ADFinlayson

I'm not sure, but he knows the luthier knows best

It's a fairly tight fit anyway so there isn't much lateral movement, but I did use an extra couple of cocktail sticks and the screws are going to be located in difference positions to the regular prs style control cover. The cocktail sticks though are there to prevent the vibration from the orbital sander causing it to work it's way up (which would mess up the carve) or jumping out. It also makes an incredibly annoying noise if the cover is able to vibrate while power sanding.

I'm still waiting for Matt to sort out pickups etc for his tele so I've decided to shelve it for a couple of weeks and I'm focussing on David's CU24. I finalised most of the carving on the top yesterday and routed the final shapes for the pot recesses. I had some nasty burn marks but they were surprisingly easy to scrape and sand out on this top. I've still got the area around the horns to finish and there are some rough areas in the middle that need a fair bit of sanding. I got them rolled over nicely with some 150 grit and drilled the holes I needed for the jack, pots and switch, the routed a control cavity and get everything fitted. The only real issue that I ran into was that I had to move the tone pot in slightly to hide evidence of where the router ate the top when I did the initial route, this meant the locator pin (cocktail stick) I used to hold the top in place while glueing is closer to the edge of the pot recess, fortunately it'll be hidden under David's knob. All in all, I think these are my best pot recesses to date, they're all sized consistently, smooth and not too deep which can cause the knobs to foul the body. At some point I routed the pickup cavities and cut the neck tenon too though I still need to reduce the height of the shelf that the neck pickup ring sits on. Then today I routed the shelf of the control cover to sit on and shaped the slither I cut off the back into the cover. I came up with a new method with the control cover (new to me anyway) because I've always struggled to keep it in place while carving in the past. I fitted the cover, then drilled my screw holes through it and plugged with cocktail sticks (no glue) so that I can pop it off my poking something through the pot holes. I cut the sticks flush and the cover was nicely held in place while I had at it with a no6 gouge Then again with a thumb plane to rough in the shape I'll blast over it with the orbital sander tomorrow to tidy up and get the top carve around the horns finished. David wants the maple neck to be stained the same colour as the top so I'm thinking to grain-fill the mahogany and seal maple sides prior to glue up to help prevent stain getting into the sides around the neck pocket, I might even stain and seal the neck prior to setting it, still mulling that over.

So I had a couple of runs to sort out on the lp top, my initial thinking was that I'd just make sure there was enough lacquer on there so that I can sand them down without sanding through the areas around them, but I decided to scrape them down, used a small round crimson scraper, a scary job but surprisingly easy to do in the right light. Then today I decided to give it one more final coat of lacquer and it's looking a lot better. Pulled the paper towel that was filling the void under the fhole. Really happy with how it came out, a definite improvement on the first fhole I did - the natural sides makes it stand out a lot more and carving the underside of the top to make the area thinner gives the perception that the chamber is a lot deeper than it is. And here's a vid clip from the bass after I put the last coat of lacquer on it. The lacquer I'm using is precat and it says not to thin it down more than 10% but I'm getting much better results with I thin as much as 25% - 30%

Yep, but there is no stain, that's all natural as it's just a coat of sealer and 5 coats of clear lacquer . I would be interested to see how you get on with bending it. My first attempt with a 5mm drop top was a failure, even with soaking, heating and gradual clamping, left it clamped overnight, glued it up the next day and a hairline crack still opened up (on a previous prototype build). That being said, that was the first time I have tried a droptop so an experienced builder like you would no doubt fair better. But I would certainly not entertain carving this with hand tools.

that's a great looking axe you've made and it'll definitely raise a few eyebrows if you play it out. What's the baby grand bridge like? I've been wanting to try one

gonna leave these for a few weeks for the lacquer to harden and make a start in the tele body. ive been having issues with the gun, probably technique but I was struggling to get a decent spread and I was missing patches, so I thinned down the lacquer a bit more and it came out better. Hopefully I’ve got enough on there, especially on the stained top

The neck is getting there, binding on and cut smooth, headstock thickness done - my usual way with a fence against the spindle sander, well the normal way I do the backs of heastocks, fender necks still feel a bit alien to me. I need to tidy up the end of that ramp and get it nice and round before the nut and I need to clear out the nut slot but it occurred to me I don'y have a flat 2mm chisel, I need to go and buy another tool. In this photo it looks like my binding might still just be a tiny bit proud so I probably need to go over it with a radius block one more time But first I need to sort out some mitres for the bottom of the fretboard I reckon there are a couple of frets I need to make deeper, not looking forward to dealing with jumbo stainless steel frets and binding. So I'll probably procrastinate there and get on the with body, or one of the other builds depending on how flat/dry the body blank is.

ha thanks Bizman, I have build a fair few guitars since then, and learnt from more than a few mistakes. Funny coincidence - my second build (the 30 fretter) which I'm pretty sure you helped me out with over on the crimson forum, I sold it today, a guy drove over from Essex and took it away to tinker with.

tbh mate I think you hit the nail on the head with the powder not dissolving properly, it doesn't take much to clog the nozzle up, I had the same problem when I was spraying the bass I'm working on last week, hadn't cleaned it as well as I thought and it was spitting occasionally and sometimes not spraying at all.

I've watched Freddy's frets les paul series about 3 times, remember him saying that with his colour/burst, he wants as much colour going on ass possible without the build because it's important not to sand the colour coat, so I would imagine the mix is a lot more dye and thinners than dye and lacquer. I've got a Earlex pro 8 which I use to spray clear lacquer mixed with thinners - I have run into problems when I've had too much lacquer and not enough thinners, the stuff I use says not not to thin more than 20% but I get best results if I thin 30-40%, I haven't tried spraying burst yet but I certainly wouldn't use my current gun for that, it's too big and bulky for that level of control. I'm planning to upgrade to something smaller and gravity fed for clear and have been looking into airbrushes for bursting. Power dyes sounds like it could well be the culprit. have you seen any of the Dr Nitro videos on youtube? that guy knows a thing or two about colouring lacquer

I saw bens video on these a while back, it put me off tbh

Got a bit further forward on the tele neck this weekend, used an offcut from the body blank, cut it out and inlayed it, cutting out went a lot better than expected, I had the super glue and activator on hand but managed not to break it. The fretboard has already been radiused to 12" at this point, I planned on routing the inlay channel with the dremel, so instead of worrying about getting everything flat, I decided to put the opposing curve into bottom of the inlay, masking tape and superglued a bit of80 grit to the fretboard and this was quite easy to do, just had to because not to snap it. Getting the channel just right was very time awkward consuming, not my tidiest inlay but I got there in the end I think this photos was taken after the penultimate dousing of superglue and ebony dust and after I recut the slots that I ruined. Then I prepped some walnut binding strips, again out of the body blank offcuts Then I used the worlds crudest makshift bending iron to bend the binding up by the headstock, there's a bit of discolouration on one of them but it's slightly over thickness so I think (hope) I got away with it. The mistake I made was leaving the head gun on while doing the bending, I should have just heated up the pipe and bet the binding round it, but it wasn't the best time of metal. This has got me thinking that I need to make/buy something a little more suitable. I left them taped up like that for a few hours to dry out and retain the shape, I've now glued on the treble side and I'll post the final result once I've glued the other side and trimmed them flush.

Got a bit more done on Matt's tele neck this evening. Had to have a think about process as I have limited experience building this kind of neck. I drilled out the tuner holes first so the brad point just poked out the bottom in the drill press, then drilled through the from the other side so there wasn't any tearout. Then I took the top off the headstock with the bandsaw and and saw, leaving a hair over 14mm thickness - I measured the hipshot tuners in a couple of bits of scrap and test holes to make sure that was right before hand. Then I got the fretboard radiused to 12" - Matt does a lot of tapping, so we figured flatter would be better, started off with a hand plane then used the radius block. Then I cut the fret slots, and the nut slot, used the plastic nut out of my mexi strat to test and measure. Wow I just shat my pants when I saw this photo, the centre line looks way off. Fortunately it's not, that's just how it looks because of the radius. Not bad at all for a couple of hours work. Next up will be inlays and binding.

Just caught up with this build @Prostheta, while I'm jealous of some of your tools, big band saw table saw etc that make some jobs a lot easier, the work looks really clean and shows some real skill. My builds never look that neat early on in the process like yours is. I had also adopted your technique for cutting a slither off the back of the body to make the control cover, it's a neat idea Look forward to seeing it come together.

Made further progress on the billy bongo today. I've now got a bracket on the wall in a secluded corner of my garden that I could have the guitar from and spray instead of holding it which has worked really well so I got another coat of lacquer on the bass. But annoyingly I obviously hadn't cleaned the gun out properly last time because it started spitting when I was spraying the top, I was trying to preserve lacquer thinner as I've now run out (that will teach me) so I used the last of it to soak all the gun part after stripping it down and I'll see if I can fix it when the new thinners arrives. So I've now got a bit of orange peel and a few runs I need to fix, up until now I've been really impressed with how little orange peel I've been getting from that gun. So I decided to get the pot holes drilled, which was rather scary and I won't be doing that after lacquer again. I should just about have room to mount the battery holder on it's side on the north eastern wall. Haven't figured out how I'm going to mount it yet though because I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get the drill in there for screws. I did have a bit of a wobble when drilling one of the holes, fortunately it is well hidden under the knob but I think I might just get some super glue in there to stabilise and maybe use a bigger washer. This wood is so insanely brittle, I couldn't even carve the lower horn with a gouge without chunks coming away (the wrong chunks) Speaking of lower horn, I think that's my favourite feature of the bass. I still need to make a ramp to go between the pickups and do something about the warped control cover, but this one is close. After the spray misshap with the bass, I decided not to give the LP another coat, so it's chilling while we wait for thinners to arrive. This guitar looks so weird in some lights, it's almost as if it was masked off down the centre line.

Looks great Andy. So you radiused the board prior to routing the inlay cavities - how did you keep the floor of the inlay cavities flat for the inlay? This was something I struggled with on recent inlays, I ended up sticking a couple of shims to the very edges of the board so the router base had a flat surface but it's not very elegant. I've also sanded the underside of inlays to the reverse radius of the board which works well for wood inlays but not sure about risking that on 1.5mm thick mop.

I expect you will just about be ok with 1.5mm, it would only be the last couple you have trouble with if you do, in which case you cold just score round them onto some 2mm mop and cut them out. On a build I did a while back, I hand cut all the the crown inlays out of maple and inlayed them before I even owned a dremel and base, took me 13 hours to do the lot (it was the one build I kept a time sheet on)

fair enough, I assumed from the above pic that you'd already cut the neck out, but getting the nut and bridge in advance is the smart order to do things. I usually use pre cut nuts too from graphtech, in fact after 10 builds I've only cut my own bone nut once on the latest build. Definitely carve the top before doing anything to the underside of the f-hole.

The only potential issue I see with changing the scale is that it will change the string taper against the neck taper if the neck is shaped for 24.5". However I've built 25" scale guitars using 24.5" neck templates and it's not noticeable. I like the f-hole design - if you haven't thought of it already, I recommend carving the underside of it away to make it look thinner and more delicate. It will also make your hollow section look deeper than it is.

You can attach multiple pictures to your post so you don't have to make gifs. To get around file size limits, I find it easiest to create an album on photos.google.com, make the album public then embed them using insert image from url button. The google photos app on my phone lets me sync hi res photos so it's fairly hassle free.

Welcome to the forum, looks like you've got most of the hard work behind you on that build. Looking forward to seeing more pics

They've both had another wet coat today, and starting to look good. But I'm struggling a bit with coverage because I'm outside and holding them while spraying which is pretty awkward given the size and weight holding them at arms length (especially the bass). I sprayed the blue one from last summer in the garage while it was hanging which was a lot easier to control the gun but I'm trying to avoid spraying in the garage as the fumes linger. It's supposed to drop 10ºC tomorrow and be colder for at least the start of the week. So I'm packed the sprayer up until next weekend. I'm hoping I can make some sort of bracket to screw to the wall so I can hang it outside, or buy some hanging basket brackets. Here's how the purple ones looking. I'll use the time off these to get back to some woodworking on the other ones. I'm not complaining because the unexpected heatwave has meant I'm ahead of schedule on my builds

I guess at least 2 layers must have come away then because the top layer is going the other way, then there is that layer that's half come away. I wonder what the rationale for laminating the top is, it's clearly no stronger. I wonder what the acoustic properties of ply are compared to a solid soundboard.

I feel like I have pretty much done nothing but sand guitars for the last 2 days, in reality I've been constantly heckled and called away by a certain 2 year old with a paddling pool. But after all the sanding, this evening I dug out the sprayer and got a coat of lacquer on the bass and the lp. I'm feeling rather smug and excited about the bass. Couple of quick vids I managed to get a run on the back, which I'll probably level off in the morning Didn't mange to get any decent vids of the lp but a couple of pics, I just did a light mist coat for the first coat just to be sure the colour doesn't run as I've not use a tone of sealer. I'm also much more to keen to avoid runs on the front Due to have good weather again tomorrow, it was still day, mid 20s (celcius) and around 40% humidity according to my gauge so perfect for spraying outside.