Muzz

On my guitar neck I sanded 7 coats of finish with 600 and 1000 grit, then put a thinned layer on top that didn't need any sanding and buffed that, great way to get zero scratches in the final coat.

No worries , it will look great you can't go wrong with that stuff, look forward to seeing your thread. Muchos gracias. According to the instructions, a third option is you can use a roller I recorded an instrumental with this guitar to feature the whammy bar, bit of doop doop, warble, divebomb, raygun Hope you like the beautiful game

Great advice above, micromesh pads also good, 1, 500 up to 12, 000 grit, fantastic for polishing those little Dean Koontz out of your finish, Chops' technique of metal polish and a small buffer on a Dremmel looked like it delivered as well.

Always great to see blue ash with tiger stripes, the pearl pickguard is gravy and so is the vine inlay I went and had a look at my dye and finish test scraps, the bits that have been stained without finish do look a bit faded, but where the lacquer has been applied over, the colour is locked in. I'll post a pic later.

The kits at http://www.guitarfetish.com/ look good, anyone had any experience with these?

If I were you I would be waiting in glee for the time I could razz him up about it in front of all his friends at the pub and see how deep a shade of crimson I could get his face to go But I would just laugh about it, there's a lot worse things someone could do.

Sure I used Stewart Macdonald stain, 1/20 dilution for the blue and Feast Watson Black 1/30 dilution. I brushed on the blue first, using a fairly dryish brush, I rubbed it on newspaper after dipping in the stain to make sure it wasn't sopping wet Let it dry and then rubbed it back, then stained with black the same way Click Here and rubbed back Pre staining with blue made a big difference to the colour of the grain stripes, when I stained first with black, the grain showed black through the finish, Click Here staining blue first made the grain stripes a deep navy blue. Then I stained blue again, this time using a soaking brush for the sidegrain and a blotted brush for the endgrain, also used Wez' suggestion of prewetting the endgrain to stop it drinking in the stain and getting darker. When it was dry I used Rustin's Plastic Coating with a 1/30 dilution of the blue stain in it for 3 coats, then clear for the next 8 coats. Rustin's is a two pack finish, it is nice and viscous, it grain fills well itself so is terrific for ash, and it sets really hard. I brushed it on using a very fine bristle art brush, the coats went on smooth. A tip is to have two jam jars of lacquer thinners to wash your brush, rinse in one to get most of the lacquer off and then in the second to get it really clean, your brush won't clog up this way. Then sanded the surface with 320, 400, 600, 800 1000, 1500, 2000 then used micro mesh pads up to 12000 you can see them in this link This all let the grain show through nicely And gives a lovely smooth and hard finish to the guitar that feels really great, especially on the neck, makes you want to rub your hand over the surface and whistle like a chippie. Have fun with yours and post the pics to let everyone see how you are going Some day, I must put that 25th fret in.

You should be fine with a Schaller, and if your pick up is close to the bridge, your strings should line up OK, the tiny bit of taper shouldn't be noticeable, the way to check is draw out the neck to bridge, strings and pickup poles life size on paper.

That is a great shape, do you have a colour and finish in mind at this stage?

That is a great guitar, what a terrific gift, I like the mahogany top and lam pattern on the headstock.

It is 15 mm at the deepest part (under the fine tuners) which is plenty for the trem that I used. I would really recommend trying out the route on some scrap wood first, I practiced on an mdf body and really stuffed up the first go. Then just learnt from that and nailed it on my second go, hope you go well.

No, you do not need any neck angle, you can check out how I put one in, Click Here you will have to wade through a lot of chat but the Floydie does eventually get installed with step by step explanation and progress shots and works great, good luck and let us know how you go.

If I found this month's set of guitars wrapped up under my Christmas tree I would be happier than than a frog let out of a sock, great stuff this month Cheers Akula, Wez, Sunday Luthier, Chops, FireFly, Blackdog, RestorationAD and Workingman for your lovely comments on my efforts, and it's nice to know that if I ever wanted to tweak this weird 60's Japanese style design to something that someone might actually want to buy it would be an easy mod

Is it a box truss rod that you are using? Was it glued in? and if so hard to get out?

Good advice, great set up for vibrato.

Yep and I am entirely to blame plastic wood, not a glue but great for fixing up little slips on an mdf template

Thanks BigJim! I havent completely decided on how Im doing the graphics just yet. Most likely I will print it out on vinyl and glue it on after primer, then shoot black on the back and transition the burst, then clear. Originally I was thinking canvas, but the surface is so coarse and the image wouldn't be quite so crisp. KpCrash: \m/ Another possibility is do the colour base coat on the body, print out the graphic on water slide membrane and slide it on, then some clear over the top

Very good advice from the folks above. I would only add this, start off using shallower bits, ones like these so you can knock the top off the route before digging in deeper. Before you get into the zone of working give yourself a limit to the depth you will route in one pass and don't break your rule when you are working on the route. I would usually only route 2 mm deep in one go. But above all don't give up just because of one stuff up, everyone makes them, I ripped the butt out of my first body with the jigsaw, if you look around the strap pin you can see the repair. no pain no gain, guitar making is one of the most fun, relaxing, rewarding, beautiful pastimes in the world, but if it was easy everyone would be doing it, treat your FUBARs as paying your dues and a chance to get better with repairs. Hope to see your future successes.

Lovely, I would rather have one of these than five Fenders.

Fantastic, you are off to a great start

Oh yeah you can't resist its pearly goodness , welcome over to the pearly side. It's funny, in every woodwork project I do I get some scrape, nothing major just a bit of bark off the shin, or some off the knuckle. You know I made it all the way through this project without a scratch. Then I was soldering up the pots and switch on the scratchplate and I pushed it to the left and felt this sharp pain in my thumb, I look down and the scratchplate point at the neck pocket is sticking into my thumb. Mother nature allways makes me pay for using her materials with a few microlitres of blood. To route the points on this project I had to break the rules of routing http://www.woodmagazine.com/woodworking-ti...need-direction/ and approched each point from either side working towards the point, I don't know if there is a technique to get such sharp points while maintaining an anticlockwise direction around the outside with the router

You are partly right. I, like most other people, tend to stick with what have worked before and if it has worked, why alter the formula. At the same time I like to experiment. I am really tempted to try the glue application empirically: Get say twenty test pieces from the same wood type and same type of surface preparation, glue ten of them with glue on one side and ten with glue on both sides and after sufficient drying time test to see what breaks first, the one sided application, the two sided application of the wood on either side of the joint. The only thing retaining me from doing this is that my suspicion is that both joints will be stronger than the wood, so the whole issue ends up in a big nuthin. But maybe I'll get around to do those tests and if so I'll report back And I still haven't got any reply from Franklin... That is a great experiment design, good amount of repeats and properly controlled. Whatever happens it would tell us whether one technique is better or if there is no difference between the techniques. Now my 1940's table top gave way along a glue join, if the person who made it is on the forum, please tell us whether you spread the glue down one side of the join or two, because that join was b.a.d. it only lasted 70 years Fancy not being able to support me and a couple of friends dancing on it and playing air guitar at the end of a few parties

Hey, what a difference a few years makes

You should try a 46 or 48mm nut width. Most of my builds have had one of those sizes, and that is the reason I never use locking nuts - can't find them that wide I've always used locking machine heads or used the string-locking-itself method, and never had tuning problems. http://vimeo.com/3587762 Watch the video from about 3.15 Your build is great. It took me ages to read through the thread, but the end result was well worth it I am interested in trying out wider necks, I think the pendulum might have swung too far from classical style necks. As the technology improved starting around the 1950's it allowed the necks on steel string guitars to get smaller, but when should that decrease in dimension stop? After a certain point, just because a neck can be made smaller doesn't mean it should. I checked back on my old photos, the bare neck was planned to be 43 mm, but I stopped sanding a smidge over and by the time it got some finish it wound up at 44. glad it did. Wow the tap stick guitar in that video looks amazing, that is a good technique to tie off the strings. Great to hear that you enjoyed the thread, my intention was to encourage people yet to try guitar building to give it a go. By breaking the entire process down into bite size pieces and thinking about each of the stages and how they fit together I hoped would spur new builders on. You can see in the beginning I did not now how I would go with making the neck, but the neck turned out to be one of the most enjoyable parts and wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be. The thing that was probably the most difficult was the scratchplate. Two tunes I must play on this guitar soon are the themes from Hawaii 5 0 and Buffy the Vampire slayer http://www.911tabs.com/link/?5806018 http://www.911tabs.com/link/?5806018

Fantastic instruments, classy, unique and inviting, how was the Bunya to work with? any shots of it before the finish?