ADFinlayson

IMO 4º is plenty enough, I normally shoot 2.5-3.5 on my builds which is the sweet spot, the difference though is that the fretboards on my singlecuts tend to sit a mm or two above the plane of the body where as your 59' the fretboard will be sat on the body, that makes a big difference. I got this book recently, which I reckon will be some useful source material for you! I've been meaning to buy it for ages but it was crazy expensive - I think they must have done a reprint though because it's only £30 on amazon at the moment. It's got loads of cool descriptions of all the different bursts, all about the plastics and pickups of the era etc.

I hadn't noticed the wedge was the wrong way round, I was busy looking at how the grain appears to continue nicely from one side into the other, looks good!

thank you and good point re the back - I haven't done much in the way of colouring, just darkened it up a bit with some brown grainfiller I made from pumice powder, linseed oil, some brown dye with a drop of lacquer. I've tried a few different off the shelf grain fillers and tbh I'm finding my own mixture is far superior - doesn't seem to shrink, cheaper and keeps longer in a jar - just add a few more ingredients to the old mix and keep it going, like an old sour dough culture Here's the headstock just after I pulled the tape so all angles are in the thread.

I've got another carve top in the works, well this one has been a bit of a side project I've been doing over the last few months. I think the best way to describe this top is blister maple, it has some blistering, some quilting and what looks like birdseye in it too. I tried staining the blanks a few different colours when I got it a couple of years ago but no strong colours really worked with this top. It's also got an african mahogany back and neck, indian rosewood fretboard and headstock with flame maple binding on the fretboard, small-ish stainless steel frets. A friend of mine showed me his Beauty of the burst book and I saw there are a few in it with tops a bit like this so I thought I'd try a faded les paul look, not vintage correct at all as I would be using dye on the wood instead of shaders. I used crimson water-based amber to do the bursty area, then diluted some chestnut spirit based yellow in acetone to do the rest. I really diluted the chestnut yellow (it was a pot of acetone with 10 drops of yellow in) but it still came out really bright so I left it out in the sun for a few hours and that seems to have muted it a little bit. I should have fitted all the hardware so I could see all the fading but I didn't think about that at the time. I'm experimenting with some light hardware aging, I got these pickups form ox4, he gets the covers uncoated then polishes them up and they look nice textured semi-gloss without looking too aged. I'm planning to try white vinegar to age the bridge and tuners a little and I've sanded down the pickup rings which came out nicely. Not sold on these knobs so I'll try it with the classic gold knobs without the reflectors the top has been level sanded with 1000 grit at this point so it looks quite matt. I'm thinking I will buff with the medium compound then the fine polish but leave off the last super fine polish I normally do. I'm looking for hanging on the wall for 20 years, not thrown around a tour-bus.

Thank you mate, I've discovered the trick to natural binding is not to do any fancy tricks but to just seal the hell out of the sides before you dye the top, then it doesn't soak through the edges.

Couple of coats of lacquer on today. This top has not disappointed me, I think my favourite part is the contrast with the Walnut though

Well if it turns out anywhere near as nice as you two are describing then I will be very happy! Restain done, I got some sealer on the top and you can see a touch of that green has started to come through from the cellulose. Neck is glued on and I shall do any sanding touchups needed on the sides/neck and get some clear coat on it.

My thought exactly, amazing work!

I don't know if I missed the part where you were talking about the inlays, but man that is awesome. Very jealous of your inlay skills!

Love the idea of this one, are you planning to bend one long piece from the bottom to the cutaway?

that really is an incredible piece of wood. Almost as incredible as the carving, amazing work as always!

when I get round to editing, there will be a 30 min video on the finish!

1). Firstly, thank you for noticing that it has a kill switch rather than noticing the demonstrator is clearly unqualified to show it off! secondly, it's not a push pull it's just a 500k with a momentary on the top of it, it's really cool. Here's a link to it. https://www.thomann.de/gb/shadow_sh124500_kill_pot.htm?glp=1 If you want to try one, they have quite a thin shaft, I had to drill a hole only about 6.5mm for it, if you have regular holes already drilled for your pots then you might need to find bigger washers, also they're course nurled so you need alpha fitment knobs to go on them! 2). No that's fair cop, the amp is being turned down by about 90% with a cheap attenuator in the fx loop so it's humming like a stadium stack while outputting as much noise as a church mouse (it was 10pm when I recorded that and didn't want to makes the neighbours sad). 3). Thank you Mike, really appreciate it and I am very happy with how it turned out, and I've already had another order from the USA for the SAME GUITAR off the back of it, next one is going to North Carolina. Super happy!

Well I still haven't got round to editing the last two instalments of the series, but the guitar is finished.

Got some dye on, it's a mixture of Angelus turquoise and light-blue diluted slightly in some acetone. He want's it blue/aqua which the turquoise colour does look like but I think by the time the lacquer is on it will be a bit green so that's why I did a mix. I'm hoping the addition of the lacquer yellowing will add the touch of green rather than go too far. Fortunately I mixed up plenty because I've found a couple of scratches that I need to fix and restain.

I'm with Biz re cranking the loose rod up, you can turn it enough to tighten it without adjusting relief, though I've only ever had to do that once or twice. Re truss rod access, I made this crude but effective jig a few months ago. it's a router base I made out of perspex with a strip of wood slightly thinner than the channel, then I clamp in a stop block to stop it going too far towards the neck and the strip works as a stop block going the other way I use a round nose router bit which doesn't give me any tear out and if I start at the front of the channel then it's a much shallower pass to start with due to the headstock angle. That gives me a neat access channel which I just drill through to join them up.

this has happened to me more times than I care to admit. It's an easy fix though - Glue a thin veneer to the walls of the neck pocket and you will get a nice snug fit again.

I think the river mark is a fairly new thing. That being said, I know close to nothing about bikes!

Nice one Mike, well deserved!

Thank you mate, should be appearing now! must have been some weirdness during upload.

Inlay done and frets in. Gone with med/tall stainless steel from Stewmac, not sure of the exact dimensions but they're just medium jumbo to me. This is the agreed position of the controls, he wanted to mirror the f-hole and have the pots recessed. I've got a scrap of strat scratch plate which I use for a template to do the blade switch, then I drill 4 holes and join the two inner wholes up with a scalpel and carefully chisel the innards out down to 3 or 4 mm. Then routing the control cavity should reveal the slot. If there is one thing in particular that I don't much enjoy about making custom guitars, it's making custom control cavities! Rummaged through all the templates I've made previously and nothing worked (obviously). So I did what I did on the last custom and just freehand routed it all. I appreciate that if I made a new template each time I would increase my chances of finding one, but there is also perpetual procrastination. I normally route to about 5mm deep as it's much easier to control the router freehand along a pencil line, then use that 5mm cavity edge as a bearing guide for the router to go to full depth. Then after that I came back with a rebate cutter to create a lip for the control cover to sit on. That leaves me with nowhere for screws so I will come back later and glue in some bits to screw into. Then I tape down some tracing paper and draw round the cavity then transfer that onto my cover material to shape that with the bobbin sander - tedious process! He wants the cover stained to match the top, but looking at this pic I personally would be in favour of roasted maple to match the neck. And that's the neck carve roughed in too but it's a bit on the chunky side at the moment. I'll leave it a couple of days and take some more material away End of the woodworking is in sight for this one.

Bass looks fab, nice work. Amazing how much weight you can shed ditching those pesky frets

I use my buffing arbour with the medium (brown) dry compound and I don't bother taping off the fretboard, I find it does a really nice job of polishing up dark coloured fretboards like rosewood or ebony and is a huge time saver. I also do it with a maple fretboard providing it has been lacquered. If the maple board isn't lacquered then I would tape it off because it will grey up the fretboard, it should clean up with white spirit though or worst case scenario you could scrape it clean with a razor blade and apply some oil.

Stunning piece of work

Nice spot, love that