ADFinlayson

Not a super wide neck, 43mm at the nut. The dots are 4mm

I spent a good hour hunting around the workshop yesterday looking for the offcut from the top. I stashed it away somewhere safe knowing I wanted to make some back covers out of it but turned out I stashed it somewhere too safe... turned out to be behind a sheet of ply behind my wood rack. Then shaped some covers. Jump forward a few steps because I don't seem to be very good at taking progress pics at the moment. It's now wired up and all good except the p90 seems to have really low output, and measured only 4.3k. I spoke to the chap that wound it and he said he's going to send me another one, so I guess it must be a short. Apart from that, I think this is my favourite build to date.

The blue is weird, only due to the light in my workshop reflecting off the speckle in the finish, but sometimes is really apparent. Wired it up this evening, looking forward to giving it a blast through a proper amp tomorrow. My only gripe with it is that he chose chrome hardware, then later an antiquity neck pickup, so it's a bit of a mish-mash colour wise. Bridge pup is a duncan distortion which measured 15.5k so it's going to be a proper rock machine but I added a push pull coil split with a 1.1k restistor for a bit more versatility. Last job I need to do is fettle the back cover plate down a bit because it's a bit snug after lacquer.

something else.. I tend take the screws out after only 10-15 minutes of clamp time, enough to clamp the middle down but not long enough for the glue to make the screw situation permanent.

I wonder if a lot of that trouble will also be down to the size of the blade, even a 7" blade in my kitty can struggle with ebony, I just do the slots in two passes.

yeah I often do that too. Dry clamp the top in place, then put a screw in the neck pocket region and bridge pickup region, then hold then centre down and act as locator pins to prevent slippage.

Ah but there are so many different creams, if you remember the pain I had trying to get matching on the orange one a few weeks ago. Actually I managed to find some "bone white" p90 covers on ebay, someone was selling a pair. (they're clearly Hosco light cream but I'm assuming they don't make them anymore). So on this one the pickup ring, p90 cover and the binding all have the same shade which matches the bone I used for the nut, and the switch enough is close enough not to notice.

Feeling much better thank you. Mrs and Daughter recovered much quicker than I did. Also made some progress on this one. Figured I've got 2 to wire up so might as well do them together. Way to shiny to photograph

I took your comments under advisement and sprayed a spritz at full strength, buffed out fine, thank you. Started assembling her this evening.

Thanks, welcome back!

My household has finally succumbed to the covid, My daughter, the mrs and I have all been pretty much out of action for a few days with fever, fatigue etc I but I was up and about doing some light duties this afternoon. This one has had 12 coats of lacquer all in all so I pulled the tape. This ebony has so much cool stuff going on in the grain but it's really only visible with high gloss. I didn't do my best work on the last couple of coats, didn't have the gun set up perfectly after stripping it down for a proper clean so I started wet sanding at 600. The whole thing has now been sanded with 1000 but I did manage to sand through one of the edges on the back and it needs a touch up but I'm not going near the spray gun until I'm back to 100%

It's the Anest iwata LPH-80 from Sprayguns direct. I've seen it referred to as both but I think it's an HVLP gun, but it does use very little pressure, I was spraying quite high there for the flash coat but when applying clearcoat I'm spraying at 10-12 psi and it's like sprinkling self levelling goodness. Cant recommend it highly enough.

Well I'll enter one if no on else is... Duncan's SG2000 inspired guitar, his 60th present to self and my #17 build. Build thread: Spec: One piece maple top - Courtesy of Mike Ve African mahogany body 30 yr air dried mahogany neck, from may dads wood stash Indian ebony fretboard and headstock Mop inlays, Big Country inspired 12th fret inlay maple binding OX4 pickups Tone pros bridge Goto locking tuners Ebony knobs and switch tip Ebony back plates

got onto sanding this one this afternoon. Wet sanded the top at 1000, nice and level, no trouble. The back and sides required more effort on account of the grain not being completely filled so started at 600 then 800, then 1000. and after all that I managed to sand through in this little spot. I'm thinking I will just sand everything up to 2,500 then just give that spot a sprits with some thinned lacquer buff as it. Touch wood I don't sand through anywhere else - bag and sides no big deal, but I really don't want to sand through the top.

2 coats on this evening, high build lacquer, thinned about 10% Will give it a scuff sand with 320 in the morning then get a few more coats on in the afternoon.

I got a sealer coat on earlier. 2 thin coats actually to make sure I covered it properly. mixed lacquer 50/50 with thinners to seal it, and made the top pop nicely Then once that was dry I got the whole thing grainfilled. I didn't both taping off the binding, I just wiped it down with white spirit afterwards and it seemed to clean up quite nicely, but will give it a scrape if necessary once the filler is dry, Looking forward to getting some gloss on this one over the weekend.

It's nice when the offcuts are big enough to make the accoutrements out of

One of them has an ebony top, it's actually an acoustic back which came in at about 5.5mm thick and it's about 4.5mm after thicknessing, that one has ivory/light cream coloured ABS binding. The other one is korina with tortoise shell celluloid binding although it's not that "shelly", something I'm a bit miffed about.

I've been doing a bit of work on the ebony special while the lacquer is curing on Tom's singlecut. Got the neck carved. This time I used a knife to carve the transitions, very enjoyable way to carve. still quite sharp where the neck meets the body, but that will all be softened after glue up, Speaking of glue up I always drill bridge holes prior to gluing the neck on just in case there is any side to side movement, which is fortunate because the centre line was about a mm off after gluing. Luckily the centre seam is good and the wood is so dark, I don't think the bridge being 1mm off centre will be noticeable. I got the bridge studs installed and put the two outer strings on to check alignment with the fretboard, all good. Everything is sanded up to 320, taped up and ready for some lacquer. Hard to show on camera but this ebony is fairly open grained so I think it's going to need some grain filler. I think I'm going to give it a thin maybe 60/40 coat of lacquer then do a grain fill. Normally I'd wipe sanding sealer all over the back and sides of the body and neck before filling but as I need to fill the top as well, I figured I might as well just spray a flash coat. I've also made some more progress on the korina one. The rosewood blank is the most horrible sticky wood I've ever dealt with, ruined a brand new roll on the sander Got the control cover routes done and some neck progress

yeah my tip is set 90º so it's wide as apposed to tall, I set it the same way as you when I want to get left to right. BTF I know some people will spray a coat left to right, then next coat up and down. I used to do that quite a bit with my old gun because I wasn't getting such good coverage due to the insane pressure. None of these methods are incorrect IMO.

LP silverburst ish was what I was shooting for. I actually find with the new gun, up an down is giving me much better results than left to right, also I can see what I'm doing better when it's up/down, Also also! when spraying any transparent colour coat - I figured spraying in the direction of the grain would be good in case there is any visible overlap to make it look less obvious.

Well spotted although that was never by design, I was just following the outline, then when I got to the waist, headed in a straight line towards the fretboard, in hindsight I suppose I probably should have headed to the pickup route but, oh well. I'me happy with it.

Rest assured, I will not be intentionally throwing this guitar on the floor

Can't remember how much detail I've gone into on the finish for this one so apologies if I'm repeating myself. Some experimental finishing happened this weekend. Since starting this build, Tom started playing in a Tool cover band and asked me if I could make his guitar a silver burst. I didn't want to cover up all the nice maple though so this is my attempt at a transparent silver burst... After the stain, which I did weeks ago, I put on one coat of clear yesterday. Then after deciding some time ago that silver is just grey but "metallic" I taped off everything but the top, and mixed some fine silver powder into 50/50 lacquer and thinners Then I sprayed 2 coats of that mixture on the top, holding the gun pretty far away to spray the widest fan possible, one coat sprayed up and down, then the second coat right after sprayed left to right. The idea of the above was to prevent any visible lines, and I left it at 2 coats because the more than goes on, the less of the figure will be visible as each grain of silver dust is solid/not transparent. To my eyes, this has definitely taken on a bit of a silver colour Then onto the burst this morning. I mixed up some more lacquer with thinners, this time 60/40 ish and added some black angelus dye and had a go at a teardrop burst. Came out pretty cool if not a perfect teardrop, I will still trying to maintain some transparency to not completely hide the figure. This was the first time spraying a burst with the LPH-80, definitely much easier to control than the sold setup. Notice it looks quite blue in places, I think that is the blue light in the workshop reflecting off the metallic in the paint. so particularly hard to photograph. Then I sanded back the edges to tidy up the natural binding and sprayed another couple of coats of clear. So was very bright this afternoon so awkward to get a decent video, there is still a bit of orange peel in it too from how I sprayed the silver. Overall very happy with it, experiment went well.

Got the routing done and my binding on. I found celluloid binding behaves a bit differently to ABS, it came coiled up like the ABS I used on the ebony build but did not want to come uncoiled easily, I did however find that warming it up and bending it around the lower horn was much easier, especially as it was .5mm thicker than the other stuff. I trimmed it flush with a little block plane and mixed the shavings in some acetone to fill a couple of gaps I had around by the horn. I was surprised how red it went, looks like I had an argument with some sharp tools. and tidied up with the orbital sander