Bizman62

Hi and welcome to the forum! Cleats usually are a bit thicker than that, something about 1.5 mm. And also a bit larger, almost square. I've seen both squares and diamonds, the main thing is that the grain direction is perpendicular to that of the instrument. And the cleats should be quarter sawn for maximum strength. Mahogany is quite soft despite being a "hardwood" and it's also quite brittle. However, if the bottom is mahogany, using the same species should be OK. Also, there's pieces and pieces, some are tougher than others. For a small instrument like a ukulele the 0.65 mm might suffice. - I believe there's a typo in your thickness! .065 mm is only .0026", the thickness of a hair or paper. Then again, it depends on the nature of the cracks. If the cracks stay closed without pressing then wood glue like Titebond should be enough. A non-stressed crack won't break again at the glue joint. But if there's stress at the crack, meaning you need force to push the surfaces together, some cleats are required. In that case instead of sutures I'd use a bit longer strips just for looks. Either long enough to cover the space between braces or as long as you can get with the grain being perpendicular. If the bottom is of some other wood than mahogany I'd use either that wood or maple for cleats.

Yepp. Back in the day I used to work as a salesman and there was quite many of lemon/citrus oil products in our variety, starting from screen wipes through rubber roller cleaner/regenerator to hand scrubs. Very effective, skin and environmentally friendly etc. But despite the alimentary origin citrus oils aren't something that you could drink as such! A couple of spoonfuls of cold pressed olive oil nourished daily is said to be healthy, the same amount of pure cold pressed lemon oil might be fatal if swallowed. That said, it's still safe to grate lemon peel on your food, the amounts used for spicing are too minuscule to ever cause health issues.

Lemon juice! Of course! It's an acid as well as vinegar and a commonly used for deliming coffee makers. I guess any residue of lemon juice tastes better in your coffee than vinegar residue... Industrial lemon juice can even be better than vinegar for fretboards since they don't peel the lemons before squeezing so there's also some lemon oil from the zest included. And lemon oil is a very effective cleaner!

For large surfaces a small paint roller of foam can be fast but as you may have experienced with the sponge it may suck lots of expensive glue. And you should keep it sunk in water to keep it from drying. Not too effective for occasinal building! A rubber roller would also work. But the most inexpensive tool is a glue spreader made out of a(n old) credit card! A plain card will work but for more consistent results you can take a small triangular file and cut one edge to a saw blade. Doesn't take too long for a row of 1 mm deep slots. When you spread the glue with that saw toothed edge you'll get nice aligned small beads of glue that will spread evenly under pressure. The project looks good so far, seeing the neck in place gives the illusion that it's almost finished! But... what's that model? Is it a TelePaul Jr? Just goes to show that there's not too many shapes that both look good and fit the human body well!

Speaking of stands, there's those for playing as well so you don't have it strapped on your shoulder. Just stand behind the guitar and start playing. Agreed, that would limit your stage show movement but I guess you wouldn't do any acrobatics with a 50 lbs thing anyway...

Now that's what I'd call a perfectly fitted neck!

Funny. In the morning I searched for "Hearpe" for the same reason and found articles, images and videos, all relevant and on the first page.

Yeah, congratulations! Well earned!

Holy hole in a donut! That really is something different! I've seen welded guitars and I've seen steampunk guitars but not a welded petrolpunk guitar... After seeing the video a couple of things caught my eye. Nothing radical though. First, copying the measurements from a known good guitar is basically a good idea. That said, measuring the fret locations would have been much more accurate if you had just looked at a chart or used a fret calculator. Another tip is to measure from the nut instead of the previous fret - you never know if the previous fret is a bit off and the error will then accumulate. Second, as you said it's going to weigh quite a lot. Even on the neck there's a couple of things that don't require that much steel. The nut alone would have sufficed without doubling the thickness. And the piece of tube in the headstock might have worked as well being half the thickness. As I don't know anything about standard thicknesses that may have been the best option, though. Welded nuts instead of threaded holes might have weighed as much. Third, you may have to level the frets despite having filed them to accurate thickness. I don't know how much you know about building guitars, but here's a rule of thumb to help your planning for where to be able to use weaker/thinner/lighter materials: The essentiasl of a guitar are the neck and the 4" wide centerpiece of the body down to the bridge, and a place for the tuners at one end. That part has to be solid. Everything else is for ergonomics and looks! In your case seating the engine requires some extra rigidity but as you've been working with cars you already know that better than I do. This is going to be an exciting journey, thanks in advance for the ride!

A side note about aspen, something I heard from a friend who had heard it from a carpenter: It rots or doesn't rot easily depending on the ground it has grown in. It's because of how it takes silica from the ground but don't ask me which way the silica content should be for rot-resistant wood!

Hand tools! So underrated yet so powerful! Jonnes don't know what that is:

^^ exactly!!! BANG! "Hey, it stuck, where's my camera?"

I'm not an engineer, I'm a blue collar PC repair guy. No university level studies.

I agree. During the day I remembered that I actually have a bottle of it! So now for the first time I opened the bottle and took a sniff. It smells like vinegar to me. So no soap as it won't work with vinegar! It has been sitting on the shelf for several years so something may have happened as there seems to be some tiny harder particles in the liquid. Not many but when turning the bottle upside down with a finger as a tap one or two tiny grains were felt for a moment. It also leaves a slightly oily feel on the fingers. Not greasy, rather like some real lemon/orange oil that is used as a cleaning agent. Maybe pine turpentine? There's recipes about using equal parts of white vinegar, turps and linseed oil as a cleaning solution for furniture. At least all of those were available 300 years ago. Edit: I just got a bit of "insider secret" from a guy who used to work at Crimson: The cleaner had a strong vinegar smell when they bottled it. The difference between Crimson and F-ONE-Oil is that the former is a kit of cleaner and oil and the latter is an all-in-one product. For tough dirt I'd prefer separate products, for regular maintenance one single product will save time.

Well... The Restorative is a blend of oils as they say. For the Cleaner they only say "The Cleaner is based on a vintage recipe used for over 3 centuries to clean stringed instruments of the highest quality." Also, if you look at this comparison review you'll see that it a) can be spritzed and b) looks more like water than oil and c) the towel doesn't seem to get greasy. As a side note, the guy in the video later joined Crimson Guitars to work there for a while so take the praises with a grain of salt.

SInce you're in the UK... I've heard that Crimson Fretboard Cleaner would be even more effective than lighter fluild as well as being more gentle to the wood. Then again, as they say that it's a centuries old recipe without any petroleum products I guess that it must be quite close to soap... Maybe boosted with turpentine? Their data sheet is available only on demand so it's not too easy to find out the formula. Anyhoo, soap and turps have been known for centuries. You may be interested in other household mild cleaners as well. As I wasn't sure about the popular vinegar and baking soda mix being suitable, I did a quick search and found some interesting recipes: https://www.tipsbulletin.com/how-to-clean-wood-furniture-with-vinegar/. Note that there's no soda in the recipes! The reason for that can be found in https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/1397980/baking-soda-why-never-use-bicarbonate-soda-on-wood-evg , where it clearly says that baking soda can stain high tannin woods. Oh, and a tooth brush might come in handy in getting right down to the frets.

A perfect example of "How to build a Comfortable Guitar without Arm and Body Contours"! That thing looks like it could swim through wavy notes like a loon, maybe that impression came from the first photo where I first though about a lakeside dock. There's something very organic, like in the stones or driftwood on a beach, ground against the bottom by waves and ice until all rough edges have disappeared. Very nice!

Good old elbow grease is the way to go! Xylene sounds quite extreme to me, however I know nothing about it other than it's a solvent. Lighter fluid is also commonly used for tough grime. A single edge razor blade can also be used similarly to a scraper, it will take care of any deep fingernail grooves as well as thorough cleaning. Don't forget to apply oil after cleaning! And I mean real oil like Boiled Linseed Oil, not the "Lemon Oil" which is basically mineral spirits with some scent and colour. The latter can work for cleaning, though, so it's better than nothing. The oil won't "moist" the wood but it will both make it look nicer and protect it from getting dirty too soon. As with any oils, don't skimp when applying and make sure every spot gets as much oil as the wood seems to want to suck in. Rub properly, then wipe it all off with a clean towel. After some ten minutes wipe it dry again as the wood may sweat the excess out. If needed, wipe clean a second time after a while.

"Laminated" - that's what I meant by "cut and reglued". Line #1 is obviously a seam, the grain pattern doesn't continue on the other side of the line. Line #2 is what puzzled me, the line is straight but the small block looks to be from the same piece as the larger block. I'm with @curtisa in rather using wood glue, that wasn't too clearly said in my earlier post. Brushing some warm water into the crack first might help as it will go in more easily than glue. As the water absorbs into the pores of wood it causes a suction that will draw the glue in. Compressed air can also be used to push the glue deeper.

If you take a look at old/used silver items you'd see all kinds of different colours, many shades of blue included. The various colours are especially prominent on a fingerprint on freshly polished silver where the stain looks like heated steel fading from yellow to blue through browns and greens. On more stained objects the overall dullness hides the colours. So if there's shades of blue in your silver it's just as silver should look like!

Hi and welcome! That's an interesting looking crack as it goes right across the grain pattern. It almost looks like the heel has been cut and reglued which would make a weak end grain joint. If that really is the case, trying to somehow clean all previous glue from the crack would be the first task which would require some improvising. If you can wiggle the crack open to see any glue residue that might give you a clue about how to proceed. If there's glue residue, using a tiny wedge to keep the gap open would help cleaning. Proper wood glue could then be squeezed into the crack. Again, that is if it originally was a glued joint. CA is a good option as well as it will wick into the gap. Cleaning the crack would still be recommendable. If we compare CA with wood glue like Titebond in an end grain joint, it might be worth knowing that CA bonds to itself, often even better than to the actual material. So if it's an end grain joint, getting CA glue into the pores and letting it partially dry before applying the final amount might be a good option as well.

Welcome to the addiction! I've been building guitars for about 7 years now, being on my 5½th build. That's not a lifetime... Before that my woodworking after school had been pretty minimal, the most used power tool was the chainsaw. For renovating our house I had bought a circular hand saw and a battery powered drill. Speaking about school, the only power tool we used was a pillar drill. Wooden planes and string tightened frame saws were the first tools we were taught to use... There's no right or wrong in guitar building as long as the construction is solid. And even if the structural integrity of your build were questionable publishing it would both provide a learning experience to others and possibly return a bunch of ideas how to fix it. I've never seen anyone been disspirited here during the three years I've been here.

Ooh! More Jetson vibe!

Not to mention that Titebond seems to react with iron, staining the wood. Other glues might do that as well.

Agreed, there's fifty shades of cream and pure white is also usually too harsh... And on an old guitar the naturally aged "bone white" looks perfectly OK, telling stories of smoky pubs and other less asthma-friendly atmospheres. Anyhow, at least on the pictures the colour looks good on the ebony.