Bizman62

Can't you accept a rescue route when it's offered to you on a golden plate?

Are you 100% positive that it's dye? To me it looks similar to the discoloration caused by fungus seen in many pale woods. The vertical lines on the top seem to have similar bluish greyness in a number of shades.

Slowly but surely it's starting to get there. After once having seen someone inlay the jack plate it has been a detail I prefer. Not too long ago someone told having spread some DNA on his build. It took me a while to figure out that it wasn't of this ilk: The old pine seemed to be quite brittle around the hole so some solidifier was needed And voilà! Next step was the trapeze which looked like something that has been slammed on without proper planning. So I thought the same recipe would fix that. No, that plan wasn't going to work so I took it to the belt sander. Some rounding to blend the flat spot in is on the to do list. And maybe also inlaying the plate.

Looked odd in my browser as well, I thought the sketchy looks was intentional.

For me there was no problems to download and open it. It's big so it took 40 seconds to download and 10 seconds to open with my Internet connection and PC.

Hi and welcome! Regarding your first concern, I guess the post is appropriately placed but if it isn't the Forum Gods most likely will move it without issues. The actual question may seem a bit more complicated, but it took only a few seconds to find answers like this: https://www.thespringstore.com/spring-finder.html Remember, there's no such things as "guitar springs" or "guitar screws" or even "guitar paint", some companies just make living easier for people who don't think with their own brains! Installing the spring... Well, the car repair shops use threaded rods with dedicated cups for the spring ends. Modified locking pliers might provide a similar tool for a trem spring. All you'd need is a tool that would compress the spring leaving the end loops free to be put around the studs.

There's finishes and there's finishes. Cellulose can be much softer than 2k poly. No wonder I got the 3M pads from a car paint shop! Last summer I bought and sort of restored some older hand planes which led me to search for some information about the black finish on old Stanley planes. No wonder that the finish on them (and old Singer sewing machines and T-Fords) has been able to last a century: It's not paint! Instead it's a mixture of BLO and asphalt melted on the surface.

Exactly. My observations tell a similar story.

If there's too much glue under the veneer or if the veneer is sort of "too large" to nicely fit that place, you can try cutting the bubble along the grain line and ironing. I've even seen a video where they cut a slice off of a larger bubble to make it fit but that was scary! For a fingertip sized bubble a single cut may well do the trick, test in a hidden area first!

I've noticed something similar with Abranet. It works fine for some surfaces but not so well on others. My local car paint dealer once gave me a sample pack of 3M™ Cubitron™ II Hookit™ pads which are intended for sanding finishes smoothly but effectively. They also seem to work well on wood. Abranet still has its use but it depends on the task at hand, often requiring testing which one works best.

I consider you pro enough, just pointing out that there's really rough grits for really tough finishes. And I guess after all these years you knew what I meant. Or, as @mistermikev put it shortly after I followed you to this forum, "I thought he was your friend!"

Back in the day when we bought this house we wanted to get rid of the old paint on the floor and hired a pro to do it with a big belt sander, the base was a square foot or so. And the belts: Starting at 16 grit he used several sequences before getting to 100 g for bare wood. The actual thickness of the old paint may have been somewhere around one mm or even less but the old skool floor paint was made to last.

Isn't it relaxating to find out that there's ways to deal with or even prevent tear-out, cupping etc. and that all you have to do is ask? And that nothing truly bad will happen if the abovementioned happen, they're just an excuse for redesigning. Build once, plan three times, change your mind and end up with the urge of wanting to do it again, only a bit differently... Recreation in guitar building should be understood as re-creation, creating something again, and again, and again...

Or if you're lazy can use a pencil and a ruler you simply guesstimate use a contour cauge to sketch the cross sections at 2nd and 12th fret of your preferred neck profile and draw a picture looking like the CAD produced one.

My wife helped me.

That's a good reminder! The height of the rods has never been mentioned in this thread unless that piece of information slipped my eye. Back in the day I compiled this piece of math for calculating how much thickness you'd need for a flat inlay piece so it won't be sanded through when radiusing the fretboard. It might help estimating how much wood there is to cover the rods. If the rods are properly seated to the bottom of the slots you'd only need a single mm to hide the rods. Strength wise they could even peek through but making that look good might be challenging. The actual numbers depend on the neck shape, but for a half round neck R would be about 22mm at the first fret. Y is what you'd want to know, in this case in two locations. And just for clarity the drawing is "upside down" for this purpose, the fingerboard would be at the tip of the triangle.

If you've used pva glue (like Titebond or white glue) for gluing the veneer using a regular clothes iron should melt the veneer and when it cools down it should stick back. They even sell pre-glued veneer sheets to be ironed on for furniture makers. We have an expert here about that subject, google this site for applying veneer.

Tinkering with the details, had to fill a knot hole and a cracked knot. Fill, harden, scrape, rinse and repeat. There's still bumps and dings but as we're talking about wood that was used as step at our front door they sort of belong to the picture. I just had to fill those that would grab the clothing or scratch the skin when playing. Went through it all with a 1000 grit pad and applied a couple of layers of my BLO-poly blend. It's got a nice sheen, I may or may not consider the finish done. As it only takes a few minutes to apply and then wipe the excess off after half an hour I may add a protective layer or two. Then again, having our living room smell like a paint booth wouldn't be comfortable and it could even pose a health issue.

It's not about "good eyes", it's something in the spine, hard coded to our caveman within. Seeing things that don't fit the pattern like grass swaying against the wind at one spot was a life saver as the culprit might have been a saber tooth.

Thanks, I have been watching it, seeing there's something wrong with the string angle compared to the adjacent ones. That explains it. The human eye can be ridiculously accurate at times!

You definitely won't need a String Butler with that design! Nor is there any chance for the high e string to fall off the nut slot like in some Jackson guitars. Yet another trick to consider: How about locating the tuners about 1 mm inwards? Just enough to straighten at least the outermost strings. The knob shaft should be long enough to allow such minor adjustment - if I'm not totally mistaken there's headstocks with curved sides but the tuners are aligned on a straight line.

There was some discussion in another thread about the radius of the bridge being different to that of the fretboard. The conclusion was that the difference is measurable but it's fractions of a mm which many players may not even notice. Yet sometimes even the tiniest inconsistency may make the guitar less pleasant to play - just think about compensating the string thickness on the nut! So yes, filing the radius may be worth the effort but I'd recommend baby steps with a week of playing in between to find out whether it's for better or worse. As I don't have access to a PRS this idea may not be applicable: Do the threaded inserts have collars? If so, countersinking them might give some clearance.

I agree with @henrim about the headstock. It looks nice and the string angle at the nut is close enough to straight string pull. The slight angle reminds me of PRS but they have the left and right tuners aligned. Anyhow, straight string pull isn't a must although it helps with tuning stability when bending. But have you ever heard any LP user complain about that? There's one minor thing, though, that caught my eye: The string pull on the bass side is straighter than on the treble side. Yet most of the bending happens on the plain strings so that's where straightness would be most beneficial. Easy fix: Cut the lower corner a bit:

Yay! The Xmas hiatus is over! Measured, angled and double checked to find out where to cut to make the back plate line up with something. Also, don't you think a bevel at the edge of the cover hides nicely that it isn't a hermetic fit? Adding some oil made it look much better! The birch almost got the same hue as the pine, at least in some parts. There were scratches on the headstock veneer so it went through some scraping and sanding, and reoiling. The remains of the iron acetate handling became subtler which I like a lot. And a similar treatment for the back of the headstock. Not much done or so it seems. But if there's a flaw in any detail it will bug you until it's fixed, don't you think? The cavity cover now is lined up with the centerline which also aligns it with the back spine of the neck and the back of the headstock. And I'm still not 100% positive that it's going to be the final iteration!

That makes you a more serious photographer than the average Joe. Back then I bought a Nikkormat SLR and a wide range zoom, something like 35-105 with a poor lens speed, I soon swapped that to a slightly better Tamron 28-200. Most of the time I could have done with a good 50mm which I later found. And maybe something like a 150mm for more tightly cropped images. Same with guitars, I rarely touch the pots or even the switch and if I do it's not during playing, it's mostly during the "sound check" to find a setting that suits my mood - I'm not playing in a band so it's just me and my tiny amp and maybe a YouTube backing track. Back to the subject, I guess most amateur players only need a couple of settings. They may test everything but won't actually master anything - trying to find their voice might be the closest definition and the amount of owned or at least tested gear is comparable to the lures of a fisherman. As you know new lures aren't for more suspicious fish, they're for the fishermen. There's tons of recordings of brilliant guitar players to be influenced by but most players don't have the itch to actually study the instrument to reach the level that would take them into the same row. Skillful, yes. Musical, definitely. Determined... One can always say that they don't have the time to practice because they have to work for their living but the actual truth is that if the itch is strong enough there'd be nothing to stop them. One good sound is all that's needed if you can play like a god.