IWishICouldShred

Looks great! You should enter it in GOTM. I like the length of the headstock, it does give the guitar sort of a serpentine feel, especially with the green paint (and snake inlay)

Ya still have to put 8 strings on it, and they're going to be both thicker than 50, by my guess....... Time will tell. And it's more important to have a thick neck back than fretboard.... But hey. To take tension off and increase his range, he could go with a lower 7-string tuning and add a high G or something-- low to high ADGCFADG or a similar config. That way you have DGCFAD (lower than normal tension, as it's tuned down a full step) in the middle, with an extra low A and a high G up top. Just an idea good work!

I thought you were supposed to mix stuff like this with your basecoat rather than clearcoat? I've never seen it done on a transparent finish... as far as I know, flakes and pearl effects get added to the base color, not the clear.

I think the stripper is worth it for the time it saves you getting MOST of the paint out of the way. Basically just follow the directions-- (I use Strypeez) do it outside on a warm day, wear rubber gloves, don't get it on your skin, apply it in one direction, let it sit, and then scrape. Wash it down WELL with water after and you're done.

Haven't cut the body yet... but that will happen next time I'm near a bandsaw! Today I went down to woodcraft and picked up a pair of beautiful Bloodwood fretboard blanks. One is perfectly flat, quartersawn, and has a quasi-figure. In good light, it almost looks like a flame type figure running the length of the board. 3" x 24" x 3/8"... $10.99 The other is flatsawn but not 100% true so I'll have to run it through a joiner to flatten a side and then thickness it with a planer. 3" x 24" x 1/2", cost $13.99 Oh yeah, I got a 10% student discount! How's that for building on a budget? That's about the cost of 1 rosewood fretboard blank plus shipping from Stewmac. The picture I got before my batteries croaked is of the nicer one, but it's crappy light. And out of focus In buying the bloodwood, I ran into a crazy idea for the finish on these monsters. Red stain on the spalted maple and ash to match the bloodwood fretboard. This should contrast nicely with the purple heart. If I get really ambitious, I'll do a purpleheart/bloodwood/purpleheart neck, but I don't know if I'm man enough to carve it! Bloodwood ranks near the top of the Janka hardness scale-- slightly softer than Ipe and Ebony, but harder than Bubinga, Jatoba, Wenge, Purpleheart, Rosewood, Paduak, etc. In better perspective, it takes twice as much power to punch a hole in Bloodwood as it does Rock Maple. Also, with this new color scheme, I think I'm going to do gold hardware rather than black. Thoughts?

What he and I have both said is that a clearcoat on top of the crackle on the pickguard will be easier, cheaper, and just as functional. Don't waste the time doing another plexi sheet, just shoot clear over the crackle on the pickguard and it will be protected.

How much time do you think the router saves vs hand and/or DA sanding the edges?

This looks more like a violin with a heavy cutaway than anything else to me. I think you should flare out the lower features of the guitar to add interest and balance.

aidlook is right about the cavity covers. Those refer to the back cavities of the guitar, and you probably would want something stronger for a pickguard. As far as making the pickguard, I know that 1/8" plexiglass is pretty solid and WILL cut with a dremel, but the results aren't especially pretty... That's my only experience with it. Wear a respirator. As far as the crackle goes, you could just paint the pickguard to match your finish, then clearcoat it. It wouldn't be very difficult, just make sure that the clear you use is very hard. You can get clear that's specially formulated for custom painted car/truck wheels. Something like that should be fine.

Enamel swirl should be fine over a nitro-lacquer (as per #3), but I've never had a good experience using lacquer paints over enamel (#4). That doesn't mean it can't be done with clearcoat, though-- I really have no idea what would happen. Try it on a test panel?

Cheap, easy way to get your dowels to the right thickness... My DIY Lathe- Cut your dowel down to about 2" more than the length you'll need. Put the dowel into your drill press the way you'd normally put a drill bit in. Make sure it's straight. I'd advise goggles and a shop apron, in case anything breaks and gets thrown. If it's variable speed, go with Low. Grab some 100-ish grit sandpaper and wrap it around your spinning dowel. Apply gentle pressure up and down the length of the dowel in order to get an even cut. This might take 5-10 minutes... I'd advise stopping every few minutes to do a test fit. I've done this in the past with success, let me know how it works for you.

I was messing around with different ideas on how to use the spalt, and I just kind of started drawing. The instrument almost has a natural taper to it already; there's so much unused space at the ass end of a Les Paul-type guitar, I thought it would be cool to expand the spalted maple in that area to show off the figure a little bit more.

Well, at least you're not doing your Christmas shopping last minute... Looks awesome!

Update: I've enlisted the aid of a local carpenter who specializes in glockenshpiels. I'm not making this up. Anyway, the gentleman is a master of his trade and was excited to help out with the build. Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera to the shop so you'll have to make do with a cell phone picture until I go back next week to cut out the body. Today we cut up the boards I brought. You'll be able to pick all of this out in the picture, hopefully. The center section of each top is a 4" wide piece of purple heart. On either side of this is a tapered piece of spalted maple, which starts at 1" at the top of the blank and widens out to about 2 1/4" at the bottom. We cut the opposite angle into the purple heart wings, which are glued outside the spalted maple. Everything went through the joiner, and then we glued it up. In the picture, everything is harder to pick out, because we clamped both bodies together. We are obviously not gluing the 2 bodies together, but you'll see 9 stripes. Don't be fooled-- the 2 pieces of purple heart in the middle just blend together a little. In addition, we cut the ash down to length, matched the grain as best we could to hide the join, glued that as well. This was not photographed, but I'll get a shot of it next time. So here's the picture

OH! I found the right word for how I'm using the spalted maple. I guess you'd call it a pair of "stringers", but slightly thicker... maybe 2" or so.

I appreciate the advice. I guess what I said earler must have seemed kind of rash, so please allow me to explain. This isn't a "first buld" in the traditional sense. I've done pretty much everything to a guitar EXCEPT the major woodworking aspects of it-- set ups, a ton of painting, hardware installation, invasive appearance mods, some wiring, basic fretwork, whatever else. When I say "sell one", it's not like I'm advertising it and calling myself a luthier or saying that this is anything that it's not-- the people I'd ask to consider buying would be friends of mine who've seen and trust my work, and would be interested in having some involvement in what they got as the end result. The price would absolutely not be anything NEAR what the real luthiers in this area charge-- they'd be paying for what it is, which is a first build, a learning experience, but hopefully a damn good guitar. Hopefully. I've been happy enough with my previous work to show it off-- the local newspaper just ran a full page story with a big picture of me playing a guitar I built from parts and painted, with my name on the headstock. The story was about a guitar class I've been teaching at my old high school, and as a teacher, an understanding of the functional design aspects is essentially requisite knowledge-- students ask questions about it, and it's part of my job to be able to answer them. I've done everything from a basic intonation to making my own fret scale, accurate to .001", with a set of dial calipers. With that said, compared to most of you guys, I know very little. However, there is a local builder who has been kind enough to share his knowledge when I run into things I can't handle. In addition, there are a couple of guys I know with woodworking shops who have also agreed to help me out if I need it. There will be things I run into during this build that I'm not prepared for and don't know how to do, however, having real people on hand who know more than I do has made me confident enough to take this project on. Does that seem a little less crazy?

I probably should have explained the top more clearly. anderekel had the right idea, sort of. The problem with doing PH /Spalt/PH would be that I'd be relying on the spalted maple to rout perfectly for my neck joint and pickups, and withstand the tension of the bridge. I might be crazy, but I'm not that crazy. It's basically going to go PH/ SM / PH / SM / PH, with the spalted maple parts being a 1-2" strip down the body lengthwise, starting about an inch to each side of the bridge. As for pickups, I'm definitely going to find some ebay or craigslist EMG's for the one I keep! The one I sell, I'm not too sure... if I get someone on board before the guitar is finished, I'll just charge them retail for whatever pickups they want and call it an 'option'.

Of course, 10 pics per post. ok, here's the outline. There we go

I'm doing my first from-scratch build-- a LP double-cut styled electric. After much debate and eventually some time wandering around the lumber store, my plan evolved into a semi-final iteration, which is what I'm working by at the moment. This guitar is going to have a double-cut Les Paul shaped body, but I'm not going exactly by the plans. In fact, I didn't get any plans. I just traced a single cut 1970's Japanese Les Paul rip off I had laying around and improvised from there. That's what music's all about, right? Anyway, this is going to be a bolt-on neck with an Ibanez styled neck joint. I love the feeling of a well-contoured neck joint as opposed to a traditional 'steel plate' bolt-on or a regular set neck. Plus, I have a large collection of refernce material that I can take apart, measure, and otherwise probe to learn its secrets. I also decided early on that this would be a flat top-- I'm not ready for a full carve yet. In any case, with the shape out of the way, I had to pick out materials. Coming out of a long stretch messing around with auto body and paint techniques, I was originally set on an airbrushed finish or something similar (Low-Rider style fingerprint striping, rediculous Kandy Kolor flames, etc.) but I changed my mind. Why? Simple shape bolt-on neck flat top and i'm going to hide my wood, too? No. This guitar needs to show some grain! So what kind of wood am I using? Well, pics will follow in a second. Before I finalized my decision for the wood, I started looking at my budget. It is not large. My final decision was to build 2 guitars and sell one to cover the cost. By building 2 at once, I'm saving myself time and cost on parts and shipping, as well as gaining twice the experience! I picked out all my parts (black powdercoated TOM bridge, tailpiece, tuners, straplocks, jack plate, knurled knobs, and plastic pickup rings and switch, all from GFS... truss rods from StewMac, and fretwire from Grizzly. Nut from guitar center.) and before pickups, allowing $100 for wood, my budget looks like it will be right in the neighborhood of $300 USD. Not bad at all. So as for wood, I walked into the lumber store with plans for a 6/4" poplar body with a 1" purple heart top, for a total cost of about 50 bucks. I walked out with this-- a pair of 1" x 12" x 24" purple heart boards for the tops. A 1" x 6" x 48" spalted maple board for laminating between purple heart pieces in the top. A 1" x 9" x 9' foot northern ash board, which will be cut up and joined to make 2 piece backs for both guitars. Total cost for this was around $80 I found a guy on craigslist.org who's going to sell me a rock maple board which will be enough to build the "sandwich" segments of 2 necks, I just need one more piece of purple heart to laminate between them. The maple piece will be $10, and the PH should be cheap because I just need a half-inch thickness or so. There's a store around here that sells 1/8" x 3" x 24" exotic wood blanks. I don't know what their intention is, but I'm gonna buy myself a bloodwood or ebony fretboard for under 15 bucks. Oh, I almost forgot. Pictures! Here's my spalted maple. I checked it for soft/punky sections, and this board is relatively hard. I picked through a few dozen to find it. Here's my purple heart. These 2 boards are exactly the same size, so the first picture is very misleading And here's the ash. Very nice, open grain. I think I might do a purple/black "Voodoo" finish on the back of the guitar, to compliament the PH on the front. Lastly, here's my basic outline, awaiting further planning. This will be a H/H setup with a TOM bridge, but I don't know a whole lot from there. What do you guys think?

There is a way to use Titebond for a crackle... probably diluted, but the idea is that it will dry at a different speed than what you spray on top of it, thus the crackle. In any case, the guitar looks awesome so far!

Don't give up on the crackle yet! Or, to stick with the 80's theme, "Don't stop believin" Once you get it primed, lay down your base coat again, the way you want it. The crackle really will hide most of the imperfections in your base color, so it doesn't need to be perfect, but the flatter it is, the better the topcoat will crackle. I found This for you. I used something very similar on my guitar a couple years back, and it worked really well. Basically just follow the instructions to apply the crackle medium. While it's still wet, shoot black paint (brush on-type paint, diluted with water if you like) out of a spray bottle (old windex bottle, etc) and you should get the kind of even, round pattern you're looking for. If you brush the paint on, it will crack in the direction of your brush strokes. The thicker the medium, the larger and further apart the cracks are. You can get an awesome finish for a total cost of about 20 bucks, including primer, basecoat, crackle medium, and topcoat. Here's my guitar, not a great pic, but it'll do. OH! P.S. The biggest thing when it comes to doing this finish is trial and error. I totally screwed up my finish the first time I tried it. You've gotta practice a lot on scraps of wood and just stick with what works. Good luck!

If you have done no finishing on the body yet, I'd like to suggest that this guitar would look awesome with a crackle finish-- black over neon yellow. In fact, if you wanted to go really crazy with this, you could crackle the black over metal flake yellow. That would look incredible. The tutorial that was here is hard to find and the pics didnt work last time I looked at it, but you can do it very cheaply with things you'd find at the hardware store. Rustoleum makes a 'crackle medium' that I much prefer to Titebond for that purpose. Also, once you're done, if you don't feel up to doing a rattle can clearcoat, just get a local body shop to put an auto-grade clear on it for you.

On the note of Ibanez, the SZ (?) model is fairly thin, too. I think it was called SZ. It's got the zero-resistance trem and Herman Li endorses it. EDIT: Oh. I suppose that would be part of the S series mentioned above. Duh.

I'm not especially worried about the color change. That actually sounds kind of cool. I'm just wondering about how the wood will hold up, and what will keep it in the best physical condition.

I've done a handful of refinishes, a couple repairs, and one complete overhaul in the past, but now I'm going to start my first from-scratch build. I've decided to do 2 guitars at once to save on shipping, gas, etc. The goal is to sell one at the end to cover my budget, and it looks like I can do the pair for a total of around $300 before pickups. I haven't decided on electronics or anything yet.* Anyway, I'm looking at the basics right now- I want to do a LP double cut with a bolt on neck. I like the feel and higher fret access of a bolt-on, plus the adjustability seems like a good idea for a first build. I'm looking at poplar for the bodies, I can get 2 8/4 pieces in the dimensions I need for a total of about $30. I'm debating between a painted finish (crackle or airbrush) and a spalted top. Maybe one of each. I know poplar isn't so hot in the looks department, but I also don't think I'm ready to dive into a laminated carved top. For the neck, I'm purchasing a piece of hard maple very soon that will serve as the outside 2/3 of both necks ($10 on craigslist), and I'm thinking a purple heart laminate would look really cool. (Only need about 1 bf, so it will be around $7) Finally, I must decide on a fretboard wood. I see that many people use purple heart for bass fretboards, and even the occasional dulcimer, but it's much more rare on guitars. I've heard that it's an oily wood, so my question is this: Do I need to clearcoat a purpleheart fretboard (like maple) or can I just leave it raw and oil it (like rosewood)? I'm not a big fan of maple boards, and I've already got 6 rosewood-boarded axes. As for the budget, by the way, I'm going with all black hardware from GFS. Total cost for 2 guitars is around $180. (Bridge, tailpiece, tuners, straplocks, neck plate, jack plate, pickup rings, knurled knobs, and 3 pos switch) It'll be another $8 for fretwire from Grizzly or UJ and $15 or so for a Stewmac truss rod. *No electronics yet because I generally play EMG's, but I am a broke college kid and can't afford to shell out $400 for 2 sets right now. This is a lo-buck build to the -enth degree, but I still want to do something unique.