pan_kara

Thanks Prostheta! In fact this build is taking me so long that I managed to start another two in the meantime. My problem with the truss rod was the fact that my only router is a dremel. I wasn't sure that would be enough for a truss-rod channel, and I don't want to buy a real router yet (I already invested a lot in various tools, and now I want to see if I can complete any of the builds and get a guitar that plays well). On the other builds I started to use the dremel for routing jobs. I got a pre-routed poplar blank (rectangular with pickup and electronics cavities and the neck pocket done) to avoid doing the cavities, but then I started another build with a sapele blank - and there I had to do all the routs myself. The pickup cavities done with a dremel and a stewmac base (and some forstner bits of course) made me proud Then with the help of a friend I built a set of rails for the dremel to do truss rod routs - it has some guest appearances in this thread as it is great for smoothing out the sides and the bottom of neck pockets. I did two truss rod channels for dual-action rods with this setup, but both builds are currently on more-or-less the same stage as the Nylon one, so I didn't have a chance to test them in action yet. Here's one of the necks with the truss rod in place: I figured for the nylon string I could still live without a truss rod - we'll soon see whether I was right

I got into guitar building with almost no previous experience with woodworking so I'm trying to learn the tools and techniques step by step and every once in a while I hit some problem. This time its with wood itself. Part one: I bought a padauk neck blank from an online luthier supply shop. Left it on a shelf in my bedroom which is where I keep most of the wood. I was gone for three weeks and upon coming back I found the piece looking like this: A nice crack, and there is another one from the other side running more or less throught the center of the blank. The wood was supposedly dry and as you can see the ends are sealed. So the question I'd like to ask is: was it a) a random thing that just sometimes happens and I should not worry and move on a the sellers fault (faulty piece, not dried well, something else) c) my falut (storing the wood in an appartament with central heating = probably very dry air) d) a combination of the above Any hints would be appreciated. I had no problem with wood cracking up to now, the padauk has been sharing the room with something like 4 neck blanks, 3 body blanks, a bunch of fingerboards and other stuff - no problems with those. Another thing - I visited a place where I buy veneer and discovered that they also sell wood. Since it was cheap I got some to practice on. They claim its dry and ready for making furniture out of it. What I got was a piece of alder about 3cm thick and some mahogany-like wood (meranti the guy said) in two blanks, also 3cm. I cut the alder into two body-blank-sized pieces (removing the bark at the edges etc). Now problems with these: 1. the alder is warping. Bending in the direction I'd expect it to. Does this mean that I should just wait for it to settle down and then try to plane it flat and start building? Or try to clamp and flatten it somehow? Or something else? Here's a pic: 2. the meranti - its not really warping but its cracking. So far I'm ok because the pieces are rather long and if I cut off the cracked parts I can still build a body out of this, but how do I stop the cracks from developing further? Is it something wrong with my way of storing the wood or is it the wood thats faulty and I should just look for another piece? again, an illustration: the dark streaks running along the cracks is superglue (I tried to flood the cracks hoping that would keep them from cracking more). Phew, long post. Advice appreciated

The fingerboad is already on... so I have to go with what I have. I know I can take that off too, but that's the last resort - if everything goes completely bad I have no truss rod since at the time I was planning this build I wasn't sure I'd have the equipment to do a truss rod channel - hence the decision to build a nylon string as my first attempt. I hadn't thought about possible problems from fretting. So my plan for now is to move on and see - and adapt.

I'll just have to take the risk I guess. I really don't feel like having to dremel the tangs off from 24 frets I'm hoping the neck will hold since a) its going to be a classical-like nylon string, I'll keep the neck relatively thick I made it a laminate since it was never supposed to have a truss rod (classical guitars often dont have one, no?) - with the wenge center strip and the bubinga outer parts it should be pretty stable... The fingerboard is a pretty thick 0,7mm of ebony. I could make the fingerboard just slightly concave before putting the frets in, hmm... Actually. If it moves so bad that levelling the frets becomes unreasonable I guess I can always pull them and level the board again. Hell, I can even just hammer the frets in and let it sit for a few days even before cutting the fret ends off to see if it stays put. I think I'll go with this option. Thanks for all the advice! Updates in a few days.

Thanks Prostheta it was your earlier remark about waiting with planing laminated neck blanks flat after gluing them up that led me to think about this now. I did fret two (and a half) necks in the past and it was always a pain with the rounded back. Guess I will have to think harder about some proper support So its spokeshave time then! ... just noticed the replies from gpcustomguitars. Thanks! hah. I might still do as Prostheta is suggesting, since in this neck I don't have a truss rod so if the neck bends I'm screwed. Plus, I don't have equipment to thickness the neck while keeping it flat, I'd like to avoid using the robosander for this. I was planning to do it all with a spokeshave (plus something to get straight lines when the shape is nearly done), maybe running a channel through the middle with a dremel on the truss-rod jig to show me what the final thickness is supposed to be... I'll recheck the fretwire, I though my 0.57mm fret slotting saw matches all reasonable frets as the tang width is standard? This one is getting EVO gold fretwire to go with the overall color scheme chamfering the slots is something I knew about since I watched that 19-piece refret video on youtube a year ago prior to doing a refret on an old crappy guitar, on my way to deciding on building one from scratch but thanks for the advice !!!

Wow, I just realized that its been a month since my last update. I'd been gone for over 3 weeks for Christmas, but now the work is back on track. The with the fingerboard in place I re-checked the bridge position and drilled the bridge mounting and string-thru holes mounting my drill stand to the rails I use for the dremel: I could have just rested the drill base on the guitar top if I hadn't carved it lighty earlier. I will need to modify the order of operations in the future. (maybe on future builds I will be less impatient ). The bridge needed to have extra 6 holes drilled to accept the wires from the graphtech saddles: And I can finally mount a bunch of hardware to check that I got the alignment correctly: After that I tweaked the neck pocket and the heel a bit - needed to bring the fingerboard closer to the body. I decided that fingerboard needs to loose some thickness so I hit it with P40 sandpaper glued to a piece of glass: Looks like I'm exposing some cool figure in the ebony. So now, a question: My plan for the next step is to fully level and polish the fingerboard and then hammer in the frets. I figured it will be easier to get everything straight and to do the hammering while the bottom of the neck is still flat and straight. On the other hand - can the neck warp a little after carving? Maybe its better to level the fingerboard after the neck profile is close to final? Any suggestions on the order of things at this point?

Interesting idea. I had something similar in mind for some time in the future, though I hadn't though of making it rear-loaded. One extra thing that I though of was making the pickup position adjustable - so that you could take one pickup and slide it all the way from the bridge position to the nut position to watch the tone change.

I thought you drew the outline with a pencil for some reason stupid me. Nice! How are the pickup rings coming along?

From a guitarbuilding newbie: I think simple geometry will tell us that there will indeed be a twist in the neck plane introduced as you "tilt" it - if you treat the 2 front screws as forming a pivot on which the neck rotates. If this pivot line is not perpendicular to the neck centerline you will by construction be putting in a twist when tilting the neck downwards. In fact your centerline will also loose alignment. The question is whether a) these movements will be big enough to matter (depends on how much you want to tilt the neck I guess) and whether this can be avoided. To avoid this you'd have to somehow force the neck to rotate around a different axis than the one formed by the two bolts. I don't think I see a way of doing this that is practical. You can add a fifth bolt mirroring the position of the one that is moved back to form the contoured heel but I imagine you'd get into all sorts of trouble whith having to adjust the tension on all bolts to keep the neck geometry the way you want it. So in the end I dont think this idea is practical, unless the tilt adjustments are meant to be really small.

I'm also using a jig of this type - I believe the post was linking to this page: http://www.sixgunguitars.com/fret_slotting_jig.html

Time to attach the neck. I shaped an AANJ-like joint freehand on the sanding drums I put the neck in place and double-checked the body and neck centerline alignment. Once everything was nice and straight I clamped the neck in place and drilled the screw holes. Then I went ahead and rounded the joint And the neck went in the clamps together with the fingerboard:

Wow, it turned out really nice. The walnut really pops now after the oiling. Do post sound samples! Stupid question #1: how come the saddles stay in place? Friction or there is some means of fixing them that I failed to spot? #2: I have linseed oil, I have mineral spirits... where do I get oil based varnish? Should I just go to a hardware store and look for lacquer that will say "thin with mineral spirits" on the tin?

I love the headstock shape and the wood choices. Can't wait for more!

the only thing that comes to my mind would get 2 strings to consistently NOT be able to get intonated is some problem with the nut - as already suggested. Maybe the slots on the locking nut are worn in some weird way making the final point of contact with the string move a little towards the headstock?

The name of this chapter is: making the neck pocket with a Dremel. I conclude that this can be done, but I'm starting to appreciate the need for a full-size router. The routing itself (not counting set-up etc) would have probably taken 5 minutes instead of 2 hours or so. Anyway - on to the pics. I glued the fingerboard to the neck with double-side tape and shaped the heel to match the fingerboard: I then carefully aligned the neck on the body and clamped it between two straight edges of mdf - a jig with unclear purpose that I ended up not using Well, ok - I did use it to show me where not to drill with the forstner bit: After drilling I cleaned up the edges with a chisel and set up for routing. I used a jig that a friend of mine build with me, I was planning to use it for truss rod slots (in fact I did already - works pretty good for that) but I realized that basically anything requiring straight lines can be done with it. So I mounted a routing bit in the dremel, took measurements of the neck heel, drew the lines on the body and started taking wood off. Along the edges, down all the way to the depth I planned for the pocket (or so I thought). By the time I was done I realized that the router bit slipped out a bit and one channel ended up being deeper than I planned. The two obvious solutions would be gluing some wood in there or making the whole pocket deeper. To see I'd need to check vertical alignment i.e. string height at the bridge. That will come later. For now I only made the pocket as deep as initially forseen. I first chiseled out the wood in the middle of the pocket and then used this nano-planer: ..and finally after some fine-tuning I could test the neck fit: Its pretty much spot-on. I think that the nut is 1-2mm away sideways from where the body centerline would extend, but I still have room to correct that when I do proper alignment. Which is the next step.

indeed, nice heel joint. I do have a bass build hopefully planned some time down the road, taking notes

Thanks guys! One of the points of this build (and another two I have running in parallel) is to try to do without bigger tools. I'm starting to appreciate the need for a bandsaw (though I would have no place to use it I think) and of course a router but I'm trying to see if I can manage without them. I managed already to smooth out the bottom of the electronics cavity in another body by mounting the dremel in my drill stand. Worked pretty good so I'm already planning to use the same technique for the neck pockets. If it turns out that I'm able to create a guitar that actually works (i.e. plays) I'll think about investing in new tools (I'll probably need a blue bosch or something else in place of my green bosch drill. I've already managed to make it wobble through too much sanding). Hadn't thought about fix-mounting a router to use to thickness stuff as opposed to the sliding rails idea that I typically see people use. hmm...

Before I post my headstock progress let me show a snapshot from another build I'm doing in parallel. I arrived at a point where I needed to get a neck from 30mm thick down to the 21-22mm I'd have at the heel. This would mean potentially hours or plane/robosander work so I decided to try an alternative (encouraged by having success with this method when bringin heastocks from 30mm to 15mm): to my surprise.. it worked ok But back on topic.. I glued the face plate to the headstock, drilled the tuner holes and shaped everything. I still need to take some thickness off, as this quick mock-up clearly illustrates. I'll probably sand off the bottom part. ok, after shaping the edge of the headplate its obvious that the face side will need to be lowered too

nice build! I'm also doing my first build in parallel.. in fact I'm doing three guitars - but only one got its build thread. I guess that's cheating My neck laminate is similar to yours - wenge - (flame) maple - bubinga 5pc. Good luck with neck-thru!

funny I was just trying to figure out what to use to make cavity covers.. so you're saying the stuff they sell as "heastock veneer" is good for this? gotta check prices... I have some thin 0,6mm veneer and I was thinking of gluing together several sheets or just laminating one to a piece of thin hdf, but this looks like another good option. for pickup rings you need to stack two anyway, right? The ring should be 5-6mm high IIRC. nice job with these, can't wait to see the rings done!

Fingerboard time! I'm running two pieces of wood in parallel until I am capable of picking one. Here is the merbau one in the high-tech fret slotting jig: (in the background in the clamps is the neck, getting a layer of flame maple veneer that will go to create an accent line between the neck and the fb) Here's my high-tech thicknessing jig - basically a ripoff of the luthier's friend. With the ebony board being run through. Both boards were slotted and trimmed to final size using a shooting board, which makes it easy to very accurately dial in the size (by extending the plane blade I shave off fraction of a mm deeper of the sides). Over to the body. I mostly did the belly cut starting with a chisel, then a rasp, then a spokeshave and finally a scraper. Still not perfect but close. I'll need to work on it some more. The top got sanded, I sill had some small pinholes where I put the epoxy so I repeated the procedure, changed from 40 to 80 grit on the robosander and ran around the edges and here we are, basically waiting for the neck to be done so that I can start on the neck pocket:

thanks! stupid question: by "turned backwards" you mean the top stays the top and you rotate the piece horizontally by 180 degrees, right? Or flip it upside down too? (not sure if this makes that much difference...)

I love that top! are you sure you want the vol and tone so high up?

I love the neck sandwiches! Wenge and padauk.. I have a baritone six string in my head with a neck like this. But cutting neck laminates is a pain when the best tool you have is a cheap borrowed rotary saw.. lol. Do you have a method for the orientation of the pieces that go into the laminates? The padauk on the right looks like you just put wenge strips in the places where you took out the narrow padauk strips, or are you turning the pieces around?

ok, after-weekend update time. First, the body - tried to fill some imperfections in the top with imbuia dust mixed with epoxy (I made a lot of dust when I was thicknessing the headplate). Here's the body just after putting on the epoxy: I haven't sanded it off yet so no idea how it will turn out. Most of the work was on the neck. I glued the headstock and after unclamping I cut out the shape roughly with my jigsaw: then I took out a template I made some time ago for the headstock, and checked again on paper that the tuner hole placement should be giving a straight string pull. I attached the template to the headstock with double sided tape, drilled the tuner holes and shaped the edges on the robosander: I narrowed down my choice of fingerboards to two pieces of wood, I couldn't decide between the two so I'll continue working with them in parallel up to the point where they're ready for fretting and gluing to the neck. I'll post when I get the fret slots cut.