JAK

It’s all nice, of course, but really love that back wood, especially now that it’s under glass. 

 Stunning stuff, mate!

59 minutes ago, TG903 said:

6 piece poplar neck.

Done purposefully for stability or because of the wood stock available for this build?

29 minutes ago, TG903 said:

maybe I'll try binding next time.

I like how the black covers the bevel of the sides, not just the vertical (does give a bit of binding appearance). Combined with the poplar’s grain and colouration, it almost makes the flat top look like an acoustic top. It’s working well for this build.

Some purfling/faux-purfling pinstripe demarcation between the two could look sharp and the top would pop even more. (A thought for a next time )

That burl is like wood pearloid! Burloid? But better because it’s wood 

Stunning stuff

Oh wow - a four-way tie! Do we need a second round of voting? 

Just a testament that there’s so much great stuff everyone builds here. 

That burl got real nice and deep! Did not expect that much dimension

That plastic battery box inset - very nicely done! I usually don’t like how the plastic boxes look, but that little detail makes a huge difference! 

On a related note - I recently noticed a lot put the battery on the centreline (production manufacturers included). Some even put it below the bridge or between the pickup cavities (which seems like poor designs to me). LP having extra space on the lower bout you don’t have to be under the bridge/tailpiece at least. Did you have anything specific with your placement choice? Convenient near the control cavity and/or aesthetically balanced?

The colour made me think “surf shop”  

On 2/7/2023 at 1:55 PM, Stu. said:

I think that the carve is going to need to dip below the walnut and then come back up, otherwise the veneer between will never have a clean line.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean. With the texture of the top it’s a bit hard to tell the smoothness of the carve (looks like it’s getting pretty close in most places, but maybe there’s enough roughness adding to the “uneven” lines still?)

I, too, generally like clean lines but oh man, let me tell you - the way the veneer blends so well with the spalting and then paired with the walnut looks superb. Especially in the bottom pic. It’s like a live edge - a tree that grew into a guitar (and the walnut then being the pseudo-bark binding). Looks like a happy accident to me! 

Really love that purple! Interested in what your process (incl. which dyes/colours used) to get that result. Is there some visual tomfoolery going on? At some angles looks like it has a thin black burst border.

Nice work mate

I second Bizman - looks like crystal, picturesque water. If I didn’t know any better, you could have taken a photo of water and cut it out / photoshopped to look like the colouring of the guitar 

Even the book match seam is nearly invisible. Beautiful start to the finish (pun incidental…)

Not sure why this is called an oddball build  

Sure, it’s not a standard body shape, but I think it looks quite elegant. 

P.s. 3rd picture down (the one after you talk about chiselling the blade switch slot) isn’t loading. 

Grats on GOTM 

Also that purple heart version is looking delectable! Does the heat treatment help the colour stay rich longer / age slower?

19 hours ago, nakedzen said:

installed the binding with acetone this time that I like much more than CA glue. 

Interesting; heard of acetone for cleanup & filling gaps but how do you install with it? Wouldn’t think it holds all that well or could deform it; are you melting the inner surface to the wood somehow?

3 hours ago, Prostheta said:

I mean the sort of artist whose work is recognised, and once it's out in the public sphere they lose control of it....imagine if there was that one thing which bothered Da Vinci about the Mona Lisa. Something that only his eye and intimate knowledge of the piece could discern....yet the rest of the world is so crazy about it that he can never tell a soul.

The art owns the artist.

“Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned.”
- Da Vinci

That is one of my favourite quotes. I can attest that as an artist (music, visual, written), getting a work to a place where it is “ready to be released to the world” is a difficult endeavour. It’s never truly ready, in the artist’s mind/eye. There’s a striving for impossible perfection and the artist has to be at a point where they let it go.  I can almost guarantee that there is one or more things about the Mona Lisa that bothered Da Vinci that he felt he could never get “quite right” but reached a point where he was able to abandon it. 

Well, as anxious as I am to build guitars, I’m actually not in a rush, so can forego the meter then. It will likely be some time before I can get things in place to work so I can wait and give plenty of time to dry and stabilize. 

Making a body out of offcuts - what a way to reduce waste!

Congratulations on the win. Very nice looking guitar; love how the top bends for the arm contour. Great job with that!

Just curious; what was the reason you bent the top on scrap instead of to the body itself? Was it because of the water used or something of that nature?

19 hours ago, Prostheta said:

I'm an advocate for laminating neck blanks to orient growth ring lines vertically to approximate quartersawn even when the wood itself is not so.

I am a fan of this idea also. Think it adds better stability slightly different grain directions moving in opposition to cancel each other out, etc.

19 hours ago, Prostheta said:

Just cut either side of the pith board.

When you say this, are you meaning to have a large slab with the pith at the centreline (like my illustration includes) or have a very thin full-width board to take the pith out of the equation and use the wood on either side.

On 8/3/2021 at 9:49 PM, JAK said:

This is cutting the 15" dia X 32" long log.

^^ that one on the left is what I think you meant.

Thanks for your insight! Is it worth buying a dielectric moisture meter? Is that something many of you have in your toolkit? Or should I just let it be/sit for a while once I cut it to rough planks and make sure it seems stable?

I see two sets of necks/bodies - making duplicates for this project or was another one just also being worked on back when this first started and has been [long] completed?

Inlays look very nice thus far. I know ebony fingerboards are often left raw but are you planing on buffing with some wax or something to help keep the aluminum shiny and not oxidizing? I had a piece I turned and buffed years ago; it’s stayed shiny with just the occasional wipe of the rag I wrap it in when storing, though not handling it all that often. (Still has a thin layer of buffing wax residue I’m guessing). The headstock won’t be much of a worry (can clear coat it) but the fretboard inlay under finger sweat might need more. Maybe fretboard oil would keep it from dulling?

22 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

If your pieces are too short for a bookmatch, one option is to build a slightly asymmetrical body. A slanted lower bout is almost as comfortable as an arm contour and the lower horn is always shorter than the upper bout/horn. Thus gluing the halves like below is a valid option:

 

 That was my first thought, and a much more sound idea.

And man, that's some beautiful, straight, clean cuts that guy was doing with the hand saw! Almost looked better than something cut with a fence. Inspirational.

Lots of good stuff mate, thanks for the recommendations!

Might need to look for shallow pickups - almost surface mount? Lace Sensor Dually are apparently only 12.7mm deep compared to the 22.8mm of the EMG 81.

12 hours ago, ScottR said:

Transtint is way too concentrated to use straight out of the bottle. It only takes a few drops per ounce to get a fairly saturated color. In this case I'm using them with acetone, because it dries so quickly. I'm only using these to create contrast and then smooth that out a bit with midtones. The major color will be created  by tinting lacquer. Acetone dries very quickly which can leave some streaks if you are planning to add the main color straight into the wood. Water is probably the best for getting even color and smooth transitions if you are trying to do that by wiping it on (spraying the dye mixture with an airbrush give the absolute smoothest). Alcohol falls between water and acetone in versatility.

SR

Great info, thanks again! Love all the friendly knowledge, experience, and wisdom collected in this forum.  I have a couple follow up questions, if that's okay.

If TransTint can be thinned with any of those, does that mean wiping something else overtop could smear things?  I.e. If doing wipe-on finishing, and thin the dye with water, but then wipe-on shellac, will the alcohol lift and smear the dye? Would it need to dry for a day or few between?

I never thought about tinting lacquer as the main colour overtop of dyed wood. I'd guess this adds a bunch more depth and how you got the test piece so phenomenal?

- James

So I had some ideas with cutting the logs, and did up a couple really quick visuals with AD.

This is cutting the 15" dia X 32" long log. If I do nice chunky quarter-sawn pieces I can get some good options, but then also got to thinking that as far as necks go, maybe I could have a lot less waste and use the corner pieces laminated together to make more necks. I think the grain orientations would be quite stable this way still.

Then here's one of my ideas for getting body blanks longer than 15" out of the large log. (Note: 15" might be closer to 13" if the ends are too rough, but concept still works).  The LP shape was an idea for my first before getting into more custom shapes, just because my main guitar is an Epiphone, I do really enjoy the shape, and could trace it. But it's still all theoretical at this point, and I could end up making something completely different. V, extreme/asymmetrical, etc., could be good candidates for 4-or-more-piece bodies.

I think/hope there's enough surface area to make it solid and withstand the forces of the strings. It's a different shape than a set-neck, but has quite a bit of surface area.  I was planning on separating into top& body (even if both the same ash) for chambering anyways, so could work some structural tricks in there, even if it's as straight-forward as a long neck tenon.

Thanks for the welcome, Scott!

9 hours ago, ScottR said:

I have heard that one year per inch was the rule of thumb for drying felled timber......but have no idea how accurate that is.

Yes, I believe I heard that as well. There's certainly many factors, including overall environment and type of wood. I would guess that open grain wood might dry faster than closed/tight grains (but maybe I'm completely wrong on that). Cutting might help dry faster so I don't need to wait another 20 years, and it seems @Bizman62 was successful with his poplar drying.

9 hours ago, ScottR said:

Sounds like you might have some carving experience too. We might want to talk about that sometime.

I would love to talk about that with someone as experienced as you - I've seen some beautiful carveture* on the GOTM entry archives I've perused thus far. Admittedly, it's been quite some time since I have carved anything physically (moved away from the tools I had access to) and my focus the past several years is in the digital realm (sculpting 3D virtual models) - I'll likely play with 3D shaping in that manner to get ideas for curves and lines before making custom shapes out of wood - with the caveat that the wood may say something differently once it's being worked, of course.  Which reminds me, I have some 15-year-old red cedar 4x4 offcuts I snagged from a deck and fence job years ago. Some are only a few inches long, average is about 5 inches I think, and I have one or few much longer. I grabbed them with the explicit purpose of carving cool stuff whenever inspiration strikes.  They're in my attic currently, but I just checked on them quick and they have aged beautifully with a lovely tap tone.... and I believe at least 1 is long enough to make a neck(s) out of, so hyped about that potential now too!

*carveture is now a word, because language is living and fluid. "All words are made up" - Thor, Avengers: Infinity War

8 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

A friend who used to turn wood once told me that if you let a log lie on the ground for a year the fungi will "kill" the wood so it won't warp or split.  ...  That can also cause spalting or miscolouring, the latter happened to my poplar which on a guitar body looks interesting so no harm done.

Interesting, curious how that works - fungus breaks the cell walls so water escapes faster?  It's hard to tell if it's just the camera phone / picture-text compression, or if there might be some purple, green, red, and yellow discolouration, especially in the large piece.

8 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Poor sawing with the chainsaw was the biggest issue, I didn't have a dedicated splitting chain and the regular one wandered all over the place.  ...  The cut was so rough that despite having tried to get about 5" thick blanks the bookmatched and planed pieces are barely 1 3/4"thick!!!

Thanks for sharing that experience - I was concerned that kind of thing might happen.  Sad so much gets lost in the process! (Even didn't like how much wood would be gobbled up just from the thickness of a chainsaw alone.) Now I have a crazy idea to use some kind of hand saw and a mitre-box like guide/jig - because I'm crazy.

P.S. - Apologies for the wordy/lengthy posts; brevity is not my strength!