curtisa

It's not the soft pads of those quick clamps I have trouble with. At the moment I'm having trouble locating the floor attachment to the shopvac, which makes cleaning up the floor after an afternoon of making woodchips a somewhat laborius task.

Too freaking cold here at the moment! Spent some time getting the headstock binding prepped. A bit of heat from a heatgun helps soften the plastic binding so that it will deform to match some of the tight corners without snapping or springing back. I probably should've used the heatgun to set fire to my trousers. At least I'd be a bit warmer. Staining around the CF bars is from the epoxy used to glue the rods into the channels:

One is the pickup selector, the other is the phase reverse switch for the bridge pickup. More here.

I would have suggested avoiding a trem for a first build, perhaps limiting yourself to a hardtail, especially if you're short on tools and templates, but I applaud your willingness to try something new. MDF is a cheap and easy material to work with for making templates. Acrylic plastic is more expensive and difficult to work, but is more durable than MDF (won't swell or distort if exposed to moisture, less likely to dent if you drop it) and has the advantage that you can see through the template.

Assuming the pot is the same as the bad one which was removed, I'm tipping bad or missing ground connection on the new volume pot's lower lug.

Probably the only practical solution is to apply a veneer top - a thin (1mm thick or less) sheet of veneer to the existing surface of the body. You'd have to strip the existing finish of the body down to bare wood, devise some way of precisely aligning the two leaves of veneer and create a seamless join up the middle. Gluing the sheets will require some careful planning to execute cleanly, particularly where the curve of the arm bevel is. Once done you'll probably still have a hard edge around the perimeter of the body which will need hiding somehow, perhaps under a burst paint job. The old Project Guitar website had a tutorial describing this exact process. By the magic of Google it is still lurking in the background here. Coincidentally the example body they use is an Ibanez Jem, close enough to an RG.

Welcome aboard. I'd wager most of the forum regulars here are self-taught, or at least picked up the bulk of their initial knowledge from internet or printed resources, myself included. If you're a practical, hands-on kind of person, you may find it logical in the short term to just dive in and have a go. I'd suggest taking on a smaller project for starters and build up from there - say put a cheap kit guitar together, or construct a body for a premade neck you may have lying around. Once you have some basic experience, you can progressively up the ante with your builds - make a neck from scratch, buy a kit guitar and pimp it up, experiment with different materials. As you start to build more you'll probably find that the increase in difficulty will necessitate the inevitable increase in expenditure on tools, so if you're keen to stick at it expect to invest a sizeable chunk of cash into the equipment required to machine and assemble your projects. A generous work area to spread yourself out in is always handy, but not essential. Some of the guys here have built amazing instruments on the balconies of their apartments. Buy lots of clamps. Building guitars can be dusty, noisy work. If you're using power tools make sure you have all the right safety gear (safety specs, ear muffs, dust masks). Learn the correct and safe usage of high-powered cutting tools to prevent any messy accidents. Clean up after yourself frequently. Be prepared to make mistakes. Look for ways to turn mistakes into an interesting feature. You may even find that you get more out a luthier's course after having spent some time building under your own steam.

Too long between drinks.

You probably don't need to rely on the dimensions and locations of the pickup and neck pocket routes direct off the templates. You'd get better results cutting the neck pocket to match the neck you intend to fit to the guitar. Unless you have the exact neck to fit the template you're likely to end up with a neck pocket that doesn't fit the neck. The pickups are better routed once you have the neck pocket established. This allows for any repositioning you need to do to accommodate your actual neck placement, and any errors in location of the centreline of the body relative to the neck centreline. Same goes for whatever bridge you decide to install. That leaves the body outline of your template. Being back-to-front on the MDF makes no difference - just cut/sand your MDF to shape and flip it over.

Sounds perfect

Nice one, centurion How does it sound with gain at 11?

Damp enough to leave a frost on the ground overnight and ice up car windscreens. I'm situated on the side of a hill and don't get much sun during the winter months, so any moisture that settles on the ground tends to stay for weeks. Day time temps are lucky to get over 10 degrees, night time temps around 0. Humidity in the mid 70s. Probably not condusive to reliable epoxy glue-ups in a cold shed at the moment. The epoxy I use is normally pretty good, but I'm guessing it's just too cold to work at the moment. The binding simply peeled off with a fingernail, and the glue that remained on the fretboard edges could be picked off in big flakes. The CA drying inside the house appears to hold it all together properly.

Not much to report from this weekend. Managed to shape the headstocks of both neck blanks. Gluing the binding to the first fretboard was a dead loss, as the weather has been really cold and damp recently. The first epoxy glue-up didn't take properly in the cold and the binding peeled straight off the sides of the fretboard as soon as it came out of the clamps. Have brought the fretboards and binding upstairs into the warm house and am using CA this time around. Appears to be working this time:

Must be getting close to roxxorz-in-your-soxxorz time Is it the camera angle or has the neck got almost no taper from stem to stern?

Perhaps a poor explaination on my part. At 16" radius the curvature across the fretboard should be small enough to allow my quick clamps to adequately secure the fretboard while gluing and provide sufficiently even pressure across the curved portion underneath each clamp head.

I usually use a row of quick clamps up each side of the fret board, two rows in parallel, packed in as tight as I can muster, no caul. Clamping pressure is on both sides of the fretboard rather than straight up the middle. Any loss of pressure occurs where the noses of each clamp touch on the centreline of the fretboard. Conveniently this is where the trussrod runs, and also where you don't really care if there isn't any glue in the joint due to too much pressure, or an extra 0.2mm of gap due to no pressure. A couple of 1mm brads at each end of the fretboard driven through the 1st/24th fret slots are sufficient to prevent slipping during clamping. The brads get pulled out after the glue dries.

The jointer beds in my workshop are perfect places for me to put wood offcuts...until I need to use the jointer There are never enough flat surfaces in a workshop. I reckon a lot of home builders without access to a good workshop or large power tools could take a lot of inspiration from psikoT's hand-tooled builds.

Just recently, yeah. I've been changing around some of the build steps a little and have found that, for whatever reason, I can put a radius on a board while it's off the neck blank a little easier. The binding will cap the ends of the fret slots, so it makes sense to radius the board after slotting, tweak the slot depths at the edges once radiused, and then apply the binding last of all. Getting the slots to the right depth will be nigh-impossible once the binding is on. Trimming the binding to the same level as the radius will then be just a matter of running the radius block over the whole lot at, say 320 grit until it's flush, and then repolishing the whole assembled board at 400/600/1200/2000 grit. Side dots and position markers are little easier to fit while there isn't the bulk of the neck in the way too. Clamping a 16" radiused board to the blank for gluing is well within the "skew" abilities of most clamps.

Slotting fretboard no. 2: Two fretboards radiused and ready to bind:

The Turboplane is fun to use, but probably a bit too aggressive for guitar building. I can see it working well for large-scale sculpting work where a rough-hewn look is desirable, but it's really easy to get carried away removing material. I experimented doing some concave and convex carving on some offcuts of the eucalyptus burl. Chipout wasn't a problem with this thing, but a lack of superfine control makes it difficult to maneouvre without accidentally taking too much out. I found it easier to control by using it on a steep angle of attack, where the blade on the cutter was least-exposed. The drawback is that it takes little nibbles and makes more work for later on to smooth it all out. Convex carving: Concave carving:

No, silly. Trimming my toenails, of course.

Never fear. I fully expect a period of experimentation with this weapon of mass destruction. I have plenty of offcuts from the top to play with. At the very least I can surely find a use for it for non-guitar relating woodworking projects around the house.

The closest you'll get to a flame maple-esque paint job would be to make up some kind of stencil out of cardboard with slits cut in it and airbrush or spray the paint through the stencil while holding it an inch or so above the surface of the body. The gap between the stencil and the guitar will allow the paint to go on with a feathered edge. Masking "stripes" on the body with tape and painting the whole lot will give you hard edges to the flame pattern and look much less convincing. Even so, it still won't look the same as the real deal. Maybe the real trick is not to try and purposely make it look like simulated flame maple, but to treat it as simply painting camoflage stripes on the body? If the guitar isn't worth much except for sentimental value, you're not sure of your abilities with veneering, or don't have access to the equipment to apply veneer, maybe a camo paint job with spray cans/stencils is the way to go? I had a guitar instructor many years back who put black tiger stripes on his yellow Jackson Dinky. From a distance it looked quite neat, but up close it was quite obvious that he'd simply cut up some black electrical tape into strips of various widths and wrapped the body with them.

The pattern you're talking about is actually wood. It's the natural figuring of certain timber that gives it the ripple effect, which is further accentuated by the use of dyes prior to sealing with a clear finish. It's usually not a print that's applied to the body and then sealed with clear. On some of the Chinese Gibson Les Paul knockoffs the rippled top is a print that is applied to the body to fool the owner into thinking they have the genuine article. I have no idea if there is a stock image on the net that you can use to apply to your guitar body, but possible search terms could be "fiddleback maple" or "flame maple". The other (more involved) alternative is to buy some flame maple veneer and apply it to your guitar. You can then treat it the same way as the real timber on a Les Paul by dying, sanding and finishing yourself.

You bet. Picked up a new toy to experiment with the carving process too: