Asdrael

You guys I swore I was done with the woodwork for this one and now I am planning a laminated wooden tone knob even if I never use tone wtf is wrong with me

True, I could buy. But in that case, since it's my first project, I would like to avoid buying finished wood things and go with as much experience as I can. If the lathe is fixed, I might actually go for a rosewood / maple / rosewood sandwich knob. And with a drill press, I guess there is indeed a way... I'll have to think about that one. Thanks for the suggestion!

My man flashing the Mercedes That headstock looks awesome though.

Good call, I could do that. I have a preslotted nut for this build that I was to sand down to get the proper height on e and E but I think it's a 16" radius where I have a 17" fretboard. So not perfect but might be close enough knowing how I setup my guitars. Then again my birthday and Christmas are coming so...

I thought about that. The cavity cover will be rosewood, but the lathe to potentially make knobs isn't functional currently. I am against the pickups covered with rosewood (for now) as I already have black covered pickups that look sharp. I may in the future get some other pickups done by Elysian pickups, then they would be rosewood covered.

Well, not much going on. I am half way in the planned Tru-Oil coats for the body and so far, so good. I decided against the wet sanding approach as I wanted to keep it as fool proof as possible. Wipe on a thin layer with a clean rag, wait a minute, wipe off with paper towel, wait 24 hours (I'm doing one side every 12 hours actually). I am somewhat polishing each coat with a paper towel before reapplying, it seems to help get a smoother surface and doesn't seem to remove any material. 5 coats in, there is some gloss. The wood texture is still very noticable to the eye and the touch, which is exactly what I wanted. I am pondering stopping there and rub it with steel wool as I want a mat, not a gloss finish, but I am afraid the thickness of the finish will be too low to protect the body at least marginally against my radioactive sweat (literally radioactive sometimes, I work with radioactive material). My score sheet: Definitely not the most interesting part of the build, sorry. Can't wait to have it done, put it in our 25°C / 35% humidity cellar for a week to get it real dry and assemble the guitar. I am also starting to plan for building a miter box for fret slotting. Since I can make templates with a laser cutter, I figured I could custom make a miter box and save enough money to buy nut files. I have 25€ or material approximately already invested. If there is any interest, maybe I'll publish my WIP plans and do a tutorial on it. Anyhow, not a lot going on, so going to play with my new toys:

Hah, the 25mm forstner bit for a 25mm tube. Clever and clean. I was impressed by that and also because to me, it really looks like you inlaid just the metal and the "middle wood" has always been there. The grain match is great. Did you use wood dust in the epoxy?

Build looks awesome so far, lots of clever ideas too! Not sure how you managed to get the headstock inlay that cleanly in, very impressive.

Managed to sneak out of the house on Germany Unity Day to get some more stuff done once the kids were in bed. Summary of what I did: Yep, sanding. 320, 400, 600, 600 after raising the grain. I also sanded the cavity cover (after making it perfectly flush) and the truss rod cover to 2000 grit because I can (and I was waiting on the water to dry from the body). I rushed home to be able to give the front and sides of the body the first tru-oil coat. I think it looks great. I tried on scraps beforehand and I'm going with a very easy method: After the final sanding, I just brushed off the excess dust but didn't clean the pores with naphta or anything. I also didn't fill with anything. I just... applied a thin coat of tru-oil. Wipe on, wait a few minutes, wipe off. The plan is to do it around 10 times and then assess the situation. It's possible I will knock down the gloss and stickiness at the end with steel wool, time will tell.

Neck finish is done! (The date of the heel is when the actual work was finished on it, not counting finishing.) That's around 8 thin coats of tru oil (wipe on / 2 minutes / wipe off). Which ended up a bit sticky to my taste and a bit too glossy. Gave it a decent rub with 0000 steel wool, and it ended up right where I wanted it in terms of looks and feel. The flame can be seen under the right light - it's a nice but not very contrasted pattern. AA quality, which is what I paid for. Happy with it. The rosewood is actually much darker than it looks (the fretboard is almost black, a few shades darker than the headstock) which is once again exactly what I wanted. We just have so much sun today (30°C what the actual fuck) that it looks brighter.

Thanks for the insight! The initial idea behind the build was "just wood with electronics in it". So all oil (tru-oil) - meaning the cover should still fit perfectly fine once everything is finished. I am also perfectly ok with the body getting its dings and dongs, it won't hurt playability. As long as the neck remains in shape, I'll be happy. I take good care of my instruments, I am a bedroom guitarist anyway. I am still not 100% sure how I will actually apply the oil, I get that's a rabbit hole in itself... so it will probably be just me rubbing oil. Not wet sanding or anything. I want to feel the grain (and be able to go back and fix stuff easily).

Thanks. Now watch me fuck up the very last step or the classic - let the neck fall down right before assembly, or whatever critically stupid like that

More progress! And a fix First order of the day was to route out the cavity cover recess. Easy enough with a lasered template, I just had to transfer it to a thick enough scrap so my template copier could route out only 2.5mm deep. Looking clean Close enough, given that I still have some sanding to do. The tallest pot will still have room to spare, even if my body is very thin. Now, I had to fix the ferrule holes. I went with @Bizman62 recommendation and made plugs. It took a bit to find 8mm diameter plug drills but Amazon came to the rescue. I prepared a 8mm plug which seemed to fix nicely - not that snug, I could push it down with some strength but no need for a hammer. Of course, made from swamp ash with the same grain direction. It was now just a matter of checking thicknesses and depth and made what was needed: 3 plugs of 3, 4 and 5mm for bring all ferrule holes back to 10-10.5 mm deep. Easy, but I did it with the belt sander. A flat bottom to glue them was all I needed. I wanted to glue them in, just in case, and to be able to drill the string holes through. A few drops of Titebond: Position the plug: Push it down using a 6mm diameter plug: Hold it for a couple of minutes, done. Since their use will be to compensate for compression only, I wasn't too worried about getting a perfect joint clamped for hours. All three done! Close enough. I left this to dry on the side and move on to more rosewood, as I wanted to get the cavity cover and the truss rod access cover out of the way to. Those were to be flush and 3mm thick respectively. So I started with a "resaw" of a piece of rosewood I liked the grain of. That works! Now I just had to shape it. I used a belt sander mostly, with 240 grit. It didn't take long, just a lot of back and forth to make it fit perfectly how I wanted. I managed, so I am happy about it. I think the grain complements the swamp ash very nicely too. One thing I don't like at all is fiddling around to put the cavity cover back on when you need it. Always rubs me the wrong way. So I "beveled" the underside of the cover to help it slide in. Just had to do some holes next: Those were easy enough (2mm wide), but I want to use inserts here so I just had to widen to 4mm on the body. Also, woops. Almost went through to the input jack hole. No metal will ever poke through so that's what... our dirty little secret #37? And now, truss rod cavity cover! I had a rough outline from one of mine and just freehanded it on the belt sander. I wanted to see how good I could make it. I just drew a centerline and tried to have both sides symmetrical. This one gets a bevel on the top face as I think it slims down the shape nicely. From then on, I drilled the string through holes back (3mm with a large guiding hole, and the glue held so yay easy enough) and then... there was no choice. I had to sand the body. No pictures because... well you know, not that inspiring. Currently the body is sitting sanded at 240 grit, next time I will do 320, 400 and 600. Then it's tru-oil time. Same for the truss rod / cavity covers. I will also have to start soldering the electronics, which shouldn't be a big deal but I literally haven't soldered in 25 years, so I am hoping I won't just make a big blob.

Yeah, I was surprised. If anyone is wondering, I was using 90W at 8mm/s for cutting and it was still too slow and making burn marks. I think the engraving worked great though (10mm/s at 10W basically did a clean 1mm deep line). There is quite a bit of scraps lying around, I guess I'll spend an evening optimizing parameters for thicker material at some point. Most people stick to 3-5mm MDF but it's too weak to support a router, I'd rather go for 10mm.

Let me try again, updating from a computer and not from my cell phone. Laser: Lasering: Even more lasering: End result: I could have gone faster on the cut, the bottom face has marks. But at least the cuts themselves are perfect and will perfectly be followed by a router bit bearing. And for 1€20, whenever I want and however I want it? Unbeatable.

Thanks! For the neck, I suppose you talk about the inserts? It's really easy with a drill press but you need to get the right inserts. I bought 2 types before being happy with mine (Rampa Muffe for hardwood). As for polishing, yep, just a small drop of Autosol on each fret, and kitchen paper towels. By hand. If you did the sanding steps correctly before and do a pass of steel wool, you'll be done in 5-10seconds per fret. You'll see it becoming shiny and the tape protecting the fretboard become black. As soon as that black starts rubbing off that's a good sign you are done. Mind you, it works perfectly well for nickel and for SS frets. Good point and my bad - somehow wrote it on my phone and the upload messed up. I'll do it on a fixed computer later today. I do always upload directly from my computer to the forums, I don't usually rehost. This forum is actually working well, even for long posts with large pictures I find (and you are right, it's infuriating finding the info you are looking for to just load up a page with the legendary broken picture icon).

Fake update day. As you might have read, I messed up the vanity initially, routing it too big (since I used the cover template, doh). So I was left without a template for the cover route. What a great reason to learn to use the laser cutter in the workshop! So I spent an hour today getting training on it. Now I can use it alone. It's a 100 W CO2 laser. It went through 8mm plywood very easily. Next time I'll try mdf and/or thicker plywood, I have scraps lying around. A laser Lasering And now I have a template. This cost me 1€20 in operating costs. I'm fairly sure I can do an entire guitar template for less than 20€.

Hoh nice, didn't know the serbian place, thanks! I really have to start looking for a local lumber yard but everything I have found so far is basically a place where they sell non-seasoned wood to build cabins out of.

Mind sharing? I am always looking at wood porn for my next build and it always revolves around two websites, it gets stale - Espen (Germany, huge) - Maderas Barber (Spain, huge) And I also know of - Guitars and Wood (Portugal, limited) - Rall Guitars (Germany, limited) - Kollitz Tonewood (Germany, seems large but no pictures). - Madinter (Spain)

You are right. I should make sure the ferrule issue doesn't worsen with string pull, especially since I won't be using very light string and will experiment with alternate tunings. But since you said "fancy", I felt compelled to go this route obviously. And even beyond. I will plug the bottom with leftover swamp ash from the body, same grain direction. I will make dowels out of them and use a tiny drop of wood glue to make sure it's all good before redrilling as needed for the string. The only issue is that I don't have anything to make decent dowels of the right diameter. So I turned to youtube and found this: Looks like I'll be making one more "jig" next week Thanks for the motivation!

Thanks a lot! The design is directly ripped off a blackmachine with very minimal changes. And for basically every step I'm doing I spent hours trying to find walk walkthroughs online. So in a way, it's not that hard, but in the end it's really harder than I thought to actually do everything at a decent standard - or in my case to let it be when you'll do more harm than good trying to "fix" a mistake.

Another evening, another learning experience. I am nearing the end of the build though! So I started by "refinishing" the neck. I tried sanding away the rosewood dust that somehow got into the maple, but to no avail. I so just took my time to reprepare the neck for tru-oil correctly. It's now perfectly smooth, shaped, etc but has some inclusions of rosewood dust. Hoh well, happens. I should have paid more attention to it earlier on. As long as the neck feels fine, I'll consider it a success. With the time left on my hands, I decided to finish routing the body and basically get it ready for sanding. Step one: redraw the centerline and intonation line (and pickup cavities) properly with the neck attached. Recheck approximately 20 times while sweating profusely. My "real" centerline is less than a mm off the theoretical one, so not too bad. Same for the intonation line. Redrawing the pickup cavities, I put the bridge pickup where I intended it to be since the start (the middle of the bridge pickup 6.5% of the scale length from the intonation line). As for the neck pickup, I moved it slightly back compared to my initial plan to leave a small 3mm "wall" between neck and cavity. This is all according to my experience with various guitars and the "theory" that says the closer to the bridge the brighter the sound. Step 2: draw and mark locations for the controls. Tape a block to avoid tear out: Realize the only 12mm bit you have is a monster: And voilà: Step 3: Pickups! Just a classical forstner bit and routing. And I got my first tear-out ever. I had set the router a bit slow. I am lucky it won't be visible. I had to be a bit "smart" there to compensate for the fact that my route design had tight turns but my pattern bit was rather large. I used a 6.3mm shaft 6.3mm cutter, which basically cuts flush but with no bearing. Not a terrific idea with acrylic as it melts rather fast but I did the job fast enough that it wasn't an issue. Anyhow, cleaned it up, sped up the bit. And that's a perfect fit! 2cm deep for a 2cm high pickup. The cable is 4mm thick, and the strings will be at least 1cm from the body. So should be good, even with the neck pickup cables running in the same cavity. Same process for the neck pickup, but this time better. Funny how experience trumps any online tutorial on pickup routing, right? Could be the moto of this build Ok so now comes the fun part - the string through bridge install. Apparently you have two schools of thought on this: "easiest thing ever" or "easiest thing ever to mess up". Well, I decided I wouldn't mess it up. So it would be, right? I started by marking the bridge mounting screws locations, putting it well in the middle using my new centerline and putting the intonation line more or less 1mm behind the further the saddles would go. Drill with 2mm bit, easy enough. Except I drilled slightly deeper - I didn't account for the bridge thickness. So I think my pilot holes are exactly the length of the thread going in. Not too bad, as the hole is 2mm wide and the screw is 2.8mm wide. I should hold perfectly fine. Now the fun begins! Drilling string through holes aligned and prepare for the ferrules. I decided to go fancy jig style. First, I kept the bridge mounted and drilled 2-2.5 cm deep, 3mm wide holes following the bridge line. I didn't want to go all the way to avoid a possibly wandering bit causing misalignment, even if it was a brad bit, who knows... So instead, I copied a jig I saw online. It's basically a pin to index the hole onto which you flip the body to make sure you drill according the the already drilled holes on the top side. So you make this, using scrap and a 3mm screw: And align it to the drill press: All the pros have a setup with screws etc to be ultra stable. In my case, low tack tape and superglue to the existing surface. And roll. I started by drilling for the ferrule (8mm diameter, 10mm depth). And bam, mistake. My depth reference moved while drilling. So while all my hole are aligned freaking perfectly, I have a gradual deviation in depth, up to a few mm. Nothing dramatic, but still it's there. Since there is a lip to the ferrule (10mm lip, 1mm thick) and the ferrule itself needs to be softly hammered in (it's like 8.3mm diameter into a 8mm hole) I don't think anything is going to move but still. Anyhow, I had to keep on. So using the same system, I drilled through with a 3mm bit, and decided to recess the ferrules anyway (10 mm diameter, a tad over 1mm depth to allow for sanding). Looks like this (you can somewhat see the difference in depth, goes from 10mm to 14mm depth and back to 10 when I realized the mistake): So yep, hopefully it won't move and it will be our dirty little secret. If they move, I will lower all ferrules to 15mm and live with it. Next, something I always found scary because even though I think I am decent with straight lines, I think I'm crap with curves. Drilling for cables between cavities free handed. Hole 1: grounding cable from the bridge to the bridge pickup cavity: Perfect? Hole(s) 2: Neck to bridge pickup cavity: Perfect?!!?!? Hole 3: Bridge pickup cavity to control cavity: PERFECT??? Well, I am happy. I believe the only thing missing now is the routing for the recessed cavity cover but I would like to laser cut the template in our laser cutter (I don't have anything I can use for and I don't want to freehand it - I have made the CAD for it and am waiting for a friend to help me with it). All in all, satisfied with the day even though the neck couldn't be improved and I did the ferrule whoopsie. Nothing should affect the instrument itself. Next steps: Tru-oil on the neck (again) and sanding the body to prepare for tru-oil while waiting on the template. This can be done at home or in quick burst at the workshop while the kids are already sleeping, so should be swift progress. Next workshop session will hopefully be cavity cover routing, and making a cavity cover + truss rod cover + string dampener all out of rosewood.

Well, I am back. A week of holidays, a week long business trip on a conference, a bout with COVID, a follow-up with strep throat, and a fight with the antibiotic side effects later, I could do some work. Not much though, and at home. So no fancy gear. I thought that since I have to redo the finish on back of the neck, I could finish at least the front. Tape the fretboard! Polish with 0000 steel wool! Be somewhat happy! Go to the last step! Damn I love that stuff. Minimal effort and you get a nice shiny result. I am really really satisfied of how the frets came out. Honestly, they have exactly the shape I wanted them to have despite it being my first attempt at fret installing, leveling, crowning and polishing. Too bad the slotting was a tad wonky. Decided to also oil the fretboard. I wanted some contrast and with the temperature and humidity changes we have had around here in the last three weeks, I think my fretboard deserved it. Now I have to decide if I want to Tru-oil the headstock face or also lemon-oil it. We'll see after I correct my sanding mistake at the back and redo the neck finish. But now it's negociation time to try to secure my friday in the workshop - wish me luck!

Thanks for the explanation and analogy. I have a clearer picture in my head now. I think I'll go back to 400 and try to sort the rosewood/maple issue best I can before moving on with grain raising properly.

Thanks! I'll clean the coats already on and restart my process then. I was surprised how thin the coats ended up being but I started on 800 grit initially... Might have been too tight.