ADFinlayson

those burl blocks look great mate, really smart.

have you had a good look at the top? over time the top can bugle around the bridge from string tension, also check if the bridge is lift off at all, both those things are common on old acoustics and will raise action and could also be down to a split or delaminated brace. You should take the strings off for a few days and see what the straightness of the neck is like, You could also see what happens when you go down a gauge or two, switch down from 12 or 13 to 10 or 11 is a big reduction in tension and thus height of the bridge relative to the fretboard. You could totally remove the fretboard and plane out a bit of the relief in the neck, I would be up for routing a truss rod channel too, that would definitely help to future proof it but you'd probably need to get the neck fairly flat before hand. The other common thing which I haven't had to do yet is a neck reset which usually involves shaving a bit off the bottom of the heel and shimming under the fretboard, providing you can safely remove it. I recommend checking out Ted Woodford on youtube, that dude is a wizard. https://www.youtube.com/@twoodfrd

Thanks chaps!

yeah I was just looking at it on wooddatabase. On spec it looks very similar to african mahogany, about 2/3 the hardness and 3/4 the weight. I think it could be really well suited for a solid-body with TV finish, I think I'll get some!

Thanks dude!

Maybe it's just the sanding scratches but it looks fairly open-grained on the pics, like a slightly yellow mahogany. dents/scratches when working softer woods is annoying, I've taken to iron the backs of my bodies with a damp tea-towel prior to getting the oribital sander out to expand all the marks, I do a lot more work with a towel down on the workbench that I used to as well.

That Obeche (which I had never seen or heard of before this thread) looks really nice, what's it like price-wise? is it easy to find in the UK?

I didn't spot a CNC in the above photos, but that will explain where all the tidying time comes from!

Dave just shared a music video he recently used the Vela in. WARNING: It's quite metal.

Bloody hell that's tidy, you must get so bored with all the extra time not wasted looking for tools.

I did that on one of my early builds, 2nd or 3rd I think, I just wedged a bit of veneer down the side of the truss rod and it made it all snug, didn't even need to glue it in. I wouldn't worry too much about the channel being .5mm to deep either, once you've got strings on and a bit of load on the rod, it won't move around. Just remember the depth of your channel when you go to carve...

I've had the blur you talk about in the past. I now glue my tops and backs together slightly oversized which prevents that.

thank you mate, that is a roll of bog oak veneer that I got off ebay - I like that pin stripe look but it's also functional, if I spray a shader on the mahogany and want a crisp looking natural binding edge then I don't have to spend hours scraping it clean, I just tape up to the middle of the veneer

Top is carved, mostly - just a bit of tidying up to do around the lower horn. This was the mostly bastardly piece of maple I've had to carve with hand tools, I think the only time I had less fun/more blisters was the ziricote build I did a few years ago. I am particularly pleased with the quilty and flamey goodness that appears down the sides The pot recesses were fairly awkward, I used a rounded over spade bit which is my current preferred method, but there was a lot of tearout so I made them a hair smaller than usual and enlarged them by sanding I've got several hours of footage to whittle down and comp together so EP 2 will follow in a week or two.

Looks like you're off to a flying start. I've got that rosette cutter, it's a really good bit of kit. I found it quite scary cutting the route for the rosette the first time and did get a bit of tearout on the spruce, second time round I wiped a bit of danish oil on the area which helped a lot, I expect a bit of schellac would work just as well. Looking forward to seeing it progress.

It's just one of those things, you have to open it up, see what nature has provided you and see what you can work around.

Had a few days in Poole the year before last, you haven't missed much. LP looks fab, looking forward to seeing it carved.

For a second I thought you'd managed to take a chunk out of the back of the guitar and I see after a closer look that it's access for the control cover that's very well hidden, fantastic job on the grain match. Now hurry and get some strings on it

Thank you mate, those items are newish, the tablesaw/planer is a Kitty Bestcombi 2000 I got in May 2020 along with some hand tools from a workshop clearance and it had been sat in my dad's garage until I got this workshop finished. I upgraded the bandsaw from the old Axminster hobby saw in late 2021. The hobby saw didn't owe me anything, got 15 builds out of it and sold it on market place for nearly what I paid for it. But the Laguna is something else, ideal for resawing tops so I don't think it will take long to pay for itself. I actually wish I bought the other version of the Trend because I've only really used it as a plunge router, I do have a makeshift router table made out of my workmate with an insert for my makita trimmer which works well for fretboards, binding channels etc. The Bestcombi also includes a spindlemoulder, and at some point I'll get a follower bit for it so I can route guitar bodies out that way instead of making multiple passes with the trend. But That being said, I shaped the body for this one at the weekend and I just shaped it with the Triton bobbin sander because this bit of mahogany is quite teary.

it's so flecky it's almost metallic

Almost forgot a pic of the headstock

It would appear I forgot to update this one and I didn't take that many pics but here goes... I had to change my processes up a bit, I was going to use the neck template of my Suhr Modern templates for the neck taper but Andy wanted the neck to be a bit wider, so I ended up dimensioning the fretboard to measurements, glueing it on the routing the neck to match the fretboard - normally I would route the neck, glue the board on and trim the board to match the neck. But before I could do all that, I had to do the route for the neck pickup, so I used locator pins on the board to figure out exactly where the route had to go and do the route before the fretboard was glued on. I also had to route a channel down the side of the neckthrough to where the bridge pickup cavity was going to go so that I could thread a wire through because no drill bit is going to join those two cavities up. Then I used a surfacing bit on my 1/2" router to take 2mm off the top of the body end of the neck through except the area where the fretboard was going to go, that way the fretboard will sit 2mm higher than the rest of the body and the bridge is the right heigh relative to the strings. Then I got the board glued on. Then the wings which were just roughed out, apparently after fretting. you can see all the router marks where I skimmed 2mm off the top of the neckthrough part Then I finalised the body shape, mostly with the bobin sander Then I got on to the rest of the routes - The Kahler bridge came with a cardboard template for the internal route which I duped on to the mdf, but for the outline, I screw the bridge on, went round it with a find pencil and chiselled out a couple of mm to recess it, like a really big inlay There is a little grub screw on the back of the bridge which locks it off into a hardtail but that screw isn't accessible if the bridge is recessed so I used a round-nose bit to route a little spot to get an allen key in there. Fast forward a little while and it's done. Andy is picking it up later this week. The wiring is quite cool but it wasn't fun to do. He wanted some quacky sounds but wanted to try series/parallel instead of coil splitting with a push pull which required a special 4DPT pot. Fortunately Andy did the research and found the pot, the only thing suitable that was available was a Warwick pot which was £50 by the time it was shipped and extremely fiddly. Here is the pot next to a plectrum so you can see how tight it was, and ALL terminals needed something soldered to them. I had to do it in situ because all 8 pickup wires had to connect to the pot. Amazed I managed to get to the end without a massive solder burn on the back fo the guitar. The push pull part of the pot goes out to the 3-way switch which goes back to the regular part of the pot before the output, the other item you see on the front is a stutter button from Tesi which was way easier to install that I thought it would be. Have to say as a non-trem person, I quite like the Kahler, it strikes me as the Betamax to Floyd roses VHS.

Well after getting the neck fretted I noticed that the fretboard overhang had developed a bit of a bow, so I begrudgingly pulled the last 6 frets, widened the slots and refretted which has improved matters. I seem to remember fretting going a lot easier last time so I think I might try doing the radius and fretwork the board prior to glueing it on next time. Got a rough shape in to the bridge, located it and screwed it down. To get intonation this time I cut up an old 105 bass string which seems to be a fairly accurate, cheap and dirty way to find saddle location, certainly less hit and miss than the extra low saddle I slid in under the strings on #1 The action is a touch higher than I'd want it at the moment at 2mm on the bass side but I think I can get that down by taking some material off the top or bottom of the bridge which is currently around 9mm - I wonder how thick the bridge actually needs to be? The nut is also way too high as it's only rough shaped. I can already tell it sounds way better than #1, hard to explain other than saying it just sounds bigger.

All this talk has got me excited to put some strings on it now, I'd better get the bridge finished and hopefully the mild weather continues so I can get some lacquer on it

That is a very good point and reminded me that the radius of the top changes when you put strings on too as the tension of the strings lifts the bridge up which makes quite a difference to string action.