ADFinlayson

Latest episode, a couple of sound issues on this one I'm afraid, it's all perfectly listenable but the voice recorder wasn't working the entire time

Yeah thanks man, I'm not feeling too bad. could be just coincidental head-cold symptoms. No fever or persistent cough, my mum is the same. Hoping we've dodged it but continuing to be a recluse to be on the safe side.

I disagree, I don't think a router is a particularly dangerous tool. My main router has a deadmans switch and it turns off as soon as you let go of it so it's really rather difficult to keep the thing switched on and put your other hand near the spinning bit. Tables on the other hand always have the bit spinning up, unguarded and needs to be manually switched off. I use my little trim router table for making control covers against templates but that is pretty much it, I'm terrified of them.

Routing is a lot safer hand held than it is on a table - Your arms take the shock of the kickback so it's a lot easier to manage. My little triton router has so much clear plastic covering that the top of the router is pretty much sealed, so there is nowhere for projectiles to go other than down towards the ground up the dust shoot. I'm not saying I would route through a nail hole, I wouldn't, but I avoid router tables as much as I possible can

you probably can't remember because there were so many grits 320 is plenty for lacquer

I'm not an expert I've only sprayed lacquer once from my hvlp gun, but I had a big old run down the front of the guitar between the pickups. Instead of sanding it all level again, I just kept on spraying until I was comfortable that there was plenty lacquer on the body. Then I level sanded and it was fine, that's the beauty of lacquer. I would say that you are totally sanding much too fine though, 2000 is giving very little for the lacquer to adhere to. I only sanded up to 320 but still got a glass like finish.

Glad that's improved it. One thing I found really helped my little triton thicknesser was buffing the bed with machine wax, it helps the wood glide through and thinner pieces are less likely to get stuck under the rollers.

Crikey this one is starting to look awesome. That top looks mean and I love how the binding jumps out of the wenge

Also I think it's worth saying if it hasn't been said already - Given the title of this thread, it's starting to look a lot like you know exactly what you're doing. Good job, looking forward to seeing it finished.

My dog goes nuts when I start filing down a bone nut, it's like he turns into a mad hunting beast. I can't stand the smell personally so I make sure the belt sander has a vac on it and I wear a mask if I'm hand filing it.

I was watching a demo of a local (to me) builder that had made a guitar with 2 humbuckers and a blend pot yesterday. It sounds great tbh so I wouldn't worry about both pickups remaining in the circuit at all times. I'm sure a 500k blend pot will work just fine. I'm using a 250k blend pot on the bass I'm working on, but that is because they're single coil pickups. But... in the unlikely even that it all goes horribly wrong, there is nothing stopping you reaming out the pot hole to make it big enough for a 3-way toggle.

Love the rosewood neck, they're great looking builds, especially for someone with minimal tools, though I think I can see more saws than they had a Waterloo

Nothing wrong with a bit of grain enhancement. I doubt there is a single photo on gibson/prs/fenders websites that hasn't been meddled with in photoshop. One thing I like about hosting my photos on photos.google.com is that I can do all that stuff even after I've embedded a photo on the forum, yet it stores all the edit history so a year later, I could come back and revert to the original file if needed. The wonders of modern technology

It's turning into another beauty, nice work as always.

David was talking about doing some filming when he comes to collect the guitar, so when he does a video on that, I will give it a mention My camera setup is just a gopro 4 and an iphone 8, sometimes 2 iPhones instead of the gopro if I can steel the Mrs phone. So you could do 2 cameras, even if your phone camera isn't up to much you could use it for extreme close up stuff so the details get picked up anyway. Only thing to note about a second camera is it is not x2 the editing, it's more like 3x or 4x the editing.

Thanks Biz, got a couple of editing tips from David and started doing it all in Adobe premier (instead of iMovie) which has a lot of extra gadgets like audio limiters and that's helped the sound a lot. I just had one annoying bit of routing that I missed which is a bit louder than the rest of it. But they're going in the right direction.

Filmed the latest instalment this weekend, routed an angled neck pocket and humbucker cavities with my usual what, why and how waffling

Really interesting stuff, I'd like to try it out. What platform is it designed for? I don't see any dmg or executable in the repo, installation docs would be useful for the less tech-savvy users.

Advertise it on Luthiers Club (fb), you never know - There are plenty of amateur builders buying necks and making bodies.

Real ebony is not a few % more, ebony is the most expensive wood there is

That sounds like a lot of work, but I've not heard of Jerry Rosa so I'll check him out. I left the phone on while I was doing a couple of jobs last night, so heres a quick vid on drilling for bridge studs

Spent a couple of hours on the monkey build this evening. The goal was to get the bridge installed but that involved a couple of other jobs too, Started off by reaming out the tuner holes so I could test fit the sperzels and later check that the bridge is drilled accurately. Then I needed a nut to put my strings in if I was going to test the bridge... I've always used Graphtech and never bothered with cutting/slotting my own from scratch - the price of nut files seems hard to justify when a Graphtech nut is £10 and is almost perfect out of box every time. But Adrian wanted ivory coloured appointments (pickup rings, switch tip) and I have a load of bone nut blanks (one of the ebay sellers I buy fretboards from throws one in with every order) so I figured a bone nut would look good on this build. I got the Crimson nut file set and their string spacing ruler during their last sale and finally got round to using them tonight. Making the nut was quite enjoyable but man, it's was time consuming. Dusted off the disk/belt sander - first time I've used it in an age, but really glad I had it for this job. I rounded off all the exposed corners and stuck it in place with a drop of super glue. Then I marked the string locations with a pencil and the string spacing rule and made a light cut with the razor saw so I had a start. Then I got the bridge location marked out and a couple of 11mm holes done with the hand drill. I used a couple of squares to ensure I was drilling plum Bridge all good so I got a set of strings on, it's now officially a guitar Then I spent a good hour on filing the nut slots. On the slots where I had a file that was slightly bigger than the string gauge, I got perfect results. But files that were the same gauge as the string were a bit awkward, eg the 26 and 10 gauges - the string would bind in the slot and be really difficult to get all the way down or to pull back out again, fortunately I realised that before I went too deep on any of them. So I played around with rocking the file side to side to widen the slot slightly which work well. I think I've still got a bit too much height on the nut, the string slots are pretty good, but the overall height of the nut (making the slots deeper) was clearly contributing to the strings binding. So before I do the final assembly, I'll file a bit more off the top of the nut, it all needs a good sanding and polishing anway. I still need to do fret levelling, crowning polishing etc yet but I'll let it hang on the wall with strings on for a while, get it used to it's new shoes. That was an enjoyable evening of learning, all be it time consuming. I think I'll have to revisit the ziricote build at some point and make a bone nut for that one too.

Welcome to the forum. Pics would be helpful. When you say stained - have they sanded sanded all the mahogany back to bare wood and stained or is it painted?

For the record, I am not saying that I think multi lam maple necks are cheap, I really like them (esp with go faster stripes) but I am saying that a lot of cheaper guitar necks are made that way. I'm thinking about the hondo bass I refretted last year and maple PRS SEs etc. So the persona of cheapness is probably there for a lot of players. In a lot of cases it has nothing to do with appearance or stability, but that 3x 1" maple boards are much cheaper than 1x 3" maple boards in material terms.

I don't really pay much attention to the properties of something I'm only using as a veneer. I'm sure there is a valid argument for a veneer between laminates providing strength, but I expect it is probably negligible, in fact it is probably the extra glue that provides said strength, the veneer is .5mm thick so I can't see it has a real impact, I just use it for the visual aspect - 3 pieces of maple stuck together looks like a "cheap" neck, but 3 pieces of maple with something contrasting between looks cool while only adding about £2 to the material cost.