Bizman62

Did some more playing around with the 'Vette swoop. Designing a guitar is much easier than designing a scratch plate that big! Anyhow, you can see where I tried to duplicate the shape. The proportions may not be ideal, just copy-pasted the swoop all around the place:

1 hour ago, mistermikev said:

reinforce them with a toothpick or something assuming I could cut them without blowout

You can glue a piece of gauze or even tighter fabric to the place before cutting the holes, measuring about an inch all around the hole. I'd suggest using cotton or linen or other organic materials as they might live similarly to the wood if the humidity changes. That's a common method used by fiddle and mandolin builders to prevent cracking with straight grain woods like spruce.

1) I see what you mean. The effing hole just doesn't match!

I like the 'Vette type headstock inlay, especially if you carve an indentation for it similarly to the model. You might want to apply the same curves here and there, both in the F-hole and the pickguard.

The diamond in the F-hole is not in the same angle with those on the neck but I suppose that's just because of the sketchy nature of the image.

The sandwich sure adds strength. Did you put any of the layers cross grain to prevent cracking?

7 hours ago, ADFinlayson said:

The light source is to the left of the camera so it’s probs just a reflection

That's what I thought, too, knowing your nitpickiness. Reflections and the grain versus the pale pin stripes can create funny optical illusions at certain angles. I'd like to hold that in my hands to get a true grasp of it - then again as of lately my axe handling has been more on the townshendy side so it's definitely safer to keep some distance.

Ooh shiny! And those stripes all over the wood!

Is it just the glare on the second image that makes the straight line at the heel area look uneven? Having seen it like that tempts me to suggest some more carving, making the straight line to a large curve to blend the heel to the body. Don't take this as a rebuke, it may just be a funny reflection I see with my envious eyes.

Another thing is the direction the saw works. As I already said, friction is one variable and it can be reduced by cutting the corners rather than following the bottom of the kerf.

Another variable is wobbling which is due to friction but not as directly as above. I believe this is the main culprit here.

Wobbling is caused when the blade teeth stick to the wood and the blade is then forced to cut. The longer the blade the worse the issue. Compare it to getting a kite down from a tree with a fishing rod. The rod is plenty long enough and the kite is light but when you try to push the rod just bends. There's just too much force behind the rod compared to the stiffness of the tip.

Western hand saws suffer more here since the cutting starts at the tip and the blade is then forced to continue the cutting for all of its length. A pull saw like the Japanese ones start the cut near the handle where the downward pressure is the strongest. It starts the cut deep but the rest of the blade length mostly just carries dust away from the groove. Thus a pull saw might be better for slicing large boards than a traditional hand saw. If you have to use the latter, keep the movement short and close to the handle and don't add any pressure to speed up the cut.

Well, I'm not a native speaker either so take my understanding of it with a grain of salt.

For what I understand and what he also says, it's about a French polish or at least something very similar to it. You might want to check various tutorials for French polishing. Although this is about Tru-Oil only instead of shellac, the basics remain. The main caution with that is to never stop the cotton ball inside the area you're working on or it will stick and leave a mark. By "vigorously" he means you should try to flatten the surface with that cotton cloth ball! Now how should that be possible as the cotton is softer than the wood? But that's what it basically means. I've done the same by rubbing a softer wood against a harder one and it really makes the harder one shine. "Burnishing" might be the right word for that procedure.

"Buff and polish" might be just an idiom as the two words mean basically the same. And yes, it's done with that ball made out of a 400 count sheet. You just keep rubbing back and forth, back and forth along the grain, applying a tiny drop of lemon oil when needed (which I assume is just plain mineral oil with some scent), using it for lubrication rather than adding to the layers. Without that drop of lemon oil you'd end up rubbing that piece of cloth into the layers of Tru-Oil!

I had to look for what 400 count cotton means. For those who don't know, it's a very tight cotton fabric made with very thin fibres. As Howstuffworks tells:

Quote

Technically, thread count means the number of threads woven together in a square inch. You count both lengthwise (warp) and widthwise (weft) threads. So 100 lengthwise threads woven with 100 widthwise threads produce a thread count of 200.­

Hope that helps.

Don't take it as stone carved, it's just logical thinking based on elementary physics.

3 minutes ago, Lwguitar said:

There is probably something off in my technique

One main reason for a flexing saw blade is too much downwards pressure compared to the friction. Based on the images it looks like you followed the bottoms of the circular saw grooves, a method that maximizes the friction. Instead you should have knocked off the corners so you'd always be cutting the shortest possible stretch.

I thought I already had posted a sketch about the sawing order, but apparently not:

5 hours ago, mistermikev said:

neat trick if you are using a hand plane to get there!

On another video he uses the huge Triton TPL180, if you prefer power tools.

What size are those magnets? I just got a pile of 4x1 mm ones and they look so small I've hesitated to put them in.

I would never, ever, paint my guitar yellow and green! But that looks just fantastic! Especially in the lower light images where the "small guitar" just pops out! Am I using too many exclamation marks?

And... dare I even think about it? Should I revisit my fondness of yellow I used to have in my childhood?

Very interesting! Guess I'll have to split my offcuts for more testing surfaces to see if I could reach anything interesting with my ovangkol top.

10 hours ago, Hyperion21 said:

should i cut it and inject some glue

I'd vote for "Yes".

You're probably talking about a very thin veneer, in the range of 0.5 mm or so. That may flatten with the clear coat but the bubble would still be there. It would be prone to resonate and give you some extra buzz if you leave it loose. Also the thick block of wood beneath it might swell or shrink with the surrounding humidity, making the bubble come and go and crack the clear coat.

Credit to whom it belongs. I saw it on a Crimson Guitars video, probably the nine hour build or some other fast forward challenge. With the side note that it's not the right way but the result being surprisingly good.

Anyhow, the sandpaper is only for rounding the fret ends, you'll still have to put the angle on the edges. That said, 90 deg is an angle as well and sometimes it may be needed to maximize the playable fret width. A slight bevel would be preferred, though.

3 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

but was having fun

I can't afford that for myself. Trying to write unambiguous sentences in a foreign language is tough enough even without linguistic finesses. 

3 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

wolf notes... sounds cool

They aren't cool. There may be other names for that phenomenon, wolf note is what I've heard of. It means the instrument has  accidentally tuned to a certain frequency (plus the harmonics) which thus gets extra boost. Think about playing a scale: Do, re, mi, FUUU**!, so...

Wow! Never would have guessed that a router bit would cut through frets! Then again, they weren't stainless steel...

AFA the second photo, since the deepest cut seems to be just at the side dot that'd be a perfect line for the rest of the neck. Make it rounder if you wish but start with that bevel. A cabinet scraper might be the right tool although a sanding block might work as well, or a Shinto saw rasp.

For the heel... You obviously mean the parts where the neck is wider than the fretboard? If it's the traditional LP type neck joint it's a no-brainer. On the upper side simply cut the excess off, on the lower side make the cutout a little wider, blending it in at the 17th or 18th fret.

The rolled sandpaper method works well with steep fret edges as it only cuts the sharp corners away, leaving a maximum width of fret wire under the e-strings. Actually I've done my best fret end jobs with that method!

Squeeze-out is your friend when gluing. It tells you immediately if there's enough glue in the joint in all places. As with all things too much is too much, when under pressure an even 0,5 mm rim all around the joint is about optimal. A wet rag for wiping the excess off will minimize the need of tidying up with scrapers. 1 mm is still acceptable but after that you'd be having a pool of glue between two pieces of wood which is bad both for the sound and the joint.

Even though you can hide the gaps with binding you should still fill them with something. Otherwise you'd end up having long sound chambers in the neck and those can cause wolf notes.

6 hours ago, Urumiko said:

changing ones own light fittings and switches etc is fairly common practice in the UK. Its nigh on impossible to prove who did what anyway.

It became legal in Finland too a few decades ago. The basic idea is to allow replacing switches or lamps or covers into an existing inspected  and approved wiring. Redoing the wiring in the fuse panel isn't allowed. Same goes for changing the functionality of the wiring, i.e. adding a wall plug to the radiator cable and such.

For any electric devices the CE certificate sets the requirements.

Exactly how are you going to use that template? With a router you'd have to pull the frets off which I think is not ideal at this point. With a file or sanding beam you'd easily end up taking material off the template as well. You're making me curious!

3 minutes ago, Crusader said:

finger tips during winter, the skin cracks and never heals

Ouch! I once met a young copier repairman who had to wear cotton gloves on his utterly greased hands all nights (talk about foreplay...) and similar gloves at work on days. The plastic colour powder caused him similar issues.

Yep, that sure looks like a streamlined process, industrial indeed. No unnecessary hassling despite the obvious curiosity of wanting to get a glimpse of how it might look when finished.

@Osorio, to me a great deal of the process of building a guitar is to see the almost miraculous change from pieces of lumber to a playable and good looking instrument and the astonishment when it finally is finished to the limits of my skills. Do you still feel the same magic when doing a series of instruments almost like on an assembly line? Do they just give you the pleasure of making a job well or are they like your babies?

11 hours ago, Urumiko said:

No point trying to take the board off to fix it. It will just destroy my blank.
I've seeped superglue in to the gaps for strength

Give it a try, though. Even super glue will break when heated, as well as Titebond. According to some sources the flash point is about 80 degrees which won't scorch the wood. A clothes iron and a heated palette knife plus some small wedges should do.

If you used the foaming type of glue, it won't come off by heating. Instead, a shock like dropping the neck on the floor might break the bond. How to slam the neck for the desired effect without bruising it is another issue.