, and let things cure indoors in a well ventilated space. For making dust, a dust collector will do things a vacuum (or shop vac) won't (larger volumes of dust) and vice-versa (shop vac plays nicer with power tools' built in dust collection than a full-sized dust collector). Thing with the dust collector is that you still need the respirator, and you definitely need a dust collector with a microfilter mounted on it, as the ones with 'two bags', if you will, will blow all the really fine dust into the air. In terms of more protection than ear, eye (safety glasses) and respiratory, it depends on the wood. There are some woods that I know are allergenic and I don't want to risk sensitisation to (cocobolo) that I won't sand indoors or work without gloves.

Hey, it's a discussion forum, and we have different opinions. The ad hominem doesn't really address the question. I'm not being contrary for the sake of it, but I really don't see any particularly significant advantages to building bolt-ons in terms of setup. Yes, they're easier to build (but only very, very slightly) but I'm not a factory so I don't think 'easy to make' is a reason to choose a certain style. And given we're building our own instruments, choice of scale length and neck angle is also entirely up to us. Advantages would have to fall into the categories of playability, serviceability, sound, and aesthetics/design. For electrics, none of these things is 'better' in bolt-on neck guitars with the exception of servicability (= ease of neck replacement). Not 'worse' either. For acoustics I can think up several real advantages to bolt-on necks and no disadvantages (aesthetic or otherwise - they look the same). Hence my question of what advantages you were referring to.

Water will catalyze (kick) a CA glue reaction, but you do not need to wet surfaces to get the stuff to dry. Ambient moisture will do the trick.

Mick: like what, precisely? Swappable necks are a complete non-issue IMO, and inserts do not magically allow the same kind of smooth sculpting you can do with a neck-through or a set neck. No more than regular bolts with ferrules would allow. Each style has its own distinct look and feel (and sound, although not in the 'my neck joint sustains more than your neck joint), and most bolt-on neck 'advantages' aren't all that relevant for electric guitars; neck resets shouldn't be necessary, and proper construction and material selection should keep the need for neck replacements due to warping very close to zero. At which point I'm out of major advantages. Acoustics, different kettle of fish.

System 3 makes a 'water clear' clearcoat (I use West Systems and Z-Poxy, neither water clear, but I like the amber tint for filler and it doesn't matter for much else). Check the website for distributors. Why epoxy, though? I personally like CA glue for inlays. Or are you filling with epoxy+filler material or something?

Too soft for a fretboard, like people say. Spanish Cedar is a traditional wood for necks on classicals and flamencos, and for linings, and some electric bodies and necks have been made from it. It's not common as back/sides (you're probably thinking of Spanish Cypress there), although it certainly could be used. It's sort of mahogany-like, grain's usually less pronounced, it tends to be a little lighter and softer.

Modern ones do. Traditional ones do not. Google image search for 'flamenco tuning peg' for images. Re: nylon, they're nylon (= plastic) cores or entire strings, which requires less tension to tune up than steel.

Check out MCLS woodworking (I think .com) for the US site and the spiral bit set, but the arm itself I got from Axminster: http://www.axminster.co.uk/product.asp?pf_...le=1&jump=4 it has it's limitations: not very tall, to the point I'm considering adding a block of wood to raise it a touch higher (I don't template route very thin things, as a rule), and the welding was frankly a bit crap on mine, so I needed to shim it to make it square up perfectly. Took about 3 minutes to shim appropriately, mind you, but it's still handy. Nice cheap add-on to the router table, and works lovely.

1. what others have said. 2. I usually apply the base coat as a stain (say, yellow for a traditional burst), seal that with a clear (so you can sand off the burst without messing with the base stain if you screw it up). Clears don't help with 'witness' lines or fading, your spraying technique, gun settings (fan, feed rate) and paint colour (degree of opacity) determine that. Practice on scrap until you get it right. 3. For 'traditional' bursts, I usually start with the stain and seal, then do the black edges, and then the transition with the 'in between' colour afterwards. For a traditional Fender burst, tinted red is the last thing to go on, over the black.

For me it kind of depends on the woods I'm gluing, and what bit of the guitar I'm gluing. For bodies, 9 times out of 10 I use titebond. Easy to use, easy cleanup, tried and tested, plenty strong. For necks, if I'm laminating, and I have time to let it sit around and dry up properly, I use titebond. If I know the wood's stable but want to work it a little sooner, and/or I'm laminating slightly exotic woods, epoxy works a charm. Getting the good quality stuff makes it a much more pleasant experience-not what I'd call easy or clean, but easy and clean enough if you've got disposable gloves and mixing cups to work with. I also use epoxy for fingerboards, because it doesn't introduce moisture to a part of he body I really don't want to introduce moisture to. And it releases just fine with heat.

Sorry, bit sloppy that way at times. I've used (incidentally) water and alcohol soluble powdered anilines, these days I pretty much exclusively use TransTint (OK, so it says ColorTone, but that's because StewMac's the only one who will ship the stuff internationally for a reasonable price).

Seriously, the first time that slow-spinning router bit overloads and the chuck (which is likely held on by a taper friction fit) falls off, drilling the bit through your top, you'll be cursing yourself that you ever thought using a drill press to route was a terribly good idea in the first place. That Grizz looks handy, although I'll resist the urge for now. I've got a daisy pin routing setup (from MCLS) which works wonderfully with a table router, and most cavity type work I can do very safely and easily with a handheld plunge router. Or so I tell myself so as not to go off and buy tools I don't have any more space for...

Dyes always make the grain look dull and dead; it livens up a little more once you clearcoat it, but....if you want that really shimmering 3D look in real life, I find a light tinted clear works better than dye. Dye 'locks' the light and dark end-grain areas into a pattern more strongly than clearcoat seems to. An analogy I read somewhere is the loverly shimmering blue seas you see in the tropics; the background (sand) is white, the water clear, and reflecting the sky (ie, bit of color imparted to the translucent clear). Rather than painting the bottom green/blue with a clearcoat on top. Try both ways, see which works best. I sometimes like one, sometimes another, as direct stain methods will give you a far more striking, impressive, complex look than 'just' applying tinted clearcoats, but it is a little less subtle and chatoyance-y (3-D ish).

Uh, no, they really, really don't. Look at any number of baroque or romantic small guitars, or any modern flamenco, and you'll see friction fit pegs in solid headstocks. You need a tapered reamer to match the peg to the wood, and preferably a fairly tough, solid wooden peg (boxwood, ebony) slotting into a slightly softer wood that helps bind it in place. This works reasonably well for gut or nylon strings (lower tension application), but if you want modern tuning stability with higher tension steel strings, just use traditional tuners, like doug says.

I'd like to plug 3M's paint preparation system (search YouTube for PPS or similar, should be a video). Saw a link on the OLF, Rick Turner's talked about it, and my initial tests are very positive. It's a system with disposable cups and flexible liners, the system allows full vacuum in the paint cup (no air at all, so no bubbles, no sputtering due to material flow issues), and when you're done spraying a coat, you can unhook the cup, but a stopper on it, and you have a little self-contained cup of finish, and a gun that can get cleaned out with a minimal amount of thinner (which you can generally re-use for in between coat cleaning). It's not terribly cheap, but 50-60 bucks bought me enough cups for several years' worth of building, assuming I finish up guitars in batches so I can spray multiple instruments at a time.

Chris: why do you think ebony would be terribly bright, per se? Yes, it's hard and heavy, but most ebonies are among the least resonant, tonewoody tonewoods I have. My lovely black nigerian and madagascar ebony fingerboards have dull thuddy tap tones. I'd go with Madagascar, Honduran, Cocobolo or Indian rosewood (indian is my least favourite rosewood for resonance; it makes lovely acoustics, mind you, but it's not the thrillingest tap tone rosewood). Blackwood is lovely, but finding a piece that's large enough AND stable enough to make a neck out of will set you back a lot of money if you even succeed in the first place.

Titebond, epoxy, either works.

Why only? I use smaller diameter bits in handheld drills fairly frequently, for example to drill holes for jack sockets. Don't have (correction, until very recently didn't have) a drill press that could accomodate a full body, so doing it by hand was the only option. Certainly a smoother ride than spade bits. For hogging, though, it's gotta be a drill press.

I will be trying a similar method, but using a jigsaw instead of a bandsaw. I have an older, but big and solid hand-held jigsaw that has survived much punishment builting speaker cabinets. I will see how it goes. That's how I built my first 10 or so guitars. Works just fine until you discover the joys of bandsaws and never want to go back

MDF for the table piece should work just fine and dandy, particularly at that thickness, but 8mm MDF to hold a router? As the plate? For long-term use? I'm very skeptical. I'd use plywood at the very least, preferably phenolic (Trespa) or aluminum if you want to buy one. I just got one of the MCLS plates, installed the router in my 2"-MDF-plus-1"-melamine top, reinforcing the melamine a little with superglue post-routing. Rock solid.

I'll go ahead and put in a plug for U-cut.com. They have pretty much any band Lenox made, and I got a trimaster 1/2", aluminum master 3/4" and a woodmaster CT 1" blade from them recently, shipped within a week (didn't have some of the blades in stock), and had very fair prices - $145, $150 and $101, respectively, for a 145" blade length. Although I have to say the weak dollar/strong euro situation is why I bought more than one. I've got a lifetime supply of bandsaw blade now, I suspect.

Yeah, but I really wouldn't want to run even a 1" forstner in a cheap, small tabletop drillpress. That's because I've done it, and it works, but they burn, bog down, and generally don't work very well. I now have a far bigger (16") press that handles up to 1.5" with relative ease, and bigger in select woods, but honestly, simply using a jigsaw followed by router templates is easier on the tools. These days, I prefer to bandsaw the body (duh, if you have a bandsaw), then sand down close to the line and route the final 1mm away with the router. Minimal chance of tearing chunks out of the side, and the router gives me a very nice, very smooth finish.

That's my neck, not Daniel's; I grind it away so only the cheeks need to fit the curved headblock (don't like flat areas anywhere on my guitar other than the headstock face, pretty much, and certainly not the heel and butt), and yes, that's before fitting the heel cap. That comes after pre-fitting the neck. I get some of my inserts down at the local hardware store, and I ordered a bunch from Lee Valley a while back, mostly because they had pretty bolts...