Bizman62

But does it have a large air exhaust like kilns do? The temperature of steam is also high but it won't dry anything!

Hello and welcome! Here's some thougths that are just my personal opinions based on what I've learned. For stability, a laminated neck is often a better choice especially in the less expensive price ranges. Single piece necks are common but as wood is a living material a cheap neck may be just that, cheap. Ideally you'd want straight and tight grained wood which has been properly dried and stored in a humidity controlled space for a decade or so to make sure it doesn't warp or do any other unwanted tricks. That's not a cheap process! Fret material has nothing to do with tuning stability. Durability is another thing and that's where stainless steel is the toughest material. Then again, your playing style and activity play a big role in how fast your frets wear. Good tuners are a must, as is a good nut. And any neck should stay straight when changing strings unless you change the thickness which changes the tension. To your questions: a) get the kit of a well known maker. You never know what you get from the Chinese online shops. At worst the frets are totally off! Also get all the wooden parts from the same maker to ensure the right measurements and tight fitting. Crimson Guitars make pretty good kits and you can modify the order from almost square blocks to a painted puzzle. b) For a kit the minimum you need is a screwdriver and a wrench, and a soldering iron for the electronics, and some means of slapping the finish on. Of course that depends on the level of readiness of the kit you choose. If at all possible making the guitar tutored by a luthier would be worth gold. Joining a guitar building course, public or private, would teach you both how to use the tools right and how to build the guitar in the right order, not to mention how to fix the problems you'll most likely run into. My guitars have been built from scratch at a course offered by my hometown and under tuition of a Master Luthier, yet the neck of my first build is like a baseball bat. But it's playable, stays in tune and has the intonation right.

Yes, I exaggerated quite a bit and all that in purpose. My main goal was to hide the backing fabric as much as possible, yet maintaining the outlines of the guitar visible. As you saw it didn't fix the focus being off. Check the autofocus settings of your camera! IIRC there was several focusing modes available, I suppose you'd want the focus being in the center rather than all around the place. Your pictures all look like the focus is in the wrinkles of the fabric - they actually work well for focusing but in this case that's not wanted.

Regarding the amount of light, you most likely have either taken or at least seen photos taken with a flash in dim light. With the right aperture size and exposure time that makes the close up objects pop and makes the background dark similarly to Curtisa's photos or the Twangy videos. That means lots of light on the actual object and it's your task to control the amount that you get on the "film". One of my best shots ever was a closeup of a girl in heavy stage makeup in a well lit hall, shot with a very cheap (<1% of my summer job monthly salary, a tenner in current money) camera and a flash cube. Her face filled most of the area, nothing was burned through and the background went all black. Lots of light on the object, that is. @curtisa's pictures have very sufficient amount of lighting, they're not candlelight images despite the back being dark. With enough light you can get add contrast which you can control with the aperture size and the exposure time. You can also play with brightness and contrast afterwards but it helps a lot if your raw material already has what it takes. Look again at the collages in my earlier post. All of the images are "as is", they're taken in the same place under the same lighting conditions. The only difference is that one set has been shot using adjustable time and the other using adjustable aperture, the camera took care of the rest. Post processing the images can make a big difference as well as you can see here: The brightness has been reduced by 20 and the contrast increased by 20 - guess they're percents as the scale goes to 100 both ways... It's not perfect by any means but you can see the difference:

I'd say that's not the best option. My technically best shots have been taken in direct summer sunlight which is much brighter than most lamps. Light allows details to be seen, the exposure time and aperture size determine how much lit background you get. Play with your lights! You said you have three of them so you should be able to lighten the shadows or illuminate to the sides or even back to your object. When you see no shadows the object will pop up from the backing canvas.

I've been watching the acoustic build that someone linked to on Youtube. The luthier told that they store their ebony fretboards for seven years before using to make the wood acclimatize to the workshop conditions. Guess your top is a bit greener than that! But that looks like a bit of sawdust and some glue will fix those cracks.

@curtisa already pretty much pointed out what I might have said, and a bit more. Creases in the background, direction of light etc. What still puzzles me is that the focus still seems to be more on the backing fabric than on the actual guitar. You said that there seems to be too much light. You can tame that down by shortening the exposure time and tightening the aperture. That will also somewhat help with focusing as the depth of field will increase. Here's how the exposure time works, taken against my office chair with only the light behind me on the ceiling. The aperture is f3.4 and the exposure times 1/30, 1/10, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, and 1 seconds, supporting the camera on the hand rest. I was using a Canon Power Shot SX200IS which is a simple pocket size super zoom type camera, with the ISO value set to 200: And here's how the aperture size works, all having been exposed for one second. The apertures used were 3,4, 5 and 8: And finally one taken with the flash where you can clearly see the fabric. It didn't make much difference whether between 1/30, 1/250 and 1/500 seconds as the flash was so powerful to the close distance of about one foot.

Lovely! Using a local animal for inlay motif rhymes nicely with the local woods. Can you build more sustainably than that?

I don't comment, I just drool...

With my mediocre skills with hand tools I wouldn't try to fix that. Carving a new channel sounds easy enough but making the inside of the current channel match the patch i.e. preparing both the side and bottom of the groove for gluing a planed piece is something I wouldn't do freehand. That said, there's people who make better looking cavities with a drill and a chisel than I can do with a template and a router. As you said your other neck looked like hell so I guess our hand tool skills are alike.

It almost looks like they've aligned the channel along the bass side of the neck but that would be about 5 mm off... Anyhow, as the channel is at an angle fixing it would require filling the entire length with a slice of veneer at least as thick as the offset is and then realigning and rerouting the channel. Not too much of an effort if you have the tools, jigs and materials at hand. Trying to fix that with individual small pieces is not worth the hassle and it can even make things worse. Then again, you never know about wood. What if the wood is stiffer by nature on one half? In that case an offset might be a valid option, Or, if you carve the neck asymmetric? Wouldn't that change the behaviour of the truss rod as well? Plus the thickness of the strings... There's already many unknown variables so adding one more may not make any difference. So it's doable, actually getting the fretboard off may have been the hardest part of the process. But would you have noticed that had you left the original fretboard on is another question.

I used to do that in my teens through the microphone input... It didn't work as such as the impedance doesn't match with the guitar and the pickups have much more gain than a microphone. Hi Fi speakers didn't like that at all! At that time I had a Hagström Viking with two humbuckers and if my guess about the switches is right the only usable selection was the bridge pickup split as that had the least basses. Even with that the volume had to be tamed down a lot, no distortion allowed! The listening volume was silent enough not to disturb my parents. I don't know how a 16 ohms guitar speaker would have worked. Most likely a bit better but I still would hesitate to crank the amp. A Direct Input box might work there but I'm not sure about that either. In any case the modification would not be too cost effective unless you're an electrician and know how to safely do that yourself - in which case you wouldn't ask.

Try to make it a three point supporting thing, that would make balancing the guitar easier. A double sided tripod i.e. three rods tied together from the middle with some kind of an individually adjustable clamp, perhaps? What @curtisa said about the background is crucial: "Using non-reflective, dark backgrounds may also help disguise that the guitar is also not in contact with it when in fact it is actually (at least partially) resting on it." and "If the sheet is black and matte enough it doesn't tend to be so apparent that the guitar is resting on a soft surface." You may have seen photos of studios where they have the background continue on the floor in a large curve. That's for hiding shadows. Bitumen paper might be an inexpensive choice. They also use light from several angles for the same reason. One from front up and two lesser from the sides is a good start. A diffusor such as a thin white fabric or even baking paper can be useful in hiding reflections, just don't let the light bulbs burn the material! Green screen video tutorials may give you some hints, there's tons of those. For inspiration, look at My Twangy Guitar videos. That guy knows how to hide the background! Summarized: Matte black background without wrinkles and edges that might cast extra shadows, three point lighting and perfect focus on the object instead of the background.

Regarding electronics I'm 5½ years old. But this much I know. As it says under Notes: All Grounds need to be connected. You're partially right in guessing that they should be connected in one place, however that one place can be as big as the control cavity shielding! And finally the combined Grounds have to be connected to the Output Jack sleeve where it continues to the amp and finally to the ground of the electric socket. There's been warnings about ground loops but lately I just learned that there's no such thing. If all grounds are connected it doesn't matter if that's done as a star or a loop from point to point and as said, often the components are grounded by the shielding as well and a copper tape covered cavity sure doesn't look like a star or loop! Just make sure that no hot wire ever touches any ground. I put copper tape into the jack cavity of my Strat and whaddayaknow, when I put the plug in, the tip touched the copper and no sound came out..,

Was there a guitar in this thread?

Exactly that. I haven't tried it myself as back in the day when I read about it we only had film cameras and having dozens of failed photos of random household objects wasn't something I would have liked to pay for. With all the ultra powerful tiny led torches compared to the yellowish light bulbs we had thirty years ago I suppose that painting with light would be much easier and more versatile than it used to be. The tight beam of leds is definitely a bonus.

I've done that for every guitar I've built. Every time I take the guitar out of the bag at the workshop I struggle with the hook being stuck! Last week I thought it would have been dry enough and left it in the bag.

That happens sometimes, no clue why. IIRC when that happened to me I had to make a copy of the original photo and use that instead. Oh, and you have quite some time to edit your post and replace the picture. The three dots in the upper right corner of your post...

You can also do a semi-manual mode. I have a lesser Canon which also allows that. You can e.g. choose the exposure time manually and let the camera choose the aperture or vice versa. And I bet you didn't know this trick: If you set the exposure time to very long like a minute or several and work in a dark space, you can "paint" the object with a simple torch! That will leave the background dark and expose only the lit areas. It's somewhat similar to the "<city> by Night" photos with stripes of car lights marking the streets or rather like using flash in dim light. Even a small pen light will do as you don't need to illuminate the room, just the target. That will even enable several lit details in a single photo depending on the focus of your torch.

A monopod might be the solution. Your feet will make that as a tripod and it should stabilize the snap as we're not talking about super long times. 1/30 second is pretty long and should be enough under a good room light but it's almost impossible to do free hand. Longer times aren't needed. I haven't done much photography but these are the basics I learned when I bought a decent full manual camera and thought I'd become an envied shooter (which I didn't): For a good picture you'll need enough light on the film For enough light you can either widen the aperture or lenghten the exposure time If you widen the aperture you'll also shorten the depth of the sharp area which requires on the spot focusing but when you manage to do that right the results are stunning There's several types of films, some are more sensitive to light than others. A more sensitive film requires less light with the cost of the images being more grainy. Same goes for digital cameras, you can add sensitivity but there'll be "noise" which makes the images blurry. Of course you can try to find a balance Summarized, it's all about balancing the triangle of exposure time, aperture size and light.

Nothing wrong or odd with the colours. Of course it's hard to tell without actually seeing but knowing the looks of both maple and the turquoise stone it looks about right on my factory calibrated monitor. Again the focus seems to be on that backing cloth, the guitar being ever so slightly off focus and thus blurry. Two inches can do that much! I can almost see individual yarns of the fabric while I struggle to read the letters on both the knobs and the headstock. I took a quick look at the properties of the T6i and it really seems to have a ton of features. If you have a tripod, use that. That will allow for a slower shutter speed which enables shooting in less light. That alone can help focusing. As I said previously, you can also increase the aperture value - the bigger the value the smaller the size! - to expand the range of sharp focus. And further, use the manual selection for autofocus to pinpoint what you think is the most important thing to show. Ideally you most likely would like to have the backing fabric blurred and the guitar highlighted. That can be done with a large aperture (small f-value) and precise focusing.

Yepp, that's automotive acrylic, brand Car-Rep by Maston. Until now it has behaved well, today I took yet another new can which did that... I've bought them from the same shop one by one but I guess that stuff doesn't sell very much now when it's wet and cold outside so chances are they're even from the same batch. Hard to check since I left the previous can in the trash can at the workshop.

Same here, that looks like the only one where the focus is on the guitar instead of the backing braid.

This is going to take forever to finish! Last weekend I sanded it matte and left it in the gig bag for the week. Big mistake! Despite the lacquer having been dry enough to sand it was far from hard so the wrinkles in the lining of the bag marked the back without me noticing it until I had sprayed a heavy coat of lacquer on it. I can live with that but for some odd reason there's spots where the new lacquer sort of boiled to ripply bubbles. I wonder if they can be sanded and buffed like regular runoff.

Home made tools are the best! I've seen instructions to make a two-in-one filing block that doesn't require any tape. It appeared that the blade of the circular table saw was of the same thickness as the file so one perpendicular and one angled slot on a piece of wood was all it took. And potentially a bolt for securing.