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Professor Woozle

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Everything posted by Professor Woozle

  1. 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 ...
  2. 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...
  3. 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...
  4. 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.
  5. 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...
  6. 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.
  7. 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!
  8. 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.
  9. 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...
  10. The top is lovely, what timber is it? It looks a bit like olive wood to me.
  11. Looking at this guitar on their website (https://www.music-man.com/instruments/guitars/sabre), one of the videos momentarily showed the trem in exploded view and it looks to be a two-point strat style trem with an additional plate on top. If it was me trying to replicate this, I'd probably be thinking about getting hold of a good quality trem unit (Schaller, Gotoh, or suchlike) and getting someone to machine a plate to go on?
  12. You've got to admire his dedication, but I can't help thinking abrasive paste on a sheet of glass would do the job just as well!
  13. Just gone looking and the Strat I mentioned above didn't sell, guess it didn't make the reserve - https://auctions.tennants.co.uk/auction/lot/lot-73---fender-stratocaster-guitar-serial-no-l11885-1963/?lot=2455556&so=0&st=&sto=0&au=14118&ef=&et=&ic=False&sd=1&pp=96&pn=1&g=1
  14. These days, the classics are bloody expensive - I saw an advert for a music instrument auction in the paper recently where the star lot was a pre-CBS strat, estimate of £10-15, 000 GBP. When a 58-60 Les Paul comes up for sale, I've seen estimates of five times that and given that Gibson lost their ledgers during the move from Kalamazoo, it's hard to guarantee you're getting a genuine one unless it's got good provenancing evidence. Personally, I'd want to play a vintage classic before buying it to see whether the reality is as good as the dream. As Henrim says, follow your dream if that's really what you want but given this site is dedicated to building instruments, there's always the option of building yourself an exact replica - a friend of mine has designs on building himself an exact copy of a '58 LP, or getting someone to do it for him, with handmade pickups to match original PAFs as closely as possible. I've long wanted an 8-string Rick which are pretty much unobtainable in the UK, so I've been gathering together timber and hardware to make my own and if I don't muck it up, it'll be to a higher spec than a factory Rick!
  15. I vote for triumph - the original finish looks pretty awful to me and if someone gave me a guitar like that, I'd be wanting to strip it back and do something else, anything else!
  16. Are you sure it's aluminium? If it's light but really hard it could be titanium.
  17. Ages since I posted an update on this, progress has been pretty glacial... the slot was slightly off, so I had to glue a sliver of mahogany into one side to correct it. With the slot right, I masked off then epoxied the CF rod into place, using the offcut as a clamping caul. I then glued a strip of mahogany veneer over the slot and sanded back. Next job is remark the centre line, check and re-check, then glue the headstock plate on and cut the tenon to its final profile
  18. Seeing that front on, I'm getting Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" going through my head...
  19. I've got a Shadow P2 which has a Schaller 3D piezo bridge and an active humbucker (Shadow EQ5), wired separately from the piezo electronics. There's no switch, you mix or cut the two pickups with the volume controls - simple, but it works.
  20. Ebay is a terrible habit (says the man who bought a set of Schaller M6 135s cheap earlier today...) but there's so much potential out there - good luck with this one!
  21. A quick search online turned up this one - https://www.instructables.com/Homemade-Lathe-for-Drill-Press/ , I like the idea of using an angle adapter to avoid bearing stress. So yes, easy enough to make if you think it worth the time, or look out for one second hand like I did - I've got the B&D one at the bottom of this page - http://www.lathes.co.uk/black-and-decker/
  22. There are base plates you can get for woodturning that you fit an electric hand drill into - that's perhaps the cheapest and easiest route to having a lathe. It's what I've got and although not as good as a proper woodturning lathe, it does the job. You _might_ get away with using regular chisels and gouges but I'd recommend getting proper turning ones, the edge angles are different.
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