ADFinlayson

inlays done and its ready for some frets. This is the Kawasaki river mark, Will is big into his Bikes.

That made me chuckle re the sales speil and that my 5 yr old regularly expects me to guess what she just drew. I honestly thought the gouge marks was the look you were going for. You must have been sanding that for days, you mad man

That would probably depend on which of the hundred or so genders you choose to identify as that day.

All of those phrases belong in 80's Peckham with Derek Trotter and Gordon Bennet. The kids mostly say ting, blud, literally like and absolute touch mate now, and that's why I mostly stay at home.

I've always thought it meant well on your way i.e I'm normally half cut if I have 3 these days but I'm usually thoroughly pissed after 5 or 6.

Barely cut, I like that but as a drinking man i'd say @Professor Woozle's half cut seems more appropriate!

I tried to log on earlier and there was a server 500 going on, maybe you broke it.

Depends on the rosewood, I got 4 Indian rosewood fretboard blanks for £40 from Ebay (UK) last week although they aren't particularly dark - I normally pay £15-20 for the really dark purple stuff that looks black once oiled. I don't think you can find Braz anywhere here, if you could it would be hundreds. I have 1 that I was gifted a few years ago and I'm saving it for a big birthday build, I certainly won't be flogging it!

I seem to be back to starting lots of builds without finishing any of them, that probably means I'll end up finishing them all at the same time and bombarding the forum. This one is for my friend will, he popped over a few weeks ago and picked his wood. Walnut back, quilted maple top, roasted maple neck and ebony fretboard. Then he messaged me a week or so later with his own design. I got a jpeg off him which I traced in Illustrator, scaled up so it was 335mm at the widest part and did a tiled print. I've been almost exclusively using this contraption for gluing drop tops for about a year, I find it does a much better job of keeping everything flat which is handy for this one because one piece had a bit of cupping which I bulled out of it by leaving it like this for the best part of a week. Skip forward a bit because I forgot the photos. There is a large chamber under the f-hole (also Will's design) which has shed a lot of weight, In fact it feels a little neck heavy at the moment which I expect will be resolved with neck carving and adding hardware - the roasted maple is quite heavy It's getting a schaller roller non-trem bridge a vol tone and 5-way blade. I haven't done the back route yet but I'll do the holes and the slot first then make a custom shaped cavity to suit. This is what he want's for his 12th fret inlay which I will cut out of white MOP - I hate these kinds of inlays because there is no such thing as a perfect circle or a straight line when your name is Ash Finlayson Now the question is... Is it a double cut, a single cut or a no-cut?

Doing another tele, this time "See-through black" although I think there will be a very fine line between not black and not see-through black, so I'll be doing a tester! A 4a roasted maple neck blank from Hades Roasted Maple, nice dark Indian rosewood board from Feelgoodwood and a one piece swamp ash blank from Stewmac. I'm hoping it's going to come out around 7 - 7lb 3. I've got all new nickel (mostly Gotoh) hardware that I am hoping to slightly age with some white vinegar fumes - The pre aged hardware I got for the last one looks way too aged for what I want for this one and is significantly more expensive. I'm not a huge fan of where the crotch figure is but there was some of that annoying grey discolouration you can sometimes see in Ash that I cut out having the cutaway where it is, this also hides that little knot in the control cavity. So you win some, you lose some. I've skipped forward a couple of steps because I plowed ahead and forgot to get the camera out, but there is where it's at now. I'm going to lacquer the headstock to show off the figure and protect my scribbles on the back but I think I will just oil or maybe even leave the shaft of the neck bare - It's has some really tight grain, nice and uniform and perfectly quarter sawn.

oooh yeah that has popped, lovely bit of swamp ash. I just started another swampash tele build, my blank isn't a scratch on that one though!

Yes this whole endeavour looks like it is going to be one of opulence. I just worked out what I paid for everything: Ebony top: £325 Swampash back: £135 Curly maple neck: £100 Fretboard: £25 I bought the neck blank 3 years ago and the swampash last year so fortunately I'm not feeling all that cost in one go. Don't know what hardware I'm going to put in it yet, but it would be silly to use cheap parts after spending that much on wood, plus the additional premium of gold hardware. I think I'll be waiting for one of my commission builds to get paid before I order any parts for this one.

The top is rouged in now, next to carve the underside. It's currently at 3lb 10oz and I'm hoping I can get another 1/2lb off it before it's ready to glue a back on.

The dust sure is unholy, I've done it a couple of times, but much prefer doing it with hand tools.

I did consider the angle grinder but didn't want to spend the next few days looking like a chimney sweep.

One of my suppliers told me about a lump of ebony he had lying around for 10 years, and I haven't made myself one for a while and apparently I am a masochist so I made an impulse purchase. Took ages to get a decent joint After getting down to 18.5mm and roughing out the shape, it still weighed over 5lb so this needs to be a semi hollow body to get the weight down, I need to carve the top off the body so that I can carve away the underside. I have to say I was expecting a horror show but it really wasn't too bad - it is as hard as hell and I had to use a gouge to take small chips because the gouge just skids along the top of the wood otherwise but it was quite predictable. I weighed it again after carving this perimeter and that had removed 100z, so I'm confident I can remove a lot of the heft. The smaller sized thumb planes seem to work pretty nicely on it too. And then on to the task I was sure was going to end in misery and be a total waste of £300. But to my amazement the recesses came out beautifully, I couldn't sand them smoother. So this is where it's at. I know I'm calling it a black beauty and it's not really going to be - it's not going to have body binding and actually the back is going to be swamp ash (to keep the weight down). But it's going to have gold hardware and block inlays so it's going to be my black beauty. Next up, I'll do the break angle on the top and get the top carve all finalised before I start removing material from the underside.

Love everything about this build, that walnut is divine

If you're making something to play jazz, I would put the pickup in the neck position, if you're making something to rock, then bridge position.

Use a multimeter to determine which lugs on the switch are active when the selector is in the middle position, then make sure each pickup wire is bridged to the middle position lugs

I'm liking the pink. Angelus rose and light rose are great colours, I use the light rose a lot over yellow to make a much more interesting orange than just orange because you get pinks, yellow and orange depending on how you look at it, works particularly well if you use a water based yellow as they don't mix as well.

the correct number of tools is equal to the correct number of guitars.

your sled you made to radius could easily be modded into something that can do thickness/flattening, so a drum sander would be my choice. I am biased because I have one though and find it to be a fantastic tool, saves a huge amount of time and removed the risk of tearout from a thickness planer on highly figured wood. They are very expensive though, but worth every penny.

I think my mrs would want to know what was wrong with me if I didn't come in for dinner covered in sawdust.

it's quite nice building a guitar without inlays from time to time, certainly saves a bit of work.

The next instalment. There's a bit of a teaser for the inlay but it isn't included in this video because I was trying to keep them to half an hour and it was getting a bit long.