ihocky2

This topic comes up about this time every year and what has been said so far is correct. You need everything to be at the correct temparute, the fluid in the gun, the wood, the air in the drying room. Minimum tempature is about 70F, some will go down to 65F depending on the brand, but I would not go below that. The finish may dry, but it will not cross-link properly.

The yellowish hue of the lacquer sounds about right, especially for nitro lacquer. There are a few that are water white, but I have never been happy with them. How heavy are you spraying your first coat? Brushing I am sure they are very heavy and will drag the dye with it. It sounds like you are spraying wet enough to put the dye back into solution. Typically when I use a dye my first coat is a light mist coat, just enough to lightly seal off the wood and lock the dye into the wood. My second coat may go slightly heavier, it depends on the finish I am using. Lacquer will melt the previous coat, so a heavier coat will only incur the same problem you are having, so I'll usually give it about 3 light mist coats total with lacquer. If the finish is too rough for my liking I'll give it a quick kiss with a scotch brite pad just to knock down the wood fuzzies, but nothing more than one light swipe. Then I'll move to medium wet coats and my last few coats before setting it aside will be full wet coats.

I'm in the same boat as Wez. I've used them and after a few string changes found that I use them as reguler tuners and skip the extra hole. They do not hold tune any better than non-locking tuners.

Sorry, but I have to ask. If you are having trouble with the concept of a string thru, how much about the rest of the concepts in an electric guitar are you comfortable with? Do you understand scale length? Do you understand neck angle and why/when you need it, or how to determine it? Neck width and taper? Guitars are more science and math than they are art. It is not quite as simple as picking a cool shape and creating a bad axe. There is a lot of math to it and a lot of theory. A decent TOM bridge will cost more than the book, spend the money and buy Melvyn's book. Even better and cheaper yet, go to the local library and see if they have it. If you live in a city that has several libraries in your area, check the others out as well. Answers can be found in places other than the internet.

The good thing with this co-op is that it sounds like there will be plenty of people around to help you learn new things and help with you mistakes. Teaching how to build a guitar might not be your strong point just yet, but I'm sure if you give it some thought you probably have something that you are good at that you can teach.

I think the main question you need to ask yourself, is do you have enough knowledge to be able to teach someone else. It's not so much about the steps of building a guitar, because those really are not that hard. It's about dealing with problems as they happen. With 5 or 6 students who have limited or no wood work experience there WILL be problem, heck even with experience guys there is always a chance for problems. An example is your post about how to deal with the bowed bookmatched. You now know how to deal with that, but if it happened during class to a student before this post, what would you have done? If a student routes something in the wrong place or has a bad chip out, what will you tell them to do to fix it? We all encouter problems along the way, experience is what helps us determine how to solve it. And you don't have much experience yet. This is not really doubting your abilities to build, but just trying to get you to think about what you'll do when someone else has a problem. Do you have the knowledge to help them fix it? People will not be happy they are paying for a class and come in, make a mistake and are told they will have to wait until you can find an answer on a message board about how to fix it. I work as an ice hockey referee and the last few years I work as an instructor at our yearly seminars. Teaching the material from the books and the slide shows is the easy part, and really anyone off the street could do it with no background knowledge. The difference is when people start asking questions about stuff that is not covered in the books and how to deal with problems, that is where experience comes in. Bottom line is you have to ask yourself, do you have enough experience to handle problems when they occur?

I'm not great with who makes the best spray guns and such, but I do know that you want to make sure it states that the gun is compatible with water-base. I am not sure what the differences are, but not all guns work well with water-based. As for what is a good gun to get, you can drop the large amount of money on a SATA and get great results with it, but you don't HAVE to spend that much money for great results. I asked the guy at the local PPG shop if I would see a big difference between my Finex 1000 and a SATA mini and he said that for the size projects I am doing you would not notice much of a difference. If you have the right tip size and and pressure a lower to mid grade gun will do just fine. You might need to do a little more level sanding, but even then it will be minimal. He said if you are working on a lot of pieces or large pieces you will see a difference, but not something the size of a guitar. By lower-to mid grade I do not mean Harbor Freight either, but something starting in the $100 ball park, maybe a little less. I vote gravity feed all the way. What size compressor did you get and what is the CFM rated at? That will go a long way in determining your selection. You'll probably need to get a mini gun since they require less air in an HVLP.

That is just awesome. I can't wait to see that work finished up. How long did it take you to cut that many inlays pieces?

Check out Kustom Kulture Lounge. Most of the guys on their do a lot of high end paint work, but they should be able to help out and point you in the right direction. Also search on Google. Follow the paint instructions from the tech manuals. Beyond that, spend a lot of time spraying. Practice is the best way to learn. Any time you try a new type or even a new brand of paint, practice first. They have different flow characteristics and different build rates, so every time you are starting from scratch.

I've done several guitars out of poplar and have never grain filled a single one. If I am painting them I lay down two or three coats of primer, depending how bad the first coat gets absorbed into the wood. Then level sand the primer until it is dead flat. Then paint and clear. For the transparents I sand the body up to 400 grit to really smooth things out and then dye. Then I'll apply a few coats of clear to seal the wood and sand it level. Then any color coats and then clear.

And an extra tuner.

Holly is a very light cream color. Not completely white, but close. Maybe bleaching it will get it white. It has similar properties to ebony, except not oily. It is dense enough to not need a finish, but it will get dirty very quick. You can finish it, but you will wear through the finish at some point. You biggest problem with any light color is keeping it clean.

I know shellac will stick to almost anything, but I have never tried it over a polished polyurethane finish. I don't know if it will stick or not. My fear would be the risk of it not sticking and lifting the signature as it peals off. But again, this is just pure speculation as I have no experience to back it up. This sounds like a good place to do a test though. Apply a little shellac on the back of the body where it won't be seen and see what happens. If it sticks, you at least have a good start. It does not mean that it will stick forever, but you'll at least find out if the finish will stick at all to the existing finish. Another trick is to take an area like inside a cavity or something and apply a little lacquer thinner with a qtip. If it softens the finish, than it is some type of evaporative finish and shellac should stick. If it doesn't do anything then you at least know that it is some type of catalyzed finish.

Probably the best thing to do is do a full setup from start to finish in the correct order with new strings (if your current ones are old). The last step of a setup is intonation because everything else affects it. Once you are setup to your liking it might be less of a problem.

Someone please correct me if I am wrong here as I've only ever coated signatures once and they were on a nitro finish so I could just spray nitro right over it and I was good to go. If you have a disolvable finish like shellac or nitro lacquer you can spray mist coats to start and it will bite and melt right into the existing finish. But something like polyurethane that will not disolve needs to be scuffed first for the finish to adhere. That will create the problem of scuffing around the signature.

I'll disagree slightly with what Ken is saying, only about what determines the scale length. Fret spacing is determined by the scale length, if you don't have your scale length ahead of time you cannot run the 17.817 formula to get your fret spacing. Scale length is twice the distance from the nut to the 12th fret, hence forth the distance from the nut to the saddle. But it is not even across every saddle. The saddles are moved (when the saddles are not fixed) to adjust for the difference in string thickness. This is the compensated scale length, made famous by Gibson. Fixed saddle bridges are angled to adjust for the compensation, but are never exact for each string. On cheap guitars very little time is spent on setup so it will be common for the intonation to be off.

What are you using to glue the neck in? With the neck already oiled and the pocket finished, wood glue isn't going to hold.

Ferrules are a great fix. You could also recess the plate and blend in the round over and call it a feature.

I've found I like the results better by going up to 800 and then using a gray scothbrite pad and then a white scotch brite pad. I tried sanding up to 2000 grit and got a nice result, but even with 2000 grit the scotchbrite seemed to bring a little better shine after sanding.

Not to take this too far off topic, but a lathe can pay for itself pretty quickly. My grandmother already goes to craft shows to sell her knitting so I send pens and bottle stoppers with her. Little scraps of wood that I normally would use for fire wood are now being used for profit. As long as you or someone you know is willing to spend a weekend at a craft fair occasionally you can make decent side change from scraps.

Knowing most of the guys on here that extra cut off wood never really goes to waste anyway. I can't keep my wife out of my scrap pile no matter how hard I try. It took me a week to convince her that poplar is going to make horrible looking pens.

If you search on here for scarfed joints you'll find a lot of information on this topic. There is a youtube video comparing a one piece angled head and a scarfed joint and the scarf joint is much stronger. A good joint is stronger than the wood itself.

Avengers' method is a very old technique which utlizies the natural tanins in the wood. Woods like oak, or walnut with high levels of tanin will work with that process, but woods low in tanin will not. So I shouldn't work with rosewood.

Don't waste your money on the 3/4" Woodslicer with a 14" saw. Grizzly says you can use a 3/4" blade, but it is not recomended to use over a 1/2" blade on ANY 14" saw. It comes down to the saw just not being physically big enough to handle the blade properly. I don't have my bandsaw notes here with me at work, but I do remember that the 14" wheels are too small and force the blade into too tight of a radius. The blade will fatigue very early. I think part of the issue is also the tension required on a 3/4" blade. I know the topic has been discussed on here already, so you can probably find more information on it. All I use for resawing is a 1/2" Timberwolf. They are not the best blades on the market, but I still get fantastic results.

You wouldn't believe how many time pictures are the only thing that got my car back into running condition. I pull stuff off, put the bolts in what seem like good places, try to put the parts in good order and the next day when it is time to put things back together I have no idea what I did. I love my digital camera.