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Worked on this pretty late into the night trying to finish thicknessing the top until I had a little mishap with my router, I got pretty dang lucky here. I had my extra long router base on the router, shut the power off and grabbed the base, while the motor was winding down my hand slipped and took a good chunk out of 2 of my fingers!! A little peroxide and gauze and were good to go, finished thicknessing the top this morning. I had to go a little thinner than I originally planned, I wanted to go to 1/4" but ended up at 3/16" but it's nice and sturdy I think it should hold up just fine.

I guess I can go ahead and get a build thread going on this and get it caught up, I started this build on Wednesday. This will be a thin line tele type build. Specs, african mahogany body, curly maple top, curly maple neck, Birdseye maple 22 fret fretboard, Purple Heart veneer between the neck and fretboard, back of the headstock and heel will be Purple Heart, bigsby (haven't gotten yet), filtertron pickups (haven't gotten yet), lmi dual action truss rod with a spoke wheel, medium jumbo fretwire, gotoh tuners (haven't gotten yet.

No just over to the hill country! My family has been getting hit over there pretty hard lol.

Haha I don't know about the only person but I am surprised this didn't arise before now. It is a great product and lots of people use them so it's kind of surprising.

Looks great!! In my experience with doing laminated scarf joints, you may want the laminate on the back side of the neck to be moved down just a hair. On my first attempt at this I had it almost the same as you and would have had a void where the laminate met the back of the headstock. May just be the way the picture was taken tho.

That's awesome man!! I'm glad that I came in the ball park, thank you for getting in contact with them and letting them know.

Scott I think you're onto something here, I tried and tried to get the black to work. Switched over to the brown from a little guidance from a couple guys and I think the brown is just close enough but darker to the Amber that it worked so much better!

^^ this makes sense to me! And as I am learning there is a very fine line between not enough pigment and to much pigment. Just a 1/4 cup of extra water with the same amount of pigment can totally change the outcome of the dye. This time I started with 3/4 cup of water instead of 1/4 cup and the same amount of dye and just slowly added dye till a decent color was achieved.

Thanks guys! Simpleone, I'm kinda thinking about mixing up a darker mix of the Amber, yellow, red mix and doing a slight burst around the very edges but I'm not sure if I'm going to go that route yet or not. Pros, I agree now that I see it. On this last test I made up my Amber and brown dyes super diluted and slowly added color till I got the darkness that I wanted, I can see the difference between the 2 pieces and I think it looks much better when it's not super concentrated. I was thinking the ugly spots was just because my sand back sucks but I don't think that is the case anymore.

This is the finish for the maple that I came up with after reading komodo's post, what I did was dye Amber, sand back, dye brown, sand back, dye Amber, dye Amber/yellow/red mixture.

Not really a whole lot to show tonight but I have been trying a bunch of different finishes. I Re read komodo's build thread on the dragon today and kind of got the idea of what he did on his finish, while mine isn't looking quite like his I'm thinking I'm happy with this, I also tried a bunch of different finishes for the mahogany back and neck. I think we decided on the brown ignore the maple pieces in here that's not the one we are going with I also got the neck finish sanded and the belly cut carved.

Not really a whole lot to show tonight but I have been trying a bunch of different finishes. I Re read komodo's build thread on the dragon today and kind of got the idea of what he did on his finish, while mine isn't looking quite like his I'm thinking I'm happy with this, I also tried a bunch of different finishes for the mahogany back and neck. I think we decided on the brown ignore the maple pieces in here that's not the best way be we are going with I also got the neck finish sanded and the belly cut carved.

@komodo Carl, brought to my attention/reminded me of your "dragon" guitar. That is a very close finish to what I am trying to achieve here, would you mind walking me thru your steps and dye mixtures? This guitar imperticular.

I do see what you're saying Carl, so should I dilute the darker colors or dilute the Amber/yellow mix. It had these darker specs in it that I don't like which is what I think you're talking about. I tried sanding back more on the darker color but then it just made the dark lines smaller than I liked.

I have a spray setup and I still get orange peel, I also can't get a dust free environment with my setup so an hour after each coat I lightly sand with 600 grit to knock it down. As for the orange peel I've had pretty good luck with being able to get rid of it all after all my coats have been sprayed and the finish cured. It takes me a lot of wet sanding but I get rid of it eventually. nice work man, it's coming along nicely!

I thought I remembered seeing that somewhere, I'll read thru that thread agin, thanks simpleone! I usually ca glue my fret ends when I do a fret job so I figured it wouldn't be much different than that except for cutting the tangs. I test dyed a few pieces today and I think I've got a winner, I'm gonna post the formula in here so I don't forget when it comes time to dye. 1/8tsp brown dye in 1/4 cup of water apply one coat, sand back 80-320, 3 coats of 1/8tsp Amber 3/8tsp yellow 1/4 cup of water, vinyl sealer, nitro lacquer.

Also, I don't know what happened but after using my neck in all those test pieces to figure out the location of the tremolo I went to put the neck into the real pocket on the guitar and it was pretty loose again, I don't know what would have caused this but I went ahead and glued another piece of veneer to the other side and now the neck doesn't fit so I will be able to slowly sand the neck until I have the perfect fit, again!!

Haha yeah it could have gone horribly wrong but I just took it slow and kept a good hold, although I probably won't do it again. Hmm filler stick hadn't thought of that. Something like this?

It's been a decently busy morning in the shop today, got the control cavity routed, the cover shelfs routed (had to get a little creative here), radiused the fretboard to 12", finish sanded the fretboard to 600 grit, drilled the tuner holes and test fit the tuners. For the cavity cover shelfs I didn't have a router bit short enough to cut it so I put a couple blocks of wood under my template and used my 1" depth bit. I probably should have just cut my template into a thicker piece of wood and used that as a template but this worked decently well. I need to recut my fret slots, and take my fret wire up to a shop in Tulsa to have the guy that radiuses my fretwire run it thru his bender. I kept all the rosewood dust from when I radiused the fretboard and I'm wanting to hide my fret ends with that, how does that work? Cut the tangs short so they don't go all the way to the edge of the fretboard, make a dust/ca glue mixture and push it into the slots, then just sand it down?

You aren't to the mahogany yet, you are at the sanding sealer. The reddish wood you are seeing is the sealer, Ibanez's sealer is the devil!! The light color that came up would be the mahogany.

Thanks for all your help curtisa, it's much appreciated. Simpleone89 yes it really had me on my toes, it's taken me quite a while to figure everything out but I'm glad it's good! i also got the rear cavities routed tonight, I plan to get the control cavities and the cover recesses cut tomorrow.

I had a little bit of tear out of the stud mounts and I nearly wanted to cry lol.

Ok, got this sorted out! So for anyone that needs this information in the future, the front of the cavity should be .250 from your scale length line and the center of the holes for the stud mounts should be .240 from the scale line. The scale line is almost directly in the middle of the front of the cavity and the center of the stud mounts.

I agree Carl, I am trying to work out where the placement actually needs to be and once I figured that out I figured I would try and contact them to let them know but I think you had told me in the past that you've talked with them quite a bit before so if you'd like to that is fine.

Ok so the hipshot print is definitely off, I'm really glad that I took the time to check the print to the guitar before just starting to cut. I wonder how many people have been screwed over by this. Anyways, I went to lowes today and bought a 2x6, cut my mortise in one end, inserted my neck, marked my scale line and cut the top routes and mounting holes to the exact measurements of the hipshot print. As you can see with the front of the cavity on the scale line and the mounting holes .490 from the front of the cavity, with my tremolo up against the mounting screws and the high e exactly where I want it on the bridge the edge of the saddle is waaayy past the scale line. In order to get the break point of the saddle on the scale line I have to max out the screw on the saddle as you can see in the forth pic. Now I have to figure out how to figure out where this is really suppose to go, which I'm not really sure how to do at this point Excuse all the tear out, I really hate pine lol