Bizman62

No, I sold most of them to my builder buddies and kept only two. But I do have four different grits on the narrow sides. The broad sides aren't level and having two different grits meet at the corner could cause issues. It's always safer to run a smooth face against something you don't want to scratch or shape.

Stories, meat behind the builds, mixing and matching what you've learned and done at work to guitar building...

Now that you put that in words, this build has turned out to be one my favourites to view. Nothing wrong with a well built Tele or LP, on the contrary. However this one has features that make my fingers tickle!

2 mm is plenty especially if you put them in after radiusing. At some point I did some math which I later transformed into a formula for comparing the radius to the edge to edge straight line, i.e. how much higher the center of the fretboard is. Note that if you're going to put the drops on the side of the fretboard like in your previous build you can halve the width of the fretboard as you'd only need to know the height difference on that area. Even further, you can just calculate by the length/width of the inlay pieces as they're the only things affected. Thus W could be either the size of your inlay or half of the fretboard. And Y will tell you the depth of the inlay carve when the inlay goes to zero at the ends. So if Y is less than 2 mm then 2-Y=the thickness of the inlay material after sanding the inlay flush with the radius.

Now please help a non-English speaker here: Are we discussing the best glue to stick that wooden plate on the bobbin or the best glue to stick the turquoise dots on the polepieces? Or/and maybe gluing the sides of the turquoise dots to the wooden plate? Which are apples and which are oranges and are there peaches involved?

For Tele pickups both the traditional flatwork and molded single piece plastic bobbins are available. The latter are much easier to use since the pole pieces will be inside insulating tubes - that enables even swapping pole pieces as you don't have to worry about damaging the coil when pushing a pole in. The flatwork of traditionally made pickups is vulcanized fibre i.e. heat treated compressed cellulose. It belongs to the plastic family but isn't plastic like Tupperware. Carving a smidgeon and burning it should reveal the material by smell. Even burned vulcanized fibre is dangerous emission free so it should smell like burning paper or cotton cloth. Burning plastic on the other hand has that dark oily toxic aroma...

I'm a bit late to understand that you actually wanted to get the wooden part to the plastic bobbin... As has been said epoxy is a good choice and CA should also work. And then there's ZAP/Pacer Formula 560 Canopy Glue which is designed to glue plastic to wood... It's available everywhere from Amazon to Walmart so it's not difficult to find. It's good for plastic bindings as well. And you can wipe the excess off with a damp towel when wet.

Instead of "for sure" I'd say "most likely". Getting the action just right from the bottom is tedious and hazardous. Just think about loosening all of your strings a dozen time, pulling the nut off, filing the bottom and putting the nut back in and tightening the action again for every string! And if one end is perfect and the other too high, filing a tiny wedge off yet keeping the bottom of the nut perfectly flat isn't easy to say the very least... There's always something positive to say about most everything. In this case, if you take too much off from the bottom you can fix it with a shim - which of course requires more or less more trimming! If the nut is hugely oversize, I'd recommend putting it in place and stringing the guitar, then measuring the action. A flatpick is a good tool for measuring the action, simply slide it on the first fretwire under at least both of the E strings. On my guitars a 1 mm Nylon JimDunlop lifts the string while a 0.88 mm one fits snugly. If you use that method "calibrate" your measuring picks on a known well playing guitar first! Anyhow, if your desired action is below 1 mm but your current action is over 2 mm it's safe to take the extra 1 mm off from the bottom and you should still have your action a hair too high. That's when you start filing the grooves for fine tuning the action. Compared to removing the nut it's much easier to loosen a string about a full note and slide it to the next groove out of the way when you file a couple of strokes, then slide it back for checking the action. Rinsing and repeating until you're satisfied. A hint for marking a thin parallel line on materials like Tusq or bone where pencil won't stick or show: Take a sharpie and mask the area where you want the line to be drawn. Then take your caliper and adjust and tighten the screw for the desired amount to be cut off. Run the other external jaw of the caliper along the bottom edge of your nut and scrape the Sharpie stain with the tip of the other jaw.

If it's the one I found via Google, one with looong forks for the posts and depth adjusting screws the posts seemed to not be at an angle. With the bridge seated it seems there's an angle but it looks like the bass side fork is set back with the screw. Like so: Regarding the intonation line, the moveable pieces don't seem to be right along the post line in the pictures I've seen. To check it, simply adjust the pieces to about 3/4 towards the bridge and seat the pole screws to the bottoms of the forks, with the screwdriver slots aligned with the bridge. To me it looked a bit like that:

You made me curious. First question is should the bottle be unopened or empty (an opened one would obviously spill beer all over the unprotected wood which even I understand wouldn't be ideal)? And more: Would a full bottle act similarly to a dead blow hammer? Would rounded glass be better than polished steel for tapping in the plastic rod? Is there a difference in how the glue reacts with the surface of the tool, potentially staining the wood? Or is there simply so much more surface on the bottle that you can turn a clean side for every hit? I will be disappointed if your answer is that it's required for the builder as instead of being about a tool it would be about lubricating the engine powering the tool.

Once again it seems that English is a poor language in itself (or should I have said "per se"?)... No harm done as I don't practise my poor French on francophonic forums.

Nothing to be sorry about, I'm just snappy... More pictures? Other projects? Yes please! Including all the stories, mishaps, successes and whatever has happened and what you have learned during building them.

Not impossible at all. I've seen Jerry Rosa do that many times for old bridges. Some heat may break the glue join so you get the inlays out in one piece. If not, dot inlays don't cost a fortune so replacing them with new ones should not ruin your budget. I don't know about you but the last time I took off a pickup ring on my guitar was forty years ago! Even that was totally unnecessary, I was just curious to see what's underneath in my brand new Ibanez FG-100. But I do know that some people like to change their fully functional pickups in hope of a new, interesting sound. Just my 2c...

Guess he meant the tool you made a comment about on page 2:

Do like the boatmakers: Sink the screws deeper and inlay dovels to hide them. Or, if the depth is an issue, use fret dots on top of the screws. If that's good for big names like Gibson on their acoustic guitar bridges it must be a valid construction!

Well maybe it's just that I've never heard any Finnish builder find any solid exotic wooden furniture that could be used for guitars while I've heard of several ones from Britain. Agreed, the body of the Red Special is blockboard and the Oak neck of it is most likely domestic so that one doesn't actually count. But I know about at least three or four, starting from Ben Crowe at Crimson Guitars to someone on the late Crimson forum to someone on this very forum, all this during the last five years or so. It's rare but it happens. Stairs, tables, bar counters of solid mahogany, walnut or other tonewoods... Oh well, Bill Kirchen's Tele was built of pine so I guess I should end my rant right here.

Something similar came into my mind as well, for the bolt-on neck guitars on the course a little play was recommended to allow the finish bend over the edge of the neck pocket. For a set neck one might want to have a bare wood gluing surface on the sides as well as on the bottom.

Details... And even smaller details... I wonder what your crime was! On TV it takes much less for bribing a cop...

A picture is worth a thousand words, eh? And six pictures worth six thousand... In this case that's so very true although it doesn't tell anything about you and your builder history or how you acquired that table I sort of envy you guys living in old colonial powers as you have access to some rather inexpensive exotic wood furniture - solid wood instead of battenboard (old good quality) or chipboard (current quality). Having first been the backwoods of Sweden and later a periphery of the Russian Empire the rare upper class furniture is considered antique... And even back then the local cabinet makers substituted the exotic woods with dyed local ones. And our local ones aren't too sought after as tonewood...

Flattening is one valid option. Ignoring is another valid option. Exaggerating and duplicating it i.e. making a(n at least partially) radiused top would also be doable. Rounding the edges will also hide such a small imperfection. On an oiled surface it won't reflect light in a revealing manner so I'm tempted to suggest ignoring. Even more so by looking at the image with the square, it makes me think that the wood has cupped rather than being a sanding issue. If the nut and your build both are true to "original" dimensions there should be no need. However the nut is generic and hopefully oversize so depending on your choice of frets, strings, desired action etc. you'll most likely have to modify it to suit your preferences. You don't need fancy tools for that, small files and fine sandpaper will take you a long way. I've used a steel feeler gauge to modify my nuts, rounded the edge and roughened it with a coarse file to make it cut the bone. A piece of wet'n'dry paper folded over a thinner blade will make the slots very smooth and just of the right width. If you need to deepen the slots, remember to file the excess off the top so that the strings sink in only halfways or a hair more. Plain strings can be sunk a bit deeper (3/4 or so) as they don't grab as easily. Whoa! I just noticed I hadn't submitted this reply! Fortunately it was still in the cache...

Such lovely insanity there!

Ahh, the "Tried" is part of the name, I thought you just added it, possibly remembering you being the guy with experience with TruOil... Since it's just oil and wax it might behave a bit like Osmo which also has no solids as far as I know. BLO will build up by itself, although very slowly. As @ScottR said burnishing it when it's properly dried can help. If you leave the surface "live" getting it to shine may be a bit tricky even if you apply wax as the bottom of the grain and pores stays untouched. A brush (like a shoe shine brush) will polish even the deepest grooves.

I won't show that to my wife who also is a teacher. We're just renovating the room previously inhabited by our daughters and she's planning to get a desk there...

Oiling is a dark art but for what I read you're on the right track. The amount of thin layers should finally build up a shiny level surface. A satin sheen should be even easier to achieve. For what I've experienced with Crimson Guitar Finishing Oil (which I've heard is basically counter-engineered TruOil which in turns is a tried old mix of oil, lacquer and turps) it just takes forever. A dozen layers rubbed on and wiped off seems to be just the start... The thicker stuff should actually build up faster but the surface will still look dull until you buff it after the final coat has properly cured. Applying a layer of good wax will improve the shine but even that seems to take quite some time to settle. My semi hollow LP shaped one with the Ovangkol top has only recently started to really shine. It's not glossy like a clearcoat but the wood seems to have some sort of internal glow without no visible glass like layer on it.

My current build has a clearcoat on the body and the headstock and I've simply covered the neck with masking tape. It's not any different to protecting the fretboard, you don't want any lacquer on it unless it's a lacquered maple one. There'll be a ridge of lacquer at the edge of the tape which has to be sanded flush. It doesn't matter much whether you oil the neck before or after sanding the ridge, either way the transition will become smooth. Shortly put, I believe that if you apply the rattle can stuff first the oil won't push it off by seeping underneath. But if you apply the oil first there's a chance that the aerosol won't stick.