beltjones

I made more progress today. I used my 5 minute, $1 MDF truss rod routing template to route the slot in my son's guitar. Then I cut the angle on the headstock. Then I prepped the Peruvian walnut / Spanish cedar for the body of this guitar... Then I cut them out on the band saw and glued them up. Later I'll get the neck blank shaped up and glue on the body wings using dowels to locate them.

I'm not an expert on wiring, but with 50s wiring the tone caps are connected to different lugs on the volume caps than modern wiring. The result is that turning down the volume pot doesn't bleed off treble like it does with a modern volume pot. I need to be better about taking pictures. Today I cut fret slots on both fretboards using my 5 minutes MDF fret slotting jig, and I started working on body shapes. I ALSO realized that I totally fouled up the black limba body blanks I had planned to use. So now I need to think about whether to try to save them or just head back to the hardware store to see if they still have that 5/4 piece of mahogany they had last time I was there.

My son just turned 8 months old, so I figured it was time to build him his own guitar. At the same time I'm going to build one for myself as well. The blank on the left is for the boy. It's purpleheart, tigrillo, and wenge. The one on the right is for me, which is four pieces of book-matched bubinga. My son's is going to be a 24" scale, 22 fret single cut with Spanish Cedar wings and either a Peruvian walnut or curly maple top (I haven't decided which) and a curupay fretboard. It will have a single bridge pickup (an SD pearly gates humbucker I have leftover from another project) with a volume and tone control wired 50's style. I had to order a shorter truss rod for it, so while I'm waiting for that to arrive I've been making progress on the other one. This one will have P90s also wired 50s style with black limba wings and a curly maple top. It will have a 25" scale and 22 or 23 frets on a katalox fretboard. Thanks in advance for all of the help I'm going to need with these builds...

Hahaha. Yeah, I dug those out of my screw organizer. I didn't think they would be so noticeable.

Oh yeah, the wiring: It has a three way switch and three push / push pots. It goes neck volume, bridge volume, master tone. The neck volume splits the coils on both pickups, the bridge volume switches both from series to parallel, and the tone control is a "blower switch" that sends the bridge pickup directly to the jack.

Ok, it's "done." Some really cool figuring came through on the body. I really like the "raw" padauk fretboard. I'm surprised it isn't used more often. It's not plasticy-glass smooth like ebony, but with the open pores it's not that far off from rosewood. I made a little curly maple truss rod access cover. I left the neck "raw" with just one coat of tru-oil, rubbed back with steel wool. The neck is still a little fat, and I'm going to open up that belly carve a little bit and re-do the finish, but otherwise I'm really happy with how it turned out. I know the paduak will darken over time, and I'm ok with that, but the current burnt orange color is awesome. It makes me want to do an all-paduak guitar ala our friend in New Mexico.

I'm not good at taking compliments, but thanks guys. I really appreciate the kind words.

Well I guess I'm done with the finishing. It's had ~15-20 coats of tru-oil that I leveled between coats and that I just buffed with some Meguiars and a wool pad on my orbit sander. It's not nearly as good as Scott's work with tru-oil, but I'll take it. It looks way better in person than it does in my crappy photos. I also installed the ferules and the bridge. If I had nothing to do tomorrow I'm pretty sure I could get it all wired up and set up, but I think I'll stretch it out a little further just because I don't want to be done just yet.

A funny thing happened the other day. I was opening a new bottle of transtint red mahogany that I'm using to dye a piece of curly maple for the truss rod cover. I cut a tiny amount off the nipple, and blood-red dye shot forth like a damn squirt gun. It got all over my bench, all over the floor of my garage, and all over my face. I started to wipe down the bench when it occurred to me that if I didn't get that dye off my face immediately I would be walking around town like Captain America's nemesis Red Mask. When I first looked in the mirror it looked like someone had thrown a cup full of blood all over my face and bald head. It took quite a bit of scrubbing, and luckily my face was pretty sweaty and oily that day, but I got it off.

I've been putting on a coat of tru-oil pretty much every day for the last week and a half, minus a few days when I have been traveling. It's starting to look good.Also, this happened. The one on the right is four-piece book-matched Bubinga, and the one on the left is quartersawn purpleheart, tigrillo, and wenge.

Awesome! How thick are the pieces for the body and the top?

I applied the first coat of tru-oil yesterday afternoon. My plan is to only do one sort of "matte" coat on the fretboard and neck, and to do multiple coats with an attempt at grainfilling on the body. Later I'll level and polish the body and see how it looks. I'm not sure how many coats I'll do, but the number will be somewhere south of ScottR's 30 on his stripy doublecut. I don't think I have that much patience, skill, or tru-oil. The oil on the fretboard really made the padauk come to life with some really amazing, almost iridescent, lines and stripes.

I was out of town for a few days, and at this point all of the progress is small stuff that you wouldn't necessarily notice in a photo, like sanding. I did re-bleach the top after finish sanding to 400 grit paper, and next it's time to start applying the final finish. I also made a little cover for the truss rod access hole with some curly maple off-cut I had lying around. I'm going to dye and sand it back a couple of times to hopefully pop the grain a little bit.

I strung it up just to see if it played reasonably well, and even without a proper setup it played well. The action was too high at the nut and I need to radius the bridge, and with the strings on suddenly the neck felt huge, like a baseball bat, but otherwise we're in good shape.

Ok, I took off the masking tape because it's about time to finish sand and apply the oil finish to this thing, but first I'm going to string it up and test it out before I go through all that. I figure it would be a real bummer to spend ~25 hours applying finish, sanding it back, and repeating only to find out that I have to plug and redrill the bridge and ruin the finish, ya dig? In the meantime I snapped a picture. I also wiped it down with some mineral spirits to remove some adhesive left behind by the cheapo masking tape, which is why parts look wet and other parts look dry.

This is how the paint is described on their website: "DO NOT CONFUSE this with the lame watered down stuff they sell elsewhere- This is the best.I package a 1 ounce bottle with a nice stiff brush. This is water soluble so cleanup is a snap! This stuff is so thick and adheres so well I think you'll be able to do 4,5 or even 6 guitars with one bottle!" So I asked how thick it's supposed to be, which should be an easy question to answer. Something like, "About the same as latex house paint," or, "Like maple syrup," or "Fluid, but dense, like Mercury," or any kind of description or comparison, really. This is what I got back: "In answer to your question, its fluid, its not especially thick or thin in nature. Again I am not sure what your issue might be. As I stated before we sell a ton of this stuff and have very few complaints whatsover." I guess I should read the rules here as they relate to talking about bad suppliers, but I figured someone else might save themselves from the same mistake I made.

I've asked guitarfetish twice how thick this shielding paint is supposed to be, and they emailed a response that didn't address that question at all. They did offer to send me another bottle, but I'm reminded of the time I was in high school driving around with my buddy, Mike. We stopped at a convenience store to grab a snack, and Mike bought some beef jerky. We got back on the road and he ate a piece, and it turned out to be pup-peroni, a jerky treat for dogs. He turned around and went back to the store to ask for his money back, but they refused, and instead gave him more pup-peroni sticks, which he ate (and it made him sick). The moral of the story is that more of bad thing is not as good as cutting your losses and trying something else.

I made cavity covers out of some left over black limba.

Right, I'm getting nothing. I emailed guitarfetish.com again asking about how thick the liquid is supposed to be. Mine is super thin - I think maybe they didn't homogenize before aliquoting into the little bottles.

That last sentence about trump is exactly what I thought when I read the email. My in-laws are in town, coincidentally, and they're both retired electrical engineers. I showed them the bottle of shielding paint which specifies 105 ohms of resistivity per square inch. They were both confused by the specs. I'm going to go try to find a light bulb with two posts and a nine volt battery and do a science experiement with my f-i-l.

I got this message back from guitarfetish.com. It is NOT going to show resistance on a meter- Try this- run a 9 volt battery to a lightbulb- attach negative to one post of the the bulb, touch the other to the dried paint and touch the positive from the battery to the paint as far away as you can- you'll find this paint will pass current like nothing else- You could paint two stripes on the floor and light up a lightbulb 30 yards away! It produces a near perfect faraday cage and we have sold thousands- and people are reporting excellent results!

Let me know how it works out (or I"ll just keep checking your build thread(s), that's probably easier).

I ordered some shielding paint and painted cavities, and drilled the string-through holes with a drill press. The bit wandered a tiny amount in the wood, but I think I can square the holes up a bit when I drill the recesses for the string ferules. The shielding paint looks good to me, but I can't get a read with my multimeter on it at all. I used www.guitarfetish.com's shielding paint, and it specifies 105 ohms per square inch of resistivity (not sure how that differs from resistance), but if I set my multimeter to 200 ohms it doesn't show a resistance reading at all. Anyone know about this stuff?

I'm at the stage of the build where a backordered part or tool sets the whole timeline back. Previously if I didn't have a part I could just look at my list of to-dos and pick something else to work on, but now everything is sequenced to the point that if I can't work on the next step then I can't work on anything. For example, I pulled out my little can of shielding paint only to find that it was solid as a rock. I ordered more, but until it arrives I can't really proceed to wiring anything, and in the meantime I have the whole thing masked off so final sanding of the body and finishing is going to have to wait.

Spoiler alert: Everything turned out ok. With the nut cut it's time to mount tuners. So I used a template I made earlier (top right in the picture) to lay out where the tuners would go, then double checked against the nut slots to hopefully get as close to a straight string pull as possible. Then I marked the drill points with an awl, and drilled pilot holes with a small drill bit. The hipshot tuners call for a 10mm bit, and previously I purchased a 10mm brad-point bit just for this task. I aligned the brad point with the pilot hole for the low E string tuner and reminded myself to go slow, keep the bit straight, and the pressure light. My plan was to drill about half way through from the front, then flip the guitar over and drill most of the other way from the back, and then lightly, lightly finish from the front. I began to drill and quickly learned that this drill bit was the dullest piece of crap I've ever used. I began adding more and more pressure to try to get the bit to bite, and mostly I just created enough friction to burn a hole through the wood. I should have just stopped there and bought a new bit. Instead I applied pretty much all the pressure I could and drilled that mother. By the time I finished drilling the first half of each of the 6 tuning peg holes the drill was almost too hot to touch. I let it cool off for a second and flipped the guitar over and started again from the back. Finally the joint between the shank of the bit and the cutting end failed, and I tossed it in the trash. I ended up finishing each hole with a reamer and a small circular file and then did a test fit of the tuners, and everything fit well. Instead of straight sides on the nut, I made them fit the curvature of the headstock. I'm not sure I like it though. I might straighten all that out later.