Bizman62

I came to thinking about a much simpler solution: If you have a fence, you can reduce the effect of changing pressure with every soft spot in the wood by attaching your workpiece to a rectangular solid block or other perpendicular jig similarly to what was described in the video. You'd lose the exact adjusting method but you'd have a means to keep your piece straight. Like so: Another simple trick is to take a large enough board and saw a kerf up to the middle of the board. Usually the plate in the table has a large opening, a narrow gap just the width of the blade should help from wandering. The image is from up above:

No expertise here... I just wanted to say that there's several ways and materials to fill the pores. Lacquer type fillers tend to shrink so multiple applications are needed for a glass smooth finish - although a well polished grainy surface can have a more "woody" feel! Once I saw someone fill the grain of an ash body with ebony dust and either glue or lacquer. Wood dust should fill more effectively as you can control the solids content.

It's amazing how a sliver of veneer can take the looks to another level! IMO the standard look of P90's has always yelled "cheap!". The covers look just what they are, plastic pieces from a well polished mould with small humps and bumps where the plastic has slightly deformed while cooling down. Even leveling and sanding matte makes a huge difference! Not to mention what you did. And it only takes a minute or three! Speaking about plastic covers, my hometown used to have a factory where they made the covers for Nokia phones back when 2110 was the top of the line. Obviously, considering the price, even the standard quality was good but the customizers really made some stunning covers. I especially liked the fake walnut, it looked real enough to match with the panels of a Mercedes...

How coincidental! Just yesterday evening I watched a lengthy Jerry Rosa video where he demonstrated a new tool for the bandsaw. As you see, it's intended for cutting uniform slices very accurately. As Jerry says there, pushing a piece against the fence has all kinds of variables like uneven pressure which can make the blade drift no matter how well your setup has been done. As wood is quite an inconsistent material by nature something odd can always be expected so I wouldn't consider trying to compensate a softer or harder spot in the wood an operator error.

Custom made pickup housings! Looking how you made those tiny boxes made me forget to read what they were for, or at least I didn't fully understand the idea until now! You've taken "high definition" yet to another level!

I just keep shaking my head in awe.

Good find! Although the basics are similar it's more explanative to see a scarf joint being cut instead of a molding.

Hey, you've learned how to build guitars and then you've learned how to make a machine do part of the building. You'll get there! One thing I miss from my old camera is the focusing system, whatever those halves of a circle are being called. If I got a line continue from one half to the other it was perfectly focused. Agreed, it sometimes took a while but guitars don't run anywhere!

Isn't the digital camera a blessing! 60 pics would have cost some serious money for getting the film(s) developed only to find out that they weren't what you wanted. If that sounds plenty, remember that professional nature photographers may take thousands of photos for every picture they publish! A shiny object is tricky to focus on, You've managed to blur the background from what you used to, now it seems that the focus is often inside the f-hole, showing the matte black roughness! I especially like the strap button pic. You've managed to get the essentials pop up - the curves, the faux binding and the shininess. Some image editing can also help! Here's the image with 30 less brightness, 30 more contrast and 20 more saturation, done with Paint.net: And using the built-in Windows Photos App, using Filters/Improve at 100, Changes/Lighting -25, Colour saturation +50, Clarity +100 and Vignette +50:

Good catch! I didn't think about that a mitre saw only can cut up to some 50 degrees either way. There's several videos about making a jig for any angle, this one seems to have all the information without going back and forth. One of the biggest issues in cutting long and narrow pieces like a plank is to hold the piece perfectly upright. A taller jig would help as you can lean your piece against it.

Both should work. A band saw is most likely the more common choice simply because few of us have access to a big miter saw with a fine toothed blade but if you have one and know how to use it, it should do a more precise work. Make use of the tools you have and master them! And just in case your sawing goes all off and you'd need to straighten your cut, an angled sanding/routing ramp can help!

And I who thought that inlaying the truss rod cover would be an extremely fancy way! That cover is just so classy!

I'd even call that a couple of levels higher than that. What is the superlative for mind-blowing? Mindblowingest?

Just thinking out loud... First I thought about making a wedge and cover it with veneers and then finally cut that into pieces. That might work but after some more thinking it's obvious that one piece at a time is a much better option. The laminated two colour veneer already speeds the process up sufficiently and is much less prone to errors. The second thought proved to pass by the second and even third round of pondering and that one is about your health! No, not about adult beverages - actually I just got a dram of peated Connemara I got from my Mother-in-Law for my birthday (she doesn't know that she gave that to me, yet). No, I'm talking about exotic wood dust and glue vapours. My imagination seats you into an easy chair in a dimly lit corner. In order to see what you're doing you'd have to lean over your work like Rowlf in the Muppet Show. And you can't wear a dust mask because of your hydrating agent.

Just as the Nouveau artists with their lettering, you've proved you can do a perfect arc. They could draw letters that look like done with a typewriter or other template. They could draw/paint photorealistic faces and animals. Instead they chose freehand - with strict rules about spacing for better readability! Same with yours: Perfectly fitted freehand form - or an impression of a shape if you will. I've got an old parlour guitar with a decorative bridge. Nothing fancy, it just narrows until it ends to a Fleur de Lys. The lilies aren't symmetric by any means, neither with each other nor by their left/right petals. To me it tells that someone has actually grabbed a file to get that shape.

For the same reason I like laminated necks! Just a bit of extra length and you'll get two sturdy necks out of two slabs and some slats.

Haha! Is that a Telelele? That's something I might want to copy for my brother-in-law. He got a Tele for his 50th so the shape is something he likes - and my sister started playing the uke a couple of years ago! And I actually have no plans for next winter despite having signed to the course...

It's so hard to forget how tiny they are until your hand is holding a major part!

What I like here is the tiny imperfection in the continuity of the outline of the perfectly fitted inlay which tells that it's a one-off piece made by hands of a human - somehow it reminds me of the lettering in the posters by Toulouse-Lautrec !

^^ those.

So... The everlasting saga of my experimental build has come to an end. For all the iterations, mistakes, fixes and frustration look here: Long story short, some years ago I saw a company felling big poplar trees in a yard in the town centre. So I asked if they could give me a 1 m long piece from the stem and they did. It was 70 cm in diameter and a real pain to lift into my station wagon. The log stood upright in my yard for most of the summer as I was trying to find some place to get it sawn. When I noticed that some fungi started to rot the end I took my chainsaw and butchered a few blocks out of it. And after having had the blocks for several years on the beams of my firewood shed I noticed that they had dried so I took them to the workshop to see what I got. I managed to resaw bookmatched planks of about 40 mm so I decided to go through my leftover pile for a neck and the rest is history. This was my first set neck build, I've built two bolt-ons and three neck-thrus before this. Let's call her "Buttons" for obvious reasons Body: Poplar felled in the yard of a block of flats. Neck: Multi-laminate maple-cherry-nogal with flamed birch veneers all from a parquet factory Fretboard: Merbau from the same source Pickups: Made by a friend when he studied luthiery at the Ikata, AlNiCo 2 low output design Tuners: Gotoh locking staggered Frets: Medium nickel silver Fret markers: Buttons salvaged from a Melka short sleeved shirt with thinned brass nails Side dots: Brass tube with nogal inserts Bridge, ferrule block, fake turtle binding and other misc. stuff from China Finish: Crimson Stunning Stain Shots Cherry on the bottom, Lidl rattle can lacquer continued with Maston made Car-Rep Acryl rattle cans Weight 2.3 kg. Lots of sustain, warm tone.

So... The pickups are now re-magnetized - it's possible that the pile of neodymium magnets salvaged from hard drives in the drawer below the shelf where I stored the pickups for a couple of years did something, or that they interacted each other being in touch for that long. But they now work! The finish is a self-relicing mess, it seems to melt by touch. I'm teased to strip it away and spray a 2k on it. But for now it will be as is at least until the class starts again.

Oh wow! Usually it requires quite a lot of poking and sketching to make others see the non-existing things you do. Are you sure you aren't my big brother? Dad used to date an American girl before he met my mom...

You, sir, are a man full of surprises when it comes to finding solutions!

Well, I'm pretty sure by now that the round thing down there isn't a human head between the legs of a mid size feline. Humans sinking in lava may also be too far fetched a guess.