Liquorice

I definitely have to try that. Next step in my building project would be neck and fretboard. I think it would be easier to glue neck and fretboard together if those blanks were as big as possible and after gluing cut them in shape. Then I thought that if I trim my necks in final width with a router, how big is the risk to damage fretboards sides ? Are fretboards sides normally prone to chipping easily ? Second mystery to me is that router cuts rounded corners on cavities, then how to match that accurately with that same bit ? I could shape the heel to match routerbits radius with handtools, but was wondering about a router template of some sort. And while writing this I thought of an idea to screw a ballbearing into a plywood or plywood sandwich and then rout it to match that radius. I would like to build all kind of templates out of mdf because it´s fast and easy, but there is not a single store selling that stuff in my city, can you imagine ?

Awesome video, always nice to hear self made instruments in action and not just looking at slideshows. Glad you changed your logo from abalone to decals, those abalone letters looked a little too busy in my eyes. And self made brass headpiece for that headless guitar was great.

Ok thanks, maybe I´ll try spool clamps on horns and squeeze the rest of body with some kind of clamping cauls. I remember that those pieces really came super slippery when there was glue between them. Some kind of indexing pin system would be great also. We´ll see what happens. I´m using my "shop time" now mainly on other building projects, such as a desktop for myself and other furniture. My favorite wood by far is birch and that my table is going to be made out of. Not the easiest to work with, but it´s so good looking in my eyes and pretty cheap in here too. I bought few pieces and few were own woods and best looking pieces I just had to reserve for other use (guitars). Cutting it in two was a really exciting incident. It started to cup and squeeze table saw´s blade and wanted to jump off the table, That wood in my hands and saw blade inside it raised my heartbeat a little. But as a reward there was really nice tiger effect on those pieces.

Yeah there can be flames in ash or oak or what not, I think it looks great. I have few flamed ash veneers on my thread that might be going on top of my guitars. I have done my roundings with 3mm radius bit (roughly 1/8th), It feels great in my hands and looks nice also. But there is that one ancient Ibanez drawing from the stone age lingering around web and it says that those edges are rounded with 2,5mm radius ( 1/10th). Houli bools I can´t remember if "it" is with a capital letter or not.

So, I was thinking again. Just thinking and not doing anything. About spool clamps that is. I messed up one top with a bad glueline with too few clamps. There simply was not even enough pressure from clamps. Maybe It could have been easier to glue top and body together when they were still whole blanks ?! Then again rough shaping bodylines is easier with thinner pieces. How have you guys solved this simple task ? I was thinking that spool clamps could give me more even pressure, and with my routing template on top It could be even better. But then again if there is thick plywood piece on top of guitar body, those screws in clamps would have to be super long. Are spool clamps strong enough to glue bodies evenly without any template bumpers ?

I bought this long piece of ash over two years ago, and back then I had no idea what to do with it other than guitars. I noticed from far away that in that ash-pile there is a blank big enough to make one piece bodies, so that I had to have (they sold only whole blanks). That blank was 2,5 meters long so it was cut in 5 pieces. I have two bodies with pretty straight grainlines, so to me those two doesn´t look that exciting. There was this idea floating that maybe I could put a flame veneer on top of these plain bodies (two pairs of veneers), but now I´m not so sure. Gluing those would be a pain, but i could always use routing templates as a clamping surface. Maybe glue one half at a time ? Then there are these other two with nicer grainlines and very clean edges from routing (made improvements in my routing technique). These won´t be having any veneering done but I have black grainfiller so maybe I´ll try that on one of these. Fifth body was split up and made in to a top and a bottom. By the way have you ever had to explain your compulsive behavior to yourself ? Like; I had to make these because they were looking at me.

I was planning my guitar projects, and while looking through my old photos there were few from my building process. Usually I just focus on the task at hand and not taking photos, but this time there were few somewhat successful ones. My routerplaner setup mostly aluminium, sledge would be great to build from aluminium too, but would need some kind of slippery plastic bottom. 3-piece neck blanks, somewhat curly maple and wallnut middle. Headstocks will be needing "earpieces" .

Great looking RG body, nice piece of ash. I did also my first two bodyshapes with drill, jigsaw and router, that was a tough job.

Yeah I bet it is, I got a taste of that while making templates out of thick plywood. And I have already sanded off routing marks from few bodies. It´s hard to tell what is sufficient enough, and if they are going to show in a certain angle only. There were also a few dents on my template which left few really shallow waves on the bottom part of bodies. Picture would tell more than words ofcourse but I think those kind of imperfections can be hidden with surface finish.

Little hard to see, but those scratches are mainly on inside curves of both horns. The hardest part to sand ofcourse. I didn´t secure my routing template with enough doublesided tape when routing this body. It was first of few bodies I made. It came out smaller than my template on the hornside but bottom is what it was meant to be. This body can´t be 7-stringer what I have been talking about because of smaller body but it´s going to be a guitar anyway. There are some dents and holes from too eager routing but I´ll leave them as is, too hard to fill and can´t sand shape any smaller.

Neven you seem to have worked a lot with ash, I have few ash bodies also. I´m not totally sure what kind of scratches will show in finished guitar body, because I haven´t finished that kind of wood yet. It seems that specially endgrain parts are showing those scratches pretty easily. Finish is going to be some kind of clearcoat, I have a bottle of truoil so maybe start with that. Ofcourse advice from anyone willing to share is taken with gratitude. I have sanded and then scraped to see what it looks like and then sanded again and so on... Is this method going to take me anywhere ? Can I finish on scraped surface or does it have to be a little coarse from sanding ?

I had two screws on the side of my scarf joint, apparently it wasn´t enough. To me it seems that absolutely hardest thing in any woodworking is making good glue joints, it needs a lot of planning and drytesting and quick hands. I was planning to use in next gluejoint some kind of bolts that go through the whole thing and then just lift them out after clamping. About fretboard gluing, I haven´t done that yet at all. I was thinking about it ofcourse and planned to pin fretboard from locking nut screwholes and from body end, there is extra wood that I can cut off. Can´t wait to take some photos and showing off my mistakes

Thanks Neven for a great point, I was a little afraid of proceeding because of fear of ruining my headstock. When rotating tunerline do you redraw the whole headstock ? I think I can now draw my own plan with your example. When I was glueing scarf joints on my necks everything went well but at some point those headstocks shifted a little and had to be separated. I was affraid of reglueing those necks and sure did learn a lot about glueing wood. I was also a little too eager to jump on to next stage and shaped those headstocks already in rough shape. Then I decided I wasn´t satisfied with my work and cut those headstocks out of necks. Soooo that means that I just now have to make my plans using those preshaped headstocks.

Hey thanks, I somehow missread that max file size is 0,5 mb. Ok so I´ll just add that same picture in here also.

Not too much progress has happened on my guitar projects, but I´m slowly getting back to it. Few other projects are on my list first. Even some of my christmas presents are still rough planks. So many questions and so many things to do, but I wont litter one post too much because some questions might get lost in text wall. I was thinking how to embed pictures in my post. I don´t yet have any picture sharing account but I have used dropbox so I´ll just try that first. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ax3jbv9zscg2tx7/WP_20171218_12_18_18_Pro.jpg?dl=0 About that picture; It´s showing two of my 7-string ibanez style headstock templates. One on the left is a little shorter and one on the right is stretched 6-strings drawing. Left one has centerline on the center of stringlines, so stringlines might match nicely. Tuner posts are not perfectly spaced though and it looks in my mind that last tuner is too close to end of headstock. Shape leans more to right than other model. Right one is too long and centerline doesn´t match with stringlines. Just so that if anyone finds those plans online and is planning an Ibanez style build then these are my discoveries. I have compared these with pictures of real headstocks and none of them seems to match perfectly. Anyways what I finally decided to do is to build them both with minor changes and then see witch one I like better.

Thanks a lot Scott, i´ve already enjoyed every step on the way. Working with wood is so pleasing to me. And you know what they say about hobbies, "if it doesn´t take all your money then you have wrong hobby". I was going to use locking nut with string retainer if needed. Neck angle somewhere around 12 degrees, so I wasn´t worried about strings lining up perfectly. Though it would look better if strings continued in a straight line from nut to end of headstock. I quess I just have to draw those tuners and plan the angle of straight side of headstock to match spacing of locking nut if i want straight and even spacing of strings. I believe tuning machine makers have recommended spacings for their tuner models so maybe start planning from there then.

Thanks guys I like to draw by hand and I´m using autocad to mainly printing some templates or other shapes. Working with autocad is pretty slow for me so I just use it as an additional tool. Dwg-file is CAD file and for future it would be best to start learning to draw with computers better, but I´m more pen and paper kind of guy. One of my building projects is going to be a drawing table with real old school architects rulers and aluminiun rails. About functionality or looks, I wasn´t trying to create exact replica because then I could just buy the real deal. I wasn´t worried about functionality either, not until now because it indeed looks like my design might be 20+ mm longer than factory neck and maybe it won´t fit in case ? Never had an Ibanez case in my hands so don`t know about that. I dont have much first hand experience with different kind of guitar equipment, only from pictures. Never played live, only bedroom gigs. It would be so convinient to have a bunch of musician friends to test all kind of gear and take measurements. Yeah I quess Andy you are right about putting something my own on my guitars, I don´t want exact replicas but in style of original. I do this same mistake often that im too obsessed about little details that I forget about the big picture. Quickest way to overcome shortsightedness is to ask another opinion. Thanks for easing my mind. If I find myself making progress on my projects should I just post It here or always make a new thread ?

Hello I am building my first few guitars right now and as I make progress I sometimes get disheartened by many questions floating around and by lack of experience. I have already read a whole lot about guitar building and spent time reading on many forums including this one. I really like the atmosphere in here so decided finally to join in. I like Ibanez style headstock and body shape, but sadly I don`t have any Ibanez guitars. So I decided to build a few guitars in the spirit of Ibanez and not exact replicas. I bet many others have battled with headstock shapes but I couldn`t find a good source for 7-string headstock. I have a dwg-drawing of 6-string ibanez JEM made by someone enthusiastic about guitars but not totally sure about 7-string shape. I took that 6-string shape and lenghtened it with one more tuner and redraw the rest of headstock by hand. Now this looks good to my eye, except that my neckblank has a brown middle laminate of wallnut and if you follow the centerline of neck to the end of headstock it doesn`t come out same point as it would in Ibanez headstock. So in other words headstock is balanced a little bit differently. I actually have one dwg-drawing of Ibanez Universe with headstock shape on it. It leans a little bit more on right side and looks shorter, too short compared to pictures because last tuner looks too close to the end of headstock. So i figured that it must be drawn from a picture with headstock leaning away from camera, that would cause headstock to shorten up a bit and to lean more on right. Thats what I noticed when looking at pictures and comparing them. So the real Ibanez 7-string headstock is leaning more to right (front view) than my modified and stretched 6-string headstock. Was that universe headstock legit after all ? How long are those headstocks usually (6 & 7 string) measured along straight side of headstock ? Anyone have any first hand experience with this ? I quess there could be more potential Ibanez experts on that one other forum, but I like this friendly atmosphere better so that`s why I`m reaching out in here.