Bizman62

Hi and welcome to the forum! Patina is one thing and shit is another. Not to mention that the guitar is in sort of an unplayable state. You definitely don't want a flake of dirty finish under your skin! First thing I'd do is to clean the neck. Soap and water shouldn't ruin anything, just don't flood the neck so it starts to warp because of excessive moisture. A squeezed sponge should to the trick without harming the neck. After cleaning the gunk off you have several options. The extreme is to scrape all finish off the neck which is what I read some famous guitar player does, leaving the neck to bare wood. It will soon get that grey shade of your personal secretions. One step further, you can use wax to protect the bare wood. Next more protective is some sort of TruOil, a mix of boiled linseed oil and poly with a suitable amount of turpentine for better penetration. And finally we're up to renewing the clearcoat, more in the following chapter. If you prefer to fix the existing finish for a proper restoration (no wonder for the prices asked), a lot depends on the type of the clearcoat. Nitrocellulose lacquer will blend to previous layers quite easily while 2k poly and other polyurethane based finishes most likely will show a line unless you take it all off. But how to tell? Well, nitro is basically the same stuff as nail varnish so acetone should wipe it off and alcohol at least soften it. Then again, used liberally and given enough time and elbow grease most solvents will soften any sort of clearcoat so be careful and only attack spots that will be refinished. 1980 isn't "delicate vintage" so some experimenting may be allowed. If that clearcoat melts to alcohol I'd assume it to be nitro. So after proper cleaning and light sanding I'd try clear nail varnish to see if it blends in with the rest. If not, that can be scraped off to try something else. Even a full refinish might be within reason but if the problem area is only in the playing area of the neck I wouldn't touch the headstock.

That's close enough to the 10 cm I cut mine off.

The curing time can be surprisingly long. No wonder the professional builders hang the guitars on the wall for months before sending them away. My latest finished build still sticks to my forearm, don't know if it's the wax or the clearcoat that seems to melt under body temperature. I even tried to remove the wax with turpentine but it didn't help as much as I was hoping. Maybe it's my sweat reacting with the acryl? But would it do that through a sleeve? At first I thought you would wrestle with your buddy and wondered how that's related to a fret job!

Agreed! The binding not only serves as protection for sharp edges, it also can draw the outlines to guide the focus to what's inside it.

ahh yes, they're not too thick. Half an inch or at least 10 mm whichever unit you prefer should fix that issue but there's times when you just have to go with what you have. An exoskeleton of sorts might do the trick, retaining visibility while damping vibrations. Didn't someone just do that on a recent build? Or was it someone at the course? Or some youtubist? Anyhow, CA can be used as a finish. But you'll have to have very good ventilation, rather a fume hood/closet so you won't breathe or get the vapours into your eyes. Even sanding and buffing should be done under similar shields. That stuff is nasty as hell!

That sounds funnier in Finnish: Puu näyttää puulta...

Ooh, you built a fancy sanding block!

Some candlewax on the blade?

Tru dat. My first suggestion about connecting directly to the amp is intended just for that: If the guitar and amp work perfectly together, it'd be clear that the pedal is the culprit. My second post basically applies to the pedal as well. If there's a shortcut i.e. some loose wire or pot touches the housing it can be tested by nudging the pedal to find out if random vibrations cut the signal.

If it comes and goes, it might also be that the lug of the volume pot grounds to the shielding tape. A piece of electrician's tape between the two metals should fix that.

So today the course started again. Woohoo! I even opened the zip of the gig bag to show the guitar in its current shape. Instead I spent some time with the robust table saw, the big band saw and the planer, working in turns with a guy who had a couple of half a metre wide sallow stumps. Aside of the abovementioned alder I also had a nice lump of birch which seemed too knurly to be chopped to firewood. Instead I cut some headstock material out of it: I also took three halves of the alder to be cut. There's now a blank that can be made into two one-piece bodies and a stack of various sized material, stacked with sticks in between on the upmost shelf of the two-storey high working space. Fun times ahead after they're properly dry!

Is it quiet even if you connect the guitar directly to the amp? If so, to my very limited knowledge about eletromagic it might be a shortcut in the volume pot.

The fence with rollers seems like a clever idea! And the wood is just gorgeous.

Yepp, it might have been different back in the 70's when we painted our summer cottage. My understanding is that at least the window frames of the old building were painted with sparepart paint for agricultural vehicles. And if memory serves me right, the new building was painted with a similar paint. The window frames still look good, no chipping or crackling. The new building was towed away after some twenty years but the painting was intact, my folks just wanted a real cottage instead of a small cabin of 3x6 metres. But all that was back when good paint included all sorts of poisons.

For paint that most likely would require some primer that's made for wood, and that should then be suitable for car paint. That said, the ultra clear 2k which is intended for metal flake paint seems to work perfectly well on guitars.

That's what I've been thinking as well. At least it has grown much faster than ours. Only two growth rings on the side!!! Here the definition for high quality pine is about 1 mm per year, the southern lumber having grown on fields about 5-10 mm a year is called snot pine (literal translation) as it's soft like phlegm.

That headstock looks yummy, I definitely have to do at least one asymmetric one! And mirroring the shape at the end of the fretboard sure looks something else. And the mitre box is yet another example of homemade simple things that work just as well as a $500-ish pro tool milled out of a single block of pompousium, with unicorn oil lubricated bearings and other bells and whistles.

I'd say all parts are guilty. The whetstones I bought earlier this summer make quite a lot of slurry with the metal dust of the blade and it penetrates skin quite effectively. The stones look similar to those that one youtuber was strongly against. Then again, that guy is a huge fan of certain diamond slabs so his opinion may be somewhat biased. After restoring four plane blades from round to razor the set still looks like they haven't worn at all, only got dirtier.

That one was the rustiest of the four I've brought to life this summer. It's also the only one I've used phosphoric acid on to remove rust. Looking back the entire process didn't take too long. The acid treatment took about a couple of hours one evening, including dismantling and rough cleaning. Sanding from dark to bright metal with abrasive felt and sandpaper maybe another couple of hours - the bottom and sides of the body haven't been leveled, just cleaned. Sharpening from rounded and pitted to razor sharp also took an hour as the blade required reshaping. Cleaning the handles took quite some time as well, the crud was too soft to sand and too hard to wash. Obviously getting the handles finished took the longest but in short intervals. Using some 2k poly instead of BLO would have done the trick in one go. Cleaning my hands after every metal honing session took almost as long as the actual work! Anyhow, the time needed depends much on the required tasks and what tools you have.

True! Back in the day I spent one weekend as a railroad worker for a narrow rail track and in order to change some of the sleepers we had to cut salvaged standard width ones a bit shorter. That involved chopping the surface off with axes before using the chainsaw as there was quite a lot of sand packed in the pores. But indeed the center didn't look like being treated.

I - want - a - workshop! That said, despite having tickets to four lotteries weekly I've still paid more than the few wins I've got. But as long as there's a 50% chance to win the main prize there's hope. One day the coin may flip my way.

That was once asked in a Crimson video and Mr Crowe couldn't find any major issues with the idea. With a bolt-on neck changing it would be difficult but a set neck is intended to be permanently attached. Then again, you don't need much surface to glue a neck. The neck pocket of a Strat is big enough for a glue joint. This pocket is 45-75 x 55 mm, 20 mm deep, and it doesn't seem to want to crack:

Will the next tool be a nut polishing device with compound impregnated fiber disks to reach the slots? A furry version of the saw, sort of? Looking at those makes me seriously want to make a brass nut, now all I need to do is to find some brass!

Outsourcing is the name of the game! Rather than sending your builds, why not ask for a paid course or some sort of part time apprentice deal? She would teach you how to spray 2k, you could help with sanding and other tedious tasks as you already know how to prepare your work for finishing. Finishing metal is not too different to finishing wood after all, especially when it comes to painting or clearcoating. Every scratch and dust particle will show...

This little sidetrack woke up my curiosity so I found this: https://www.agicorailfasteners.com/news/what-wood-are-railway-sleepers-made-of.html saying Common track section and turnout track section: Elm, birch, oak, jarrah, karri, sal, mora, maple, azobé, poplar, larch, pine, Yunnan pine (a kind of Chinese pine), spruce, fir, hemlock and other broad-leaved tree species (poplar isn’t used as turnout sleeper). Bridge track section: Huashan pine (a kind of Chinese pine), larch, Yunnan pine (a kind of Chinese pine), spruce, fir, hemlock, koraiensis, etc. The common nominator seems to be availability, using a local wood that matches the criteria for strength and durability. That's most likely why we have used creosote treated pine here in Finland. Pine grows naturally almost all over the country so there's little transportation costs. Birch is almost as common but it tends to rot so the choice is clear.