mistermikev

congratulations!  couldn't happen to a nicer guy, or a better build.  earned every oz imo.

1 hour ago, komodo said:

Back of headstock veneered. The piece was probably too thick, it mostly clamped down but theres a bit of a glueline around the volute. It’ll may be subdued after oiling, or I can do some tricks to remove and fill. For now I’m moving on with fretting and getting the neck glued in. Thrilled with the grain matching.

wow, nice job matching that.

+1 lovely finish.

4 minutes ago, Dantahoua said:

Sadly it's my last piece of figured birch... Next one will be Quilted maple...  

jeez, I'd like to have your 'problems'!

wow, this is a really cool build and I think I'm in love with your birch!

9 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

I might have aligned the raiser strips along the edges of the fretboard. However, after a second thought I realized that your way was the right one for keeping the fretboard uniformly above the router table.

Re banding and binding... You know why it's called "binding", don't you? For those who didn't know, they used to bind the banding using bast or leather bands.

did they bind the banding or band the binding?  I'm confused.

on this note: binding... I've seen a lot of guys do binding on the board prior to attaching to the neck stock.  I'm going to try this on my les flawes but for me it looks so much nicer to have a consistent thickness of binding all they way down the neck.  long story short... you binding looks good!

good to know.  have not tried indian but it is now on my list.  thanks for that (or curse you for that... one more thing on my 'must try' list!)

wow, that is some beauty ebony.  is it dyed or naturally that black?  if dyed... what did you use?  love it.

sounds about right to me.  I don't think danish oil will seal off well enough for faux binding - might want to use lacquer.  Maybe if you did many coats it would work, but I doubt it.  I did my first build with danish... and after 3 days I put on the shielding paint.  got some on the finish... and it sort of mixed in with it as I tried to get it off.  was very difficult to get back off... in fact never did get it completely off as it left a little dark spot.  beautiful finish tho. 

also, my experience with danish is that is take a long time to dry too.  true oil dries much faster and that's what I was used to. 

3 minutes ago, killemall8 said:

Havent updated in a while.
had a rough month. Ive ruined 6/8 guitars, including one day with a rare top.
Hit a huge wall where no matter how long of a break i take, i come back and make mistakes.

Dont know why it always goes in phases like this. I make some great guitars, then out of nowhere i cant even measure a pickup cavity location correctly.
hope everybody else's builds are going better.

I hit a similar phase recently.  when I started my recent project I cut the neck angle a little deep on a blank and it was too short of r a 25.5scale guitar.  then later, accidentally bought a 24.75 sl fretboard and realized it wasn't 25.5 once I had the inlays in.  ok, I go back to the shorter blank.  got the truss in, fretboard glued on and mounted it on the guitar to realize I forgot to cut the heel shorter.  back and forth, back and forth.  oh well.

I think sometimes you just need to step away and get yer mind right.  Here's to better days for you and me both!

ah... also I've found that for some reason... in the cold finish/wood somehow seems to get softer or is otherwise more likely to dent.  I don't know if there is any science to back that up... but I seem to recall when living in WI if I took a guitar out to my car and dinged it in the winter I was guaranteed to see damage later.

you must have a weird soft alder up there.  the alder I've seen nearby is not hard... but about the hardness of ash or a little harder.

31 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

The blanks are wide and thick enough for a two piece body if you're not too nitpicky about the thickness (1.5"). I've used them for the wings for a couple of my thru-necks with a top. On the con side, they're fast grown wood and rounded on the edges which has to be cut off before joining.

sounds like a perfect candidate for a 1/4" top!

1 hour ago, Bizman62 said:

They sell wood in our hardware stores as well: Pine and spruce as blanks and beams and panels for building frames, covering walls both inside and outside and making floors. Large boards made of finger jointed slats are also commonly sold for hobbyist furniture builders. In the sauna section there's aspen and lately also torrefied alder. Oak is sold as skirtings and thresholds, readily planed and often even lacquered. Even birch can be a little hard to find except for furniture grade plywood despite it growing everywhere! Most likely it goes directly to the plywood factories.

right on... well that actually sounds nice: torrefied alder - could def make a nice strat if you get a big 'nuff piece. 

at my hardware store they've actually started carrying walnut - you can get 3/4 x 7" x 2' for around $8.  I always look to see if there is any figure in there but nothing yet.  they also sell 3/4" mahog by the bdft.  there have been challenges over at tdpri to build an entire guitar out of things you find at home depot.  obviously frets and hardware would be sourced elsewhere but I admire the creativity of those guys.  There's a gent over there that built a tele bridge entirely from scrap... and it was easily one of the nicest I've seen... but man what  lot of work that would be!

nicely done.

11 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

That's what I was talking about all the time as I remembered you having a router sled for thicknessing and routing neck break angles into bodies. It just takes a while for us to speak the same language!

Nice wood, btw. There's no place within 300 miles I could find anything like those.

right on.  I hear ya on the language barrier... I am really good at finding ambiguity in things people say so that is my own language barrier within my own language!

In theory it could be done with my planer but I'd have to raise the neck off the bed and it would leave 1/2" round edges... so I thought a little jig might make the whole job a lot less cumbersome. 

the wood - we are lucky in the us but I am esp lucky here in phoenix.  there are probably 10 stores I can get any kind of figured wood I want - but I try to find the deals.  every time I go to the hardware store I always take a walk thru the wood section - can't help myself.  figured oak is not that desireable for guitar, as it is super heavy... and hard as hell.  that said I just have a weak spot for it.  each board is 3/4" x 11.25" x 24".  $30 well spent.   something for a project to dream about anyway.

54 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

How about changeable tops and fitting blocks for different purposes? A wide one with a centerlineand a slot for thicknessing the heel in an angle?

 

interesting idea for sure.  I could actually do that on my router sled... the reason I needed this jig is that I couldn't do the sides w/o moving things.

stop coming up with ideas bizman - I'm def NOT going back to the hardware store!  (jk)

look what happened the first time:

going to have a carved top figured red oak build in my future!

22 minutes ago, ShatnersBassoon said:

This is such a gorgeous guitar Mike and it sounds so beautiful! A lovely take on an old design with some interesting tonal options!

thank you very much for saying so mr bassoon.  what you describe is exactly what I was going for vintage/modern and it makes me happy to know that's coming across.  very much appreciate the feedback!

"IT'S GOOD!"  (holding both arms up for field goal)

Just now, Bizman62 said:

Exactly. With a "box" you'll create an external slope if only you can get the bottom of your piece laying flat. The size of the tilting box determines how large a piece you can work on. For a neck pocket jig you'd need a tilting box about 12" wide and 4" tall in the inside. Plus a template for the neck pocket. And you're right about the long bolt. Hammer T-nuts in the insides of the bottom wings and screw short wing bolts from the outside. The illustration shows the basic idea, make it narrower for the neck or wide for the body to fit in.

funny, your quick design doc is a better illustration than mine - nice work - at least one of us knows what is going on!  I'm not planning on using this to cut the neck pocket... just the rebate on the neck blank.  the blank doesn't have a fretboard on it yet so it will clamp flat to the bottom piece.  probably make it only 3" wide - just wide enough to get a neck through.  t nuts are a good idea.  can't do wingnuts on the outside because the router has to be able to run on 3 sides of it to get a consistent angle on 3 sides of the neck blank... so I'll probably just use a forstner to countersing a lag bolt and then tighten via socket.

thank you for your input bizman.  I believe the idea has def improved based on your contributions.  heading to the hardware store now.

cheers

Just now, Bizman62 said:

Draw a line, use a plane.

What puzzles me is why would you cut an angle in the sides of the neck blank?

Another way would be to route the neck pocket in an angle for a square neck - didn't you have a jig for routing the neck break angle to the body?

Other than those, your idea looks nice. I'd use one long bolt for the tilting action. That would allow you to use a wingnut for setting the angle. Another idea would be to stick a protractor to the side and draw an arrow showing the angle.

right on, thanks for the reply.  using a plane is certainly a fine way of doing it but A) don't have a plane, and B ) it seems to me you don't end up 'knowing' you actual angle when you do it because as you go deeper, your angle changes.  Either way... trying to solve this with a router.

afa route neck angle... that ends up complicating the hell out of your tenon.  Could certainly be done. 

On my les flawes... I just cut the join area at 90deg to the 4.5deg slope.  You can't do that on a les paul tho... because of how the body meets the neck.  it only worked on my tele as it has a protruding area where the neck joins.

afa 1 long bolt... the issue is that a router would need to run on either side to get the 4.5deg angle where the neck meets the body... so you can't have a bolt sitting out on either side.  My solution to that is to have both bolts pointing inward and sitting flush on the outside.

protractor idea- love it.  going to have to snag one at walmart.  I was thinking I'd just print out the angles on paper but your idea is much better.

2 hours ago, pshupe said:

I popped over to a friend's place to spray my head stock.  My shop is a mess right now and my gear is all over the place.  Ended up not packing my second big G inlay so I had to scrape the paint off the pearl.  Damn, I was looking forward to NOT doing that scraping but it wasn't too bad.

 

 

Man does it take a lot of black until it looks black! Here it is after about 10 coats of black, which looked maroon up until the last one.

 

 

 

and here it is all scraped.  That looks better.

 

 

 

back to my place and lots of finish sanding still to do.  My friend's shop has much better lighting and I instantly saw things I didn't even notice in mine.  So I tried some mood lighting and went to town with the hand sanding.

 

 

 

Cheers Peter.

ok, you kind of glossed over something I was wondering about and hoping to see.  How in the world did you scrape/clean the logo so perfectly?  If I can add 2+2... sounds like you were going to use your 'second g' to mask the inlay?  but you somehow scraped it?  what tool?  so many questions - sorry.  looks fantastic.

also, who got shot and had the nerve to bleed all over your ac unit?

I need to create a simple jig for doing a neck angle with a router.  for my current les flawes proj, it's a 90deg angle so I really just need a box, but I figure this is something that is going to come up if you build guitars... so why not build a jig that would gut a 90 - 84.5?

specifically -how to cut the angle in the back and sides of of a neck blank.  I've seen a lot of tutorials where folks cut them on their table saws... but I do not own a table saw and really would rather avoid using/having one.  lots of other folks cutting them on a table router which is also a fine way of doing it... but I much prefer "THE HARD WAY"!  The router is my hammer.

so here's what I came up with:

bottom piece is a simple 3 sided box with a longer base to clamp to the neck.

the top - is a 3 sided box sitting outside that... and the 3/8" hole there would be for a lag bolt on either side... sitting flush on the outside.  so as you tilt back... you stop at 5.5deg.  as you tilt fwd you stop at 0 deg.  I would ride my router with an extended flush cut bit on the top sides to remove material:

would probably want to put some sort of set screw stop for the top box so that it can be dialed in to the exact angle.

hardly a revolutionary idea... just a simple solution.  Just looking for input in terms of pitfalls, things I've overlooked, better ways of doing it, general comments, etc. 

20 minutes ago, JayT said:

I got new router so decided to finally do the neck pocket. I’ve been putting this off for a while...

all was going ok...

Did 4 passes with router, getting closer to desired depth each time...being careful...then 1/2 way  through final pass something happened...the bit dropped loose or I hit the plunge thumb lock...not sure

disaster...I knew it. Figured might as well level it all to that new depth. Once I calmed down and left the room with all the sharp stuff I collected myself and tried this fix (no idea if right move but it is what it is)

i made a shim...like 6mm, glued & clamped....looks ok, nice tight fit. 

there are more clamps but I didn’t get too many pictures due to barely subdued rage

at least I a 2nd build on deck either way I guess. Live and learn 

I find that when I make a mistake... it's best if I fight my urge to correct it right away.  That's when I make it worse.  I force myself to sit with it overnight... and freq I have found that I'll think of a solution that was simple and right in front of me.  Either way it's the mistakes we make where we do the real learning... and it looks like you recovered ok so... nice work.

40 minutes ago, pshupe said:

Yes a straight channel, 1/8" deeper at the heel. I get a lot of my stuff from Tom Bartlett.  He just started selling the pre-bowed fret board clamping cauls.  link here - Clamping Caul

Cheers Peter.

 

 

 

 

 

right on.  def would be $60 worth of work to create that.  thanks again.