Bizman62

That petroleum jelly sounds like a good idea! I've been covering the truss rod with a similarly trimmed strip of masking tape. As per a hint on a Crimson video I've also rolled a few pieces of masking tape on the truss rod to prevent rattling. There's space for those as the truss rod sits a hair deep.

Did you remember to put the truss rod in before gluing?

Thanks, that was the very piece of information needed! The body looks pretty thick. As @curtisa said you could remove material from the back without any changes to the setup. Based on the neck which looks factory made that's basically a Strat. A Strat body is 1 3/4" (45mm) thick with a deep belly carve and big forearm bevel to make it comfortable. You can easily go down to 1½", just make sure you leave enough space for the pickup, Floyd and controls. Some 1" should be plenty for the heel area, just make sure that the screws aren't too long. A belly carve alone could help a lot!

Wow! Even a single one of those would be a horn of plenty! And the shape of the body is simply seductive!

The patching strip looks fine. Believe or not, trying to figure out how to help you recover from your mistakes helps the rest of us as well. One lifetime would not be long enough to face all the potential issues in our own builds. The last time I made a similar patch was to replace rotten wood in a window pane.

That scarf jointed end piece is a very nice detail!

Looks great! Did you do some wirewool magic to the pickups as well as they look satin instead of glossy?

Pretty much yes. Although you can draw the centerline first aligned with a true straight side of your blank and use the adjustable side fence attached on the router base:

She has said in an interview that the reason for her lower body parts being so small including her shoe size is that nothing likes to grow in the shadow.

No, it's not easy at all! I've seen a Crimson Guitars video about the subject and even after hundreds of builds Ben Crowe considered it difficult. If the action is nice and low the extra space under the strings at the pickup area is only about the looks. Actually it helps keeping the body unscratched! As @Workingman said the body is thick so routing the neck cavity deeper would be the best option. The big question with that is how to support the router. Of course you can do it with a chisel as well, in which case you'd have to be extra careful to keep the bottom level. The first question though is about your bridge: Are the saddles adjusted to their highest position? A picture or two of the body might also help. One from the top for a general view and one from the side, if you please.

Hi and welcome to the forum! Restoring your first love can indeed be rewarding and also fun to follow. If the rectangles on the lower picture are the original pickups I must say they look very strange! More than that they also look very thin! It also seems that the body and neck are in line with no neck break angle. That means that there's not much space between the body and the strings. Although the dogear pickup is low, will it fit under the strings. The hardtail bridge isn't too high and it can't be for keeping the action low enough. By measuring three of my bolt-on necked guitars there's only 8 mm free space at the most below the strings. That said, if you're willing to change the looks even more, routing or carving a pickup cavity would solve that issue. A soapbar P90 sunk into the body would be adjustable and sound similar to the dogear version.

Why exactly would you do that? There's two ways to do that, either by carving the neck cavity deeper or by cutting the heel thinner. CAUTION! BUT!!! By doing so you would also change the action. Lowering the nut would change the angle between the neck and the strings. If you lower the neck by 3 mm you'd raise the action at the 16th fret by the same amount and even more at the 21st. There's ways to fix the above issue as well. A lower bridge would do the trick quite easily if you can find one. Or you could route the neck pocket at an angle. Or you could cut a similar angle on the heel. Changing the angle would also change the intonation beyond the adjustment range.

To me that sounds perfectly working. Bass amps have been used for guitar since the beginning but there's some differences in gain presets and the overall design,partially to prevent the speaker from blowing out. Basses require more power to be heard which also means larger speaker cone movement. Thus a bass amp works fine with a guitar but a guitar amp may "explode" with a bass. I'd try with another bass just to be sure.

That's the joy of bolt-on necks! Drilling the wood to save the router is a good idea indeed. However for the truss rod cavity a few shallow passes aren't too much of an effort compared to routing control cavities and such. The channel looks like you've routed it using the side of the neck as a guide, and the neck is wedge shaped. If you want to fix it, it would be easy at this point. Simply glue a strip to fill the channel and reroute. If the neck is already wedge shaped you can use a fence to lean your router against:

Auto-correction? Anyhow, looks interesting. I'm a bit worried about the truss rod channel, though, as it's both off center and has those holes on the side. That may cause issues.

Let me join your brass band! That's a fine example of making do with what you have.

You should first learn how to do it by hand just to learn the basics and there's quite a lot to be learned. The best CNC coder in town can't do much if he doesn't know how a guitar should be built. CNC is just a tool among other tools, only faster if you're going to build tens or hundreds of similar guitars. If there's a guitar building course in your neighbourhood, join it. Having someone to guide you just when you need it is better than any forum. Read Melvyn Hiscock's "Make Your Own Electric Guitar". The facet method is the easiest way to create a usable neck profile, this is one of the many sites I found by Googling for "guitar neck facet method": https://koentoppguitars.com/blog/carving-a-guitar-neck-with-facets/

Hi Jamie! Assuming you're talking about the factory finish, a fine microfibre cloth (the type used for cleaning eyeglasses) is very good for greasy fingerprints. If there's real tough gunk, you might want to moisten it slightly.

A good finish usually does. Even the thickest 2k requires sanding in between and after and after you've finished you'll find a deeper pore. Or the pores seem to be flush and level but after a couple of months the surface looks similar to yours as the clearcoat has sunk into the pores. Although seemingly solid, all finishes are flexible and as the wood dries (or rather the remains of the fluids crystallize in wood cells) the widening pores create sort of a vacuum and suck the finish into the pores.

You should plane or otherwise make sure that the surfaces you're going to glue together match as good as possible. You'd better let the wood acclimatize i.e. lay stapled on and between slats for a few weeks. Remember the wood drying image? A radius block is the easiest tool for radiusing the fretboard. Radius gauges can be printed. A saw rasp is good but a plane rasp is as effective and can be easier to find. A spokeshave is nice but it requires some skill not to make an hour glass shaped neck. There's tons of them. I suggest you to carve your first neck using the facet method, here's one example of that: https://youtu.be/b0ycwy7XMIg You don't need templates for actually carving a neck. A long straightedge to draw the centerline and the sides is sufficient. There's drawings available and you can use them to make templates or just attach a drawing on the neck blank and cut along the lines. They're handy in finding the location for tuners and getting the measures right as well. When using drawings check that the measures on the drawings match those given as numbers! Keep asking questions! Study videos, study guitars by measuring them at every end. Imagine the process before attempting to do anything. Cardboard can be your best friend when mocking up things...

Some minor progress today as well as some drawback. The bearing of the router bit dug into the soft poplar so badly that I had to resand the sides. That made the binding very thin. I'm currently pondering whether I'd leave it as is or redo the binding channel deeper and get some fake tortoise shell. The latter would match with the buttons... After countersinking the control knob cavities to make them level with the control cavity I then routed the latter deeper. Despite several measurings I routed it too deep so I had to add some material. Luckily there was a piece of 3 mm Baltic Birch plywood in the trash bin! As the poplar is very soft I had already thought about laminating a piece of 0.55 mm birch veneer cross grained to the bottom of the cavity so actually I could as well say that this went better than originally planned! Or should I just say that I added a piece of Tone and Volume wood to the cavity?

The pores are very deep and obviously the layers you're setting are thin. @Andyjr1515 knows that stuff better than I do, in my eyes it just looks like there's not enough stuff to fill the grain. I can't tell whether you just need another 30 coats with light sanding after every 5th layer or use less spirits for faster buildup.

Support while drying. I refer to the picture I posted into one of your previous posts: A solid level base, slats under and between your boards and another solid board on top with some weight added.

FWIW my younger daughter studies music in the LCCM London. It's ten grand a year for three years plus another annual 10k for the rent of a single room in a shared apartment. This semester they only have one day a week at the school because of Covid and half of the days have been canceled due to the teacher being ill. Further, the bachelor degree she'll get is basically worth nothing on the job market. Singing and composing lessons help to express your feelings but they don't bring bread on the table unless you're both very talented and very determined.

Especially if you don't think about circles...