ADFinlayson

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.

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. 

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. 

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.