curtisa

Edges of myrtle top trimmed down. As a side note, I think I may have stumbled upon a reliable way of routing body shapes with minimal risk of tearout. The trick is to use two router bits - one with the bearing at the top of the bit and one with the bearing at the bottom. Attach your template to the piece to be routed and use either bit in the table router and route as you would normally, but don't do the cutaways and horns. The danger zones in my experience is the tips of the horns where the edges suddenly change from going parallel the grain to perpendicular to the grain, or inside the cutaways where the same thing occurs. Couple this with the low amount of mass at these points and it's easy to see why the router has a tendancy to grab and take chunks out. When you get to these points consider the rotational direction the bit is moving in relative to the grain. At these tight points you want the bit to remove timber in a direction that doesn't cause the grain to lift away from the work piece. The bit should "scoop and compress" the grain, rather than "shear and lift". Another analogy is to imagine running your fingernail along a piece of velvet - in one direction it will smooth the velvet down and offer little resistance, in the opposite it will cause all the velvet fibres to stand up and feel rough to the touch. What this means is that you'll have to go halfway around each of the curves with the template on top using the bit with the bearing on top, and to do the other half of each curve with the workpiece flipped over so that the template is underneath and use the bit with the bearing at the bottom. It also means that it's possible to do an entire body without having to resort to (IMO) a risky climbing cut. Maybe this is old news to some people here, but it works pretty well for me so I though I'd share. I used the above method for trimming the myrtle top down to the body profile here and had no trouble whatsoever, even with all that crazy wavy grain:

Out of the clamps:

1 piece Vic ash, 1 piece Tas myrtle, 1 metric f**k-tonne of clamps (and there's probably still room for a few more in there. Might need to go shopping again...):

Ta. That myrtle was definitely a lucky find. I picked it up at a country town craft store where the owner was getting rid of all his speciality timber slabs to make way for a coffee shop he was setting up. Everything was half price and I couldn't resist. Also grabbed a piece of straight-grained Tas blackwood that will probably do two necks for $15. He had some blackheart sassafrass boards too (which I'd like to try out one day), but they were a bit too twisted and warped so I gave them a miss.

Thanks. Down here Vic ash (aka Tasmanian oak) is as common as muck, but I wanted to give it a go as I'd heard mention that a nice clear piece makes a good substitute for mahogany. Can be a bit heavy, although the piece I'm using isn't too bad. Haven't weighed it, but it feels lighter than the Queensland maple I used on SY6. Trussrod channel routed. I've used a couple of countersunk screws in the waste-side of the blank to hold the neck in place while running the router up the middle. While lining up the guide for the router I had an idea for a new jig that I might explore in the near future. A kind of multi-function thing that would enable me to hold the neck blank to do various things like route the truss rod channel, put the volute on the back of the headstock, route the nut shelf etc...Anyhoo, back on topic: Neck taper and headstock trimmed to size: Vic ash body routed to shape, and control and battery cavities added. I'm so glad I went to the trouble of making decent templates out of plexiglass when doing SY6. What took me 3 or 4 days to get this far now takes a quarter of the time:

Righto, while I'm waiting for the finish on SY6 to cure fully I figure I can get cracking on Number 4. I'm going with some more local species again, plus I scored a really nice giant slab of Tasmanian Myrtle burl at half price, probably enough for 4 bookmatched tops if I tread carefully. It'll be an 8 string but tuned low to high A-D-G-C-F-A-D-G, effectively a standard 7 string down a full step with an extra string on the top instead of the low F#. Target specs: Body - Victorian Ash with figured Tasmanian Myrtle carved top Neck - 5pc Celery Top pine/Tasmanian Myrtle/Vic Ash with Jarrah fingerboard Scale length - 26.5" Radius - 16" Trussrod - Allparts Tuners - Hipshot Grip Lock Nut - Graphtech black Tusq Frets - Jumbo stainless steel Pickups - EMG 808X neck, 808 bridge Bridge - Hipshot 8 string fixed Electronics - 1x vol, 1 x 3-way toggle That myrtle slab: Got wood?:

Beer ain't gonna work that way up.

The router got a bit hungry at the deepest part of the treble cutaway, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with some minor reshaping with the spindle sander. The tools I used for carving probably weren't the most ideal (primarily used a curved-sole spokeshave for the bigger areas, half-round rasps and spindle sanders in the cordless drill for the rest), but provided I kept the blades nice and sharp it generally gave me no real trouble. You can just see in those photos further up the page some blade-chatter marks around the control recesses - that was about as bad as it got. Generally whenever the spokeshave started making ridges in the wood I found I could get around it by changing my cutting direction, or rotating the spokeshave so I was cutting diagonally while drawing across the curve.

It's pretty vivid. The golden section around the pickups wasn't immediately obvious until I started coating it, which was a nice surprise.

Ha! Go Eurovision! A shining beacon to all things tacky and kitschy in the music business! I'd play some of the drinking games but I suspect I wouldn't make it through the night if I had to take a swig everytime they broke out the wind machine.

Thankee very muchly, chaps. Started applying the finish to the body today. Getting a good idea what the final outcome will look like now, even though the photos don't really do it justice. My camera isn't too crash hot, and the lighting in the shed is all fluoro-tubes. The actual colour is somewhere in between these two shots. The brown in the first shot is about right (camera flash on), but there's more golden "flares" going on in the flame pattern which comes out better in the second (no camera flash):

Gah! Too hard this month! Bukosfsky got mine this time.

Carve done and sanded to 600 grit:

That's what all the ladies say.

Decided I couldn't continue to wait for this Ibex plane to turn up and carried on with the tools I have at hand. I'm doing the carve with a long Sureform and a curved-sole spokeshave. Possibly not the most ideal tools to be using but they seem to be working pretty well on the larger curves around the bridge-end of the body. Carve depth routed out and control recesses added: Carve starting to take shape:

I use a 12mm dome-shaped bit in conjunction with the router pattern ring and a circular template (just a large hole bored in a piece of plexiglass). The shape of the hollow ends up more like a flattened dish rather than a hemisphere, but you don't have to worry so much about low RPM leading to tearout at the sides. Going to be a sweet looking instrument

Isn't that pretty heavy going for a 1/4" bit? How far below the table surface is the collet? May have just been too much for the bit to handle, and flex plus dense timber killed it?

Thanks Guitar2005. I've already beaten you to it - I filled it with clear epoxy not long after that photo was taken. For better or worse it's been immortalised forevermore on the treble-side of the fretboard. Consider it character-adding... The sheoak fretboard is weird when it's been coated. From some angles the flame pattern disappears completely. Tilt the neck another way and the pattern jumps straight out. Progress has slowed a bit recently. Still waiting on an order to come in for an Ibex finger plane and some cabinet scrapers and so I can start carving the blackwood top. I could do it with the flapdisk on the grinder like I did for the SY7, but I'm a little cautious it creating mountains of blackwood sawdust (known sensitiser), and I wanted to try a different technique this time round.

Interesting idea. Has anyone tried this on small items? The quick scout around Google suggests that it's meant to be rubbed out otherwise it turns a burnt red colour rather than blue-black. Not at all, merely finding out others' opinions on cheaper suppliers, and lamenting the prices I have to pay for the same things my American/European colleagues are able to purchase for their builds.

24 frets, 6 tuners and 12 coats of Minwax Wipe-on Poly satin later...

Thanks for all the input. I understand completely, and recently I have paid a visit to the specialist nuts 'n bolts supplier just to get a handfull of screws suitable for a trussrod cover rather than go through one of the big name suppliers, but even the specialist store couldn't give me black screws and I had to settle for stainless steel. To get black versions I'd have to go through something like Stewmac and pay the higher price and the ludicrous shipping. In this case, as a hobbyist builder the cost vs quality difference in a dozen non-critical components doesn't hold compared to some of the Chinese suppliers, which in all likelihood are probably the same people that feeds Allparts, Stewmac and others. The threaded blocks on my last Allparts trussrod from the Australian reseller was welded lop-sided to the flat bar section - even the supposed standard brands can be hit and miss. The unfortunate thing for me is that I simply have no other choice. If I want a Hipshot bridge it's international ordering or nothing. Switchcraft jacks, CTS pots, Graphtech nut blanks and the like can be bought within Australia, but at a premium price plus whatever shipping the vendor deems suitable (usually more than the cost of the parts for a one-off). Shelling out larger amounts of cash on bulk-discount quantities of the better brands for one or two builds per year doesn't make economic sense in my case, hence my query regarding the quality and service of ebay suppliers of less-critical parts. If I were undertaking a commissioned build I would be using the best quality parts the client's budget would stretch to. At this stage I am still building for me. I can justify $100 for a set of locking Grover tuners, but I can't see a reason to pay $5 plus $10 shipping for 8 black pickup screws. Bah! Grumpy Monday-itis mode off I did see that store when I was browsing last night. You've been happy with those ones?

Heya, Anyone had any experience purchasing supplies from Hong Kong/China Ebay stores? I wanted to get a few builds-worth of bits at once, and it seems silly to pay full price from the big name suppliers for the minor stuff, especially from down here in Oz. It occurs to me that for some of the more basic supplies for guitar building (neck screws, neck ferrules, strap buttons, string-thru ferrules, knobs etc) it would sensible to take advantage of some of the really cheap prices on some of these stores, and save the big bucks for the more critical parts (tuners, fretwire, bridges, nuts, pickups etc). I'm also curious about some of these Allparts-style trussrods from the same kind of stores - anyone have any experience with using these Chinese-made trussrods, or have a recommendation for a supplier? Cheers.

Stiff competition this month, I really struggled to pick one. Demonx - got my vote this time. The combination of woods really sit nicely with each other. I like how there's nothing too flashy, and yet there's a lot of visual interest in the marriage of the deifferent species of timbers. Nice work. Trubl - The black grain filler in solid white finish made this instrument one of my favourites this month, just not completely sold on the extra long 8-on-a-side headstock in conjuction with the long scale length. Coupled with the thru-body string installation I would imagine finding a set of strings long enough for this guitar is a challenge! Boggs - Like the simplicity of the build, like the profile of the upper-half of the body and the cutaway on the bridge-end of the body, but the treble side cutaway and the profile of the Strat pickguard clash for me, and the heel/neck pocket looks like it might make playing above the 17th fret uncomfortable. Madhattr88 - Another understated build that looks really smart. Les Paul-style single cuts aren't really my thing, but I like the extra twist in this one with the exposed layers around the cutaway and armrest. Andyt - A beautiful recreation of one of Satch's most identifiable guitars. The "perfectness" of the body finish seems a bit at odds with the worn-in look on the hardware and neck, but it's nicely executed nonetheless. Another of my favourites this month. Verhovenc - 2nd choice for me. The woods used and the way they are combined in subtle ways is the shiz, and I love the funky inlay. The body shape is not my cup of tea though. But I gotta say that it's a cool looking instrument. Excellent work everyone

Thanks, though time will tell. The photograph above is probably the better angle. There's a definite hair-width dark line visible on the opposite side of the tip that will require more work to hide.

I've had reasonably good luck hiding glue seams by carefully brushing on a matching stain-and-varnish-in-one finish using a tiny paintbrush, drying the bristles on paper towel before applying it to the area ("dry brushing"). Kinda feathers the painted edges without flooding the area with too much colour which makes it look obvious, occasionally put heavier strokes on to the blend grain lines etc. I'm hoping I can pull off the same trick here. Don't know, only tried it on one un-inlaid boards so far (this one!). Depending on what you inlaid with it may not work. I imagine it would make a mess of pearl or abalone (too brittle), but acrylic plastic or wood would probably be fine. In those cases it would probably be better to radius before inlaying, or use a more gentle method to radius ("traditional" sanding blocks).