Professor Woozle

Wowzer! Looks even better with the hardware on.

Apologies for taking the thread off at a bit of a tangent, but has anyone ever tried accelerating the curing of nitrocellulose using a vaccuum? I've been wondering for a while what effect that would have on the speed of solvent evaporation, and whether it would cause the nitro to shrink too quickly and check? Could be a way of artificially ageing a guitar if it did do that!

There are glaciers retreating faster than this build is progressing (largely thanks to work being a total nightmare at the moment), but here's a bit of new stuff with putting the headstock veneer on. Firstly, pinned/taped in place, but I should have been looking a bit more carefully at this point - can you see what's not quite right here? I didn't spot it, so on with the glueing and clamping... On getting the clamps off I then notice the slippage, and the centre strip is off the centre line on the neck by about 1mm. To quote Father Jack, "ARSE!" Okay.... I can try and take it off, risking breaking the thin Brazilian Rosewood or I can live with it. Since the idea behind this was to build something that was little sister to the cittern, and that has a truss rod cover, I'm thinking a fake truss rod cover would mask the centre strip being slightly out by the nut, as you'll no longer be reckoning its position relative to the strings on the nut. Another thing I've done is a slightly unusual volute, the whole headstock ended up with a keeled profile after I cut a bit too deep on one side with the spokeshave. This build is really going to be one big creative mistake fixing exercise... I've also made up some cardboard templates, one for half the body and one for the headstock: The other thing I'm looking into is bending the sides. I found I had a Murray McDonald tin case from a long-since drunk Caol Ila, and an old garage inspection lamp - marry the two up with a heat bulb and that will do the job. Or, it will when I've worked out a way to mount the tube on the lamp base as it has a rubber surround which won't take kindly to hot metal!

AFAIK Wilkinson get their hardware made by Gotoh (though likely in Korea rather than Japan, I suspect) - I agree that they're worth trying if you want decent tuners for less than "name" brand prices?

Hope you manage to get it sorted, with the top looking as wonderful as it was before! I think I'd have been experimenting with solvents like xylene to try and get the original finish to uncheck ...

A friend of mine ( who did the caricature of me I use as an avatar, BTW) once dropped a circular saw while it was locked on, and had to dance out of the way until he could pull the plug. I tend to use a footswitch with power tools now as a safety measure, although I had to rewire it first as it was most definitely not safe in its as-bought-off-ebay condition - no prizes for guessing where it was made...

I like the sparkly Phantom!

Not the biting sort, I hope? The midges round here bite hell out of me, evil little bastards! However, the guitar is shaping up into a real beauty - likely another GOTM winner...

Hmm... if I can find two 9v batteries to go in the preamp of my old Westone Thunder II I'll see if I can replicate buzz on that with a phone - I'm assuming there won't be much difference in behaviour between a 40+ year old Japanese preamp and a recent Korean one.

Definitely worth bringing that one back into use! Found a bit of an issue with mine, the smoothing blade is slightly too large so I'm thinking of taking a little bit off the edges, I also dismantled the block plane and found it also had a Sorby blade in it so another one to clean up and resharpen! Then there's my boxwood spokeshaves I got in the same job lot, which are Sorby too. I think we do need an "vintage tools given new life" thread...

A retired chemist friend of mine always recommended oxalic acid solution for getting rust off iron as it doesn't leave a deposit on the surface, iron oxalate being water-soluble.

Also, there's the Hawley collection of Sheffield-made tools http://www.hawleytoolcollection.com/index.php?sheffield-tool=hawley-gallery, held at Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield - https://www.sheffieldmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/hawley-tool-collection/ - I've not had a proper look at the Hawley Trust's website but there's likely to be a lot of good information there. The museum is also well worth a visit, particularly when the River Don Engine is up and running!

Old Sheffield tools tended to be made from crucible steel (hence the warranted cast steel stamp on my plane blade) which they made by first packing bars of best Swedish wrought iron into stone chests full of charcoal dust, sealing the top with a mixture of clay and grinding swarf then baking for an extended period, They then took these bars (known as blister steel), cut them up and melted them down in crucibles, and cast ingots out of it, hence the name crucible steel. It's a high-carbon steel (around 1.2% IIRC), and takes a damn good edge, though it doesn't hold its sharpness quite as well as modern alloy steels. As an aside, the vitrified cinder formed by the clay-swarf sealing is known locally as "crozzle" - Sheffielders still describe almost burnt bacon as "crozzled", though I couldn't say whether that was in usage before the steelmaking process or whether the name applied to the red-black cinder got attached to well-cooked bacon due to their similar appearance.

Hijacking this thread for a moment, ages ago I picked up an old block plane smoothing plane blade in a job lot of woodworking tools, found it again the other day and gave it a clean today, will resharpen it then fit it in the 12" block plane. As you can see from the make, it's too good to be left to rust...