2.5itim

Ok we are back in business here! I found my center line on the neck and figured out that the neck pocket was slightly off center from the center of the body towards the treble side so I glued up a piece of maple veneer on that side to push the neck back over to center and now we are all centered up and a nice tight fit!!

My god that looks great! I love Sabres! If you find some time please explain how you carved the radius of the top and back.

With single action rods you have to do a curved channel, is this correct? That's mainly the reason I've went with dual action each time.

The primer is water based, I might just have to bite the bullet and pay $22 for transtint black pigment and mix that into nitro lacquer to get rid of the shellac all together. It seems that transtint is the only thing I can find that will mix with nitro and I think if I leave the nitro on for enough time to "cure" before applying the primer I may get good results. Im going to bring all of my spare ash to work and run it thru the media blaster because I'm starting to run out of test pieces lol.

On all of my neck I have used the stewmac lo pro and lmi which both have a depth of .375 and my fretboard thickness I always cut them to .25" thick, I always cut my necks to .780 1st fret thickness to .830 12th fret thickness, doing this I know that I will always have .150" of wood under the truss rod at the 1st fret and don't have to worry about doing math anymore, now I just simply measure real quick and cut.

I think that is what's happening. The white primer does dry really fast so with not waiting long enough for the shellac to dry it just pulls everything off, but the middle there was after waiting a day to dry. I also bought more nitro planning on tinting that black but I can't find a pigment to tint it anywhere.

Ok this looks terrible but I feel like I'm starting to somewhat get somewhere with this! This test piece is painted black, one light coat of shellac, white primer and then took the primer back with 0000 steel wool. I didn't wait long enough during steps for the materials to dry so I pulled some of the black off. It looks terrible due to this but I see potential. I have another piece that instead of using black paint with shellac on top I just tinted the shellac black with a pigment, this one is drying right now so we will see how it works out. If it's not any better I will be going back to the paint+shellac.

Hmm that's strange! I never get a cough and very rarely were a dust mask, the dust masks just don't do much for me with the big beard. I don't know if it's possible to be allergic to poplar? But maybe that could be it?

That's similar to how it is here in ok but backwards, west is all dessert, central is all plains and east as you get closer to Arkansas it starts to get into big hills/small mountains. Anyways it's nice to see another neighbor here, if your ever over in ok give me a holler and I'll get ya a beer.

Wow, that's really impressive for New Mexico! I haven't been there in years but I remember it being dry, we go hunting in western ok pretty close to Nm and it's pretty much like desert over there.

Holy crap tho! I don't know where he is in this world but that's some nice grass!!! Here in Oklahoma we get like 2 months with rain and the rest is dry so there's no way I could get grass to grow that nice, his almost looks like turf it's so perfect lol

The guy that is getting this guitar doesn't want 3 humbuckers he just wants a neck and bridge.

Give me the run down when you get it sorted out if you don't mind! I was thinking of making a copy carver to do it.

I think a big reason that I didn't like the finish was because it wasn't what I had originally planned for this guitar, so with that in mind I can't really do the finish that I had originally planned on because of the screw up with the pickup cavity. So what I've came up with since I've already pore filled the top to be smooth under paint I taped off the middle from the neck pocket to just passed the bridge and then I wire brushed all the pore filler out of the rest of the top. What im hoping to achieve here is to have a solid opaque center to cover up my screw up and then the rest of the top will be the "gothic" finish that I had originally planned on doing. So fingers crossed that this will come out looking good, now I'm gonna spend this next week trying to achieve this gothic finish.

After lots and lots of time to sit and think about this I really did not like the way this finish came out, so this is how the body currently sits. Really 90% of it was lack of preparation so I decided to completely sand it down and start all over. Im thinking about completely changing the way I finish this one yet again, I'm going to ponder over it a bit and see what I come up with.

I do too pros, as I've mentioned before I have always loved ibanez Sabres and I could see it being a huge pain to do the "arched" body the way ibanez does so I just figured I'd make this one as thin as I possibly could to still give me that same "feel" while it still being a flat top.

Thank you very much andy!

I crutched my way out to the shop today, I just couldn't stand being confined anymore. So I finish sanded, polished and started assembly on this one. I still need to make my cavity covers, wire it up and order my last 2 tuners if they will ever come off backorder. Anyways we are almost finished with this one and I'm getting super excited! Lol

Honestly I knew that I shouldn't do it but it's the only way that I could think of to do it, I really screwed myself by cutting the pickup cavity first, if I hadn't of done that I could have just used my regular bearing router bit. I took extra precaution to cut all the material out without touching the template until the final cleanup pass but I guess even still it made my template bigger. Well, lesson learned and now gotta focus on getting it fixed!

Pros, the only reason that I could think that this happened was because I used 2 different router bits. For the test pieces I used a 3/4" bit with a bearing, for the actual pieces I used a 1/2" bit without a bearing and just used the shaft to run along the template. That's the only difference between them so it must be it.

Thanks Andy, I appreciate that!

Yeah I'm really itching to get out there and try to get this sorted out but It's gonna be a bit, I think that I can make the veneer work, I'm gonna go to woodcraft and get some maple veneer at some point to try and make it a little less noticeable. Thanks scott, this is my 3rd go around of dislocated knees but the first one on this leg. I think I was just plagued with bad knees from the get go.

Well I got my neck pocket cut last Thursday, I don't know what the hell happened but I practiced on 2 scrap boards and those the neck fit perfect, nice and snug! I routed it on my body and now the pocket is to big, I can almost squeeze in 2 pieces of .023 veneer. I blew my knee out on thursday night so I have a while to think about how I'm gonna fix this. I'm kind of thinking about glueing 2 pieces of veneer on each side of the pocket and then my neck should fit tight, what do y'all think?

Well I shouldn't have routed the pickup cavities on this type of neck pocket before the neck pocket itself, now after a $150 bill I think I can finally get this neck pocket routed tomorrow when my new router shows up. Because the longest template bearing I can get in 1/4" shaft which is what my router is was 1", and because around the pickup cavity area there's nothing for my bearing to run along anymore since that material is already gone. So I had to go to woodcraft and get a 1/2" shaft 1/2" diameter 1-5/8" cutting length bit (which doesn't have a bearing so I'm just going to run the shaft along my template which should work fine I think), but because of the 1/2" shank I had to buy a new router which they didn't have in stock so I had to order it and it will be here tomorrow. So today I got my neck pocket taper jig sorted out, at 12" from the front of my body I need the template raised .420 off the face of the body to give me my taper, so I cut a piece of wood at .420 to use as a riser block, double sided tape, regular tape and clamps this dude shouldn't be moving anywhere.

I think you're right pros, I will just focus on the 2nd design for now and bin the first one until I can figure out how to take what you are saying and put it to paper I guess. I had a friend contact me today that wants me to do a chambered body single cut tele thinline type guitar for him so both of these may be put on the back burner for a little while.