Geoff St. Germaine

The snakewood looks great. I've wanted to use some, as I think it's one of the best looking and most unique woods for fretboards. I have read about issues with checking and cracks in snakewood. Have you had any issues?

I've been away for a while. You're burst looks outstanding! I can't wait to see how it turns out with all the ebony bits and string up.

Wow, just ran across this one. The carve with the wenge and ash body looks outstanding! Great work!

That's coming along fantastically!

That headstock back veneer looks great! Pure class.

Thanks a lot, Robbinst and Scott!

Thanks guys, I am very happy with how it's coming together. I glue in the neck. Shaping the neck extension was tedious to say the least. I used chisels to get it roughly to shape. After that, I placed sandpaper between the top and underside of the fretboard extension and pulled it out until I got a tight fit. I applied glue only to the inside of the joint and a bead to the fretboard extension, as described in the Benedetto book. A single clamp with a couple of cauls held the neck in place. I am now into the tedious process of grain filling the walnut. One of the reasons I'm excited to work with flamed maple on the two archtops I'm following with is that the wood has closed pores. To get a glassy appearance the walnut is going to need substantial filling. I sprayed a sealer coat on the walnut and I'm in the process of filling the pores with CA. Here's the walnut with some sealer. My intent was to keep the cost down, which is why I went with a plain, slip matched 3 piece back and plain sides. Here's a shot:

I decided to take some time to work on some of the small bits - bridge, tailpiece and fingerrest. The bridge is right out of Benedetto's book. Two piece ebony with knurled adjustment posts. I simply cut the two pieces to the correct size and shaped them using files, chisels and a spindle sander. It' rough fit to the body top. I'll sand it for a perfect for once the body is finished. The tailpiece was made at the same time. Again, right from the Benedetto book, but with a slightly different profile. The string anchors were drilled with a drill press and the slots added with a Dremel in the Stewmac precision base. I also put the magnet into the truss rod cover. It pulls against the truss rod nut to hold it in place. So far it seems to work, but the nut needs to be installe before it will rest in proper alignment. The fingerrest was cut from an ebony fretboard blank and bound with white plastic to match the other binding. The fingerrest is mounted with two screws to the side of the neck through an ebony block attached on the underside. It is slightly angle to match the pickup and sits parallel to the body sides, 3/32" below the fretboard surface. Here's a mockup with all the bits:

Thanks, rip away! It's not original to me. I've seen it on Bill Moll's work and I believe a few other guitars. Speaking of which, I should try to get an update posted.

Fantastic!

Gorgeous! Good call carving it more. The first one looked good but the current carve looks great.

Yeah, I'm gonna skip the additional veneer. Thanks for the input!

Great fretting setup!

This will be the last update as I'm going on a business trip for the next 2 weeks. I have carved the neck. I still need to do some final shaping of the heel and the bottom of the fretboard extension. I carved two areas of the neck, near the nut and heel with a surform and rasp and then connected the two points. Final shaping was done with a spokeshave. I test fit the neck in order to get an idea of the shaping required for the fretboard extension and the alignment of the neck wrt the body centerline. I've marked the fretboard extension outline. It promises to be a tedious task! So that's where it is for now. I have been considering adding two veneers to the back of the headstock, a maple inner and a black dyed outer veneer. This supposedly would reduce the chance of the headstock warping as a result of the ebony headstock overlay. Does anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks, Dean!

Ha! Your buckeye burl vixen is outstanding!

Thanks a lot, Shad! I've looked at many of your build threads here and at MyLesPaul and learned a lot and taken a lot of inspiration from your work.

I installed the frets. This was pretty straight forward. I cut the frets to size and nipped the tang off of the ends with a tang nipper. It was then a matter if simply hammering them in place. I used a piece of the neck cutoff as a support to hammer against for the lower 12 frets. I had to make sure any adhesive that had seeped into the fret slots from binding was cleaned out. I did this with an Xacto knife. On the first fret it seemed like it was harder to hammer in than I was used to. I realized I hadn't filed a chamfer into the top of the fret slot with a needle file as I normally do. Doing the first one without this and the rest with really illustrated to me how much easier the fretting goes with this chamfer. Here's the setup with my tools and fretwire. It's LMII FW74, 18% silver/nickel wire. Fret cut to size: Starting the installation: All installed: Ends trimmed: I hope to get the neck shaped this weekend. I'm away for 2 weeks after Sunday, so hopefully I'll get that done. After that I'll start fitting the fretboard extension to the top.

The next order of business was to get the headstock bound. I used a heat gun to heat the binding to get it bent for some of the tighter curves. I used modeler's cement to glue it on and binding tape to hold it in place. Once that was all attached I scraped it flush. Overall I'm pretty happy with my first inlay. Next I glued on the tapered fretboard. I kept it aligned using two finishing nails that I'd drilled through the first and last fret slot to mount. It kept things aligned perfectly during the glue up. Once the glue was dried I installed the fretboard binding. Nothing really fancy here. I used muttered joints at the end of the fretboard. Since it was straight runs the glue up and taping was very straightforward.

Looking great, as always. Your work looks very clean!

The binding looks great. Good choice of colour as well.

It's time for an update. I finished sanding the inlayed fretboard down. Overall I'm very happy with the result. On the board with white MOP blocks, the black dye seems to have penetrated the shell in a couple of areas, most noticeably on the inlay of the 1st fret. While the dye penetration appears uniform and is not a huge issue, I will have to come up with either a different manner of glueing the inlay in, or some way of sealing the shell to prevent this. Interestingly there was no dye penetration of the gold shell. Weird. Next I turned my attention to the headstock. I glued in a "fretboard" stop, as Benedetto calls it, which is a piece of wood glued at the headstock/fretboard surface intersection to bring the level of the headstock overlay up so that the binding for headstock and fretboard line up. I wasn't able to get it to work exactly, as I would have had to move the fretboard further down the neck, which would have moved the 14th fret past the body join. That goes into the notes for the next two. I didn't get a picture of that. Next I glued on the headstock overlay. I cut a 17 degree angle into the edge of the headstock so it would make a 90 degree angle to the fretboard surface. I then rough cut the headstock to shape and the attached the headstock template to route it to shape. I routed it to shape with a top bearing flush trim but when DISASTER STRUCK! The short grain near on the sharp edges tore out. Fortunate I had off cuts from the headstock that I was able to use to make a patch piece. I cut the headstock surface flat with a fret saw and planed the headstock off cut true. Overall the repair looks ok, so that's done. Next I routed the headstock for the binding and for the inlay. I decided to try CA glue and dust instead of the dyed ebony. It seems to work well. Next I tapered the fretboard. I have a jig that I can use to route straight lines with a flush trim router, which I used to trim each side of the fretboard. I've been working on a commissioned neck build that is close to wrapping up, so I should be able to get back up to speed in terms of progress.

I jus noticed your GSD puppy. Awesome!

The colour scheme of this guitar is amazing!

Next I moved on to the fretboard. This one's getting MOP block inlays. The next archtop is getting gold MOP blocks, so I did all of the routing and installation at once. I used a Dremel in the StewMac precision router base to route the inlays. I lined up the inlays on the fretboards and scribed around them to define my routing line. I then routed each cavity to hold the inlay with the center of the inlay very close to flush with the fretboard (the board is already radiused, so that adds some complication). The inlays were glued in with more of the System Three epoxy but with both ebony dust and black dye to make the epoxy black and hopefully with a very similar sheen to the ebony wood. I'll wait for a day or so before sanding the inlays flush with a radiused sanding block. Finally, I started cutting out the headstock inlays. I was going to put my last name on it, but St. Germaine is a lot of sawing. GSG are my initials, and a lot less work with the jeweler's saw. Here's the first one (it's the back, as the front is covered in glued on paper that I used as the template and which won't come off until the inlay is installed)..