ihocky2

Deft does tend to dry a little slower, maybe a week or two longer to cure. I have had no problems with checking and it does not yellow. Any time I've used it for any projects it seems to dry nice and hard. At least better than the minwax polyurethane has for me. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with it though.

You have to make sure the scale is the same scale length. Even though you might have it adjusted so that the nut is the correct distance to the bridge, your 12th fret is not going to fall in the middle. All of the fret slots are based on the scale length. So if the scale of the neck and the guitar body setup are different, all of your notes except open ones, are going to out of tune. I agree with Mickgaurd. Get a piece of hardwood, shape it and sand it to fit as tightly as possible in the current neck pocket and then glue it. The using one of the neck pocket methods listed throught the posts on this sight, cut the neck pocket to match the neck you have.

I used some small drill bits to remove the bulk of the material, and then several types of Exacto blades to chisel away at the remaining and then sanded the rest with bits of popsicle sticks. Actually went a lot easier than you would expect, but like always sanding the end grain is a pain.

I have not worked with basswood yet, but I would tend to agree that basswood is lighter. But I do not think it is tremendously lighter. Both are easily dented, at least as raw wood. I am just finishing up a guitar out of poplar, and you really have to watch where you set it. An errant wood chip under it is enough to cause a small dent. I have always heard that basswood is even easier to dent, but can not confim it. If you want to try and make the wood a little harder I would tend to lean towards giving it a good bath of CA (super glue). It will absorb into the wood, which epoxy won't. I haven't finished my guitar yet, so I can't say how much harder it will be though after it is clear coated. Some of the two-part poly's will add a very hard finish to it, so you may want to look into that.

I have absolutely no idea what you would be talking about. I didn't want to go with a standard f-hole and really like the way the longhorn looked. So I borrowed a chapter from your book, and changed it a little to suit my personal tastes a little. I have to say that the little toe holes were a pain in the but. A dremel tool would have tried to chew away too much too qucikly so I had to just cut and carve by hand on those. Where is the laser table when I really need one?

RAI6: The body is a little under 1-3/4" thick I just didn't read my depth gauge correctly when routing the spring cavity so it barely went through, but it still went through. I actually did use templates for this one, but they kind of took a crap on my in the middle of my routing. The jack hole I drilled both ends and then free handed it. The tele I used a template for the bridge pickup which came out well. I couldn't find a good picture to make a template for the neck pickup so I just drill the corners and connected with straight rails. But I do need to invest in a better set of templates. Greg: The body is a mix of original design and modified designs. I took the upper horn from a Mockingbird and changed the angle that it sits at. I used the upper wing from a Beast. The bottom half is entirely orignal. It took me about 2 days to get the top half to look the way I wanted and about 2 weeks to get the bottom half the way I wanted. It just did not want to come together. I got the lower wing after a day or two and was happy with it, but couldn't get the lower horn to work. I originally had the bottom thick in the waist area, but it didn't quite work. It made the lower horn too think and the front horn just wasn't working with it.

I dyed the enitre body red last night. I have a wooden binding that I will glue on tonight. Then I am just going to spray it with Sherwin William conversion varnish. Hopefully I can do that this weekend. It is one of the last weekends that I have enough time to shoot all day long, but the high is only getting into the low 60's and I know that I need it to be at least 70. I have a spare room in the house that I can throw heaters in for a few days for it to finish curing but at least for the first 12 hours and during spraying I need somewhere warm to keep it. I might see how warm I can get my garage and only take it outside for a few minutes to spray the next coat and then take right back in to the warmth.

I have been building a second guitar at the same time as my Wormcaster. I have dubbed it the Warbird. This is going to be a Christmas present for my brother in-law. I have been working on it so about 2-1/2 months but haven't really taken many pictures until recently. So the first pictures of it are pretty far along in the build. I managed to dye it last night, but did not get those pictures yet. So here is up to the rough sanded stage. Here are the specs for it. Body: Poplar Neck: Hard Maple with 3x3 headstock Fretboard: Bloodwood, 24.75" Scale 2 humbuckers 2 Point Strat style tremolo with Graphtech nut 3-way switch, vol, tone Color: Stained slate gray with red candy coat with a Punisher Skull logo painted in white. Rough sanded Rough Neck http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b192/iho...rd/DSC03166.jpg Fret Board http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b192/iho...rd/DSC03167.jpg Body and Neck http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b192/iho...rd/DSC03172.jpg

Well, time for a long over due update. Over the past two months I save sanded the body fully to shape, cut my sound hole, added that control cavity and control holes, routed the binding ledge, final sanded and pretty much anything you need to do before finishing it. Last night I dyed it red. Tonight I will be attaching the binding and painting the pickup cavities. I hope to spray conversion varnish over the weekend. I will get more pictures tonight of the dyed product. I am really happy with the way this is turning out. The only big problem I have run into is that the blade swtich slot got a little chewed up and ugly, but it is usable. http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b192/ihocky2/DSC03157.jpg http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b192/ihocky2/DSC03151.jpg http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b192/ihocky2/DSC03163.jpg

Think about what you trying to do. A tighter radius means that the ends are lower than the middle by quiet a bit. A 12" or 14" is a lot flatter. Meaning that you would barely have any of the fret tang in the slot. It simply will not work at all.

Very nice work. What is the scale length of that guitar. It might be because the body is so large, but the neck looks rather short to me. Might be just because of the angle or something. You can get 42 sounds from the guitar with all of those switches, but can you esaily and quickly remember what sound you are using and how to get to the next one? Very cool though, once again nice work.

Just like all other girlfriends and wives do, right?

Do you need to make the caul itself or the tool holder that the caul clamps into. The cauls themselves are cheap, it is the holder that is more expensive. If it is the holder you need, look through the tools section or the tools tutorials. There was a thread in there on how to make the holder from aluminum bar that you can buy at home depot.

The one main tool that you need to learn is patience. Go to the "What mistakes to avoid thread". I think every post in that thread says to be patient. And you sit here and say that you have no patience to do this. All you are setting yourself up to do is fail. Problems occur, mistakes are made, things take longer than planned. Unless you are comissioned to build the guitar by a specifed date, there is no reason to just rush through just to get it done.

I have to agree with Wes on this one. I never touched a handplane until one of my current builds. Once I had the blank glued up, I had to remove the cupping that occured from gluing. And at 17" wide it was not fitting through a 12-1/2" planer. So my onnly choice was to do it by hand. I spent an evening sharpening that blade on two hand planes and a few hours on the net searching on how to use a plane effectively. It is not a difficult skill to learn. Especially on wood that is not full of knots or difficult grain, which yours looks pretty clean and straight forward. Two evenings of work and sweat and the body is just a flat and level as I would have out of the planer. So if you take your time to setup and learn the proper techniques, you are going to loose 3 or 4 days. That is not a whole lot. You are not building this for a customer, so where is the rush to get this done. I have spent 3 months on the two guitars I am currently building and am just ready two dye them now. This is not a hobby to rush through if you want quality results. I would think a quality product that you can be proud of would be more important than getting done 4 days earlier. Learn how to use your tools properly and you'll enjoy using them more. I absolutely fell in love with using hand planes. All it takes is a little patience.

I have a small 2" vise that clamps on to the edge of a table or bench that came with my house that works great. I just ran the jaws over the grinder to remove the teeth and then sanded them flat. You can probably find one of those types at any hardware store. Or here is a nice one that you can get on the cheap at harbor freight that would work nicely. http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/Disp...itemnumber=3311

27/64" = 10.715625mm 7/16" = 11.1125mm 0.1125mm doesn't sound like a lot, but I found it to be enough to make the bushing a little sloppy. I could easily pull it back out by hand. Which to me means that it is not transfering vibrations to the body as well. Plus that is figuring on the bit drilling a PERFECT 7/16" hole. If your drill press has any runout (which they all do to some extent) will cause the hole to drill a little oversize.

Since I see that patience has flown out the window, I would recomend going with a painted body to hide the flaws. Which means you can go with the body angled on the blank so you don't have to add another piece of wood. My question though is, if you decided ahead of time to build a Rhoads Vee, why not do a layout of it and figure out if you have enough wood for the blank. If that was the only wood you had, you should have though about the body style a little more. Now, instead of taking the quick and dirty way out you still have options. First it does not take that long to learn to use a hand plane. Especially in this day in age with the amount of info available on the net. Secondly you can just find a nice flat work surface and glue or tape down a piece of 60 grit sandpaper that is a little longer than the blanks. Then just run it back and forth by hand. 0.5mm is too much of a gap for a clean joint, but with 60 grit paper, you'll remove that gap in no time.

Is there any specific reason you NEED a carbide tipped brad point? I know carbide tools have their bonuses, but unless drilling metal, a good HSS has never failed me and I can resharpen it myself with ease. An 11mm Forstner might be hard to find, but an 11mm brad point should be easy enough. I experimented with a 7/16" and it was a loose fit. A 27/64" was actually a little tight, bit I cleaned it up with a little sand paper and it was fine. But a 27/64" is going to be harder to find than a 11mm.

One of the guys over on the re-ranch forum used tru-oil to finish a maple board and had great luck with it, so I am going to give it try. At worst it gets dirty like any of the nitro finishes do anyway. But I at least get the oiled feel.

I'm going to be trying Tru-oil on a maple board in a few weeks. It will probably be over a year before I can comment on how well it wears, but there is a discussion in this section if you search through and it covers a lot of what you want to know.

Glad to hear this. I just got my hands on a few cherry logs that I have to cut up to dry, but was planning on using them for a few guitars if I could and was hoping that I could use the one for necks. I won't get a lot of body sized pieces from the one log, but I can easily get a good 6 or 7 quarter sawn neck blanks.

I see what you mean about the downward angle and do agree with your accessment there. I think if you used rounded corners instead of sharp corners though, it would fit better with the body. I alos agree with the narrow waist. I would fix the waist issue and see what that does to the ablge of the upper horn and adjust until it looks right. Then repost and see what you have. There is something about the angle of the upper horn that I don't like, but once you thicken up the waist, you will need to change that angle anyway, so we'll wait to see what happens there.

There had been a thread on here somewhere in the past that Harbor Freight sold sheet metal nippers which where almost the same as fret tang nippers, except they did not have a groove for the fret crown. But you could get them cheap and then cut the groove in with a dremel.

As long as you are staying at speeds that a drill press generates, and the collet grabs nice and tight, you are okay with them in the router, even though I would still recomend against it. Hopefully a newbie doesn't find this thread and through a drill bit into a router at 20,000 rpm. All they'll generate is shrapnel. The portable drill guide would work great for what you need. But if you are patient, you can find a used drill press for about 20-30 dollars more and it will be more accurate.