pan_kara

I am proud of it, last year when I was starting this I had no idea if I'll be able to make a working guitar. I finished this one and two others that I worked on in parallel and I'm happy with the way they came out.

Now - I'm getting ready to start preparing the templates for the next ones. My pile of top and fingerboard woods "for the future" is growing and I have a list of 10 or so guitars and basses that I want to try building. So yes - I think I'm addicted.

Thanks everybody!

having purcashed an actual drill press I finally nearly managed to get a process down for making knobs with the hole for the tuner shaft reasonably centered. So I redid the volume knob (and made a couple more while I was at it)

Some more photos with the new volume knob. (I oiled it this time to match the top finish, the previous one was dipped in nitro)

The final thing I need to do is a sound demo video. This is coming soon. Then I'm starting another batch of builds

ust to clarify:

- you did 240 wet or dry?

- what did you use for backing?

- 240 wet sanding...

- what do you mean with backing?

I might have gotten the word wrong - I meant what you're using as the sanding "block"

(backing I guess is cloth/paper etc, )

Thanks psikoT. The cross-brushing, graing filling etc I think I more or less got myself, the secret here was the 240 girt I think. I started a lot higher. I think I was trying to sand with P320 between coats when brushing on nitro and then wetsanded with P600 or P800 onwards. Then the usual polish, wax etc - I ended up with mirror shine but the mirror was not "uniform", the reflection was distorted by the general "wavyness" of the surface I created. I'll try 240 next time I'm at the finishing stage (probably some time from now).

Just to clarify:

- you did 240 wet or dry?

- what did you use for backing?

Thanks again for sharing! And do enter in GOTM!

Whoa this looks killer! How did you manage to get such an even surface with the brushed-on nitro? Just sanding with a hard block? What grits did you go through? Care to share the process?

Looks like its out of phase - maybe try connecting it the other way around. Middle pickup out of phase does reduce the overall volume quite a bit in the neck+middle and bridge+middle configurations. One funny thing (and you can see if this happens in your case) is that in neck+middle notes played around the 17th-19th fret have the fundamental frequency mostly canceled out so they sound like played an octave higher than in reality. A pretty cool effect.

I have another newbie woodworker question: every once in a while when I place an order in one of the "instrument wood" shops I throw in a random top or fingerboard. As this wood will spend some time before being used some time in the future, I started to wonder - should I glue the tops (potentially also body blanks) or leave the two halves separate and store them like that?

Is there any good reason for either or is it just a matter of preference? Any input would be appreciated

Edit: as a thread with no pictures is boring, here's a piece of imbuia that I scored recently. Beautiful, and completely different than the one I used for my nylon string.

I haven't bought from them due to this 200 EUR thing, I'm just starting up with guitar building as a hobby. I think some people over here must have ordered something though. I agree that the prices are good!

I just saw this having a random click through luthier shops:

http://www.tonewood.es/product.php?id_product=857

(too bad this is the guys with 200 EUR minimum order)

I'm in France at the moment. For some reason I thought I can only get it from the US and never came across the stuff in the online UK shops I was looking at but just after I read your reply I checked again and indeed - it even comes up on amazon and at least one of the merchants doesn't have the annoying "only UK shipping" limitation that hit me a couple of times already.

Looks like I'll be ordering some of that stuff then.. Thanks!

All finished in Tru-Oil except the Buckeye guitar (2k gloss clear). No, won't stand up to the same levels of abuse as lacquer but easy to fix, refresh or completely refinish.

Where abouts in Europe are you? I'm UK based, no problems buying Tru-Oil here (Birchwood Casey Tru-Oil) - try eBay if you can't find it elsewhere.

I was using this:

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Tools/Special_tools_for_Routing/Precision_Router_Base.html?actn=100101&xst=3&xsr=850

the base keeps the router perpendicular to the body surface - unless you fall off when there is not enough body to support it. Hence my suggestion

Nice work! The buckeye burl turned out beautifully! I like the V too - very nice with just dyed wood instead of painting it black.

So are they all finished in just tru-oil? The end result is top-notch and looks like exactly the type of finish I'd like to achieve myself. Just less resistant to abuse than nitro or poly I'd imagine, but on the other hand easier to "refresh", no?

Does anybody know any equivalent of this stuff that's available in Europe??

Wow, nice woods indeed. Can't wait to see the next steps!

Those shooting boards are what grit? I'll be doing a bit of that soon, trying to decide between a hand plane and sandpaper.

Thanks guys!

@The Fool Guy

Build one man, when you're done with that cool strat of yours ! Its major fun, almost no routing except the neck pocket (at least the way I did it) and its tremendous fun to play. The softness and classical spacing combined with a thin electric-like neck and body make it quite unique.

I will post a sound clip sometime when I fix the string issue..

Ok, she's nearly ready. I only need to redo the volume knob since this is just one I was testing on that I put here as a placeholder. And I need to get new strings since the A sting snapped for some weird reason. Thankfully I managed to take a few shots before that happened:

Welcome! I've been doing a similar thing quite recently (as one of my test builds - I only just started building), so I can answer from my limited experience. I didnt have any tearout problems with veneer - the pickup cavities I just cut out with a scalpel after the veneer was glued on and then finished off the edges with a dremel sanding drum. And maybe by hand with sandpaper after that, I don't remember for sure. But it wasn't problematic.

How do you plan to do the body binding? I was also using a dremel with a small routing bit, in the Stewmac routing attachment. The lesson I learned was to always have something with the same height as the body on the outer side, otherwise its hard to keep the whole thing from falling off at the ends of the body horns.

I glued it with superglue, but I might try the acetone method next time, I was getting some small gaps (partially due to my sloppy routing)

Lol I feel an urge to build a 666mm scale guitar now...

One thing you might consider - I'm planning to do a baritone build next and I was meaning to use my 25.5' template and just add another fret behind the nut, so to speak. Then I did the math and realized that I'm basically getting 27' that way. Not sure if this is what you'd want, I'll just use my old template and position the nut slot by hand.

Thanks guys. I'm really thrilled to have dreamed up this project and now see it finally take shape, pretty close to the original concept. I'm loving this guitar building thing

Anyway, she's almost there. I mounted the volume pot, the graphtech preamp etc:

Waiting for the neck and the strings:

Thanks! I'm really getting close to having it finished, right now I'm oiling the top:

Through trial and error I'm slowly learning this whole wetsanding thing. First mistake that I was making in the past I only realized now, since this was the first time I tried to level and all-brushed finish. I was using some foam-backed paper holder and it was too soft - it smoothed out the smaller brush marks etc but the mirror surface I got after polishing was nowhere near flat.

I changed that to cork and that made it much better. On the sides, where I was getting a lot of runs and stuff I used a scraper and followed that by the small micromesh pads. This actually turned out really well.

The only problem... I went through in a couple of places. Since RPC hardens chemically not by solvent evaporation the drop-fills I'm doing now will not be perfect I guess - unlike nitro, which I believe is very forgiving in that respect. We'll see how well I'll be able to blend them in.

In-progress shot:

Nice, thanks for sharing this!

I'm approaching the moment when I will have to do my first Floyd route, I will need to build myself a set of templates like these and I will probably be following this very closely.

Wow! Looks awesome after the carve!

oops a giant head of mine appeared in my sig.

will try to fix that

Ok, after the input from you guys I've decided to keep my original idea of keeping the top with just oil. I added more oil to the testpiece and the colors improved a lot.

The neck got oiled and waxed in the meantime, I just need to buff the nitro on the head plate.

The body had some mahogany pore filler, sandind and then I started on the RPC. Here's the first coat fresh after brushing:

I put 4 in total over one day and left to dry. That was Friday, I'm still waiting before I start wetsanding. I didnt manage to keep the top clean so I'll probably sand this off before I wetsand the back:

But in general looks like the end is near