ADFinlayson

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.

thanks mate, yeah as acoustic woods go, limba is pretty cheap, easy to bend and looks a bit more interesting than other options. I got myself another set recently so I think I'll do another limba build at some point

Thanks, I've got a 15' dish for the back and 28' for the front. I stuck them to each other so I just flip them over when I want to change radius, also works as a good clamping caul when gluing the top/back on

I've been back down the rabbit hole over the last couple of days after nearly 6 months of procrastination. Largely due to getting this route right. I'm not sure how the holes I drilled in the end block ended up off centre because the route was in the right place. and the alignment was pretty close when I did a test fit, just needed a little bit of fettling I got some ears glued on and the fretboard in the right location with some locator pins annoyingly, I managed to thickness the back way too thin - it was <1.5mm at the end in some places, so I ended up getting another back, thinning it down to 1.5mm and glueing it on to the back to make a ply which was a bit of an arse of a job and a shame because I really liked the figure of the original back. With that issue fixed, I did the binding channel and got the binding on. I used the stewmac binding dremel attachment this time which I am still getting to grips with - it does cut parallel with the sides but it is quite hard to control so I had a couple of wobbles and ended up with a couple of gaps to fill and a few spots where the binding is slightly thinner after trimming, I think a lot of that is largely my fault for not thoroughly checking the consistency of the channel before glueing the binding in and I haven't got the will to route it off and do it all again. This is what it's looking like all together and with the new back. I still need to sand all the scratches out of the neck and find sand the top/sides before I can think about doing anything finishing. Ideally I need to redo that bevel veneer but I'm tempted to just spray a bit of shader over it to make the glue line. I'm putting this one down as another learner anyway because it's got that flat spot at the top. Something I like about the mortice/tenon joint as apposed to the butt joint I did on #1 is that I could make the heel considerable smaller without having to worry about revealing a threaded insert. and a close up of the very simple inlay and neck heel.

Thanks Carl, that machine has made my life better for sure, I never really use the thicknesser on it but the table saw and the planer have made a couple of jobs way faster so it's well worth the space it takes up. At some point I plan to get a flush cutter for the spindle moulder on it too so I can route bodies out much more quickly than I currently do. Funny though, that machine cost me £350 and the bit I need for routing is £300. Reminds me of when I was a kid and my Dad bought a TR7 for £250 and the welder he needed to restore it for £300

adding dye to clear lacquer to get a transparent tint

a top around 7mm with some cupping will probably conform anyway then the glue joint will hold it flat, but you can do the heat gun trick something I used with success the day before yesterday. Place the wood hump side up and go over it with a heat gun for a few mins, focussing on the middle where the hump is, get it hot but don't scorch it and you will see if start to flatten itself out after a few mins, then leave it under heavy weight for a couple of weeks and it will remain flat or close to flat.

I've seen this finish discussed a few times. IMO that is a bit of spalted flame maple and they've clearcoated, then they've used the strong spalt lines to break up the two elements and taped off and the colour is done with shader, i definitely don't think that it's dye because you would never get crisp lines given how much spalted maple soaks up dye. You could really carefully scrape the detail back in that the tape couldn't cover, at least that's how I'd do it.

Nicely done, congrats. You might not know it yet but you're going to spend the next 5 years of your life in your garage and you're going to spend all your money on wood and tools. Hi my name is Ash and I'm addicted to making guitars.

Jesus that is a serious bit of wood. What's the betting in about a 100 years, someone turns your table top into a guitar.

I forget his name but there was a guy that came up to me stand at the london show a couple of weeks ago, boasting of a 38k humbucker so it must be possible with fine wire. You could try experimenting with stronger magnets though, I asked my pickup maker to redo a pickup for me recently. He didn't rewind it but just put a stronger magnet of the same type in and the pickup was way hotter.

yikes, I actually did that at the weekend, fortunately the router was in the middle of a forstner hole and I was able to grab it before it started eating pinball fashion. I have been soo careful to make sure it's switched off since - I'm ploughing through a couple of builds this week so I've been doing way too much routing.

I had the slightly smaller 1/2" version of that router (the 1100w one) and it was useless to be honest. the first thing I noted after the excessively high pitched motor was the clear yet completely opaque dust port you mentioned. A couple of the features stopped working not long after I got it, firstly the fine adjuster would slip gears then the speed dial would move of it's own accord during use, after about 6 weeks it stopped working entirely so I ditched it and went back to my old cheap Ryobi, What was most aggrivating was that Amazon wouldn't let me return it after 30 days and Triton didn't want to know either so I was well out of pocket. I've got the Trend T11 now which is superior in every way IMO, although the dust port has just broken so I need to replace that. But that was 50% bad design and 50% down to my miss handling of it. I do use a trim router for odd jobs but IMO you're better off with something with at least 2hp motor and a solid build for routing bodies, pickup cavities etc, smaller routers and much more likely to dance around and eat your work piece.

If you remember my thread on Les Paul Specials I was building at the beginning of this year, well I made a carve top version a few months ago which came out really well. This one has a beautifully quarter sawn curly top from Bosnia, a bit of a dead spot right down by the strap button but you can't have it all and is why I decided to burst it. If you're interested there are a couple of finishing videos for this one on instagram https://www.instagram.com/adfinlayson First clearcoat https://www.instagram.com/reel/CjDHA1mriDC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Spraying the burst: https://www.instagram.com/p/CjD2YkVMDKQ/ One of my instagram followers liked it enough to order one so I'm building another one in quilt flavour which is what we're doing now and I haven't done a proper youtube build in a while so I thought I'd do that instead of pictures. But rather than explaining it all as I go, it's all just footage.

It really depends on the circumstances, if it's a build for a customer and it goes wrong, then you gotta fix it. e.g the other day I was routing a truss rod channel in a neck blank and I didn't have the bit sinched up properly in the trimmer and created a really nice channel for a skunk stripe, so that blank is now a really expensive neck profile template. On the other hand, the sides of my first acoustic build warped before I got the top and back on so it looks like an offset OM but I carried on regardless because I wanted to prove I could make an acoustic that didn't implode when I put strings on it. Personally, if I dented a build after a few coats of lacquer, I would be inclined to see if that can be fixed, normally dents can be steam out or mostly out and sanded, and lacquer can be reapplied.

Thanks very much chaps. I got it back off Dave and took it to the London Guitar Show with me last weekend, it was tied as most popular with the orange on in the middle.

Totally, I was thinking about this entirely as hidden reinforcement, like fibre rods. I generally only make 1 piece necks these days because it's less work, less glue joints so I didn't consider multi lam, and IMO multi lam necks definitely don't need reinforcement.

That's very cool, how many guitars have you built since 1972 and 2022? are any of those old tools still in use? Tell all

I never got the impression that any of the members on this forum were out to become millionaires from guitar building, quite the opposite when you factor in the cost of the tools

I bought some carbon fibre rods once, similar dimensions to what you've got pictured above and I noticed they actually had quite a lot of flex, so from then on I decided they were a waste of money. I might change my mind if ever I have a neck twist, but I'm also of the opinion that if it's going to, it will twist eventually with or without fibre rods. My other argument for not using them is that anything that stiffens the neck is making the job of the truss rod harder so it's more likely to snap or suffer a stripped nut. As to your question re alternatives, a friend of mine is a classical builder and as a traditionalist doesn't believe in truss rods, but he uses a centre strip of ebony as neck reinforcement - Imagine routing a 1/4" truss rod channel and just glue in some ebony. It's slightly heavier but ebony is way strong and you could route a 3x6mm channel either side of your truss rod and glue in some quarter sawn ebony. I expect you could get 6-8 trips out of a single fretboard blank.

Well this comment has served well to remind me to actually update this thread. We're rockin! My usual approach to polishing now is to use the stewmac medium (brown) hard compound on my buffer after wet sanding, then I use Chemical Guys 36 then 38 polishes on separate mops, but it just didn't look right being all shiny with aged hardware, so I went back down to chemical guys 34 which seems to give a slightly finer polish than the Stewnac medium. I do like this aged hardware, the bridge is the aged Gotoh "in tune", the tuners the aged Stewmac set and the rest of the hardware came from Charles Guitars in the UK. The only trouble IMO is that the screws that came with the Charles hardware are too aged, they're pretty much covered in rust. The screws on the guard in the above pic are new nickel screws which don't look right so I lightly sanded the top of them and left them in a tub of salt and malt vinegar for a few hours which worked quite nicely, I'll get some pics of that when I'm in the shop later. Essentially I am trying to make it look aged without making it look relic. He wanted it to be an Esquire but said he didn't want the switch so I've just wired it up like a Junior with 250k pots.

Looking great. I use Danish oil on my necks all the time and sand in the slurry coat like that, but I've never thought to warm the oil up first, I'll give that a try. Thanks for the tip.

Here's my latest one finished. Semi hollow, carve top Vela style build for my friend Dave. He picked it up on Friday and is over the moon with it. Spec - 2 piece European walnut top with Dave's design of F hole - 2 piece chambered black limba body - 2 piece flame maple neck - african ebony fretboard and headstock veneer with walnut logo inlay - ebony back cover - 24 SS girders, 25.5" scale - hipshot hardtail bridge with hipshot open gear tuners - Bareknuckle polymath and p90 - 2x volume, coilsplit mini toggle and 3-way switch

I imagine that must feel like a cut and a burn at the same time, ouchy

Yeah, the ebony dust + CA trick is the bedrock of my guitar building ability. I spent a good hour cutting out that inlay piece, even with the dremel. Checking and rescoring with a scalpel regularly and used a super fine router bit in the corners - I don't think I could get it any more precise with a modelling chisel either. I did have some bigger than usual gaps around the inlay. This is by far the smallest version of my logo I've done so it was awkward to cut out and inlay, I used some dust from this neck blank mixed with the some titebond to make filler. I mixed it really dry so there isn't much glue in it which got the colour really close to the neck wood. Here's how it's looking at the moment. I've done some levelling on the body, I had a bit of blush too which I hopefully sanded out. It's really wet in England at the mo, I'm managing to keep the shop to 50% humidity with the dehumidifier on 24/7. Trouble is as soon as I switch the booth extraction on, all that dry air is sucked out of the shop, fresh air comes in from outside and it get's up to 60% in not a lot of time. So I'm waiting on some anti-bloom thinners before I spray anymore on the body. I made up some shader for the neck with some yellow, a dash of brown and a dash of pink and sprayed it on conservatively, and it's had a couple of coats of clear over the top. Lastly, once I had a few coats of clear over the white, I decided to tap in the ferrules which was a total swine to do, these are the flush fit ones and there isn't any overlap to hide any chip out, I did have to touch up a couple of areas with some white lacquer on a cocktail stick to hide tiny imperfects after knocking them in. I did this so that I could spray over them and re protect the area after knocking them in with the lacquer remelting. I think infuture it would be easier to just install them before finishing and try to tape them off. I did do a bit of research but never found out how Fender do it.