Muzz

That's awesome, Muzz. Thanks for taking the time to post in so much detail! I was hoping to finish mine with a brush, so was considering the Rustins... this has convinced me! I will start a progress thread for mine soon... just hope it looks half as good as this!

No worries , it will look great you can't go wrong with that stuff, look forward to seeing your thread.

Excellent job Muzz, and plenty of detail in the thread. I must use Rustins on my next build. I've had some here for a while now, but keep putting off using it because I havn't decide whether to spray it or brush it.

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?

I also would care if he just said " I have a builder make the bodys and necks for me" and not name me. At least it's honest. Claiming you built something you didn't build is bogus...plain and simple.

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.

Sorry if it was mentioned during the thread, but I had a look and couldn't find it (i's a bloody long thread!). Could you please post the exact finishing process you used? I am currently building an ash guitar and would love the finish to look half as good as yours!

Cheers.

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?

Nice work but I can't help thinking that it would make a very effective weapon.

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

Thanks for the info guys!

Hey Muzz;Was your recess, at it's deepest, 17.5 mm?

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.

Okay, I have installed a fr on my other guitar but it is not fully floating. My next guitar I would like it to float. I'm sure floydrose.com has the info I need but its under construction.

So before I ruin a perfectly good body blank....a few questions

1. Does my neck need to have an angle?

2. Does anyone know where to get some plans?

I am by no means an expert on this and would greatly appreciate help--i dont want to mess up.

Can someone quickly type a checklist or something to make sure I don't miss anything?

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?

Dude, screw the stoptail!

Get some string ferrules and run the strings through the body. You can drill your holes to follow the curve of the bottom cutout.

That will look a lot better than putting a straight stoptail very close to a curvy edge. I am a big fan of having the extra string length as well.

Good advice, great set up for vibrato.

lol @ thread

Yep and I am entirely to blame

plastic wood, not a glue but great for fixing up little slips on an mdf template

Looks great I love this whole project! I was wondering how are you planing to to do the graphics themselves?

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

Ok, i'll admit it... that pickguard did not destroy it like i thought it would. Nice work, Muzz.

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

The concept that I think you and most PGers have got their head around is that if one technique is good and works well it does not necessarily follow that all alternate techniques are bad and wrong.

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

Zeb: FWIW, I don't plan on EVER making my own necks. There are just too many things that can seriously go wrong unless you're extremely meticulous with detail & measurement, which I'm not. I'll be happy as a lark buying them and doing my own inlay work and maybe shaping the headstock.

Hey, what a difference a few years makes

...A neck 44 mm wide at the nut feels heaps better than 42 mm, easier to play fast without your fingers tripping over each other, who would have thought your fingers can feel a 1.5 to 2 mm difference

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?

As mentioned this isn’t a thread about glue, but as it has become a really interesting discussion about gluing techniques I cannot help continuing off topic…

For those who can’t bother to follow the link Woodenspoke posted, this is an excerpt from the quite interesting article: “With some adhesives, such as resorcinol, […] double spreading […] may be specified for dense woods and surfaces of low porosity to allow wetting of the wood and to permit thickening of the adhesive to prevent excessive squeeze-out.”

Unfortunately this doesn’t prove anything to me. It says that some specific glues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resorcinol_glue, seems to be an outdoor glue that I doubt have much use in guitar building) together with dense wood (that part applies to most woods used in guitar building) benefit from being applied to both surfaces. But that isn’t a general rule. I think it’s quite funny to read what he also writes: “if all else fails, read the instructions”. That’s exactly what Muzz has done and the label on his bottle clearly states “Add adhesive liberally to one surface only”! On the other hand the instructions for original Tightbond:

http://www.titebond.com/download/pdf/ww/OriginalTB.pdf

doesn’t mention if it is supposed to go on one or both surfaces. Can’t find this topic in their knowledge data base either (got a time out when doing a serach). I have shot them an e-mail asking, just to get the manufacturers point of view on this. I’ll report back on that part if/when I get a reply.

Unfortunately this leaves us with the information that according to the writer of that article some glues for some application benefit from being applied to both surfaces. But there is at the same time a manufacturer that claims that their glue should be applied only to one surface. No conclusive data as they say in Mythbusters...

I think the most important lesson here is that you need to learn how to use the glue you use. If the information isn’t available, contact the manufacturer, explain what you are doing and ask them how their glue should be applied.

Those are wise words SwedishLuhier, you are right, we do not have any conclusive evidence as yet, and evidence would need to be experiments done on joints done both ways, not just people's subjective opinions.

The concept that I think you and most PGers have got their head around is that if one technique is good and works well it does not necessarily follow that all alternate techniques are bad and wrong.

In the following pic you can see an oak table that I built, the top was rescued from a 1940's pedestal table that was falling to bits, the top was split in two and stained dark brown. Each of the legs are made of two pieces of wood PVA glued longitudinally and for them and the top, I broke the manufacturer's rule and used Aquadhere spread on both sides of the join. It is two years old and didn't explode when I read the directions that I should have only spread on one side.

What I think is a much more important issue is some bad advice out there about fitting box truss rods, Paulie and I have chatted about this before

Click Here