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?

7 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

you can buy dried wood, drying your own wood is it's own art form, you can buy already bookmatched tops too, there are stacks of luthier suppliers and tonewood suppliers online including on ebay, etsy etc. 

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?

45 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

Start now while you can nag your parents for tools. I wish I had a go when I was 15, then perhaps I'd be doing it for a living too - I don't know anyone that didn't become hooked after their first build.

All the info you need to get you started is free on youtube and ProjectGuitar is your support network. This is the first episode of Ben Crowes first series that got me hooked.
 

 

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.

50 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

That too. However, even if the job is something you'd love but the bosses were a-holes, you won't love working there no matter how well you'd get paid.

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

20 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

For fret pulling, grind the top bevel off unless they already are perfectly flat with the jaws closed. There's those as well so you may have got a pair of those. The idea is to get right under the fret (or the top of a nail)

Yea probably need fret pullers meant for fret pulling

5 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

Ouch! Not surprising, though... By the way, have you noticed that fret pullers are just regular pincers with the top bevel ground off? I bought a pair of nippers from the automotive shop for a fiver and after a few minutes by the grinder they became fret pullers!

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

12 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

I don't know other American guitar building tool vendors than StewMac. There must be others but as a European the mailing costs are stellar. I've ordered tools and other stuff from Crimson Guitars (GB), Madinter and Maderas Barber (Spain). They sell worldwide but the high mailing costs may be an issue that direction as well. A quick Googling didn't show any but I found out that Maryland is the Land of Luthiery so you may find a radiused sanding block in your local music store.

Bear that in mind! Even those of us without ADHD tend to haste when the blanks start to look like a guitar. Prepare yourself to the idea that your built-from-scratch guitar may take a year to build. I can build during wintertime only at the communal workshop, from 9 to 2 every Saturday excluding some holidays. Every time a couple of hours is spent just chatting and getting into the mood of performing the next tasks. Even if you don't plan on doing guitar shaped pieces of art like @ScottR does, getting the shapes and fittings right is closely related to sculpting. When carving a neck your hands will get numb and you may think it's smooth and perfect - only to find out the next day that there's humps and lumps everywhere!

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. 

3 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

Young man, you definitely have found a dream to follow!

I've heard two facts of life and work which I believe are worth considering:

1.  No matter what you do, if you're the best you'll get paid well enough and more.
2.  What you do as your job should be something you love and get well paid for, in that very order.

 

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.

13 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

That's a BIG question! For carving a neck think about what has to be done and what tools you already have or can easily get.

• You need a tool to make the blank flat. A (hand) plane is the obvious one but you can also level boards with a router and a couple of rails. Or even by attaching sandpaper on a flat surface.
• You need a tool to make the truss rod cavity. A router is nice but you can do it with a chisel as well.
• You need a tool to cut the basic shape. Some do it with a copy router with the bearing against a template. Drawing and sawing along the line is the method we've mostly used. You can do it with a hand saw, a scroll saw or a band saw.
• You need a tool to shape the neck round. A saw rasp is nice, a rasp plane is good as well. You can even carve a neck with a knife. Or a spokeshave. Some get an expensive router bit.
• You also need some sort of a drill to drill the tuner holes. Handheld or a pillar drill or even a brace.
• Making the fretboard requires a suitable saw, an exact ruler and something to create the radius with. You can radius the fretboard with a hand plane but for a beginner a radiused sanding block is most likely easier.
• Plus tools for fretting like a hammer, a fret rocker, files, cutters...

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.

5 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

The price of wood sure doesn't ruin your finance even if you fail in your first build! Go for it!

Although StewMac is very good, I suggest you to widen your vision by viewing some other builders as well. Crimson Guitars have quite a lot of tutorial videos and viewing them from different dates can show some changes in the methods used. Rosa String Works is more about fixing than building but it's interesting to see the difference in the tool set. And speaking about the necessary tools, the Malawi refugee camp luthier shows an example that you really don't need all the fancy tools!

As for shaping a neck, the Master of our class quickly carves a basic shape groove at both ends of the neck after which the students then simply connect the bottoms of the grooves. Yesterday I saw one first timer using an inexpensive 6" rasp plane which made the job very easy. A spokeshave can easily take too much from the middle whereas the flat rasp plane kept the neck straight all the time. It only took a couple of hours from square to round.

 

 

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?

3 hours ago, Invader Zim said:

For shaping necks and body contours I recommend a Shinto Saw rasp.

 

 

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?