mattharris75

Thanks guys!

It's getting there. It needs to be wired, and the setup has a couple of issues (string height at the nut and intonation). 

At least it's looking like a guitar. 

Inching toward the finish line. 

I burnished the finish and put on a topcoat of Briwax,  got the bridge mounting posts and ground wire in, ran the pickup wires, and mounted the tuning machines. Unfortunately I'm missing a little hardware, so I can't get the pickup rings mounted, and need a few other small things to get everything buttoned up and call this one finished.

Another couple of projects that have kept me busy.

Finished this built-in bar/storage area in our upstairs rec room.

And then made this keepsake box as a gift for my wife for Christmas, out of some great looking crotch walnut and some African cherry.

I've never seen linings look that good. Your work is ridiculously clean, just amazing. When I look at pictures of my own kerfed linings it makes me feel inadequate. 

I'm not generally a paint guy, but man that's so clean it's sexy!

14 minutes ago, ScottR said:

Indeed. Correct me if I'm wrong Matt, but didn't you pore fill these with Z-Poxy before the Tru-Oil went on?

SR

On the little electric guitar I did. On the acoustic it was just a few coats of shellac, as all of the wood on that one was very closed grain. And I wasn't sure about epoxy on an acoustic anyway...

On 12/4/2021 at 6:14 PM, mistermikev said:

hats off.  that's looks fantastic.  I have done a tru oil gloss before... and I'll never do it again.  it is an incredible finish... but man do you have to work for it... or at least i did!  looks really great - nice work.

Thanks. Both of these guys were full gloss Tru Oil, and they were certainly time intensive:

But the results were good... 

The Tried & True oil will never really get much beyond a satin finish, I don't think. And that's fine, that's what I was intending. The vision and the reality weren't necessarily correctly aligned this time, but it should still be a nice result.

The key to using Tried & True oil seems to be thinning it with turpentine. This pic is after I burnished it in preparation for what I believe will be the final coat. I think it's coming up toa  solid shine now. I've put on several thinned coats since my last post. Once this last one is cured I'll polish it up, maybe with some orange oil and wax, and get it assembled.

Wow. Just wow. This might be my favorite tele style guitar I've ever seen...

I've achieved really good results with Tru Oil in the past on several different builds, but this product, Tried & True Oil, is a bit different. It's just boiled linseed oil and bees wax. I probably should have stuck with Tru Oil as I'm pretty comfortable with it, but I tried something new and it hasn't gone as well as I'd hoped...

Just another of the many projects that take my time away from instrument building...

My wife, who is a teacher, told me she needed a better work/craft area for school stuff, so I built in a nearly nine foot long desk in our spare bedroom:

I feel like I should update this thread. Life obligations have limited the time and energy I have available to work on this guitar, but I haven't been completely idle. 

I completed the application of the Tried & True oil finish per manufacturer's instructions. I didn't like the thickness of the finish, it made it a bit difficult to apply evenly. After following their instructions I decided to hit it with some synthetic wire wool and put another coat on that I had thinned 50% with turpentine. It went on much easier, and certainly looks better than it did prior to that coat.

At this point I really feel like I just picked the wrong finish for this build. It looks a bit dull and lifeless to me. The whole thing is maybe a bit muddier than I had imagined. I think this finish would be more suited to a more highly contoured carve on the top. It would catch the light better and look more vibrant. I like the way it looks in the area of the hook scroll/cutaway, and if the whole top was similar I think I would be much happier with it. I also think it would pair better with a darker wood like walnut, it's just not adding much to the maple. 

So at this point I'm leaning toward just futzing with it a bit more; a few more coats, some additional burnishing, etc. And then just finishing it up and moving on. The result should still be quite nice. But I've still got a lot going on, so it will be awhile before I make any additional progress.

Here's a fairly crummy picture of where she stands right now:

1 hour ago, Armaan said:

 

Combat robot work!? Is that like Robot Wars / Batllebots? Sounds cool

Same idea, but I compete in the insect weight classes, 1 and 3 pound robots. I've fought and am friends with some of the guys that do Battlebots. A few years ago I got to do the graphics for one of the robots on the show.

12 hours ago, Armaan said:

This looks great! How did you do the inlay? I'm thinking of doing a headstock and 12th fret inlay on my guitar 

I designed it so that I could use a 3/4" forstner bit to cut the inlay hole. I drew the design in Adobe Illustrator and then used my favorite laser cutting service, SendCutSend, who I use for all of my combat robot work, to cut the design out of 1/8" thick brass. Then inlayed it with epoxy with a little black furniture powder in it.

Drilling the tuner holes before thicknessing the headstock...

It's cool that y'all describe it that way, as that's very much what I was going for. I feel like that's the general vibe of my builds, my aesthetic, merging classic and modern. 

4 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Guessed wrong... But that one looks classy.

Which one was your guess? I almost used a different one, but when I got it drawn out in Illustrator I didn't like it as much as the hand drawing.

Need to drop fill some epoxy in the voids and micromesh everything to a nice polish, but here's the inlay design I went with:

Same here Scott, getting too old for the scary tools. I enjoy the use of my hands... I use routers for straight cuts and cavities, that's it. Watching videos on youtube where guys have their fingers inches away from the bit when using a router table gives me anxiety. 

A boiled linseed oil based finish looks great on walnut. Tru Oil is generally a good option as you can go with either a more 'in the wood' look or build coats into a shinier finish if you are so inclined, so there's a lot of flexibility. Danish oil also works well for the in the wood style of finish.

As far as tung oil, that's a whole can of worms. Tung oil and tung oil finish, which are different things, can have a pretty wide variety of ingredients, sometimes not even including any actual tung oil. So unless you have a brand that you like and have worked with successfully I'd personally choose to stay away from it altogether.

I haven't really gotten that introspective about it.  However I do like order and symmetry. 

So many bad ways to draw an H...  But that's part of the creative process, ehh?

The finishing process is underway.   It's doing that thing that maple does, where from some angles and under some lighting it looks brilliant. And others it looks like poop.  

I'll let y'all guess which angle/lighting combo this is:

1 hour ago, Bizman62 said:

Aside the abovementioned tricks, spreading some salt on the glue can help.

 

I had never heard of this trick until I watched one of @ADFinlayson build videos. I may have to give it a try!

As far as scarf joints slipping when gluing, if you have enough extra width to your neck blank you can drill some registration pins in to prevent movement when you clamp. Looks like you were pretty tight on this blank, but for future reference...

I've also used pieces of binding tape stretched across the joint to help with movement too. Better than nothing.

My personal preference is to put the scarf into the headstock and use an overlay and backstrap, which gives you plenty of room to put your registration pins outside of the headstock area. But there's a lot of good ways to skin this cat, it comes down to what makes sense in your head and what you think you can most effectively execute. Looks like you got it worked out!

I've been at the beach for the last week or so. Prior to that I'd been playing with headstock inlay design ideas. Even cut out a few failures. So I decided I'd spend some vacation time working out the design. Plenty of bad ideas on the page, but a few I liked. One of these ended up the winner, and in a week or two I should be able to show off the results...