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.

Normally what I do is build a booth from 1x2 and plastic sheeting, put a small fan in one end to exhaust the fumes. Put the parts in it and run a small oil-filled electric space heater (read no open flame) until the temperature is up around 60 degrees. Sometimes that is 4 - 6 hours. The small oil heater will remain hot after it is shutdown and allow the parts to cool slowly (preventing checking).

Lacquer is evaporative finish. It dries by the solvent evaporating. Use the right thinner for the temperature you are spraying in and it just works. Temperature affects lacquers drying times but not as much as you may think. In my experience the difference in drying time between 55 - 75 degrees is not noticeable. Building a box to dry it in once sprayed is not necessary. Once the coat flashes off (about 30 minutes) I have never been able to tell a real difference in curing time except in the summer when the garage gets to about 110F during the day.

I was trying to explain that it is good to get the ambient temperature of the booth and the wood above 55F just because it makes for better flow out and it is easier to spray than in 40 degrees where you need a faster evaporating thinner. I use the heater to slowly lower the temperature of the finish and the wood to prevent checking and cracks.

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

The real issue is guitar parts have to be over 55 degrees Fahrenheit as well as the paint.

Normally what I do is build a booth from 1x2 and plastic sheeting, put a small fan in one end to exhaust the fumes. Put the parts in it and run a small oil-filled electric space heater (read no open flame) until the temperature is up around 60 degrees. Sometimes that is 4 - 6 hours. The small oil heater will remain hot after it is shutdown and allow the parts to cool slowly (preventing checking).

I put the paint in the house (still in the can) the night before or until I am ready to use it. That way it is above 55F when I am ready to use it. Carry the paint out to the shop, mix, remove the heater from the booth, shoot with exhaust fan on, wait 30, shoot, wait 30 shoot. Put the heater (turned off) back in the booth. Repeat the next day and the next until you have 9 - 12 coats.

I usually mix the lacquer a little hotter (more thinner) to help fight runs. This of course leads to longer gass off times so you have to be patient. After a day or three out in the shop it usually has gassed off enough to move the guitar inside the house to a spare bathroom with the vent fan going. Luckily I live in NC and I just leave them in the garage cold.

Scuffing the clear with 600 grit after about 2 days should speed the gas off and let you buff it sooner.

Don't bother with water based lacquers. They go bad in sub freezing environments. It is a pain in the arse to get them shipped without freezing. The 2 times I tried a few years ago I had to reorder twice.

If you decide to try the water born nitros the procedure is the same just never leave the clear outside as it will freeze. It is still just as smelly and bad to breath the particles (not fumes so much) so don't think you are bringing the guitar inside any sooner.

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.

Maybe just build the box and use a small wattage light bulb? They use 100watt bulbs in a fox bender for acoustic guitar side bending and trust me you can burn a side up in just a few minutes if not careful. So i would think depending on the size of the box a 25 to 40 watt bulb would be more than plenty to keep a constant temp that would be reasonable. Still you must make it so that it would not catch on fire though.

If need be you could set up the light using a solid state relay and a PID temp controller with a thermocouple. This would then monitor the temp and turn the light on and off at predescribed temp +/- a few degrees.

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.

Regardless of the things that can happen if you are careless,compressed air is still one of the most effective ways to clean off wood dust on your guitar,clean your sandpaper to get more use out of it,or get those stubborn pieces of steel wool out of the crevices they embed themselves in.

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.

The magnet/bag thing is not going to be effective...I just mentioned the bag inside out thing as an improvement over shaking out a static-y bag.

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

It has been played in other locations and been declared to sound like all strats always do buzz wise. It currently sounds normal at my house too.

SR

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

Did you ground all the pot cases together and the switch's body to the output jack? I don't see any jumper wires from pot case to pot case in your photo.

ken

If you were to do that,it might be worthwhile to turn the bag inside out first so instead of trying to shake off all of the tiny steel pieces you just wrap them with the bag itself...like people do with dog poo.

This is a really good idea.

I won't let compressed air anywhere near steel wool... ever since I watched a coworker spend all day cleaning a dirty machine tool with steel wool and mineral spirits. At the end of his shift, dummkoff blew the machine dry with shop air, and got a face full of wet steel wool bits for his trouble. He went to the hospital for bits in both eyes. There is no emoticon known for how stupid this man was... and no, it wasn't me.

ken

I was hoping I would see this sometime... I'm learning a lot.

ken

Also really good to stuff the magnets in your pickups!

Steel wool itself can cause incredible damage to guitar pickups... just ask me.

Ever try an microabrasive impregnated rubber 'electric motor commutator cleaner stick' for cleaning frets? It works great.

If you are using steel wool and *aren't* working near pickups, try putting a magnet in a bag and use this to pick up all the steel wool fragments. When you're done, just go to the nearest garbage can with the bag, hold the bag over the can, and remove the magnet from the bag. The steel wool that was stuck to the bag will fall into the can.

ken

Plain straight grained Mahoganies of the "suitable for necks" variety average about $8-$9 BF...all over the United States..if someone tries to charge $30-$50 BF then you need to shop elsewhere unless it is a very unusual and ornamental piece.

Sometimes to get good prices on wood you need to buy it at 12% moisture content or even higher and store it properly for a couple of years.Your average woodworker will have a revolving stash of lumber.

If you try to find cherry at 8% moisture already cut and prepped for guitar blanks you will pay more than the same mahogany most likely.Comparing the price of 12% cherry lumber to 8% mahogany prepped blanks is not a proper comparison.

Obviously,they have charts on most hardwoods that list neat little things like hardness,stability,workability,and how well it takes glue.These charts will tell you everything you need to know about woods you are unfamiliar with if you compare the stability and hardness to woods you know are proper for certain uses

Sites like these can be quite handy,especially the last link

http://www.highlandh....com/chart.html

http://cfchardwoodfl...ity-by-species/

http://www.hardwoodi...view/pro/24/267

Thank you for the great advice. I was just about to ask the forum where to find some nice mahogany too.

Well wes, I've built a cherry neck, worked great. I've built a few walnut necks, worked great. I've built an oak and maple neck, worked great. I've built an ash and jatoba neck, worked great. Ive also built the prototypical maple necks, which of course work great. All of these are uncommon for neck woods. In my experience using them, I can't understand why.

I was wondering 'why' this is myself, especially after looking through piles of some very interesting 'nonguitar' woods in millyards all summer. I guess part of this is difficulty in finding mass quantities of good quality wood, and part simple tradition... 'Leo or Ted didn't use that wood, so I won't either'. Frankly, for some buyers traditionalism sells.

ken

I could use a few bottles... the stuff I have is made from Irish midgets (actually regular short irishmen but to the rest of the world "midgets") and it has a short open time because of the high alchohol content.

Not to mention it's a very strange color too... green. Hard to camouflage on a natural colored top.

I read somewhere that someone made a tap out of a screw the same size and thread as the outside of the insert. This way, with the wood prethreaded for the insert, the insert and/or wood wouldn't get mangled if the insert driver slipped during installation.

ken

I have always had good luck with older tools, just not the new ones. I burned up a six month old name brand table saw's motor on a sheet of plywood, and it was almost the same price to buy a new saw as replace the motor. Never again. Now I go to antique auctions and estate sales looking for the best quality tools I can find.

Bearings for just about everything ever made in the USA are available either at machinist bearing supply houses or Ebay. All I needed to replace my drill press's bearings were an old bearing so it could be measured. It did take awhile to get it apart, but you can see it turning in the photo.

I just bought a 1940's Rockwell 8" bench mount table saw for scrap price a couple of weeks ago, and it is much better built than my 'new' saw ever was. The cool thing about it is that it has a cast iron table with slots either side of the blade, and the blade can be set with enough height to use a 5" diameter blade, so I can use this as a fretsaw.

I wish I could find a Unisaw or even a Uniplane, but all I'm really looking for is a decent three wheeled belt sander and a 12" disk sander. I could have had a radial arm drill at an estate sale last summer, but the seller was offered twice what he wanted for it... and what I already paid.

ken

ken

I was wondering if there are any vintage/antique power tool users in here.

I am... by choice

Show 'em if you got 'em...

ken

1950's Delta/Rockwell industrial 24" scroll saw

1940's? Delta tablemount drill press

I have a later edition of the book myself, but as much as I like Mr. Hiscock's ideas I really don't want to bother him. I'm thinking about using the double action rod because of the ease of installation, but I like the idea of having the flexibility of using either kind of rod.

I just found a Youtube vid on a jig somewhat like his, also a factory blueprint of the Am Std. neck. I'm looking for an original 'vintage' neck blueprint right now.

Thank you,

ken

Hello all,

I'm reading 'da bible' (Melvyn Hiscock's book) at the moment.

Pages 94 and 95 mentions a fixture for drilling the truss rod holes in both ends of a bolt on guitar neck.

Has anyone ever built this fixture or know where to find some detailed blueprints to make one?

I'm trying to figure out how to drill the headstock end properly.

Thank you,

ken

Thanks for the good ideas.

I'm leaning toward a 'dry method' of removing this stuff, since the body was refinned in a very nice shade of dark blue and I don't want to

damage it. Supposedly heat might soften this stuff, so I was thinking about trying a small heat gun in the pickup pocket first to see what happens.

I wish this was the 'modern' graphite based paint and not nickel paint. This stuff is probably hazardous too.

ken