ADFinlayson

Yes I was just jesting at an old adage.

Did some inlay work tonight. It's a very simple celtic knot design. I didn't want to go any more complex because designing it is one thing, inlaying it is a different ball game. Wasn't as awkward to cut out as I thought although I should have cut a bit closer to the lines. It's upside down so you can see the material, it's laminated abalone so I hope it's going to play well with the radius. and the right way up, I've got some filing to do, but it's 0º in the garage so it can wait until the weekend. The hardest thing about this inlay so far has been putting the pieces together in the right way. Fortunately I printed several copies of the design. Once I've got it all filed, I expect I will end up sticking it to another copy then sticking that to the fretboard to scribe round.

Well that is very kind, I'm not sure this is a particularly high difficulty level, it's just routing a binding channel and sticking a piece of wood and veneer in the rebate, but then I have done binding on almost all of my builds so far - It's good had hiding my wonky fret slots Yep, it will be 2 years in March since I started building my first guitar, but I reckon I must have put a good few thousand hours in to it by now, as you've said yourself, Welcome to the obsession... Only about another 7000 hours to go and I can call myself an expert

Got David's fretboard slotted. I can't remember if I mentioned in a previous post, but I cut the fretboard blank very close to final dimensions before glueing so that I would have some offcuts for binding. I squared off the sides of the board as well as getting the bottom perfectly flat before cutting so there are 2 sides on each piece that were ready for glueing because jointing rough cut binding is a real PITA. Also used some maple veneer to make a pin stripe. Again used a paintbrush to apply a modest amount of titebond then taped with 3m tartan tape, that stuff works really well. Once I'd flushed off the sides and planed the top close, I cut the mitres with a sharp chisel At this point I realised that I didn't have any more Indian ebony fretboard offcuts that were tall enough and I didn't want to use any of my Gabon ebony offcuts because they look quite different. So I ended up using some of the peg head veneer offcut from this one. But it didn't occur to me until after I glued the end piece on that that involved having end-grain sticking up, fortunately it wasn't too bad to get cut flush with a sharp chisel. One of the mitres is totally perfect, annoyingly there is a hairline gap on the left hand side. Close enough to let it go... Nothing new on the tele yet, still waiting for the body to dry. But I will probably get the fretboard radiused and slots cut over the next week or so.

Thanks @ScottR I will lacquer first

I've got a couple of builds where I want to try and blend an oil finished neck with a lacquer finished body, specifically a neckthrough with a ramp from neck up to the body. Anyone tried this? I'm trying to determine whether it would make more sense spray the body with lacquer first, let it harden and buff before oiling the neck and blending that way. Or whether I would oil the neck and just lacquer over the oil? Any experience here would be much appreciated Cheers Ash

It's been hanging on the wall for 24 hours and the body hasn't landed on the floor, so I'm calling that a good joint. I've now started the not so enjoyable job of sanding, especially those pot recesses. starting with 80 grit. Annoyingly I've got some quite deep scratches around the bridge/f-hole area down to the bottom, all going across the grain, that I'm struggling to get out with 80 - they look a lot like sanding scratches, but I haven't sanded it with anything < 80 grit and 80 grit is really struggling to removed them. The only things I've got at 60 grit are some orbital discs so I might try those with a bit of hand sanding. Before I get too crazy on the sanding I want to ream out the tuner holes, get them installed and the bridge too. I picked up a set of nut files and a string spacing ruler in the Crimson Jan sale so I'm going to have a go at cutting my first nut from a bone blank - There is an ebay seller that send me a bone nut blank with every shipment so I need to start using them. I'm not really feeling the back, I was hoping the walnut grain filler would stain it a bit more than it has, so I think I might mask off the sides again and stain it a slightly darker shade once I've got the above jobs and sanding done. The filler has definately worked well though. On previous builds I've wiped it on and wiped it off but it's left grain that hasn't been filled properly and required a second go or just left (not been a big deal as they were oil finishes). But just brushing it on heavy and leaving it to dry for several days before sanding has left a really smooth surface that I'm happy with.

That’s a good idea, a little cove bit would do the trick there and allow you to tap the filler piece in a little further for some more glueing surface.

I’ve never done what you describe but I often worry about doing it, for that reason I never tend to make my fretboards thicker than 5mm now, thinner fretboard means more material under the truss rod. Also the nuts on those aliexpress truss rods are huge and IMO require too deep a route. while a skunk stripe would hide the split, that isn’t going to increase the amount of wood behind the nut will it? Also how will you route that channel without hitting the truss rod? Sounds like a dangerous game

Finally got round to glueing the neck on this one, I say finally but I was really just procrastinating over sanding all the grain-filler. Got that done and glued the neck in this evening. This time, trying to combat glue squeeze out around the neck pocket - something that seems to plague most of my builds, I have applied a modest amount of glue to the pocket and tenon with a paint brush. Then I used warm water and a toothbrush to scrub away all the excess thoroughly. Hopefully that combined with already having filled the grain will prevent white lines appearing along the joints and white flecks in the grain once I've sprayed it with lacquer. Touch wood... Something else I did this time, was to thin down some sanding sealer and lightly apply several coats on the inside of the f-hole with a brush to help prevent dye seeping into the edges - it's quite easy to stop dye spilling over the sides on the body but it's a bit more awkward with the f-hole. I'll be wanting to get this one stained and sprayed before too long. But with my humidity gauge in the garage reading 75% on a good day, I don't think that is going to happen any time soon.

Yeah I saw in your thread, looks great. The size of the bottles did put me off a bit as well which is why I opted to buy the Liberal spirit stains, they're a much thicker concentrate and the bottles are about twice the size.

Yep, this is an old Marples #5 3/4" gouge that I got off ebay last year for about £20, the new equivalent from the likes of Ashley Isles or Pfeil are more like £50. Granted this one came from a seller that clearly buys old tools, refurbs them and sells at a profit, I expect if I could be bothered to trawl the car boot sales, I could find this sort of thing much cheaper. But I'd much rather be in the workshop on a rainy Sunday morning than out shopping for bargains.

Cool, give me the link and I’ll follow your Facebook page

Another stunner. Where are you selling these? They're obviously extremely desirable. Do you make them to order, sell them in shops? What's your setup?

Not very long at all to be honest, I am surprised at how quick hand carving can be once I'd done it a few times and learnt how to properly sharpen the gouges and thumb planes. I did it over 2 sessions and I think no more than 2 hours, though I expect there will be at least a solid 1 hour left before I can call it done. It's when we start hollowing it out, carving the underside and cutting f-holes that the hours really rack up, fortunately I'm not doing any of that on this build.

I refretted an 80s hondo bass for a friend last year. It's not a bad instrument, solid body made up of 3 pieces of (i think) alder and 3 piece laminated maple neck, the middle piece was quarter sawn the other two were and the maple fretboard wasn't quarter sawn either. I sanded all the lacquer off the neck, installed jumbo stainless frets and finished it with danish oil for him. Based on the fact that it's a solid colour, I don't see why you couldn't put any trem on it, worst case scenario you glue in a filler block and reroute the trem cavity. But you probably wouldn't have to. Edit: Just saw the pick of the headstock, if it was me, I would plug those tuner holes and move them in a bit, potentially reshape the headstock for a more reasonable string angle over the nut - That would improve tuning stability no end.

Finishing is the hardest part of guitar building IMO and the one area where we can't cover up mistakes

Looks great, if you want to make that faux binding more obvious on that top than where your tape stopped, you can just sand the edges, use something fairly course like 150 and sand at a 45º angle until you've got the binding cut in as far as you want. The only thing to watch out for is that you don't get too much dust worked into the edge so stop and blow it off often. I used to use a razor blade to scrape in the faux binding, but I've found that sand paper works better - the razor blade has a habit of chattering on endgrain.

A bit more progress on the PRS style build. I used the router to reduce the height of the neck heel, I needed to remove about 10mm. I used to just bandsaw the excess off and get it flat with a hand plane, but I found the router is a lot more precise. I had a nice tight fitting neck pocket, but annoyingly as soon as I got the heel down to the right height, I ended up with a loose neck pocket. So I ended up glueing a veneer in either side of the pocket. Now I have a very tight neck pocket. I'm sure it will be just right by the time everything has been sanded. Did bit of carving this evening, the carve is pretty much roughed in now and I'm on to thumb planes to even it all out. You'll notice the dye mess. I gave it a once over with purple to show David what it would look like. I might do this in future actually because there are a couple of benefits. 1. A much better tester with a bit more context than a small offcut, it told me how much colour bleed there would be along the edges and how absorbent this particular piece of wood is. In future, I think I'll do this while the wood is still completely flat, that way I can just run it through the sander again to take the stain out.

You're not alone, I don't know anyone that enjoys fretwork. When I was at Crimson last year doing a refret course. They only had me sanding the frets up to 320 to my surprise, then Christopher went at them with their buffing machine and compound. A lot less work involved and they're shinier than any fret job I've done. Incidentally, I stumbled across a PRS build video (in the factory) where the finishing tech didn't even bother taping off the fretboard, he just took the guitar up to the buffing machine and buffed the frets and fretboard. He said that there is some residue left on the ebony board from the buffing machine, but scraping the board between the frets with a razor-blade afterwards beats taping off the whole fretboard. I'm tempted to slap a buffing wheel in my drill press and have a go.

phwar, so you doing a burl back and front or is one of those tops for another build?

I'm not sure what the discolouration is, but I've got an ash body I'm working on and all of the boring uniform figure is perfect but all the interesting grain has that grey splotchy stuff, it's far more obvious under finish too, so I've had to cut it so using the boring stuff. With regards to flattening, something I've done a few times is to knock the high spots off with a hand plane, then stick several rows from a roll of 80 grit to a thick sheet of mdf and rub the blank over it until it's falt - it doesn't take as long as you'd think. That also works well after using a router sled because router will never leave you a perfect surface.

Why not just up the quota? it's not as if Likes are used to calculate anything important. Give us the likes, we like the likes.

Here is the inlay design he came up with. It's going to be tricky to cut and position all the shapes out so I was thinking I would try and cut and inlay it as one piece, but it's going to be cut out of walnut so there is a high chance it will be 50/50 walnut/superglue.

That is definitely a valid way to do it. I've always preferred to shape the neck to final dimensions and route the fretboard down using the neck as the template than route the neck down to the fretboard though.