Prostheta

It's actually a swallowing of the last part of "to", and it's common to do this throughout a sentence. "Pudit in t't tin" or "Put it into the/that tin". I'm unsure how this reads off the page, but Dave will know this North Yorkshire thing well.

Depends if you want grey black, scratched-up black or the classic golden black (texture like sun?).

We do get around....!

"Not half bad" is more familiar to me with my Yorkshire roots. There's a similar level of derision layered within - or to temper - apparent compliments so it doesn't fully come across as one in that region also. Here I think people are insanely jealous of what each other has or can do, and want to see something happen to it. "Vahingon iloinen", or "enjoyment in the minor misfortune of others" in those cases. People are weird. So yesterday, I thicknessed the back of the headstock down to 15,5mm using the largest drum on my spindle sander same as @Dave Higham does it, albeit without having such an excellent modification to the top plate. I dropped a small block of plywood under the skirt of the cast iron top and used a big f-clamp to secure a clean large board of white Oak as a fence. "Non-sticky" woods like Maple work really nicely in this setup, with fibres coming off rather than fine dust. Even Sapele can get sticky, clogging up the paper and slowing the process down. I managed to take down a full 25mm to the final size within ten minutes without real problems. The first step here was to establish a "stop" point where the drum cuts deepest. This is around where the transition from the back of the headstock plane to the volute begins. Since that is a larger radius than the drum, this needs to be refined off the machine. Once I got the headstock down to thickness, I roughed in this transitional curve by hand, mostly to reduce having to remove waste and making it more about shaping.

Thanks Andy! Shame it's just denatured alcohol, and if only real finishes were as easy to throw on, eh? Yep! How about "ei paskempi"? Much more Satakunta I think. (context: Finns don't say anything is good, hence "it got fucked up, I should have guessed" or "ah, not completely shit"; always "from the negative")

I might be wrong, since the terms vary between species. The specific anatomy of tree structure gets very complex, and is beyond my region of study. I simply know how to select wood for consistency and value, grade it for trade, the usual. I try and use good wood, even if it's going under paint...trash wood is still trash after all. The worst offender is the medium to low end of guitar manufacture, where the wood under solid paint is unselected, oriented randomly and has joins that are most liable to telegraph through a finish. It's how costs are met, but at this level where we're making instruments one (or three) at a time, we can afford ourselves the benefit of putting the right choice of wood into service. The flakes are very similar to what is seen in Beech, Maple and even Birch/Koivu with vertical-ish grain alignment. It takes a smooth finish very nicely, so it's ideal in this instance.

It's actually the natural structure of the wood with vertical grain alignment ("on the quarter"). What you're seeing there are ray flecks/flakes, and yes, it's beautiful wood that is both a shame to cover with paint but also ideal for it. It's just how good clear, straight-grained Sapele looks with that grain orientation....there's far more spectacular Sapele out there!

As you're very aware, I'm terrible with compliments because I always know I can do better with everything, but thanks! The binding cleaned up very well, and proofing with DNA shows that it looks top shelf in most places. My high water mark is whether you could clearcoat wood and it looks good. No gaps, fills, discolouration, seams, stress marks, inconsistent thickness, etc. I have one ding in the forearm from the router being too far over, which will fill out. The mentioned squish under the top horn and fill in the lower one. I could make this work as a clearcoated body in theory, so I guess it's okay ----- I just remembered something. I used my Makita palm router with its single-locking collet to do this work. Now, these are not accurate at ALL. Every time I load up a cutter, I brea down the collet assembly and clean the cone, seat and nut out with a toothbrush. Any junk in there encourages the cone (and hence the bit) to not sit straight. This can be seen by rotating the bit whilst holding the router body securely. For longer bits this can be almost a mm! That sort of vibration is both dangerous to operator and workpiece. Anybody that uses smaller routers like these, or any router with a single locking collet (do you need to loosen it "once" or "twice"? Once is single locking) should make note of this if they weren't already aware....

I don't have too much to offer this fine new year, however I did get some new binding in since what I had in was a bit of a mismatch. I also modified the forearm routing binding jig slightly by rounding over the cookie and re-positioning the router so that the cutter was as close to the inner bore as possible. The jig isn't that good in terms of maintaining for future use, but it did the job it was meant to. The binding was done by starting from the rear centreline, with me knowing that there was more than enough excess to start at the centre of the strip, so I taped it up across there. The glue of choice was some sort of Duco cement type, which is in principle a gelled acetone with nitrocellulose filler. I'm unsure of the stuff I used, but it's more or less similar in that it melts the binding and has some sort of hardened residue when it dries. That the binding I use is soluble in acetone is enough to tell me that it'll be good. In some use cases it might contaminate wood around the binding similar to how CA does, but here that's hardly an issue as we're going under paint. The larger radii curves bent without need of heat. I started by glueing the lower half about 10cm at a time, moving along before the glue fully dries. That way the transitions between each "section" can be pulled to add glue that overlaps old to new and the re-applied binding will bond between both fine. Simple 3M blue painter's tape was used for all areas that didn't require large amounts of tensioning. The horns and cutaway curves required heat, with the binding "rolled" around the curves whilst hot and held in place whilst it cooled. I must have missed or underheated one point on the lower horn as I got a crack that needed cutting into and filling out. Not the biggest problem. A proper heatgun would be useful rather than a hairdryer, but you use what you have when you understand the drawbacks. Otherwise this was fairly uneventful. Glueing the horns required more than tape, so I broke out some old flat shoelaces and went full Gibson by wrapping those up. The main trick is to get initial "grab" so that the wrap doesn't slide right off under tension. I developed a way of wrapping in an "X over and under, straight crossed sides" where the tendency for any one wrap is mitigated by being stopped by the previous wrap, if that makes sense, so tensioning wants to pull the wrap back up the hill as opposed to falling off it. In hindsight, adding a small F-clamp to the horn and wrapping behind that as an anchor would have been much quicker and simpler.... The tension developed by this technique can smoosh binding if you use too much glue. I have a small area under the upper horn that has a little of this, however I think that can be scraped out. Binding past the forearm contour was surprisingly uneventful. I'd like to have more to say about it, but I just don't!

Whoosh! The back of the headstock looks neat as hell man. Nice.

Black is always hardest. It's either tonally biased, blotchy or requires a strong mix to execute. That's about as charcoal as I've seen in a while. Nicely done.

I was actually surprised that the ink ran from the water and not the solvents in the finish. I guess this is more of an issue with the inkjet or whatever printed the decal.

I seal my decals to prevent lacquer or whatever from melting the ink, but I'm surprised to see this happening in water just releasing the film! Crazy. I found that wiping approaches (in my test case, Tru-Oil) wasn't satisfactory when sealing a decal. Vinyl sounds the way to go in this case, but I'd expect a lot of ridging. Test on scrap material if your cutter can provide a bit so you know it doesn't get messed up by the varnish.

Go to eBay, advanced search, then search by seller id as "magic_wood". I think the link might be dynamic and likely won't help me posting it.

Agreed. They look like a good product for the price. I'd be considering them if I were in need of a top.

Well you know how obsessive I get over precision and reduction of tolerances!

I was thinking about how best to drill those inserts with the least gear. I'd say that drilling them whilst the body is still a slab has merit. They'll be perpendicular off the drill press for one. Then the templates for the recesses can be referenced around a fitted plate with the inserts sunk to depth. Just spitballing. Thoughts?

Breja Toneworks' circuits are excellent, whether it's for finding an out-of-the-box solution or a good grounding (no joke intended) in which circuit aspects work and why. Recommended.

Dowels, Dominos, etc. are excellent for providing relative positioning between pieces. Some purists think (falsely) that it's not right to use them for some nebulous farty reason, but then again, they can always be placed in the pickup routs and neck pocket, etc. As long as subsequent work doesn't leave them exposed, nobody will be the wiser and the instrument will still be perfect!

Also, the adjuster access for the truss rod can be moved to 15th fret so that the adjustment length is in the bendiest part of the neck. That is, unless the adjuster at 22nd is super long and reaches out to a rod that acts over the normal stretch anyway. Who made an inlaid cover for one of these recently? I'm wanting to say @Andyjr1515 however I'm pretty certain I'm wrong. That sort of craftiness would be right up Andy's street though!

I prefer the Penny Leaf idea, as using sapwood judiciously can be stunning when balanced well. I'd say that the headstock is the big sticking point. Literally, those points sticking out are mostly short grain and will break off during build or during the first year of ownership! One idea would be to use a contrasting dark wood as the basis for the headstock material so that the curly bits are only carved down into that through the contrasting laminates. All of the effect and none of the weakness. That would be something to mock up prior to commitment in the workpiece.

I only use Abranet, well almost only. I use paper for things like radius sanding blocks or other things that need sticking. Velcro blocks and similar seem better once you get beyond 240 grit otherwise the minute give in the velcro layers can lead to slightly rounded edges if you don't pay attention to downward pressure and dwelling over edges. In general though, yes, the more costly papers and meshes do work a LOT better and in most cases outperform cheaper products in cost vs. longevity.

The edges.

The capo is purely a tool to isolate the nut from the fretwork so you can measure relief. There's a few places you can capo the neck to get a read on what needs adjusting, but mostly importantly why. Some things end up being adjusted for the wrong reasons or at the wrong time during setup, meaning you often end up back at square one none the wiser.

Unless somebody is deeply familiar with fretwork, I don't think it's wise to recommend more advanced treatments. The simplest is to capo 5th, set action over 1st at the nut. With a straight edge over the frets under string tension, dial in a slight concavity using the truss rod, measuring at 12th. Then set the saddles properly and pickup heights. That's my lazy approach anyway! A bit of fall off to the frets above 12th is useful, but can throw off measurements using a straight edge. Anybody not familiar with methodology might easily dial in more problems than they are attempting to solve.