Bizman62

They seem to be a common thing with marble rolling pins. No wonder, a freely rolling marble rolling pin can make serious damage if it rolls off the table. Not only are your toes in danger, wooden floors can also take quite a hit. My wild imagination also pictured a toddler climbing up momma's leg when "rumble-rumble-rumble" the pin rolls off the table and smashes the tiny head like a pumpkin - isn't it Halloween tomorrow?

By "tiger myrtlewood" I suppose you mean Oregon Myrtle which actually belongs to the Laurel family. If so, the Janka hardness of it is similar to hard maple and about half of that of rosewood. Looking at the pictures it looks like there may be some softer spots. As maple is used for fretboards that myrtlewood should in theory do. Then again, maple fretboards are usually lacquered which hardens the surface. One option might be to flood the entire fretboard with low viscosity CA glue. It should give the fretboard the required durability. You can do that after putting the frets in so you don't have to recut the slots. The glue should be quite easy to remove from the fret wire. What caught my eye is that the ends of the frets aren't as tight as the center. Do the frets have a larger radius than the fretboard or worse, are they straight? Optimally they should have a tighter radius than the fingerboard so that when you push them in, the ends would slide sideways inside the slot to ensure a tight fit.

Thanks for the name, @Prostheta! I knew I had heard it from the mouth of the beloved tattoo-headed luthier but trying to find the video where he used them seemed to be too much of an effort.

I'd be happy if I could build half as good as you! Both the carving and the finish look flawless. Excellent, again.

Wow! Talk about invisible patches and grain matching, that's stupendous! RE glue, if your fitting is perfect then you can use either CA or epoxy. But if there's gaps, mixing epoxy with sawdust will look more natural as CA will darken the dust a LOT.

Exactly that. Carve the neck and check for warping every day. If it starts to look like a propeller blade, dump it. But if there's just a tiny twist when the neck is almost finished, you can try to straighten it. There's a simple tool for checking for warping. I can't remember what it's called but it's simply two straight rods/slats/beams placed at the ends of the neck. Viewed from one end the beams should be aligned if the neck is straight. Time for a drawing: The red ones are the beams, the brown is your neck.

Having thicknessed the neck is a good start, further carving will release tensions if there are any. I'm tempted to advise you to carve the neck in steps using the faceting method and do one pair of facets a day so that if some warping is going to happen, you'd have some extra material to straighten the neck. Same thing if you're more familiar with carving the shape at the ends and connecting the points, leave some extra thickness. Shaping the neck before glueing the fingerboard has its cons but that will allow you to straighten the neck under the fretboard, should it warp. Plus, if it warps badly you wouldn't have to remove the fingerboard from a propeller.

Fully understood. That's what I was referring to as well when saying that the veneer can fill minor gaps by swelling. Of course it depends on the size of the dropaway. Thinking out loud a bit further, glueing a thin veneer on the original headstock and then leveling it so that only the edge is covered might be an even better option. Or routing the curve away and inlay sort of a purfling - that method would leave the original headstock mostly untouched which might add strength more than a glued veneer. @asgeirogm, looking at the picture there may be yet another option that doesn't require making the neck thinner: Simply add a top long and thick enough to replace the lost material. This drawing should be self-explaining:

One easy trick to "hide" the seam between similar woods is to add a thin (0.5 mm) veneer in between. Not only does it make the seam look like a designed feature, it also seems to fill minor gaps even when using regular wood glue. I suppose the thin veneer swells with the moisture and gets saturated with the glue so it doesn't shrink back when the glue dries. That method requires the normal good clamping pressure.

I would vote for "nothing". The black bobbin emphasizes the shadow underneath and makes the white cover pop. A sloppy paintwork would just smudge the crisp edges. A hollow cover would be another thing.

My thought was to add a large bottom plate to the router and run it over fences or sidewalls of suitable height. But as said I had no material at hand to make the large plate. I used a somewhat similar approach, though: I carefully masked the surrounding and used a sanding beam. I also covered the end thirds of the beam so that there was visible sandpaper about the length of the area to be leveled. Agreed, there was no depth stop but keeping the long beam level seemed easier than doing that with a tiny block.

A router plane jig was an option but it would have required modifying the router base. For doing that I would have had to wait until the following Monday to be able to buy some plywood and then two weeks until next Saturday which will be the first workshop day after the hiatus. Killing a fly with a cannon, wouldn't you agree... For leveling the entire surface of a guitar with the neck glued on that would have been a real option though. I agree with the top, the little yellowness enhanced by the clearcoat makes it look even nicer. And the cherry red top looks just like mahogany so it looks like a mahog body with a poplar top!

Not much progress, we had the autumn holiday hiatus. Anyhow, the finish was starting to look like it could protect the guitar from laying masking tape on for fitting the bridge so that's what I did. Poor planning was evident again: The bottom of the bridge is flat and the top of the guitar is radiused. Oh well... So I cut the outlines with a utility knife and chiseled and scraped the area flat. I can tell that the inexpensive automotive acryl lacquer is pretty hard! Not bad for the price, some €6 for a rattle can. A third can is required for the final buffable thick coat but €20 total isn't too bad. And the poplar is a PITA to work, especially with blunt tools. There's all kinds of fibres, flat, round, thin, broad baked into fluff - think about having aligned threads and twines in bread... I tried to sharpen a card scraper best I could which is quite good if I may say so but it just didn't want to make shavings. But finally I got it flat enough to fit the bridge - less than a millimetre at the deepest! The string holes need some love and affection with a small round file before applying more lacquer but that should not take long.

That's true to other plants as well. With flowers, if you cut away the flowers that have lost their glory the plant will push new ones as it wants to make seeds. If you take every second flower off a fruit tree you'll get bigger fruit. If you cut off every second bunch of grapes at an early stage you'll get better wine. To the extent, if you cut a slice of the bark off about two third's circumference of the twigs you'll get more fruit as the suffering bush or tree tries to reproduce.

Ahh yes, Frappr... Now it seems to randomly lead both to a site that tells it's for sale but also to a bunch of less safe pages - once it showed a Norton (which I don't use) warning offering a scan because of detected malware... @biliousfrog, may I suggest you to remove that link?

What is that PG member's map link directing to? I got all kind of warnings to prevent me from going there.

As you may have noticed in the study there was not too much difference between the woods. A magnetic pickup simply doesn't pick up the acoustic sound, at least not significantly. But there was some difference in the sustain lengths which comes from the "springiness" of various woods. However even that doesn't matter much for the body as it's a bulky piece of wood with less than 20 cm being stringed (from the heel to the bridge). The neck affects much more as it's both longer and thinner so there's much more vibrations going on. Regarding walnut for body, the Wood Database is your friend. Comparing https://www.wood-database.com/english-walnut/ with https://www.wood-database.com/african-mahogany/ tells that European walnut is quite similar to African mahogany regarding weight, density, elastic modulus, modulus of rupture and hardness. Putting the values of walnut (+- some to get a larger variety) to the Wood Filter tells that it's quite similar to softer maples and harder mahoganies. Would that be comparable with a mahogany body with a maple top?

That should be pretty straightforward. The only thing to worry about is where the neck leaves the upper bout: You don't want your fretboard to be hidden into the body. Thus the maximum depth of your neck pocket should be less than the thickness of your neck heel excluding the fretboard. You can tilt the neck around that spot from level to any angle you want. Just don't cut the edge of the lower arrow any deeper and you should be golden.

We're in the same boat, my playing consists mostly of three palm muted chords with a slapback echo... No metal riffs, just plain old hillbilly thumping.

If you already haven't, I strongly recommend you to study the magnificent work of @curtisa: Regarding weight, as there's several factors affecting how the tree has grown, the only way to know the weight of a certain piece of any wood is to weigh it. Walnut has been used for solid body guitars quite a lot so there's no major issues to be expected. Fumble through your storage and find a lightweight piece that makes a nice sound when tapped.

I understood approximately one third of the text but that's enough to see the value for someone who may think that letting a machine do the hard work involves just putting a piece of wood on the table and press a button.

Ahh, I couldn't read it in your first post. I still can't help wondering why you want only one sound out of a versatile pickup.

I've never thought of putting some vaseline on the rod but it definitely makes sense. Thanks for telling/reminding!

Just as a reminder, shellac seems to work between most any finishes so if you're unsure whether a decal would stick to oil, apply a layer of shellac. Then lay your decal on it and secure it with another layer of shellac. After that you can use whatever finish you like.

Hand on heart, how many players actually use their pinkie? Not to mention Django Reinhart who could only use two fingers on the fretboard... Rather than narrowing the fretboard I'd make her try several neck shapes. Even a tall V can feel smaller than a flat D as there's less material where the base knuckles are. My daughter has got her hand shape from me, including the top knuckles of the pinkies being bent towards the other fingers. She was very unhappy with that as she felt she had a handicap with the keyboard. But when she met other keyboardists at the LCCM she noticed that her stretch was way over an octave which was more than many of the long fingered players could do. Although her fingers aren't long, her palms are wide and the tips of the curved pinkies actually help in playing the right note at the extents.