Bizman62

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.

That sounds like something Ollivander's Wand Shop might have used, with the explanation how one gives clarity and the other sensibility to the spells...

Funny, when I was very young it read "Taiwan (Formosa)" in the school maps. Hadn't figured out I was that old!

Understood, but for some (hopefully not him) that's when they notice their mistake. For some even that won't be enough, they'd blame someone else, the conditions, position of the stars but never themselves.

That's a valid argument. Your auto focus seems to like dark and less shiny materials like the fabrics and the leather of your chair.

Some people just may never learn...

I'd say focusing is your main issue, both the photos and the video seem to be a bit off focus. On photos the back fabric shows crisply while the guitar itself looks like shot through a softening filter. Similarly on the video you can see the stitches on the back rest of your chair, the rest being more or less blurred. If you can adjust that, a smaller aperture would provide more depth of field i.e. deepen the focused area. The downside is that a smaller aperture requires more light. A wide aperture can be used for lifting up details - the most extreme photo I've seen was about the eyes of a mosquito, both its tail and nose were blurred so the depth of field was only about a millimetre or two!

You would but I guess at some point we've all become so self-confident that we simply forget to follow the safety orders and continued to use the unsafe methods until something serious enough happens to wake us up.