ADFinlayson

A one-piece guitar get's a kudos from me, hats off

Good save, I couldn't see what you'd done at all until I scrolled up and saw the progress. Looking forward to seeing it progress.

Just sand more oil in with wet and dry, if 600 doesn't get the sticky patches, use 400. Once it's all smooth, wipe the excess off thoroughly. I'm not a fan of scrapers, you will end up taking bucket loads of finish of and potentially ruin a stain job.

I've had this issue with Crimson oils before, you think you got all the excess off but you didn't. It's also possible that with all the heat at the moment, you left it too long and it became too tacky, It's 30ºC in the UK today, so I would be wiping the excess off after only a couple of minutes. Apply some more oil and sand it in with 600 grit wet and dry until the surface is completely smooth then wipe the excess off more thoroughly. When it comes to removing excess, I remove the excess, think I'm done and then get some clean kitchen towel and wipe it off all over again.

Quite a few members with YT channels, Project guitar is where BigD got started

Yep looks good, I think think the plastic was the right option. You've got your work cut out with those heartbeats

Your fixes look fine to me, had to zoom in to see any imperfections, It's quite easy to get little bits of tearout when cutting/inlaying wood like that but frets and strings do a good job of hiding the little gotchas. Excellent job!

nice!

That inlay is looking good mate, will look fantastic once it's done.

I did all the inlay work on my first 5 builds with wood, the rationale was free inlay material and no big deal if I screwed up, Ebony dust in maple inlays can be a PITA though,

Yeah so I've got a few pieces that I know to be dry and way over thickness which are stacked on their sides in a cupboard. But I daren't stack wet wood on it's side - A lot of what I've bought over the last year was sold as dry but registering over 15% on my moisture meter so needs to be stickered and under weight, especially the quilt stuff I've got because that will twist and cup all over the place. I try and keep the wettest wood at the bottom of the pile so it's got the most weight on it and I'm least likely to need to get it out (I take pics in case I need to show anyone). But it's still a PITA when I need something from the middle. Not buying any more wood or tools until I've moved house. Once I'm in the new workshop, I'll insulate get some free standing shelves so I can organise everything better and not have to store it in the house.

Thanks gents!

I’ve been moving this pile of wood around my office for the last year or so. I need a bigger house

Welcome to the forum. I leave the saddles roughly positioned as they come then place the bridge so that the top E is on the intonation line and the bottom E is 2-3 MM passed the intonation line. Those hardtail style bridges have quite a lot of adjustment so it's hard to go wrong on intonation. I find the main thing to worry about is getting the lateral position of the bridge right. If you're building a bolt on you've got a bit of leeway because you can loosen the bolts and yank the neck over a bit to get it right, but on a set neck it's worth getting the neck glued up, place a rule along each side of the neck taper and draw a line on each side to continue the taper, then mark a centre line in the middle of the two taper lines before placing the bridge. I describe how I do it in this vid

I can't djent or polyrhythm to save my life, but then neither can Blind Guardian so that makes djenting and polyrhythming irrelevant.

you only need one string to play a polyrhythm

Stop making it look so easy

That is looking exceptional, soooo metal

I'm not a fan of neck plates personally, not that I've ever built a bolt on anyway so I'm no expert but adding extra material to make the heel thicker is not logical to me in terms of comfort. A lot of builders use screws with bushes that look nice, like these: https://amzn.to/2CKRMcm if I would building a bolt on, I would go for something like that so I can do a bit of carving to make the heel a bit more comfortable

In those days they had pickup winders that were started and stopped by human operatives so no two pickups would sound identical - pickups being such a large factor of an electric guitars sound. Amps have arguably even more influence on sound too, after all it's the amp and cab that's turning a signal into a sound. Totally agree with @curtisa too, it's the whole recording process that has a huge affect, mic choice and placement can make or break a recorded guitars tone too.

I'll try giving the back a spray now, the braces are quartersawn and very hard maple, left over from a neck blank. The heel end just seems to look flat and it's the bottom area around the two wide braces that seems to cup the other way. I'm doing very little guitar building at the moment so leaving it in the dish for a week shouldn't be a problem. Thanks

I looked mine up on line and it goes up to 25000 rpm too so I guess 17000 is the next speed down which is where I was. The result came out acceptable to me so I'm not going to complain now, I'll just get better bits than the one that came with the circle cutter. So the funniest thing happened, the the back braces were shaped to the 15' radius dish and glued to the back in the dish and the back took on the shape of the radius dish, a week or so later I find that actually the braces have now taken on the shape of the back which has cupped in the opposite direction. Any suggestions on how best to proceed? As I see it I could: A). bin the whole thing, get a new back and start again B). plane off the braces shape new braces and try my luck again C). just glue it on to the radiused sides anyway and hope the glue holds it all together None of the above are particularly appealing to me

When I'm levelling frets, I don't use a notched straight edge - I only use a notched straight edge when I'm building the guitar and working with frets that have never been levelled. The reason for is that you want the frets to be level with each other and the fretboard itself doesn't matter. So if you're doing a bog-standard fret level on a guitar, just use your regularly trust-worthy straight edge and adjust your trussrod the the frets are as close to level (with each other) as you can get them, then do your level and you should find that you remove much less material from the frets than if you get the fretboard itself perfectly flat with a notched edge because frets are often not hammered or pushed in evenly and fretboards were not always flattened properly before frets were installed.

I'm not convinced it was the cut direction because I cut in quadrants as the pic above. Could well be the bits - When I was cutting the rosette I used a couple of very fine, 0.8mm (ish) down cut bits and they cut beautifully but I managed to break them both, so I switched to the larger bit that the dremel circle cutter came with and did the rest of the rosette and the spruce with that. I may very well have tried to take too much depth in each cut, I ended up cutting 2mm deep because that circle cutter was very awkward to set depth and the set screw seemed to force the dremel off square and kept taking nicks out of the circle. I found that out when I was taking initial cuts in the centre of the cavity so got to full depth and started taking tiny parses at full depth to gradually increase the width of the cavity. The outer cut was absolutely fine, it was just that inner cut that kept tearing out. This is it after some dust and glue to fill some seams and tearout, a bit of 120 sanding to clean up the filler and wiped with some thinners. i can see a bit of discolouration where the tearout was filled that became visible with the thinners, doesn't look as bad as I thought though. For the binding channels I was planning to use the trim router and I've got the Radian rebate cutter set which has excellent quality blades, obviously I still have the same risk on the end-grain that I had here. I was planning to use a flush trim bit to route the excess to get the top and the back flush with the sides first and see how it behaves before attempting the binding cut. In terms of the dremel cutting speed, I'm not sure what speeds it works at - there is no reference to speed, just notches 1 - 5. I'm assuming 17,000rpm is as fast as it goes?

The rods are an easy way of glueing down the braces that are otherwise awkward to clamp, the gobar deck has a floor and a ceiling, the gobars (rods) are wedged between the work and the ceiling to create clamping pressure, each rod creates a few pounds of pressure so the combination of lots of rods creates even pressure along the braces. I'm tempted tp try this when glueing down the top on the next solid body electric because it's a much nicer way to glue that scewing down a load of clamps. So this is the rosette finished, getting there was a pain in the arse the golden phoebe I mentioned above wasn't large enough to make a rossete (on the figured area) so I went with some walnut. I routed out a couple of circles using the dremel and circle cutter, then roughed it out on the bandsaw then I ran it through the drum sander to reveal my rosette. Then after lots of measuring I carefully place and scored around it and used the dremel to route out the area Then even after carefully routing in quadrants I had a nice fitting hole but with a shit-tone of tearout So I used a combination of maple and bog oak veneers to make some purfling strips and made the cavity slightly larger. I had to cut the walnut to get it to fit with the purfling but wedged everything in place and flooded it with fine super glue. After all the router tearout I decided to have a go with my DIY circle cutter and I'm not sure wtf happened with that because the circle just isn't circular. Trouble here is the centre pin for my circle cutter is 1/4" and the dremel circle cutter is 1/8" so I drilled the centre hole larger and the dremel was no longer an option. At this point I should have walked away, but I decided to get fast and loose withe a forstner bit, then thought "what have you done you moron" Then after sleeping on it I carefully shaped the sound hole on the bobbin sander and it seems to be successful. I need to fill a couple of gaps with walnut dust and glue, I also still have a small amount of tearout in the spruce which I hope I can fix with spruce dust and glue, I guess I need to potentially tape over the sound hole when routing or ceil with it some shellac to help prevent tearout because I don't think I could have been any more careful when routing Anyways, on to bracing the top!