Bizman62

Huh??? It's been a long time since I've last seen ram issues other than poor seating caused by dust or vibration

and you got something that looks to me like wrought iron! That looks seriously like something a blacksmith has forged quite some while ago, the original all-black having worn shiny on higher spots. I wouldn't bother with the light spots, they most likely blend in sufficiently with the sealer. All in all very nice three-dimensionality. That's something I'd call a Heavy Metal axe...

Welcome onboard! I'm by no means an expert but for what I've seen having been used for decades and based on what I've bought/seen been used by fellow builders I'd say any hard enough wood should do. You can look at Janka hardness charts and based on some of them ebony can be three times as hard as walnut but an average value doesn't tell the whole truth. There's harder and softer pieces depending on where the tree has been growing etc. I've got an old parlour guitar from the 30's with a flawless beech fretboard... Also, a lot depends on how you play i.e. do you press the strings on wood or just make them touch the frets, and how often you cut your finger nails. However, black walnut is quite much on the soft side in average so I'm a bit tempted to suggest other options. I don't know how much is your "expensive" but in my books an AAA Indian rosewood fingerboard blank for a tenner isn't too much. That's what they ask for one at Maderas Barber, Spain. CITES may be an issue, though, so I looked for more local suppliers. https://exoticwoodzone.com/ seem to have no rosewood fretboards but they have some nice woods as "thin dimensional lumber" which is oversize but for $15 including shipping the prices sound reasonable. Another vendor having stuff in stock is https://alliedlutherie.com/collections/fingerboards?sort_by=price-ascending whose prices aren't stellar either. If you're going to build more than one guitar, ask for 2nd grade. A couple of years ago we placed an order to Maderas Barber and just out of curiosity bought a dozen or so various species B-grade fretboard blanks for €2-3/piece. Exotic ebony, ziricote, santos and madagascar rosewood, granadillo... We could not find any major defects, at least not on the area to be used. Ridiculously beautiful pieces!

Instead of purchasing templates you can make them by yourself. Buy accurate real size drawings and take them to a copying company for a few copies. Cut and glue the templates you need on a piece of MDF or plywood and use your jigsaw. Making templates is a big part of guitar building and can teach you some valuable lessons on cheaper materials than guitar wood.

Thanks for sharing! The keepsake box reminded me of a turned bowl I was going to give my wife for Christmas and forgot all about it until now!

Hi and welcome! As @curtisa said the list is endless if we don't know what tools etc. you have access to. You said you want to start by building copies of certain guitars. That's a good starting point as there's good information about most of the iconic guitars. Studying them hopefully will make you understand how they've been built and why they're built that way. Let me help you with this tiny bit of information: The basic construction of many electric guitars fits within a 2x4" plank, 35" long. All guitars on your list can be built that way! The rest is for ergonomics (shape, bevels, belly carve...), usability (control cavities etc.) and looks. The sound is mostly made by pickups. You can build such a 2x4" guitar out of one single piece or two pieces - the latter is more common. Guitars with a neck break angle (LP etc.) require a thicker block or two pieces. There isn't those on your list. The main idea in this post is that if you are going to build instruments that look and feel like the guitars you've mentioned instead of exact copies, you can use the same neck pocket template for all of them! The shape can be copied from photos and cut even with a hand saw if needed. Similarly the neck can be carved to whichever shape you want to no matter how it's attached to the body. Pickup templates can also be very simple, as a minimum you'd need one for single coils and another for humbuckers. You can then move them on the body where needed. Control cavities can be very freehand as long as the cover fits. On a Strat the scratchplate is huge, on a Tele the tiny strip covers all the controls. Tremolo systems require the most accurate templates as there's many levels within each other on both sides of the body.

Great minds think alike... Looking at the pictures I thought a burst would wrap it up nicely - and then you said it on the last row!

Mineral spirits leave some oily residue so I'd be careful with that before staining especially with a water based stain. Alcohol might be a safer option. That said, this article mentions both for cleaning wood before staining: https://woodworkingclarity.com/clean-wood-after-sanding-before-staining/

You've managed well in simplifying the hairy ape to a few large pieces! The face is a bit pale compared to the original, though. The forehead and nose are lighter than the eyes and cheeks in the original. The current colour scheme makes the monkey look like a caricature of Joni Mitchell in my eyes...

I've been using both with good results. No matter which one you choose, there's two rules of thumb: Use premium quality and don't apply any pressure. Currently I have Mirka Abranet screens and 3M Cubitron II (737U) papers, both of which I like very much. The latter says it's 30% faster compared to other premium sandpapers, self sharpening and twice as long lasting. I can confirm that, both from my own experience and from what my fellow builders have said when I've lent them my already used sheets.

I must agree with @Andyjr1515. Moistening can show where the glue spots are but the only way to get rid of them is sanding/scraping, with hopes that the glue hasn't seeped through the veneer.

Wow! I'd say the size is good as it is, it would be tough to see the details if it were smaller. I'm saying this based on what I saw after scaling it to match a real fretboard. Another option would be an utterly simplified miniature covering only about 3 frets. That said, the smaller imager looks like a red squid so... I'd also put the head on the 12th fret as that's the only differently coloured spot and the 12th fret is what's most often marked. I'd also pay attention to the grain orientation to make the orangutan's fur look more natural. I mean something like the body being more or less in line with the fretboard and the limbs angled to match the loose hair with the grain pattern. Like so:

It's always a relief that someone confirms any advice. It often happens that the brain turns an idea upside down. or the question is misread, or the answerer simply doesn't know what they's talking about.

You can wipe the surface with a rag dampened with water or mineral spirits. I guess other fast evaporating liquids like alcohol, acetone, lighter fluid or thinner should work as well. Anyhow, the idea is to temporarily show how it would look like with a clearcoat. Just don't overdo with the moistening to prevent delaminating. Notice that when you dampen wood it will raise the fibres so a very light sanding may be preferable to cut just the stubble before applying stain for a smoother, more even result.

Merry Christmas to you too, @ADFinlayson. No tools, a bottle of Scotch instead. I don't need to own much tools since I don't have a workshop - you saw my shed in the picture in the Misc Stuff thread, no electricity etc. and the walls are only 18 mm thick. It's -25 here...

Looking at the towels it seems obvious that you aren't flooding the wood. That was talked about in another thread where a new guy was worried about dye delaminating the very thin veneer. Nice explanation of the colour combinations, too! As many other "facts" it's true to an extent. Basically all dyes and stains are very fine pigments mixed with a solvent - water is a solvent although weaker and less harmful than many others. As alcohol mixes with water, all alcohol based dyes can be diluted with water and vice versa. If your alcohol based dye hasn't fully cured a water based layer will mix easier than a dust dry one. But given enough time water will finally solve even the driest stain. As low temperature slows down the evaporating of any solvent a cool shed may not be the optimal place for a multi-layer staining job.

As @mistermikev said, get some pictures. Instead of fret2find, you can simply choose the scale length you like and start measuring from there. Compare the length of the fretboard to the body. Other useful "known" measurements are the dimensions of the pickups and the bridge. Draw a full size picture to find out how the electronics fit and how the overall looks will be. You can even make a cardboard mock up to see how it fits you as a player! On the image you posted it looks like the body is as long as the fretboard, the distance from neck pickup to the edge is about half of the width of the pickup and the distance from the bridge pickup to the edge is about the width of the pickup. As long as the 12th fret is exactly halfways between the nut and the bridge, it's a playable guitar. The rest is cosmetics and ergonomics.

Hi and welcome to the addiction! I've been using 0.55 mm veneer for several purposes in my guitars and I can tell that it's thicker than you'd think! But - you guessed there'd be a "but"! - how much have the Chinese sanded the veneer to get rid of potential humps and lumps? Anyhow, there should be plenty enough for sanding back with a fine enough paper. To answer your questions: If the Chinese have done the veneering well enough you should have enough room No matter what the solvent in your stain is, don't flood the top! Use a folded shop towel or rag relatively dry to apply the stain rather than a wide brush dipped into a bucket of stain. If don't want your sanded-back stain to blend with the main colour, using alcohol based for the base and water based for the main can help. If you're just going to make the quilt look deeper, I'd suggest some sort of brown instead of black. Using a "woody" colour will look more natural and less dirty. Darker shades of what you see on the wood are usually a safe bet. For other effects you can also use strange sounding combinations, like pink for the bottom and green or blue for the main. Try to find some quilted maple scraps for testing, don't experiment with something you don't know about on the actual guitar! When sanding, use premium quality sandpapers! The result will be smoother with less removal of the material. Also, don't ever lay weight on the sandpaper! You can't press it deeper than the height of the grain which is only a fraction of a mm but if you try to, you'll end up having burnished lumps of sawdust digging grooves into the veneer deeper than you can sand away!

Yet another clarifying picture: The ground wire only needs to go one way to the switch. Ground is ground is ground, meaning it doesn't really matter how you connect all to-be-grounded objects together - wires either in a row or a star, shielding tape, metal plate, they all are finally combined in the jack one way or another.

Further, utterly simplified: the inner wires from pickups go to a lug of respective potentiometres and the outer braid to the ground on the cover of one potentiometre the inner wires continue through another lug of the pot to the end lugs of the switch and the braid (they can be tied together) continues to the ground (cover lug) of the switch from the switch there's only one wire going from the center lug to the tip connector of the jack and another continuing the ground from the cover lug to the sleeve connector of the jack Oh, and forget about the diagram I posted before. I thought yours was a six lug thing but it most likely isn't. Look for standard LP wiring diagrams like the Breja Toneworks one where you'll find for example this: Except that you have a different type of switch which means this (swap the colours if needed):

Supposedly the binding adds quite some strength to the hornlets. If a headstock veneer is going to be used, laminating a cross grained veneer in between would also add strength. Further, if you're going to do the binding, you could even use several veneers criss-crossing under the actual surface. In that case the quality of the wood wouldn't play a major role.

Sounds like the poplar of my current build. If memory serves me right you already know about Mirka Abranet products? The mesh allows the dust go through so the wood surface stays cleaner and the contact between the "paper" and the wood stays more even. Another good paper is 3M Cubitron II https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/p/d/b40071644/ which I've found out to last forever and work both for wood and lacquer. I've only had 180 and 220 so far as they were in a demo package I was donated. They seem to remove material very effectively yet leaving a smooth surface. A sanding block with a velcro pad combined with one of the above works well as there's some space for the wood dust between the hooks. Of course you'll still have to blow the dust off every once in a while but it's more forgiving than a solid block. A velcro block with a vacuum like a Mirka Roundy https://www.mirka.com/Roundy-Dust-Free-Hand-Block-9190143011/ might be even better. I have a similarly shaped block without the hose connector and one reason to love it is that it's much easier to find top quality 150mm round sandpapers than cuttable ones, at least in small quantities.

First, hi and welcome! Second, my knowledge of electronics is almost next to nothing. But I can follow a simplified wiring diagram and yours looks like one of those should work. What you have there looks to me like a standard LesPaul type wiring, meaning two humbuckers, two volumes, two tones and a three way switch to choose either neck, bridge or both pickups. If so, the inner wires coming from the pickups go to one of the lugs of the respective volume pots and the outer braid to the ground on top of a pot. The switch isn't of the "standard" so finding instructions can be a bit on the difficult side but here's one: https://www.warmanguitars.co.uk/2019/06/18/wiring-a-3-way-on-on-on-mini-toggle-switch-to-act-as-a-3-way-pickup-selector-switch/ . It says "mini" but in this case size shouldn't matter.

One hint for the background canvas: If you don't want to iron it, moisten it, grab the ends with a helping hand and turn it length wise like making a twine or rope. Eventually the twisted fabric will want to curl around itself at which point you can let it do so and tie the ends together with a piece of cord so the bunch won't disintegrate. Let dry and store that way. That will make irregular creases. That's how my wife stores one of her summer dresses! Actually, this video shows exactly that better than I could do with a thousand words:

Così è (se vi pare)