Bizman62

This is going to be interesting! So the wood will not show at all on the top?

What join??? I went back to view the first posts where you mentioned the join and I couldn't find it! Neither can I see it in the last photos. Well, truth to be said after having re-read the post where you told about it I guess I now can locate it but it really doesn't show. This reminds me of the "contests" by @mistermikev about finding a join or mistake: After having been told that there really is something to find, it can be found. But I still struggle with finding the join on yours.

Ahh... That changes the situation. That said, our timber is more or less forest timber. That doesn't mean that we don't plant trees, on the contrary. There's nursery gardens although some say that natural seeding works just as fast. But there's often other faster growing species left as a cover against the roughest weather conditions. Alder is often used for that purpose and it seems to grow there naturally, some weeding has to be done a couple of times until the "good" trees have grown tall enough to survive. Funny thing is that the city greenies often seem to want to protect ripe planted forests as primeval! They don't seem to understand that wood grows slower than grass, the normal cycle between planting and end harvesting being about 100 years or even more with some thinning in between.

That idea makes sense and sometimes it may work. Like you I would be hesitant wetting the wood - the current weather over there must be moist enough! If you get them straighter, stack them between slats or beams to prevent warping until you need them. Use thick enough beams on the outsides so that they don't bend with your top woods.

Hopefully you're living on a hill! The Sydney downpour made it into the news here. Looks kinda moist.

FWIW birch is considered to be the "best" firewood here. Yes, the same stuff Baltic Birch plywood is made of. And it has a few fancy variables as well, flamed, birdseye and "curly birch" which is a mutation where tiny bits of bark get captured within the wood. It burns the hottest of our common woods. Aspen is another popular firewood and they say that it keeps chimneys cleaner than birch, especially the bark of birches creates a lot of soot. Both birch and alder can be and are used for building electric guitars as well. If the source is sustainable there's nothing wrong in using the wood in all possible ways.

Some simple things stylishly bundled! The brick pattern, the metal pickup rings, the binding around the fretboard make a harmonic ensemble. It's hard to see but it also looks like you've paid serious attention to blend the heel into the body.

That should be cross stitched and hung on the wall in every workshop!

Congrats! Lots to love in both competitors, a fair win.

As your pictorial shows you obviously kept it for testing purposes. Less perfect pieces also work well as clamping supports and guiding fences. That caught my eye as well. That was the very first thing we were taught about using the band saw.

Just curious: Why are the sound holes different in the finished instrument compared to the neckless body?

Do you mean the lighter area around the letters? To me that looks like intentional, emphasizing the text. It also resembles a decal, they often show a similar surrounding. If that really bugs you, sanding and reoiling is the only way. Good thing with oiling is that you don't have to do the entire area as the patch will blend - if the oil is of natural colour, that is. For a tinted oil sanding to the nearest edge should hide any differences in shade. You're right about heat sealing wood. Heat treated/torrefied/roasted wood is water repellent to an extent. Back in the day they used to char the underground ends of fence posts to prevent rotting. They once told me in a torrefying plant that optimal heat treating is quite delicate as too roasted gets ultimately brittle and too little heat is just kiln dried. As the letters are charred, I'd suppose that the surroundings are "optimally roasted" for durability. But the rest is just normally dried. That said, you may not be able to sand that away, at least not totally.

I've got nothing against Australian timbers, there's some very nice wood over there! There's one issue, though: Mail and customs. My wife's goddaughter married an Australian. Sending her gifts of nominal value can be ridiculously expensive.

Adding to that, if you raise your bridge by a fraction of a millimetre, it shouldn't affect playability too much. Also bear in mind that the effect of raising the bridge is only half at the 12th fret - if you raise the bridge by, say, 0.5mm the raise is 0.25mm at the twelfth. That'd be two sheets of paper. It's measurable, but can you really feel the difference?

Not necessarily so. There's hundreds of variants both for stainless and "regular" steel and there's some plain steel variants that are stronger than most any stainless steel. Back in the day we visited Paris (France, not Texas) and saw the Eiffel Tower. The bars used to build it had the quality markings embossed. My dad who worked in the steel importing business looked at them and said that he had never sold steel of that poor quality. Yet it has been standing there for 133 years despite two fires so the structure is strong enough.

Just a side note: Rust is usually related to moisture. I know there's areas where corrosion really is a problem as there's so much salty mist all over the place - even the life span of a PC is only a couple of years there! But for the rest of us I guess stainless steel isn't worth the extra price.

Oh, silly me! Downloading as an excel sheet works on Libre Office, most likely other versions as well.

It now opens, but it's "Read Only", saying you'd have to sign into your Google account to be able to ask for permission to modify from the owner.

You lucky bus-turd! I've never seen more than a couple dozen guitars in one shop! And most of them were the €100 ones including an amp, a gig bag and a cable... "They come from the same manufacturer as <brand>, only unbranded so they're basically the same". That's what I really, really like! "Influenced by" and tailored to your liking rather than meticulously copying is IMHO the essence of building by yourself. If you want a carbon copy, there's dozens of Far-East builders who make more or less exact copies of well known models for a ridiculously cheap price. That's a very good idea! My local timber yard would take me to a pile fo pine.

Hi and welcome! Google says there's no such spreadsheet. Check the link or permissions. A cost calculator is a double-edged sword. Although we've been recently discussing the total cost of self built guitars, that may not necessarily be something your wife would like to see. Instead of an easy reading spreadsheet getting the small parts one at a time - "such small common parts cost next to nothing" - can help hiding the total cost. Quality parts are like diamonds, small and delicately crafted... Oh, and don't tell that comparison to the wife!

That's an interesting volute! It looks like there's enough space for all chord shapes despite the lip.

Ahh, that kind of black. Makes a big difference regarding materials.

As an addition to my previous post: When refinishing our kitchen cabinet doors I found out that a foam roller gives a much more uniform surface compared to a brush.

I have a bunch of polypropylene mayo bottles stored in my cellar to be used for my BBQ sauce... PP doesn't harden in the dishwasher like PET and it seems to keep things quite fresh, at least the edible ones. I mentioned aluminium just for the colour and because it's the most common metal on Earth and thus available for everyone. Any silvery surface can be painted.

I guess you've already familiar with the world famous uke players so I won't bother listing them. My late cousin Martin could do some exciting rhythms with it...