ADFinlayson

It would appear I forgot to update this one and I didn't take that many pics but here goes... I had to change my processes up a bit, I was going to use the neck template of my Suhr Modern templates for the neck taper but Andy wanted the neck to be a bit wider, so I ended up dimensioning the fretboard to measurements, glueing it on the routing the neck to match the fretboard - normally I would route the neck, glue the board on and trim the board to match the neck.

But before I could do all that, I had to do the route for the neck pickup, so I used locator pins on the board to figure out exactly where the route had to go and do the route before the fretboard was glued on. I also had to route a channel down the side of the neckthrough to where the bridge pickup cavity was going to go so that I could thread a wire through because no drill bit is going to join those two cavities up.

Then I used a surfacing bit on my 1/2" router to take 2mm off the top of the body end of the neck through except the area where the fretboard was going to go, that way the fretboard will sit 2mm higher than the rest of the body and the bridge is the right heigh relative to the strings. Then I got the board glued on.

Then the wings which were just roughed out, apparently after fretting. you can see all the router marks where I skimmed 2mm off the top of the neckthrough part

Then I finalised the body shape, mostly with the bobin sander

Then I got on to the rest of the routes - The Kahler bridge came with a cardboard template for the internal route which I duped on to the mdf, but for the outline, I screw the bridge on, went round it with a find pencil and chiselled out a couple of mm to recess it, like a really big inlay  There is a little grub screw on the back of the bridge which locks it off into a hardtail but that screw isn't accessible if the bridge is recessed so I used a round-nose bit to route a little spot to get an allen key in there. 

Fast forward a little while and it's done. Andy is picking it up later this week.

The wiring is quite cool but it wasn't fun to do. He wanted some quacky sounds but wanted to try series/parallel instead of coil splitting with a push pull which required a special 4DPT pot. Fortunately Andy did the research and found the pot, the only thing suitable that was available was a Warwick pot which was £50 by the time it was shipped and extremely fiddly.  Here is the pot next to a plectrum so you can see how tight it was, and ALL terminals needed something soldered to them. I had to do it in situ because all 8 pickup wires had to connect to the pot. Amazed I managed to get to the end without a massive solder burn on the back fo the guitar.

The push pull part of the pot goes out to the 3-way switch which goes back to the regular part of the pot before the output, the other item you see on the front is a stutter button from Tesi which was way easier to install that I thought it would be. 

Have to say as a non-trem person, I quite like the Kahler, it strikes me as the Betamax to Floyd roses VHS.

Well after getting the neck fretted I noticed that the fretboard overhang had developed a bit of a bow, so I begrudgingly pulled the last 6 frets, widened the slots and refretted which has improved matters. I seem to remember fretting going a lot easier last time so I think I might try doing the radius and fretwork the board prior to glueing it on next time.

Got a rough shape in to the bridge, located it and screwed it down. To get intonation this time I cut up an old 105 bass string which seems to be a fairly accurate, cheap and dirty way to find saddle location, certainly less hit and miss than the extra low saddle I slid in under the strings on #1

The action is a touch higher than I'd want it at the moment at 2mm on the bass side but I think I can get that down by taking some material off the top or bottom of the bridge which is currently around 9mm - I wonder how thick the bridge actually needs to be? The nut is also way too high as it's only rough shaped.

I can already tell it sounds way better than #1, hard to explain other than saying it just sounds bigger.

8 minutes ago, Andyjr1515 said:

It does indeed.  That Guitar Bouzouki I built a year or so ago lifted an enormous amount.  Scared the life out of me!  I thought I'd got something wrong with the top thickness/braces at first, but it is absolutely fine.  I have realised that it is an extra factor to build in when setting the initial neck angle - many of the conventional methods of setting that initial angle miss that vital consideration out.

All this talk has got me excited to put some strings on it now, I'd better get the bridge finished and hopefully the mild weather continues so I can get some lacquer on it 

55 minutes ago, Andyjr1515 said:

Mine are similar to Ash's - 15' for the back and 25' for the top.  That said, I find that the top almost always flexes back a touch once the go-bars are removed no matter how many and strongly they were applied, so the final radius I actually achieve is closer to 30'

That is a very good point and reminded me that the radius of the top changes when you put strings on too as the tension of the strings lifts the bridge up which makes quite a difference to string action. 

34 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

lovely stuff as always brother.  love that backside... limba I s'pose.  really sharp.

thanks mate, yeah as acoustic woods go, limba is pretty cheap, easy to bend and looks a bit more interesting than other options. I got myself another set recently so I think I'll do another limba build at some point 

50 minutes ago, mattharris75 said:

Looking great!

What's the radius on your radius dishes for your top and back? Been planning an acoustic guild and am doing some data gathering...

Thanks, I've got a 15' dish for the back and 28' for the front. I stuck them to each other so I just flip them over when I want to change radius, also works as a good clamping caul when gluing the top/back on

I've been back down the rabbit hole over the last couple of days after nearly 6 months of procrastination. Largely due to getting this route right. I'm not sure how the holes I drilled in the end block ended up off centre because the route was in the right place. 

and the alignment was pretty close when I did a test fit, just needed a little bit of fettling

I got some ears glued on and the fretboard in the right location with some locator pins

annoyingly, I managed to thickness the back way too thin - it was <1.5mm at the end in some places, so I ended up getting another back, thinning it down to 1.5mm and glueing it on to the back to make a ply which was a bit of an arse of a job and a shame because I really liked the figure of the original back.

With that issue fixed, I did the binding channel and got the binding on. I used the stewmac binding dremel attachment this time which I am still getting to grips with - it does cut parallel with the sides but it is quite hard to control so I had a couple of wobbles and ended up with a couple of gaps to fill and a few spots where the binding is slightly thinner after trimming, I think a lot of that is largely my fault for not thoroughly checking the consistency of the channel before glueing the binding in and I haven't got the will to route it off and do it all again.

This is what it's looking like all together and with the new back. I still need to sand all the scratches out of the neck and find sand the top/sides before I can think about doing anything finishing. Ideally I need to redo that bevel veneer but I'm tempted to just spray a bit of shader over it to make the glue line. I'm putting this one down as another learner anyway because it's got that flat spot at the top.

Something I like about the mortice/tenon joint as apposed to the butt joint I did on #1 is that I could make the heel considerable smaller without having to worry about revealing a threaded insert.

and a close up of the very simple inlay and neck heel.

17 hours ago, ShatnersBassoon said:

Fantastic work as always. I would love that fret slotting setup.

And a planer...

Thanks Carl, that machine has made my life better for sure, I never really use the thicknesser on it but the table saw and the planer have made a couple of jobs way faster so it's well worth the space it takes up. At some point I plan to get a flush cutter for the spindle moulder on it too so I can route bodies out much more quickly than I currently do. Funny though, that machine cost me £350 and the bit I need for routing is £300. Reminds me of when I was a kid and my Dad bought a TR7 for £250 and the welder he needed to restore it for £300

5 hours ago, Remo said:

Lost in translation. Respectfully, what is "shader"- same as paint? Better not be a snipe hunt. I'm not finding reference to shader in web searches in relation to finishing (maybe due to my different location on the planet). Help me out, I can only speak Texan with any confidence. 

*Once the front of the house gets painted and Christmas deco is up, etc., I've got some trial maple veneers and other supplies to sacrifice on the project now, so I'll fool with some testing soon and go with what works. Thanks all.

adding dye to clear lacquer to get a transparent tint 

a top around 7mm with some cupping will probably conform anyway  then the glue joint will hold it flat, but you can do the heat gun trick something I used with success the day before yesterday. Place the wood hump side up and go over it with a heat gun for a few mins, focussing on the middle where the hump is, get it hot but don't scorch it and you will see if start to flatten itself out after a few mins, then leave it under heavy weight for a couple of weeks and it will remain flat or close to flat. 

I've seen this finish discussed a few times. IMO that is a bit of spalted flame maple and they've clearcoated, then they've used the strong spalt lines to break up the two elements and taped off and the colour is done with shader, i definitely don't think that it's dye because you would never get crisp lines given how much spalted maple soaks up dye.  You could really carefully scrape the detail back in that the tape couldn't cover, at least that's how I'd do it.

Nicely done, congrats. You might not know it yet but you're going to spend the next 5 years of your life in your garage and you're going to spend all your money on wood and tools.

Hi my name is Ash and I'm addicted to making guitars. 

Jesus that is a serious bit of wood. What's the betting in about a 100 years, someone turns your table top into a guitar. 

I forget his name but there was a guy that came up to me stand at the london show a couple of weeks ago, boasting of a 38k humbucker so it must be possible with fine wire. You could try experimenting with stronger magnets though, I asked my pickup maker to redo a pickup for me recently. He didn't rewind it but just put a stronger magnet of the same type in and the pickup was way hotter.

On 11/13/2022 at 6:36 PM, Crusader said:

I have never built a guitar without some kind of stuff up. One time I plugged the router in and it was switched on, and it did a little dance on the back of the neck. On a Les Paul neck pocket I discovered that my router didn't cut square. More than once I have routered a pickup well in the wrong place, and the list goes on and on

Generally I put a tremendous amount of effort into getting things right, but I'm starting to realise I'm not going to live forever, I haven't got time for it any more. I don't have customers by the way!

yikes, I actually did that at the weekend, fortunately the router was in the middle of a forstner hole and I was able to grab it before it started eating pinball fashion. I have been soo careful to make sure it's switched off since - I'm ploughing through a couple of builds this week so I've been doing way too much routing. 

I had the slightly smaller 1/2" version of that router (the 1100w one) and it was useless to be honest. the first thing I noted after the excessively high pitched motor was the clear yet completely opaque dust port you mentioned. A couple of the features stopped working not long after I got it, firstly the fine adjuster would slip gears then the speed dial would move of it's own accord during use, after about 6 weeks it stopped working entirely so I ditched it and went back to my old cheap Ryobi, What was most aggrivating was that Amazon wouldn't let me return it after 30 days and Triton didn't want to know either so I was well out of pocket. 

I've got the Trend T11 now which is superior in every way IMO, although the dust port has just broken so I need to replace that. But that was 50% bad design and 50% down to my miss handling of it.

I do use a trim router for odd jobs but IMO you're better off with something with at least 2hp motor and a solid build for routing bodies, pickup cavities etc, smaller routers and much more likely to dance around and eat your work piece. 

It really depends on the circumstances, if it's a build for a customer and it goes wrong, then you gotta fix it. e.g the other day I was routing a truss rod channel in a neck blank and I didn't have the bit sinched up properly in the trimmer and created a really nice channel for a skunk stripe, so that blank is now a really expensive neck profile template. On the other hand, the sides of my first acoustic build warped before I got the top and back on so it looks like an offset OM but I carried on regardless because I wanted to prove I could make an acoustic that didn't implode when I put strings on it. 

Personally, if I dented a build after a few coats of lacquer, I would be inclined to see if that can be fixed, normally dents can be steam out or mostly out and sanded, and lacquer can be reapplied. 

2 minutes ago, spindlebox said:

Man, that's a great idea.  I will consider that for sure!!!  I mean, you could also do a laminate neck with ebony too and that would look cool and do the same thing.

Totally, I was thinking about this entirely as hidden reinforcement, like fibre rods. I generally only make 1 piece necks these days because it's less work, less glue joints so I didn't consider multi lam, and IMO multi lam necks definitely don't need reinforcement. 

That's very cool, how many guitars have you built since 1972 and 2022? are any of those old tools still in use? Tell all

I never got the impression that any of the members on this forum were out to become millionaires from guitar building, quite the opposite when you factor in the cost of the tools

I bought some carbon fibre rods once, similar dimensions to what you've got pictured above and I noticed they actually had quite a lot of flex, so from then on I decided they were a waste of money. I might change my mind if ever I have a neck twist, but I'm also of the opinion that if it's going to, it will twist eventually with or without fibre rods. My other argument for not using them is that anything that stiffens the neck is making the job of the truss rod harder so it's more likely to snap or suffer a stripped nut.

As to your question re alternatives, a friend of mine is a classical builder and as a traditionalist doesn't believe in truss rods, but he uses a centre strip of ebony as neck reinforcement - Imagine routing a 1/4" truss rod channel and just glue in some ebony. It's slightly heavier but ebony is way strong and you could route a 3x6mm channel either side of your truss rod and glue in some quarter sawn ebony. I expect you could get 6-8 trips out of a single fretboard blank. 

On 10/13/2022 at 4:58 PM, Crusader said:

You're getting me all fired up, loving that piece of Ash. My Tele build has stagnated for too long and I gotta get back into it

By the way I had never used one of them jacks before either and a 22mm bit was the go

Well this comment has served well to remind me to actually update this thread. We're rockin!

My usual approach to polishing now is to use the stewmac medium (brown) hard compound on my buffer after wet sanding, then I use Chemical Guys 36 then 38 polishes on separate mops, but it just didn't look right being all shiny with aged hardware, so I went back down to chemical guys 34 which seems to give a slightly finer polish than the Stewnac medium.

I do like this aged hardware, the bridge is the aged Gotoh "in tune", the tuners the aged Stewmac set and the rest of the hardware came from Charles Guitars in the UK. The only trouble IMO is that the screws that came with the Charles hardware are too aged, they're pretty much covered in rust. The screws on the guard in the above pic are new nickel screws which don't look right so I lightly sanded the top of them and left them in a tub of salt and malt vinegar for a few hours which worked quite nicely, I'll get some pics of that when I'm in the shop later.

Essentially I am trying to make it look aged without making it look relic.

He wanted it to be an Esquire but said he didn't want the switch so I've just wired it up like a Junior with 250k pots.

Looking great. I use Danish oil on my necks all the time and sand in the slurry coat like that, but I've never thought to warm the oil up first, I'll give that a try. Thanks for the tip.