Bizman62

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Yea I know about the barn houses, used as raw material for Barncasters etc. Wikipedia told about 'bairn' been mostly used in Scotland which used to be in close contact with the Vikings. Many Scottish names, both for places and people, have a norse origin. I never had realized that until I read part of the Orkneyinga saga that was translated into Finnish. After that it was clear that names like 'Orkney' indeed are Old Norse which can somewhat be understood through Swedish. 'Ey' means 'island' even in current Icelandic. 'Orkn' can be understood as 'Orr's', Orr being the brother of Nor who on his part traveled along the Western Scandinavian fjords and thus gave name to 'Norway'...

At this stage it looks filthy. I would've expected that the paint would be clean where it gets rubbed most often, like around the belly carve just where the bare wood ends. But as it obviously still is a work in progress I won't critisize.

Yet another new word! That was an easy one, it's so close to the Swedish 'barn' and the context took care of the rest. How poor would the English language be without the Vikings! I asked my daughter if she had learned about those while in London. One sent to get some elbow grease made her chuckle, tartan paint was new but immediately understood but a round tuit required a little explaining.

That actually matches with the Calvin and Hobbes strip on today's paper: Calvin didn't have the right coloured crayon so he mixed several ones for a perfect barf.

Thanks, your drawing actually seems to match with the photos! When I first read the sentence about 120 deg I actually visualized something similar to that. What then confused me was re-reading it to notice that it says the sound is radiated to 120 degrees which made me think about the radiation patterns of the speakers. Knowing the directionality of sound is dependent on frequency the 120 deg angle could add yet another meaning... And the sentence was automatically translated from French! Anyhow, if the idea of that speaker cabinet is to spread the relatively directional sound of the guitar, it's actually similar to a trick I once heard: Back in the day when the guitar amps weren't too powerful and the PA systems were mostly non-existent they put the amp facing the back corner of the stage and tilted it back. That spread the sound all over the hall even at moderate volumes.

I'd like to add that an oiled and waxed maple neck is fantastic compared to lacquered. The palm sliding on the back of the neck doesn't cause such wear as the fingertips do on the fretboard.

Thanks for sharing those idioms! The meaning of elbow grease was known to me although it never had occurred to me that it could uncommon for an English speaking child as well. Tartan paint translates to dotted paint in Finnish so that was logical. But I had to Google for a round tuit as I couldn't figure out the right pronounciation. Back in the days when everything was done at the homestead, on butchering day kids were often sent to the neighbour to ask for a pig's tail straightener (or measuring tool) which unfortunately was just lent to another neighbour from whom it could be found etc. until the place was cleaned.

On https://en.audiofanzine.com/other-guitar-cabinet/trace-elliot/SC-312/user_reviews/ it reads that "the 3 Hps radiate sound 120 degrees,". Does that correlate with the angles of the front triangles is beyond my logic.

Decades ago when my eyesight still was as perfect as it could be I noticed that the human eye is surprisingly accurate in finding any anomalies, be it the tiniest quirk in a line, straight or curved, or a mismatching angle or mismatching proportions or any discontinuity. The issue may not be obvious at first glance but somewhere in the brain a tiny voice starts muttering that it's not right. You surely know what I mean!

No. Polishing compound is for the metal parts or lacquer, not for bare or oiled wood. Wax is a finalizing product to be used after all sanding and polishing has been done. It will then fill the tiniest scratches left to make the surface even more level for maximum shine aside an added layer of protection.

The green circled patches actually can be dust and glue patches, depending on where you bought that fretboard! As ebony can be pretty expensive it might be tempting to fix a slightly cracked board and sell it a bit cheaper than tossing it away. Another possibility is, as @curtisa suspected, that the Danish hasn't penetrated in those spots. That would also indicate that you haven't wiped the excess off the second time after some 15 minutes. What I find puzzling for both explanations is that they appeared after sanding so a natural mineral deposit may well be the culprit. Although the fluids usually reside in the sapwood close to the surface, sometimes a drop can get caught and stay in the heartwood which in the case of ebony is the dark wood. Your photos show the blemishes exaggerated, at least on my 30" screen they're quadruplicated in size, so in reality they shouldn't be disturbing especially for a first build. @Gogzs, lemon oil being a moisturizer is just marketing jargon! Moisture is always water, even inside wood. Good guitar wood should be dried down to <10% after which it shouldn't live with humidity much unless you really soak it. "Lemon oil" for guitars is mostly vapourizing solvents which help cleaning the gunk off the fretboard, the tiny drop of oil enhances the grain so it's mostly for looks and a bit for protection. It's basically a cleaner. But it sure isn't a substitute for water! I fully agree with @curtisa about steel wool. The tweezer size hair fragments are easy, steel wool dust blending with the oiled fretboard can make a dull grey mess! As I already said, dry wood doesn't actually suck water, the moisture content below 10% is a pretty stable condition unless you sink the wood into water for a long time. The same applies with oils. They only penetrate the very surface, a single mm or 2 at the most. If you look at an old workbench in a motor workshop it may look like thoroughly soaked with oil but it can be easily planed to clean wood (except for cracks, of course). That said a fix for the blemishes might indeed be applying more oil on the fretboard to see if the surroundings get the same level of saturation.

That sounds right. If you're going to use a drill, keep the rpm down. You can also use the foam pads by hand, even with the drill adaptor if that gives you a better grip. I've done all my waxing by hand but using a machine isn't wrong at all. For final buffing I've used a lambswool pad on the random orbital sander as that's the most labourious part of waxing. A hint: If the surface still has pores and grooves where the wax gathers as tiny white stripes and spots you can use a soft brush like a clothes or shoe brush during the process to polish the grooves! The wool pad will then give the final gloss on the surface.

Well, the Internet can be wrong. By a quick search only one site mentioned a water based product as an alternative. This one seemed to go in depth about the difference of nail polish and nail lacquer: https://www.difference.wiki/nail-polish-vs-lacquer/ For those who don't like a four minute read, the conclusion was that the main difference is how the nitro has been thinned.

For what I've understood maple is too dense for any pore fillers and such. Oil can be used but it will soon wear out and be replaced by gunk made of fingertip grease, sweat and fine metal dust of strings and frets. Dark fretboard woods usually are oily by nature, the fretboard oil only enhancing the grain, so they don't suck dirt as much. That's the main reason maple fretboards are lacquered rather than left natural or oiled. As I said oil potentially wax finished will work but it should be cleaned and redone often to keep it clean. That said, there's people who really like the dirty fingermarks on a maple fretboard.

Why not? I've been told that it's nitrocellulose. I've also been told that nitro is a common finish for guitars and that it can be sprayed either from rattle cans or spray guns. https://cen.acs.org/articles/86/i32/Nail-Polish.html

That colour looks like something you'd not want to see in your toilet bowl. It's like a combination of diarrhea, intestinal bleeding and hemorrhoids.

Then that wood is as solid as any "tonewood" out there. It looked like hardwood on the pictures but there's so many tree species available! Here we use spruce for that kind of boards, usually narrower slats and more sloppily glued as the top and bottom veneers would keep it together. Your tabletop looks like it would work without the veneers as well, only looking different. I can imagine this will make an interesting looking guitar top!

I've also read that "Swamp Ash" is the same species that has grown in a wet place. Logically thinking the lightness is obvious: If the tree can live there it will suck quite a lot of water into its cells so most likely the cells are bigger than those of a tree growing on poor/dry ground. The growth rings may also be wider. So when the wood is dried and the water is removed, the rest is pretty lightweight and soft. In Finnish there's a word "räkämänty" (snot pine) for pine lumber that has grown so fast on rich soil that the wood isn't suitable for purposes that require strength against the weather, such like window frames. That said, swamp pine is very dense high quality wood but that's because our swamps aren't too nutritious and pines don't like water. They grow very slowly on swamps.

Ouch! When you iron your clothes, don't answer the phone no matter how much it rings! You sound like the guy who accidentally burned his ear...

Basically not. It might look better with a thinner top, though, especially if you leave the veneer in between as a decorative stripe. So if it now is 1 1/4" you'd need a ½" slice either for the top or the bottom to take you to the ballpark regarding thickness. Strength is mostly dependent on the softness of the mid-wood. It looks solid, the growth rings are reasonably narrow and the seams look tight which all are good signs. But is that wood soft like balsa or hard like maple? Can you dent it with your fingernails, can you push a nail in with your thumb either from the side or the end grain? If not, the material should be solid enough any way you want to lay the layers. By the way, tap the board on both sides all over the surface trying to hear or feel any loose veneers.

What @ScottR said. The washers are metal so it's all metal to metal contact from the copper shield to the pots. Your wiring looks quite neat, by the way! The solder joints look solid and clean, not bad for a first-timer.

Leaving the white as a pore filler sure looks nice! The dark spots and white filled scratches especially accent the origin. Getting the 1/16" top veneer as one piece can be challenging although it's doable. But since you're thinking about a right hand bevel and potentially a belly carve, how about cutting another piece and split it so that when combined they'd make that 1 3/4" total thickness? That would also allow for routing wire channels and such from the underside. Like this:

Now that's some solid wood without being solid maple! If I see right there's cross laminated veneers on the top but I can't count how many layers nor can I see how thick the top ply is. I mean, is it thick enough for you to cut it away? Or do you have to plane all the inside off? A guitar top veneer can be as thin as 0.5 mm (0.02") if you're only after the looks. Knowing it's a flat desktop you're mostly limited to a flat top guitar. If you take the top layers only you may also be able to bend it a little for a radiused top but the surface might crack to a thousand parallel stripes which can of course be stabilized but ruin the looks. Testing required! Slabbing two pieces together would make too thick a guitar, a regular flat top is usually about 1 3/4" thick. Belly carving and other ergonomics might look funny - or then not! If you look at the build threads you'll find guitars with a smaller top veneer. Now that you know what's inside it's time for planning.

First, welcome to the addiction! Second, using a sentimental piece of wood gets a big thumbs-up from me! Third, hard maple is pretty heavy! Building the entire guitar out of that would work but it might be too much to handle. Fourth, looking at the image it looks like there's a veneer, and a rotary cut veneer to be specific. The board might actually be blockboard, meaning there's softwood slats glued between triple layer maple plywood and maple slats on each side. That used to be a common way to build mid-high class furniture. Look at the narrow ends to find which way the grain goes. If it's end grain you should see growth rings. Most likely it's sideways similarly to the long sides with a 45 deg corner joint. If you can, cutting a piece off the corner should reveal the type of the board, and I mean a pretty hefty piece, about 4"x4" or even a full width piece of 4". Or you could just cut a piece sufficient for a guitar body for the same reason. - Looking on the other side should also tell you and us something. If it looks like long boards it might as well be solid wood with a thick veneer at the ends and a rotary cut veneer on the bottom to keep it straight. That said, it might not make a guitar. However, isn't it the very top that you're most interested in saving? Even if (or rather "since") it's veneered you might "recut" the top, meaning you'd cut a thin slice (1/4" or more depending on the wood) from the top and use that as a guitar top on lighter wood. That piece should give you six tops with pretty large offcuts for backplates and such. 1 1/4" is pretty much at the bare minimum for a guitar. I wouldn't try to build that thin as a first build, not even as a second or third unless you're familiar with designing, general woodworking and calculating strength. If you can find a non-destructive way to find out how solid the wood is and find out it's indeed blockboard, cleaning it and adding legs might give it a new life as a table.