ADFinlayson

21 hours ago, Prostheta said:

Yes, definitely. Spirit dyes can be anything from fairly dilute to ridiculously potent. I know of Chestnut, but never used them. Looking forward to seeing how the tests go.

Yes that angelus yellow is practically luminous when added to lacquer, reminded me of Mr Chin's kitchen in Only Fools and Horses. I should have just added a couple of drops and tested.

I got the previous one wired up last night. In spite of the colour issues, I'm very happy with it and I'll be turning it up to 11 at lunch time.

I need to fettle down the back covers before I can take more photos but specs are:

- 1 piece chambered african mahogany body
- Eastern maple top, natural binding
- 1 piece african mahogany neck
- Indian Rosewood fretboard + headstock veneer, white mop inlays and side dots
- med jumbo nickel wire, 24 frets, 625mm scale length
- Golden age bridge
- Kluson top locking vintage style tuners
- OX4 Pickups 4 conductor pickups, 8.1k Neck, 9k Bridge
- 2x Vol, 2x Tone with pushpull, tuned coil splits, stewmac gold bell hat reflector knobs
- Bone nut and light-cream plastics.
- Nickel hardware

So after 2 full-fat coats of clear lacquer and left to cure over night.  I've redone the grainfill and got a much more consistent looking fill that hasn't stained the wood. There is a tiny bit of grey in some areas where the wood has some weird grey patches and a little bit around the edge which might be some excess. So once this has had a good 24 hours, I'll give it a wipe down with some white spirit. 

I do quite like it natural but I'm tempted to at least try one more go at amber. and I got these Chestnut dyes to try which a friend of mine recommend for tinting cellulose. Will definitely do a tester on one of the offcuts first though - annoyed at myself for not doing a tester in the first place.

On 5/13/2022 at 8:56 PM, Stu. said:

I spotted this in a video from the ESP Japan custom shop recently! It looks like a great way to finesse the transitions.

It looks like a lot of people took advantage of that Axminster vice offer at £99!

out of stock already? I guess the probably don't have loads of units of things like vices in stock - Pattern vice seams fairly specialist. 

On 5/13/2022 at 3:24 PM, Prostheta said:

Grain filler is a pain to remove. Be mindful that if you do start removing it, it may not remove evenly depending on local penetration into the pore structure. It's difficult to know what is the right thing to do in this circumstance until you are knee deep unfortunately.

Yes I thought that would be the case, it was indeed a bar steward to get out and I gave up getting it out of some spots. The issue seemed to be that my sealer flash coat didn't seal quite well enough and I got some staining, so I got all that out with 120 on the random orbital.

You can just about make out here how green the binding went.

You can see some areas around the edge where the grainfiller didn't want to come out. These pours are much bigger that the central area so the filler obviously work deeper in.

Then this area was an absolute PITA to get looking clean again. So lots of patience, then I had to scrape the scratches off the binding with a razor again.

Then is morning I gave it another 50/50 flash coat, really just to highlight if I had an areas that were going to look clean with finish (very little effort to sand out patches of a flash coat) and it looked pretty good so It's now had 2 full-fat coats of clear. Then when that clear has had 24 hours, I'll try the dark grain filler again - I think I'm stuck with the dark filler as there are patches that aren't going anywhere. But with the extra lacquer coats it shouldn't stain the wood again.

This is after the first coat. I think I'm going to stick with natural and bin off the yellow until I've got appropriate dyes for it.

Thanks chaps. I added some angelus yellow to my lacquer to spray some yellow toner over it and it looks absolutely f%^king awful (much more green in real life than in this photo) so I'm going to be sanding it all off and doing it again. I'm regretting using the dark grainfiller now too. so I'm going to see how much of that I can get out then I think I'll fill again with some clear aquacoat. 

My mate Danny popped over at the weekend for a go on the latest one so I got a bit of a demo so I can advertise it. 

Cracking on with the Korina one. Getting all the sanding scratches out of the binding was a bit of a PITA. I ended up getting the sides sanded to 320 then lightly scraping with a fresh razor blade. I don't know if it's down to the colour making scratches more visible but the tortoise shell celluloid was a lot more difficult to clean up than the cream ABS binding. 

Then I got a sealer coat of 50/50 lacquer/thinner over it so I could grain filler without staining the korina, really popped with a bit of lacquer. 

Then I used some burlap to apply some black jecofil filler. It's actually walnut but I darkened it up with carbon powder because my black pot dried up.

5lb that's quite impressive. I don't think I've managed to even get one of my semi hollow builds close to that. 

The last few weeks seem to have been fairly unproductive in the workshop due to work/life. The green tobacco one above is waiting for pickups which might be another week or two out, The ebony one finally has it's replacement p90 which sounds fab - I'll do some pics and demo of that one. But nothing else has gone on really so I thought I'd make some progress on the Korina one. 

First job was neck carving - I don't think I've talked much about carving lately but my method has changed a bit over the last 4 or 5 builds. I've gone back to using a shinto rasp and shaping a profile around the 1st fret and 15th, then I use a carving knife to shape the heel and volute transitions. I really like this method of carving, the knife can take loads or a little material depending on whether I use the wider or thin end of the blade and there is no sawdust 

Then I went back to the shinto to remove the bulk of the waste from the middle before using a no4 hand plane to even it out - not something I've done before but it works really nicely to get a perfectly level neck shaft with no dips, where I used to spend quite some time marking out the high spots with a pencil and doing spot carving and sanding. I will make a point of getting some pics/footage of that technique on the next build.

Almost forgot to mention, I've just got myself a pattern makers vice. Wow it's like an extra pair of hands. I've been after one for a while but struggled to justify the cost as they're over the VAT threshold if I ordered from stewmac and would be close to £200 by the time I've got it home. Another builder friend of mine mentioned they had them on offer at Axminster £99 incl delivery down from £150 so very happy with that purchase.

After carving, I got the neck glued up last night and it remained clamp for close to 24 hours, no reason for that other than I didn't manage to get out to the shop until this evening.

Glue up went well, really happy with the neck joint on this one. 

I hadn't decided whether I was going to go for 2 P90s or another PH build so I had left the bridge pickup route. So made up my mind and got that done this evening, then got the studs in and did a test fit of the bridge. Not sure if I've mentioned before but I recently got the stewmac p90 template and their 3/8" bearing bit, my p90s fit much more nicely now - the American covers do anyway (this one will be getting black covers, knobs and switch).

I need to spend a good hour on sanding and then it's on to finish. I'm thinking that a trans yellow might look cool on this one and was mulling over whether to stain it yellow then seal, grainfill and clear or to spray a yellow tint and I remembered @komodo's metal tele which looks really cool. So I think I might just steel Jeff's idea.

I'm thinking I will spray a flash coat or two to seal, then use a black grainfiller before shooting some yellow to taste, then clear. But I want to do my usual lacquer to oil transition at the neck heel so I might see if I can blend yellow to natural there too with the distinct possibility of sanding through if I'm unlucky.

1 hour ago, curtisa said:

If you go that route the slice that you laminate the veneer to doesn't even need to come from the same piece of wood as the body. If the join is hidden with binding you could get away with using just about anything as the 'top', and save the worry of trying to accurately remove the top face of the body on the bandsaw.

Absolutely agree, but my rationale for taking a slice off and reusing it is that (even with a veneer) I've got a bandsaw capable and that slither I take off without other wise end up in the dust collector. Or could otherwise be used for control covers, headstock veneer etc. 

I was going to to suggest the same thing as @curtisa I did something similar with some epically heavy korina, I didn't use a veneer but I just sliced 1/4" off to top of each piece (2 piece blank) and treated it as a it's own top and I hid the join with binding. You could do that with the addition of the veneer, no one will ever know. In addition to chambers, you can always oversize your control cavity and make your pickup routes extra deep, they won't make much of a difference on their own but every little helps. 

The babicz tele bridge has a similar design in the way the saddles are locked down, bit of a PITA to adjust tbh. 

2 hours ago, henrim said:

This. I really like the color on this build. Looks very nice in every other way too.

I have been experimenting with many wood species trying to make them pure grey. Staining, bleaching and what not. Lots of weird shades, very little pure grey. In that respect Larch is my favourite wood. Just some water and lots of sunlight. Beautiful grey without a trace of any other color  Not necessarily the best method for a guitar top, though.

Thanks @henrim, yes grey is quite a difficult one to actually get to stay grey. I've got a few different black dyes and I find Crimson dye seems to go red when it's sanded back or pulled back with water, Liberon black dye seams to go quite blue and so does Angelus dye, the carbon black powder I used on this one is the only colour I've got that seems to stay that neutral grey colour, obviously the colour of the wood makes a huge difference here but I do think that the acetone seemed to have a slight bleaching affect too. I need to do a bit of experimenting with that. 

Tom picked his guitar up on Friday and he's very happy with it. So I'm happy too

The blemishes you notice will be invisible to 99% of players that look at it. Get some strings on it. 

On 4/16/2022 at 4:01 PM, ScottR said:

All opposites on the color wheel equal brown. As do the three primary colors, and if one looks closely enough all opposites on the color break down into the three primary colors. Leaning heavier on one or the other shades the brown. And finally, if you are not quite pleased with the shade of brown you got, just tweak it with a tint in the clear coat. That gives the color a bit more depth too.

I realize that his is old news by now.....I've been crazy busy lately and am just taking a minute to try and catch up.

SR

Agree with all of the above, and that's the rationale for using purple. However, it has turned slightly green. accentuated by the blue hue in my workshop lighting but it's definitely there. Annoyingly this wasn't visible after the sealer coat which is where a colour change normally occurs or even after the burst. Only once I'd built up 5 or 6 coats of clear did I start to notice it.  

I don't hate it so I'm not going to do anything rash like sand it all off and start again, but I have learnt a lesson about diluting angelus purple as a base colour. This is just off the buffer so it's ready to be put together, 

1 hour ago, Prostheta said:

It looks a lot better in motion than in the still. Is that the case? I'm certain that I recommended 8Bomb Custom's videos on YouTube, however if I didn't then I would be at fault for not mentioning. His work is deeply trad-repro sort of stuff, but his approach shows that level of subtlety and detail which take things so many levels up. I'm sure you'll take a lot from it. Everything that he does seems to be toner rather than stain/dye. I've always wanted to try my hand and extend my skills out to there, but it's so much time and investment that I keep remembering how many hours there are in a day. And that I need to sleep during some of them.

....plus he uses aniline specifically because it fades, and he UV bombs it in pt. 4

I like 8 bomb, he has loads of really useful info that I've learnt a lot from and I used his grainfiller recipe on this one a couple of years ago. The only difference was that I stained the guitar red before applying the filler instead of tinting it red with lacquer - I wasn't comfortable spraying tints at the time.

When it comes to guitar finishing, I think 8bomb and Freddy Gabersek are my two favourites on youtube, I must have watched Freddy's les paul series 10 times.

Yeah I'm liking shaders the more I use them, but what I'm not keen on with all this vintage correct stuff is that shaders tend to hide the nice figure in the wood the more they're applied, like a traditional tobacco burst for example, it's pretty much solid black up by the toggle/horns where as I want to try to get a balance between a sprayed burst and popping as much of the figure as I can. So using a combo of stains, sand back and shader seems to work well. Going too high contrast on the stains though can have the affect of making it "still" so there is no chatoyance at all - my old fire red burst PRS for example had deep red colour with thick black lines in the flame, but there was no movement at all so it might as well have been veneered ply. I seem to have got lucky on this one, there is some fairly high contrast in places but there is also still loads of movement going on - that's what I'm striving for anyway. 

The other benefit to using a bit of dye with a sand back, I see all those scratches I missed and can get them before lacquer goes on. 

Forgot to post yesterday, also filmed the last clear coat going on after the burst so you can see it pop 

Oh I see, yes that's the style of tenon I'm using - I always thought it was called a dovetail tenon as it's tapered. I could do with some more clamps so I might see if I can get some that I can flip into spreader clamps. Good shout.

Got the burst on and a coat of clear to protect it, bit unorthodox but I like it. Taping off the f-hole was a bastard.

First coat of lacquer. 

59 minutes ago, Prostheta said:

have you considered extending the mortise a little further back, allowing the neck to be fitted at the looser end, then pushed into place with a spreader? That is by far the strongest layup, however the remaining gap behind the mortise seems to send some builders into crazy lunatic fits of disgust and paranoia!

I'm not sure I understand what you mean mate. 

Got the neck glued on this one this arvo. I noticed a little hairline gap on the bass side so I introduced the extra clamp which gave me a bit of squeeze out along that line so I think I'm ok now.

Unlike most of my previous builds, I did all the fretwork including polishing prior to fitting the neck. I've decided that this is the way forward from now on - It's way easier to get the dressing file to the high frets on a singlecut with no body to worry about and there is less chance of damaging finish. 

Also, I'm using my buffing arbour to buff frets now too This is sooo much faster than using the dremel and I didn't even bother taping off the fretboard, Obviously it would be a no go with maple binding or a maple board, but for rosewood or ebony, it polishes up the fretboard really nicely. 

Really looking forward to getting some lacquer on this one tomorrow, with any luck I'll get a coat of clear down as a base coat, get a burst on it and then one final coat to lock it in. I am just a little bit dubious about bursting near the f-hole, I think it will be a bit to tape off and to clean up any overspray. 

5 hours ago, Prostheta said:

I'm surprised! Where did the idea of laying down purple for the basis of accentuation come from?

Nowhere other than the knowledge that purple + yellow = brown. Using alcohol dye as the substrate and water-based as the main colour tends to give a bit more contrast between the hard and soft grain though and building a colour by layering two colours can give more interesting tones than if I just blended yellow to brown. I've tested going the other way, waterbased first then alcohol based on top but it doesn't seem to give the same result. Also, the grain needs to be raised to get the alcohol to really soak in so I go over the top with a damp rag just before applying the purple.

What I have since discovered is that the angelus purple, goes quite blue when diluted heavily, so that will be how I managed to introduce some green when I mixed in some yellow. I also hadn't tested mixing angelus yellow with angelus purple, I just did that bit off the cuff because I didn't like the diluted purple on it's own. That'll teach me not to do a tester. Doh. 

A few coats of sealer on at lunchtime and I seem to have been lucky re the green. Will hopefully get a brown burst on it over the weekend. 

2 minutes ago, Prostheta said:

Weird schedule on that one, man. I think green is in your near future I'm afraid!

well if it is, it might all be sanded off and begun again. I'm not convinced though - purple was the base colour and purple and yellow nearly always make brown. 

We'll find out tonight and with any luck you won't get an opportunity to say I told you so

Got a bit of stain on this one tonight. Started off with a light brown by mixing a heavily diluted purple angelus with a dash of yellow angelus although once dry it came out a bit greener than planned. 

Then I sanded that back so it's mostly just in the grain.

Then I stained a purple teardrop. If my brown had turned out to be a bit less green, I might have been tempted to leave it this way. Bit "Hulk" though.

Then I knocked that back a bit with 320 to bring out some more of the figure in the darkest area and went over it with 2 coats of Crimson waterbased yellow

I seem to have lost a bit of my fade here around the pot holes but I'm putting that down to the fact there isn't as much flame here and that's predominantly where the darks are sitting. I'm going to give it a subtle dark burst so hopefully that will even it up a bit.

Then finally tonight I sanded the edges with 120-320 to get the natural binding rolled over. 

Interested to see what sealer will do to it, might bring out the purples a bit more, hopefully it doesn't bring out any more green

Congrats Nicco, well deserved.