guitar2005

Nice score. Do you know what kind of wood that is?

Personally, I wouldn't plane the wood until you know exactly what you are going to do with it. Planing it now is a waste of time and wear/tear on your tools. I would joint one edge, dimension it, plane after.

That sucks. When in doubt, always ask StewMac advice for compatibility. They're always quick to respond with a proper answer. If you have your fretwire's crown and width values, that will help them in selecting the right tool.

I typically use their narrow file on "med" fretwire.

Check the fret's crown. You should have the crown as narrow as possible. I tried an experiement a while back where I had strung up a guitar with the frets levelled with little crown. There was a LOT of fret buzz. Then, I crowned the frets and polished them so that the tip of the fret was as narrow as possible for that fret size and it played beautifully.

Of course, a bit of neck relief helps too.

Your finish mishaps make me feel better This kinda thing drives me nuts.

As for the blush remover, all you need is a thinned down coat of lacquer. That has worked for me every time and I've even had to test it again last week.

I look forward to see how this works out for you.

I've had to spot repair a silver finish and I'm crossing my fingers that it won't show with the coats of lacquer over it. On the same guitar, I also had the finish wrinkle in one spot and had to re-shoot the silver.

guitar2005, The cream does do a certain justice...

Yeah, the cream binding really makes that cedar top pop. Its a nice touch IMO.

Looking fwd to seeing your next projects.

Here's one I built a while ago, with creme binding. It works well with the cedar, I find.

I would add information to qualify that shellac-under-2k/poly statement though, Luis. Shellac must be dewaxed before it can be used under those, or in fact many others. A lot of people recommend not using shellac under those coatings but don't specify any reasoning as to why not.

Is your minwax shellac dewaxed? I know a lot of people stateside recommend Zinsser. The key is dewaxed though. I mix my own and use the blondest possible in light cuts for sealing. Anything sticks to it. That is how I started paint on my most recent bass.

The zinnser bullseye I use is dewaxed but is not compatible with EM6000 (ask me how I know )

When i used to use sanding sealer, i would use the minwax stuff. You cant use bullseye shellac under poly or 2k clear.

I have just decided that it is 100% impossible to get what i want done correctly. Leading to the end of my career. 9 years of trying to get this right, and i dont see it changing anytime soon.

Using the minwax is probably your 1st mistake IMO. That's amateur stuff. I've stopped using Minwax products a long time ago.

Mohawk has a great lie of finishing products, including pore fillers.

http://www.mohawk-finishing.com/catalog_browse.asp?ictNbr=105

But as another poster here already stated, a low viscosity epoxy is what you need if you want to stay with epoxy. With the normal, higher viscosity epoxies, I'd had the exact same experience as you. Try this stuff: http://www.woodessence.com/Clear-Coat-P146C18.aspx

I might even try it and report back on my next builds, in the coming months.

What kind of sanding sealer do you use?

I used bullseye shellac with DEFT lacquer and on my 2005 Jem, the shrink back is minimal on the Korina body. It is only in the right light and angle that you can see it and that almost 10 years later.

Maybe you need to wait more between coats and spray thinner coats so they flash off more easily?

I totally understand your frustration with finishing. I took a break because it was all driving me crazy. I briefly switched to waterbased lacquers and on some guitars (the darker ones), that was a disaster. I'm now refinishing a pair of guitars for the 3rd time using tried and true products and techniques.

One of them has a lecewood top and if you're ever worked with lacewood, you know how touchy it is to get it right. I'm not filling the pores on this one: Just spray finish on it. 2 coats every couple of days. The base coat was just thinned down lacquer. I'm ensuring that each coat is thin (max 4 mil) and that it has ample time flashing off before adding more on top of it.

My neck blanks are about 3" high, 2.5" wide and 34-35" long.

The bottom and top parts are the single piece necks and the middle portion (leftover) becomes the scarf neck shaft portion. That's 3 blanks right there with minimal waste.

I just completed two raw 3"x2.5"x35" neck blanks and cut them up into 6 neck blanks.

Personally, I've never used epoxy to fill pores. I've used the stew mac stuff which is ok, then I just fill with finish.

No grainfiller has ever worked for me like that. And if there is ever ANY pores left that i fill with finish, it always sinks back into the grain within a week. That is the whole reason i went with epoxy. Literally NOTHING stops finish from sinking into finish here for some reason.

The key is to seal the wood with a sanding sealer first, and let things rest between steps... but you're right, there's always a bit finish sinking in. Personally, I like that.

+1 on the angled headstock with scarf joint. The old Gibson method of making an angled headstock from a one-piece neck blank requires a thicker blank to start with, wastes more timber (half the blank gets thrown away) and creates a headstock/neck transistion that can be prone to weakness. Scarfed neck joints have been used reliably for years by many manufacturers as a method of creating strong headstock/neck transitions and for their efficient use of timber. Don't be too concerned about the visible transition line - embrace it! Do what many builders here do and make it a feature by laminating some contrasting timber into the scarf.

But if you plan properly, you can get 3 necks out of a neck blank.

I usually get two neck blanks that I can cut as one piece with a 13 degree headstock, although I do laminate wood for strength, and one neck blank with scarf joint.

In terms of difficulty, my first neck was a scarf joint neck with 2-way rod, eye of ra inlay and sheduah fretboard. That was in 2005 and its one of the best necks you'll ever play on

I say do you you really want and take your time to do things right.

Because you'll be using a fixed bridge, go with the angled headstock and scarf joint. You'll have proper string pressure on the nut without having to resort to string tees or special staggered tuners. Scarf joints are also very strong and look nice IMO.

Personally, I've never used epoxy to fill pores. I've used the stew mac stuff which is ok, then I just fill with finish.

I have done that, minus the hair drier.

Even with a credit card there are still lines that dont come out.

Hope this stuff can help somebody else, since i am not going to be building or finishing any longer.

yeah, but you should always be able to sand down the file lines with 220 grit easily.

1- Hair dryer to gently warm the epoxy helps get rid of bubbles.

2- Epoxy thinner or lacquer thinner to make the epoxy less viscous helps

3- Spread with an old credit/bank card

The blue haze is killing me. I had what I thought was a perfect finish and colour but the blue haze made the guitar look purple. The solid brown back was not brown... arghghghgh! Same goes with the anthracite Strat I built. That combined with the weird discoloration on scratches and I'm done.

For the last couple of projects, I switched to water based lacquers by emtech. I used EM6000 quite extensively, learned to prep with it, shoot it, buff it etc. The learning curve was steep but I did end up being able to shoot nice finishes with it.

My problem with the EM6000 is that it always had problems, even when shot properly, according to spec (yes, I have the proper temp, film thickness and all that):

1) Scratches and dings have a white-ish imprint that really shows under certain light.

2) Blue tint over any slightly dark colour

3) Fixes are not invisible like with nitro.

4) Finish can crack because of wood movement (saw this on two guitars - it is slight, but its there, and there's no way to fix it, including re-melting the finish).

So I'm done with the water-based stuff.

I'm refinishing two guitars that were darker because of all the problems above.

for these two guitars, I'd like to do a quick and dirty job but that will look like a million bucks.

I have some leftover McFadden's lacquer from a couple of years ago that I could shoot but I'm really worried that it would be past its shelf life.

For just two guitars (I'm going to do one at a time), I'd like to avoid getting the compressor/ spray gun out.

I'm really tempted to try Mohawk's rattle can lacquer and see how it works. Again, the rattle can route is just so much simpler for doing just one guitar, I'd rather do this for these two guitars, unless you guys think the mcfadden's is still good?

Graph Techs produce a line of TOMs with String Saver saddles which can probably be bought unslotted. That would provide a limited range of radius and spacing setup.

True, but if you go too deep...

If you go slowly and patiently, you should not have any problems.

I think both claims are correct to a degree.

You cannot get identical tone on two guitars built to identical specs, with each part of the wood for each guitar built from lumber from the same trees. Will the guitars sound similar? Yes, but not the same because of the organic structure of the lumber.

Actually, the answer is no.

I have two neck blanks here and the tap tone tone on them is very different. The wood is from the same tree, same board.

I'm not arguing that there isn't a difference. It's easily audible in the video above. What I am asserting is that in high gain situations it simply makes less of a difference than some other parts of the signal chain or instrument construction (I think the authors of the video even acknowledge that the difference isn't that great either).

High gain is all about the amp, speakers and pickups. The more distortion you pile on, less and less the guitar's acoustics come in to play. You could play a piece of cardboard and it would sound the same.

Play some clean and crunchy tones and the guitar's tone should come out.

Agreed with everyone else. Stripping is not a good idea. I could build a new body in less time it would take to strip and fix up a old body.

sand it to 220 and re-spray.

3 way switch + push/push volume should give you pretty much all you need if going from neck to bridge is a priority. The push/push is also quick to activate and can be used for coil splits.

I think that you need to know what you want in pos 4. I guess that it could be a coil tap of the bridge pickup of some sort, but you already have a coil tap.

To include the neck pickup in different positions, you need to wire a separate switch that will be connected in parrallel with the 5 pos switch, on top of wiring the pickup to the neck position of the switch.

You really need to draw it out. Its not so complex.

I would take a different approach. why not simply have 3 mini toggles combined with push pull for the neck and bridge?

On my computer, everything is bunched up and there's a 2" brown stripe on the right of unused space... and yes, the scrolling is very choppy.

Would there be a way to make things a little larger? seems like everything got more squished together, making it harder to read.