acpken

I got this archtop years ago from a customer of mine. I love the body, but the neck design is one of the weirdest I've ever seen. The stripes on the headstock are painted on, as well as the position markers on the fingerboard. The string spacer (not a nut) is a stack of red, white and blue plastic laminates. I have the tailpiece and a white MOTS pickguard for it too. Presently the neck has a broken heel and never had a truss rod installed, so I'm thinking about taking it apart to use as a pattern for a new guitar. Does anyone know who made this guitar? ken

I found a great new book for anyone wanting to build their own shop, no matter how big or small their area is. It's called 'Workshops You Can Build', by David and Jeanie Stiles. They even cover closet sized areas too... Here's the ad on Amazon ken

This video rocks... It's amazing what you can do if you really want to do it. Who says you need massive amounts of $$$ to make a nice guitar? ken

It should work, after all vacuum pumps are compressors with the connections reversed. If you're looking for cheap vac pumps, couldn't you buy a used diaphragm airbrush type compressor, switch the input and output connections, and add a vac gauge? ken

You're lucky to have a nice big area to work in. Whatever you do, don't skimp on the wire. If you're like me, you will be continuously buying bigger tools and wishing you had more power. ken

Sorry about the wait. Wife wanted to 'DECORATE THE HOUSE... NOW' and I just finished last night. Here it was less than 20F in the daytime all week, so I've been thinking about this a lot. Later in the winter, it will get to -20F at night. So, you say that the lacquer coat is relatively safer in the cold once it flashes off? I have a larger oil heater here that looks like an old school water radiator, so this is doable. I will try to spray @60F, and wait till the paint flashes off before I turn off the heat. I wonder... since a HVLP sprayer with a turbine supplies relatively warm air when it sprays, would this be a good idea or would this add moisture to the spray? Would I be better off just using a compressor and high pressure spray gun for this? I never sprayed in the cold before, and I have 'visions' of my lacquer coats doing really weird things as they dry... if they dried at all. Thank you, ken

Thank you for the good ideas! I spent most of last night trying to figure this one out. I just want the box to keep the bodies warm in while they dry. Luckily for me, I can get lacquers locally. I wonder... would a ceramic heater work as a heat source? I have one here that is about 6" square and uses a computer box type cooling fan as a fan. I can short out the thermostat and use a controller and thermocouple to control it. ken

PO wife almost worse... She calls all paint 'nitro paint'. I'm thinking about switching to waterbased lacquers, but I still have to get the stuff to dry before it freezes.

Hello all, I live in the northern US, and it's wintertime here. I have a bunch of bodies and necks here that all need to be finished, I don't want to heat my whole shop for the whole winter just to dry lacquer, and the wife says I can't 'nitro paint' in the house. I'm thinking about making some kind of box with a heater and thermostat inside it that I can run 24/7 and put finished parts in to dry. Have any of you made something like this, how did you do it, and how did it work? Thank you, ken

Did you ground one of the side lugs of the volume pot to the case? I forgot that one twice. ken

In the shop area I was in the air pressure was 100 PSI due to lots of airpowered tools. The next morning, everyone in the building was issued 'OSHA compliant' low pressure nozzles whether they needed them or not. Grandpa was right. It wasn't that anyone got 'soft' it's that common sense is really, really uncommon nowadays. ken

The coworker was inside a CNC vertical milling machine, preparing it for repainting by cleaning out the enclosed workspace (where the work is done), and he pointed the air nozzle at an lower corner of the area... while keeping his head close enough to the corner and using enough air pressure to knock his safety glasses off his face with the reflected blast. He should have used a lowpressure air nozzle with a long extension nozzle and a lexan faceshield, but it would have even better for him to brush out the collected steel wool with a paintbrush. The moral to me was that if it's not flying through the air it can't hurt you... much. Compressed air works great, as long as you use it safely. I use an air nozzle in one hand, and a shopvac hose in the other. I tried your inside out bag idea this AM, with a quarter sized neo magnet inside a corner of a plastic shopping bag. It worked OK. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than picking all the steel wool bits off the naked magnet. ken

ScottR, it sounds to me like your Strat is completely normal. Fenders always seem to have some kind of buzz to them sometimes, it's the nature of the beast. Um... Prostheta, it sounds to me like you live in an old house or your house might have bad wiring in it. You may need an isolation transformer between your amp and the wall power to make your rig quiet. FYI... Neon bulbs fire (light) at 60 to 68 volts. If your neon light is lighting up between your rack and a known ground, there is enough volts there to hurt you. Do you have a plugin wiring tester for your house wiring? You plug this into an outlet, and it has three neon lights on the front - two amber lights and a red one. The lights on the front light up in different combinations depending on how the house wiring is configured. This tells you definitely if you have any bad wiring, and exactly which wire is the problem. I use it every time I play somewhere, and it keeps me from getting 'surprises'. ken

A pot with a bad connection between the back cover (if you're grounding something on there) and the front screw bushing can cause the problem you have. It's called a 'high impedance short'. How does this work? When pots are made, their back covers are just held on by bending tabs over the matching areas on the front bushing. Dirty tabs on covers don't ground too well, so the cure (if you're using pots with brass screw bushings) is to pull the pots out and solder one of the pot's back cover tabs directly onto the bushing. If you're using pots with cheap zinc screw bushings, junk the pot. Or if you're cheap, solder jumper wires from the back of each pot to another pot. I had this problem once with a pull pot on a new Strat, and it drove me insane... for some reason the side of the switchbox on the back of the pot was used as a ground point, but if you measured between the solder blob on the back of this one pot and the pickguard shielding foil, you got varying resistance. I replaced almost every part of the control system in this guitar before I finally figured it out. :barf: ken