PRSpoggers

Hey y'all, so I am buying some white limba neck blanks and Honduran Rosewood fingerboard blanks from an exotic wood dealer in Annapolis Maryland and I am curious, do I have to dry the wood for a month to 3 or 4 months or would it be ready to go after plaining the wood?

So if I buy the white limba and Honduran rosewood from the wood dealer (its exotic wood dealer in Annapolis Maryland) I wouldn't have to dry it? Or should I dry it?

I mean I spent my study hall today writing out at least two pages of how I was going to dry, plane, cut and shape the wood, just a few pages but I can tell this is gonna be a multi month project due to most of it will be drying. I obviously don't have these big old drying systems like PRS and humidity control. So I will just keep the wood elevated and not stacked on top of each other and let it air out.

That's why I want to work for PRS, Paul is such a great guy and so down to earth and kind to his employee's

Yea probably need fret pullers meant for fret pulling

I mean mine aren't fret pullers, they are just regular pincers but they worked like a charm!

It's a process of trial and error. I have found that out recently with my process of taking the frets out of my squire strat. I found that tapping them out with a hammer a small flat head screw driver will cause chipping, even with tape protecting the finger board. It's much easier with some heat applied to the frets and a fret puller.

My dad has told my sisters that when looking for a job, especially something you want to do, always negotiate your salary because you should be getting paid the right amount for what you love to do.

Hey y'all, I am new to this forum and was directed here from the PRS forums for luthier and guitar building questions and I would want to explain what my situation with luthiery and wanting to build guitars when I am older is. I am currently 15 years old and have been playing guitar for 3 years now. I am in tenth grade and I am considering college, specifically in engineering or finance. It all started with a visit to the PRS factory in Stevensville Maryland. My mom had mentioned PRS guitars in the past and at the time, I had only been playing for two years (this was last August 2019) and I thought hey this would be a cool trip. I knew some stuff about PRS but never really saw them in guitar stores, or never paid attention to them when the store did have them. So we go, and I was excited to see how a guitar was built. I expected to see some cool stuff but nothing too fancy. I was very much wrong. The attention to detail, the care, the craftsmenship, the dedication PRS puts into their instruments is unbelievable. I learned that it takes a whole month for them just to build a neck. Most of it is drying the wood. By the end of the tour I had the PRS kool aid and was hooked. From that point I wanted a PRS. About a month later I heard about an event a local store that is now a authorized PRS dealer was holding a release event of 6 private stocks with a special "Chessie fade" finish, which is in reference to the Chesapeake bay and how it looks from satellite. Me and my dad went and thought it would be cool. Paul Miles was there, Skitchy from PTC, and so many more PRS people were there as well. We get there and Paul Reed Smith is there, the man, the myth, the legend in the flesh. And get this, he came up to me and just started talking to me about guitars. I was wearing my PRS merch and he noticed my shirt and he said "I like this kid's style" and I said he missed the hat and he had a good laugh from that. We then sat down and the store owner talked about the event and what the inspiration was and Paul told stories about Santana and how he started with him. He then opened the floor to QnA. He was such an open person, being the head of a company and was such a nice guy and so genuine. He wanted to stay in contact with people who had wood and he threw out his 5 credit cards into the crowd for a joke and debated tonewood with a heckler and had a laugh about the lefty that was there. I then asked him a question about whether PRS would ever consider going into a SS amp market and a pedal market and he explained that tubes were just better, and he said something else that resonated with me. He told me he could see a bright future in me. That made me so happy. From that point on I wanted to build guitars. Now I would love to work at PRS and build for them, but I would also like to have a job where I can live comfortably. I want to do something I love but be able to live comfortably. I don't know how much a luthier or repairmen or a tech make, but I would love to pursue a career in luthiery. I have time to consider but I don't know what the best path for me is.

My dad has drills and stuff but not a router saw, he has a table saw but it's one of the saws that are one swift cut basically. But I was already going to get a spoke shave and a saw rasp. I need to get myself some radius blocks from stew mac as well (are there any other places that offer radius blocks for cheaper but not low quality?) for my squire project because I was going to make that radius to a really flat 17 or 20 inch radius. Then I was going to put higher quality fret wire in. I think this will be a fun project because the woods I found are very easy to recover from financially, with the white limba neck blanks being 7 dollars USD and the Honduran Rosewood fingerboard blanks being 16 dollars USD, it's very easy to recover from them. I am learning as I am going which I find is the best way to learn for me. See I am a very kinesthetic learner, which means when I work on school work or when I am in school, I need to visualize what I am working with and understand what goes into it. I am taking Euclidian geometry which is a very hard branch of geometry, and being only in 10th grade, it's a challenge. With being kinesthetic and having ADHD, I need to visualize how things work. With something like Euclidian geometry, it's a process of steps on how you figure out the proposition, and what is equal to what and it all has to do with shapes. It's a hard class and I was lucky to just pass this quarter but I did it! Now I can apply my kinesthetic learning to guitar which I find to be such a great thing. I can visually work on a guitar or a neck and understand how a neck is carved or how a fingerboard is radiused or how a body is carved and how comfort carves are carved. Everything these days when it comes to guitar manufacturing is done via CNC machine, which is financially much better and much more exact than say a human doing the work, which also takes away the sense of personality the guitar has. But that's why I love PRS, I live about 45 minutes from the PRS factory in Maryland and have gotten to go on a factory tour and I was amazed on how they do everything. They do rough cuts only on CNC and everything else they do by hand. It takes them a whole month to finish a neck, and most of it is drying the wood.

What would be like the essentials to building a neck? I can recover from my losses fairly easily, due to white limba being practically pennies compared to higher grade woods such as mahogany or maple. I am just so lucky that this local wood dealer, especially exotic had these great woods for such a cheap price. I know I need saw rasp and a spoke shave but what else is necessary to shape a neck?

I was wondering what these things were called! Thank you for putting these here, now I know what they are now!!

So Hi, I am new to the forum and I was directed here from PRS forums. I am currently 15 years old and I have fallen in love with luthiery and have wanted to do luthiery for a long time now. I learn all I know from Stew Mac and Dan Erlewine. I am able visualize things on the guitar that I am working on and understand how that works. I am learning sanding techniques, measurements, trade secrets and much more on my own. I really enjoy luthiery because it's such a hands on thing, and I am able to understand what is happening. This is my current setup at the moment: https://imgur.com/gallery/kzs8NJZ I have all that I need, pliers, hammers, screwdrivers, N95 masks for obvious protection, titebond and razors and a lot more. So currently I am working on two guitars, a kit from the fretwire and I am taking apart my squire strat. Today I got the rest of the frets out and I am going to re radius the board to a flatter radius, maybe 14-17 inches. I currently need to get radius blocks and frets from stewmac because I need to get a better radius. I may consider switching the current pickups and electronics to CTS pots and switches and jacks and texas special pickups from Fender. However, I am getting an itch to actually build a guitar from the ground up. A local exotic wood dealer has white limba neck blanks for 6.99 a board and Honduran rosewood boards for the fingerboard for 15 dollars! I currently need a spoke shave and a japanese saw blade or a file to shape the neck and a truss rod and other things. Would this be good to do for my first project? My dad has more experience with carpentry and stuff like that and rebuilt our whole deck by himself. However I am fairly well versed on what you need to do to shape a neck and can follow youtube videos for it. Advice?