Norris

After a couple of weeks "on the shelf" it was time to drag this out again. Not a huge amount of progress, certainly not worth a photo. I trimmed the headstock depth down on the bandsaw, leaving myself about 1mm additional thickness to tidy up. I then squared up my nut and got it down to thickness - the fretboard will butt up against it. The rest of the evening was some planning. As we are now fitting a neck pickup, that could weaken the neck joint. My tame luthier advised that I do a full mortise & tenon, setting the neck slightly further in than a standard LPJR. This means moving the bridge back by about 15mm, also so that we can get some distance between the pickups. It will have the benefit of not only more contact area on the neck joint, but there should be no need to make a scratch plate to cover the join. Needless to say I'll do plenty of photos of that. My guitarist ("customer") is out of the country at the moment, so I'll discuss the tweaks with him over Christmas. The guitar building classes have ended for this year now

Lovely story. Thanks for sharing it with us. Not a bad first guitar either especially considering when it was built

That turned out very nice!

Lovely job. Your builds just get better each time

That looks very nice. I'm wondering what a red translucent layer over the top would look like...

You could always practise using the router by making some MDF copies of your master templates - they are always handy, and no disaster if you go wrong - assuming you don't remove any bits of yourself in the process!

One day very soon GOTM locks tomorrow, so it will be in the December one - guaranteed!

Imho this is probably more relevant than any tonewood voodoo. Guitarists can be a superstitious bunch (speaking as a bass player ). Emotion plays a big part in how they perform - absence of brown M&Ms, lucky pants, etc. included. Haven't you watched Spinal Tap?

Get some new fret wire with a wider tang? You could then cut it to the lengths you need and hopefully they will stay put without glue

I've had some time on this recently and we finally seem to be there bar a few minor fettling issues. I've fixed the chips in the lacquer, polished up the frets and assembled it. Last night I finished and fitted the nut, cut the slots and strung it up for the first time. There were a couple of things that still could have been wrong. The neck alignment... ... which is fine, and the clearance on the E string from nut to tuner... ... also ok despite the long ramp So to finish off I need to sort the neck pickup out - it dropped off one of the adjustment screws, adjust the bridge as some of the grub screws are rattling, and take up the slack in the truss rod - I'm hoping that settles to have a little more relief. Anyway it was good enough to have a bit of a thrash last night Sexy pics and GOTM entry to follow soon!

How about going half way by gently sanding the back of the clear pickguard to make it semi-transparent?

What started as a "save" has turned into a very nice feature. Well done that man - a very elegant solution!

Thanks. You're absolutely right. As I've managed to avoid any major calamities throughout the build, I've gradually set the bar higher & higher for myself. Having "drawn the line" I set about polishing the rest of the neck up last night and am now itching to get it completed - definitely this year if not this month. I will give the body another polish though. The lacquer has sunk a bit in the time it's been sitting there, now showing a bit of grain pattern that definitely wasn't there before

Oh and just a slight note - I left the set square clamped in place while using the cabinet scraper. That helped keep the edge nice & sharp. It looks better in the photo than I remember

Welcome and congratulations on the early foot shot

Yay! Finally finished de-PhotoBucketing all 205 "old" photos in the thread! Unfortunately I can't fix any quoted images. It looks like the PG caching wasn't that successful. Never mind, they are all PG-native images now. It sure was fun revisiting the progress. I'll admit that I have been lacking in enthusiasm recently due to some of the setbacks, but will come out fighting again now. It may not be quite as perfect as I'd have liked, but it's still not bad for a first build

I suppose at some point you have to draw a line. As this is my first build and I really would like to finish it, this is where the line is going. It's far from perfect, but I pronounce myself back on track I'm really falling out with nitrocellulose though

Last night I finished cleaning up the edges of the board using my trusty 80 grit sanding beam, followed by my 180 grit beam. I'm doing a fair bit of sanding on the ebony having got a few chips on the few times I've waved a plane at it. It takes a bit longer but at less risk. I then had to file down the top of the truss rod washer as it was sitting a little proud. There's a thing I should have paid more attention to before gluing in the fillet Finally to round off the evening I made the vertical cut in the headstock plate. The nut will nestle up against it, so it needed to be nice and square. I clamped my set square in place to give me a guide, scored with an xacto-knife, then set about it with one of the nice new Japanese pull saws that my class have bought. I've not used one before, but it was a real joy to use and lovely & accurate I cut most of the way through the ebony until I could see the mahogany at the edges of the cut, then chipped off the ouffcut with a chisel. Otherwise I'd have been sawing down into the mahogany before the centre of the cut was through. Anyway a chisel carefully applied to the end grain chipped it away no problem - it's what ebony wants to do A little tidying with a cabinet scraper to remove the old Titebond squeeze out that was remaining, and the job's a good 'un

Wow

That looks much better. Nicely done

Let's try an update from my mobile phone... I glued in the truss rod fillet using epoxy And the next day took it down to level using a small violin plane followed by a scraper Edit: Ooh - that went quite well

I've found that microfibre cloth is quite good at removing the dust - if you want to keep your pants clean Wow. What a little cracker!

Love the underwater camera Nicely done

Wow! That's a fabulous inlay and a great demonstration of patience

Welcome and thanks for posting. That's some beautiful work and an excellent result!