Andyjr1515

If there was very little resistance for those 6 quarter turns, I suspect it wasn't yet engaged. I have known truss rods that had at least one full turn slop in the middle so it is a possibility. When it is engaged, even with the strings fully slack (and you should do this with slackened strings) there is quite a resistance to turning the wrench....

That looks a great idea, @sirspens ref the truss rod, how many 1/4 turns do you think you did before you stopped? I ask because some truss rods have a sizeable midpoint movement before they start to actually bend the neck. At that point, the truss rod suddenly gets very stiff but is starting to actually do its job. Difficult of course to advise, because if it is actually at the end of its travel, you risk breaking the rod if you keep turning.

OK - egg white has my vote. After the easiest and most convenient grain filling I can remember, this is 'the reflection test' after one very thin coat of wiped-on varnish (and before you ask - this isn't still wet, it is after it is touch dry) : I maybe overly optimistic, but I reckon a couple of days and the body will be fully varnished....

Sorry...pressed the wrong button Gluing with a mix of epoxy and sawdust: Then sanding off. The extra one is for the heel cap:

Yes - it's a bit of an enigma. When you apply it, other than a slight whiff of egg, it just smells like wet wood. And it soaks in like water. But once the first coat has dried and been fine-sanded, it doesn't keep raising the grain as you would expect it to. I'm really pleased how it seems to have turned out. After two days, it's completely ready for the gloss coats... I've also done the bit that tells me that the end is in sight...the inlays. Normal stuff: Tracing round the inlay: Dremel routing the chamber:

I suspect that when you straighten the neck, you will find that the action magically comes within adjustment limits. No probs - been meaning to get down on paper the 'how I do a first set up' for ages

You are quite right @2.5itim Theoretically, they don't have a neck angle. But that pre-supposes that EVERYTHING is to Fender CNC spec - flat neck, flat heel, flat neck pocket, flat body, genuine Fender bridge, exact fixing heights. With home builds, that is rarely the case. And absolutely yes - there are many ways you can compensate - take a bit off the body thickness, angle the body, adjustment of the neck pocket, routing out a small step to drop the bridge down a tad, grinding a mm or two off the bottom of the bridge. But in my view (and based on wrecking more guitars than I would like to admit to) the simplest and safest - if it's close - is to shim. And we are talking tiny, tiny, tiny - the movement is hugely exaggerated once amplified between the length between the nut and the bridge. A business card thickness shim at the back of the neck pocket can make a difference at the saddle of 1/4" !! That is why getting the router or sander out on the neck pocket is so risky... Absolutely right also on the bridge. Rule of thumb is the top E saddle at c 1mm back from scale length and bottom E c 3mm back from scale length. So...assuming it is a 25.5" scale...the bridge position looks to be spot on to me

I am impressed with your wholly misguided confidence in me @Prostheta Actually, I'm going to be really controversial here. What @Prostheta says above is perfectly correct, but for a 'first build; learning the techniques; limited equipment; not sure how everything interacts with everything else', then the last thing I would personally do is sand the body or even the neck pocket. Simply too much can go wrong too quickly! For a pro-job, then absolutely. But for a 'weekend build' first off - assuming the objective is to build something that looks OK and plays great - I would keep it simple and safe. Yes, theoretically teles and strats are zero neck angle, but many of them - even top drawer ones - I've come across have shims...even Fenders (don't know if the shims in the Fenders were there from new, but some of the other decent makes I've come across certainly have been). My quick ABC of first set-up is this. Please note, @sirspens , that @Prostheta and most of the guys and gals on this forum are much more experienced and talented than I am, and please do feel free to ignore everything I say - I won't be in the least bit offended . How I personally do it is. The reason I do it in this sequence is that everything affects everything so you need to pin down one variable at a time: Realise that the first time you string everything up, it is likely to be cumulatively all over the place and seem to the unwary as an impossible task. So in good old Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy style: DON'T PANIC! First I check the neck relief. With the strings tuned up at full tension, I pop a capo onto the 1st fret and hold the top E (or bottom E) down at the 16th fret. In the middle, ie 8th fret, I tap the string and am looking for just perceptible movement. If there is no gap at all, the truss rod needs loosening. If there is a gap any bigger than the thickness of a business card, it needs tightening. Loosen the strings, turn the trussrod 1/4 turn in the appropriate direction, tighten the strings and recheck. Repeat until the gap is just perceptible. Re-check on the other E string to make sure it isn't hard down on the 8th fret. If it is, loosen the trussrod a bit until there is just perceptible movement (the reason you do this is that the neck might not be exactly straight and whatever, you don't want either E string to be hard down) Now I can check the action height (because the neck relief affects the action height big-style) For starters, I aim for the top E at around 1.5mm and the bottom E at 2.5mm (I can always fine tune in the future, but this starting point will get me a playable and intonateable guitar) If the saddles have enough adjustment, then Ido that and move onto the intonation. If not, then I go to the next step If the action is way higher than that, even at lowest saddle positions, it indicates that the neck needs to be angled slightly downwards. The easiest and safest way of doing this is by adding a very thin shim under the neck heel at the body end of the heel. We are talking VERY thin, usually - a snipped strip of credit card is often/usually too thick! Re-tighten the neck, restring, tighten to pitch and check if you now have enough saddle movement. If they now have to be adjusted to the limit of their reach, then you could consider a thinner shim. If the action is still too high at the saddles bottomed out, it needs a thicker shim. (By the way, in the less likely event that the action was too low at top saddle stretch when you'd sorted the neck relief above, the shim simply goes at the headstock end of the neck pocket) Now I have a decent starting point for the action, I can check the intonation. The reason I can't check before this point is that the saddle positions generally have to be lengthened by between 1mm and 3mm from scale length, because pressing the string down to the fret basically 'bends' the string - albeit vertically - and the pitch rises. It follows that, if the action is too high, the string bends more than normal and the string sharpens more than it should. So you can't set your intonation until the action is broadly correct. Normal procedure - with a tuner, ring the 12th fret harmonic and then, taking care to press only lightly and not bending the string sideways, fret at the 12th. If the fretted pitch is sharp, I move the saddles backwards to lower the fretted pitch, if the fretted not is flat, I bring the saddles forward. Finally, I fine tune the pickup heights, double checking the action height once I have just in case the magnetism effect pulling the strings down have affected it (it usually hasn't) What I now have, is a guitar that plays OK and in tune, feels OK and now I can assess properly if I need or want to make any further tweaks to get it 'perfect'. Hope this helps. Andy

Don't move your bridge yet, @sirspens! I'll post more a bit later when I'm back on the desktop, but there is a sequence for set up that is quite important and, assuming you are actually doing a 25.5 scale, there is nothing I see that tells me anything is wrong at all. immediate points that come to mind: the saddles are always further back than the scale length...never forward of it The action height is probably simply that it needs a tiny shim to angle the neck a tad no point in trying to set action height or intonation until the truss rod is correctly set...and that's easy to check I'll post more in the next couple of hours...

I'm pleased you are on the project path again. I will be following progress with great interest

Sounds complicated good to me In summary, I'm very pleased indeed with this. And it's tough! Not impossibly tough-to-the-point-you-wish-you-hadn't-bothered epoxy-kind-of-tough, but tough enough that when you sand even the soft spruce, for a long while you are pretty much polishing the sealed surface rather than cutting through straight down to the wood. I've done what is probably the last coat of egg white before the first coats of varnish so, while that is drying, I've been cutting my moniker swifts. Like many others, I use a jewellers saw and very simple slotted mdf board to cut them out: ...and here they are - three for the headstock and one for the heel block:

We're back to dull, grey and drizzle. Phew! For a couple of days there I thought that dreadful spring season might be coming I'll look up that neck joint, @KeithHowell - sounds interesting for future projects! The egg white is looking very promising, @Prostheta. It dries rock hard...surprisingly so...but remains very thin. As I suspected, it's not great for gap filling although I'm still experimenting. I've done some tidying up first thing of missed gaps and lumps but I reckon by tomorrow it will be smooth enough and hard enough to start the varnish coats. Someone I was talking to last night said that they used to use egg white in the early Middle Ages and beyond as 'tempura' to harden and prepare the plaster surface before painting murals. Makes sense and, in some ways, a similar requirement to grain filling given the absorbency of untreated plaster.

The first stages of the finishing are started Ref my thread in the 'Finishing and Inlays' section, I am going to try out egg white as the clear sealer / filler. I suspect it will be OK as a sealer, but no better than, say, Birchwood Casey Clear Sealer & Filler, for filling (ie not very good at all!). I'll do a bit more later on the other thread but first impressions: Easy to apply Quick drying Cheap Pretty much odourless Easy to clean brushes / cloths / pots Dries to a fragile and thin, but - on first impressions - fully set, finish. This might mean that, if it is capable of filling anything except the grain, it doesn't do the long-term continued sinking that the polymerised oils or similar suffer from. This was it after a couple of coats: While it was drying, I shaped the headstock and drilled the tuner holes:

They certainly are! Do they do that in Finland too?

Looking good to me Well done, and as @Prostheta says, it's time to move on... . I've also made a mental note to myself to never buy a laser measure...that degree of accuracy in any of my builds would worry the hell out of me i love the overall look, by the way. Really nice design.

That's different! Where did you get that idea from (the dots and the method)?

Everyone has their own method of lining up the neck. Mine is that I clamp the neck, usually obscuring some of the holes. I put a suitably sized nail in one of the uncovered screw holes and press lightly to make a centre indent. I then take the clamp off, drill that hole. I then screw that one in and use this to clamp the neck tight enough to centre mark the remaining holes, having rechecked the straightness. the only critical issue with the straightness is making sure that neither the top string or bottom string get too close to the edge of the fretboard. Therefore the best way of measuring is to lightly string the two E strings and adjust the angle of the neck until you see both strings equidistant from their edges at the upper frets. This can be done after the first screw has been put in, using that as your pivot point.

Splintery or not, lovely end result!

That is SUCH a cool-looking guitar. I just love everything about it. There are not many guitars I ache to possess - but that's certainly one of them. Fantastic and well deserved congratulations on the charity $$'s raised

This next set of pictures is just for my own record... ...Yes...it's actually SUNNY! . I know....here in the middle of the UK. Unbelievable! I thought it was a UFO at first and it scared the cat for sure. I passed some young parents down the street saying to their toddlers, "...it's called the SUN. It's like the RAIN, but not so wet...." Took maximum advantage and profiled the fretboard: Note the pencil line which is my 'I've reached where I need to be' reference. I started on 80 grit then progressively down to 600. Then - as it STILL hadn't clouded over - added the frets. On an acoustic I find it a lot easier to get the fretboard pretty much sorted and then glue it on once the neck has been glued to the body. I buy coiled fretwire, allowing me to do the 'bead of titebond; position fret; whack one side; whack the other side; whack the middle' technique. I do three frets at a time and while I'm cutting the next three, I clamp the radius block over the three I've just done for good measure: Then laid that to one side for the glue to dry while I started the rough carve of the heelblock: Finally, wrapped the trussrod in clingfilm and clamped a piece of the walnut inner splice as a truss-rod cap while the glue dries. Here I've rough-trimmed the fretboard too: But by now I was worried about getting sunstroke in the 6 degree heat so went back indoors into the comforting gloom...

Hi @sirspens I think you are worrying too much about this and overthinking it. Keep it simple: Remember, you could just bolt it up straight and play it. Many, many, many teles and strats have gaps. If you want to fill the gap, then you need a sliver of wood at 0.025" and one a bit bigger standard marquetry veneer is 0.6mm thick. That's a gnats smidgen away from 0.025". Buy a small sheet on eBay for a few $ and cut out a rectangle the right size with a craft knife. Glue it on the top side of the neck pocket cut two pieces for the bottom side and glue those in too your pocket will now be around 0.01" too tight borrow your wife's/partners/ sisters/ neighbours emery board nailfile and sand down to a good tight fit remember that the neck itself may be slightly tapered, so trial fit by sliding the neck down into the pocket not sliding it in from the front if, when you tighten it up, it isn't exactly in line, before you file any more away, try the old luthier trick of 'loosen the screws, give the neck a tug, tighten the screws again' This is much closer to being absolutely fine than you think it is

In between some unavoidable outdoor jobs I've tried to continue small bits of progress. The main one was to get the dovetail absolutely spot on. I used Glenn LaSalle's excellent Blues Creek videos as a guide and gently, gently eased everything so that the fretboard was absolutely square to the body, that the neck angle was correct, that there was no movement top or bottom in the dovetail joint itself and that the sides were flossed to an even tight fit to the body. At the end of all of that, with each adjustment taking a tiny bit of wood off the joint, the resulting joint was smack on, but now a mm or so low. I had machined the neck slightly oversize, but not quite enough. No probs, though - I've just glued a strip of hardwood veneer onto one side of the neck joint which has also corrected a small offset in the neck position itself. It's worked a treat and I'll know next time to allow for a touch more 'wiggle room'. I'm pleased with the joint. It's rock solid, and it's in the correct position on all planes: The joint has been 'flossed' with 240 grit and, when the joint has its final glues whack, will be firm against the sides all round: The end of the fretboard will have the small magnetic pickup that is one half of the Shadow Sonic Doubleplay system. The other thing I am going to try, is to make the pickguard from an offcut of the side lacewood: The domestic decorating / garden rearranging chores are mainly done for the time being, so I'm hoping for a spurt of progress in the coming couple of weeks

Very neat job!

I would LOVE to do some metal machining, but I think MrsAndyjr1515 has enough of a problem with wood dust in the spare room let alone with metal swarf . Nice job, @2.5itim

Today's rain (when is it going to STOP?????) was a mixed blessing: it meant I couldn't do anything outside on the summerhouse footings it meant I couldn't do anything outside on the guitar but that meant I had a bit of time to think through things and experiment. One was that I remembered that the fixed base on my little Bosch (Colt) router has an extraction shroud...and I got it to work and with it, I realised I could do some modest routing indoors and then I remembered that Mrs Andyjr1515 was out this evening which meant that I could do A LOT of routing indoors First I tried the routing jig out on my first ever attempt at a dovetail with some scrap wood, angled at about 3 degrees - in line with my best projection of the target neck angle. The first attempt at the neck block slot revealed a fatal flaw through a silly oversight (which justified trying it on scrap first!). The second attempt, though...: At that point, I decided that the need to do the real thing while I could remember exactly how I did it was greater than the risk of being beaten to a pulp by Mrs Andyjr1515 for filling the house with wood dust... I routed the neck heel down to size and popped a 3 degree angle on it - the rig worked a treat! - and did my first 'for real' male dovetail: Then did the dovetail slot. Did a simple straight rout well clear of the sides but at the dovetail depth, then changed to the dovetail bit : To my astonishment and relief....it worked Nice tight sides: Angle just right: And even straight!!!: What's more, Mrs Andyjr1515 didn't get back until 5 minutes after I'd hoovered up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! For a good while over the next hour or two I assumed I must have simply died and gone to heaven....