DaveMan

I also have the 14" Jet. It is excellent, and I use it for all of my guitar building. Sometimes I wish I had a slightly larger one, but I have no regrets with this one. It is a decent tool and it does the job quite well. I have the riser blocks, so that I can resaw woods. This is great for making bookmatched tops out of a thicker board. With a bigger saw I could resaw really large slabs for one piece bodies, but this one works fine for everything else I do. I do find that it gets a bit tight trying to make long horns on basses. A really deep cutaway gets the body bumping against the backside of the saw, and I have to plan my cuts a little bit. I always do my cuts on the outside part of the blade, having my scrapwood inside the saw, but with a really long horn with a big curve at the end, I can frustrate myself a bit if I don't plan ahead. I also use the bandsaw for most of my other cutting, including necks, fingerboards, headstocks etc. I don't have a table saw, but I do have an old radial arm saw. I know I haven't used the Arm saw in over a year, so my last two guitars must have been built without it. Funny, I never missed it. Dave "If I use a sound proof finish, then nobody can hear how bad my playing is!"

I prefer a 3 saddle bridge. I like actual Fenders, or the ones that Stew-Mac sells. (I buy the cheaper version, and add their compensated saddles) Simple, and they have a nice sound. If you are playing rock or pop, you might want to look at a six saddle bridge. It is a bit easier to adjust intonation with these, although it's not that bad with the 3 saddle bridge. THe 3 saddle bridge feels a bit more solid to me when I'm playing and bending strings, plus it works well with a clean bridge pickup to make that "Tele Twang" that defines the instrument. If you want the classic Tele sound and feel, then the three saddle would be the way to go. A lot of younger players (and some older ones too) play Teles with the six saddle bridge and swear by them too. I have tried the Gotoh and WD six saddle bridges, but they never had the same feel for me. Good Luck, Dave

I was using the same print screen trick. I opened picture it publishing, and saved the screen shot of the guitar with the Print Screen button. THen I pasted it into picture it, and cropped away the stuff I didn't want. Not real clean, but the only way I could figure out. Looks like we all did it the same way.

I use a large hand plane, and I put my two boards to be joined together , face to face. Then I plane both edges at once. If I am careful to have the plane level and square (I use a fence for this) I usually get a very nice joint.If all else fails, I take a big flat straightedge, and put some fine sandpaper on it,and give each edge a touch with that. That usually cures a tiny imperfection, but I prefer not to glue to fuzzed up wood. My router isn't big enough to try joining with it. Just my approach, Dave

I think I used the print screen key last time I tried saving. I'll check it out tomorrow and see if I can remember.

I like the punchy rhythm stuff myself. Favorites include, Frankenstein, Detroit Rock City, American Band, Jailbreak, Eighteen, Don't Ask Me No Questions, Call Me The Breeze, most of the hardcore outlaw country stuff (Anything by David Allan Coe) Lots of the old uptempo classics. I like them because I play sober, and I think it's fun to watch all of the people who've been sitting drinking all night jump up and try to dance after a few too many. Other really fun songs to play; Aqualung, Hocus Pocus, Mississippi Queen, No Sugar Tonight. I'm more of a rhythm player, so I like to hook in tight with the bass and drums and kick tail. Almost forgot. ZZ-Top La Grange, Tush, and Cheap Sunglasses! Smoke on the Water once in a while.

Looking nice! I took a strat from rough cut to contoured and rounded off the edges with sandpaper once. I never want to do that again. You have more patience than I do. (Now I use cabinet scrapers and I can do a whole guitar body from rough cut in an evening without even plugging in a power tool) Keep up the good work, and keep posting pics as it goes along. Dave p.s. I have discovered a truth to guitar building. the guitar aquires "Mojo" through labor, blood sweat and tears. When you get done with that thing, you are going to have so much work into it that it will have to sound great! If nothing else, you will be totally in tune with it.

I have a Snarling Dawg Wah. Not too bad, pretty agressive at the higher levels. Not good for subtile effects, but if I want a screaming distorted Wah to shoot down alien spaceships with, I have it. Actually they make several verisons, frome a mild bluesey one to a heavy metal type. I will probably end up with a Cry Baby some day, but for now, this one does okay. I just have to keep it turned down a bit.

1) Hands, and hand tools (Planes, scrapers, knives, files, sanding blocks, etc) 2) Bandsaw. 3) Router I tend to spend a lot of time with planes and cabinet scrapers too. I like the finish better than just sanding.

Sopabarstrat, No offense taken on the body bag jokes. If I am going to discuss 1001 home uses for rejected body bags, I had better have a sense of humor about it. (BTW, they are great at Halloween, man. Fill them with straw and pillows in the right shapes, and decorate the house and yard. ) The Questioneer, If you can afford the arbor, it is a handy tool for anything that needs to be squeezed or pressed. You will want one someday anyway. If you can really afford it, the "Jaws" things are even slightly handier, as you can move them around from fret to fret without sliding the whole guitar back and forth. I used the vise method because I didn't have any better tools, and it worked well, but it was slow and cumbersome. If I had to do it now, I would mount the vise at a 90 degree angle, so that I could keep the guitar laying on its back. This would make it easier to see and support the guitar while lining things up. My way took three arms and four letter words sometimes. I had a couple of frets that fell out and landed on the floor before I got pressure on the thing, and I had to support the neck with one hand, while tightening the vise with the other. If you buy the Stewmac cauls, you might want to revive my C-clamp experiment. The only problem I had was that I used fairly narrow maple cauls. By the time I got them affixed to the C clamp, they started to crack up under the pressure. They needed to be attached to a wide surface like the vise face to work well. (Thicker cauls would have done the job, but before I made them, I got a real press.) I happened to have a huge C clamp (about 15 lbs or so) with a fairly fine thread and a foot long handle to torque it down with. I don't know if a lesser C clamp would drive a fret home or not. (Maybe those wood clamps with the two threaded rods and wood jaws would work here?) Good luck, Dave

A bit off topic, but a lot of guys in the Model Car hobby use Food dehydrators to cure their paint jobs. THis is on styrene plastic model cars, so they have to be very careful of too much heat too, lest they end up with a '23 "T" street rod looking like a Picasso painting. I wonder if a larger version of a dryer could be made, using slightly heated air, and lots of circulation. I would be scared to stick a Nitro finish anywhere near an oven. I used to have a carousel microwave/convection oven with a 150 degree setting for bread raising. I use to cure model car finishes in that, but I never had the guts to try laquer in it. I am too attached to my eyebrows! My parent's house uses a woodstove for heat, and I always take my necks and bodies over there to dry them. I usually put them in the room next door to the room with the woodstove. The combination of slightly high room temperature, lots of air circulation and low relative humidity seems to cure them fairly well. I make sure that the bodies have gassed out for several hours before doing this, as I don't want to fumigate my folks, wear out their welcome or blow their house up! If I paint them during the day, I usually take them over at night, and hang them on a stand. I don't paint in the dead of winter here due to my booth being uninsulated, and not very heated, but Spring and Fall are good painting times. ANother reason for letting the bodies gas out for a few hours is dust. They need to get past the tacky stage before they enter a dry environment with lots of air circulation, or they end up with a fuzzy matte finish!

Gary Thain was a great bass player. My first Rock and Roll album as a kid was Uriah Heep Live. Still one of my favorites. If you really want to hear some cool bass work, check out the old Keef Hartley Band stuff. Battle of the NorthWest Six is a great one. Thain really hits it on this album. (I think the other one he really nails is "Halfbreed") The best part of "Live at Leeds" IMHO is the second CD with the playing ot "Tommy" Entwistle is all over this one. Moon is drumming on the very edge of magic and madness. and Entwistle hangs in somehow, and makes it all fit together. Scary stuff to listen to even by today's standards. Moon's drumming on that album still puts my blood pressure up into the "Not safe for an old guy" zone.

Let's abolish, stamp out, eradicate and eliminate redundancy! Dave

I made a sort of fretbender because I didn't have the fret bending pliers. I just took an old piece of plywood, and I cut out a half circle of the correct radius on it. I dragged a sawblade around the edge to make a slight groove, and then I just bent the fretwire over it. After my first attempt, I realized that the radius of the bender had to be a couple of inches smaller than the desired radius of the fretwire, so I cut the outside inch or two off, and made another. I ended up with a set of four, all cut out like the stripes on a rainbow. THis wouldn't work so well forthe shred style guitars, as they would need a really large circle. I was fretting old style Fenders with 7 1/2" or so fingerboards, up to about a 10" radius. It's not the fastest or fanciest way to go, but you can make one in your basement in half an hour for no cost. My first refret I bent on a small deskside wastebasket, with a couple pieces of masking tape wrapped around it! Wow! I'm starting to sound like a cheap-o here. I agree that the tools are really nice to have. Now, I use decent tools for most parts of my work. I never would have been able to afford (Or find) most of these tools when I started, however. I am glad that I didn't let that stop me from working on guitars, and fixing them up. I guess I am tossing these experiences out to show that a decent job can be done with homebrew tools. Not everybody can afford to order one of everything from the StewMac catalog. I did that for quite a while, until I could start to afford all the really neat tools. Happy Holidays and have fun, Dave

I am thinking of a French polish for a solidbody guitar. I finished a nylon strung guitar this way a few years back, and I really liked it. I can't think of any reason I couldn't do the same to an electric . I could do this during the winter when I can't use my spraybooth (No insulation in the garage, and a small space heater) My other access to a spraybooth has disappeared. Any downsides to this for a solidbody? I know it's not as durable as laquer, but it's a lot easier to repair and touch up. (I don't drink, so I'm not worried about spilling alcohol on it and marking it.) I was thinking of a real subtle sunburst approach on a maple body, with blonde being used in the center of the guitar, and fading out through amber to a garnet or natural dark on the edges. It would be fairly subtle, as even the garnet stuff isn't that dark, and the blonde isn't totally clear. Would that work, or would it be too cheesy? Should I do that on a darker guitar wood, like mahogany or walnut? I know mahogany can be gorgeous with french polish. Thanks, Dave