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slingblader

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Everything posted by slingblader

  1. Got the binding scraped on the headstock today.
  2. I was able to get the binding scraped on the body. That came out pretty nice. I made some progress on the neck, specifically the headstock. This is one of those things where I didn't have a good plan for order of operations. It turned out OK, but it makes me wish I had a CNC machine if only to make templates. I started things off by routing the outside perimeter. It's about halfway complete here. Next, I needed to route a step for my signature "winglets". Normally, I slope the winglets, but because the center section of this headstock will have binding installed, I decided to just do a straight step instead of a slope. The winglets will receive a thin piece of accent wood on top... most likely ebony, but I haven't made up my mind yet. Here is where things get squirrely. There is no practical way to use my normal binding channel bit to put in the binding channel. This is due to the winglets being in the way of the bearing screw on the router bit. In hindsight, I should have left the winglets off, routed the channel, etc., then glued the winglets on after the fact. Oh well, as it turned out, I was able to make a third template .140" smaller than the original. But it wasn't perfect... so I had to eyeball the placement because I had no real landmarks. I tried to use tuner pilot holes, but due to the compound angle, it didn't line up. So, I lined it up the best that I could and routed it. Yep, it worked. I had to massage a couple of areas, but it will be OK. First piece of binding going on. Outer layer has been applied here and trimming the miter. Mitered the other side and got it all glued up. There will be some trimming needed to bring the headstock flush in a couple of spots. I'm glad that's finished, that was a real pain. More soon.
  3. Up next is the binding. This build is going to be bound with the same scheme as a Gibson "Custom"... which means 6 alternating colors of .020" followed by a .060" piece around the outside. The fretboard gets 1 layer, while the headstock has 4 .020" stripes with a .060" piece around the outside. Normally, the Gibson version ends up with white on the outside, this build will have black on the outside. To make this somewhat easier, I bought some pre-assembled pieces for LMII. I bought some .020 B/W and some .020 B/W/B/W. I started with the B/W, since it is more flexible. I had assumed that this binding was ABS, but unfortunately it is PVC. In tests, I could only get Bind-All adhesive to make this stuff stick. Even CA wouldn't adhere it for some reason, even after scuffing it with sandpaper. Here is the inside B/W layer going on. Here is the 2nd layer going on (B/W/B/W). Second layer complete. I was surprised that I got it to wrap pretty nicely around the horn. That thing ended up waaay more pointy than I had anticipated from my drawing. And here is the outer .060" black piece going on. This binding is ABS and I'm just weld-bonding it with acetone. And here it is completed. Can't wait to clean it up. More soon.
  4. Here is the body after I sanded enough off of this bout to allow the binding rabbet to cover. I didn't have to remove much. I wanted to thin the body and get it back to 1 3/8", so I scribe a reference line around the body perimeter toward the back edge. This allowed me to flip the body over (the center is flat) and run the body through the drum sander to bring the thickness down. That worked great. Next, I needed to get the binding rabbet routed. I do own the SM router binding jig thingy. You can see the body hitting the outer edge of the jig and the router bit doesn't reach the body edge. So, I glued up a couple 1/4" pieces of plywood and made an extension. It was fairly rigid and it allowed the router to reach into the cutaway. This is part way through the process, you can see how close it comes to bottoming out on near the "slope" Well, it turned out pretty good. It still needs some handwork to square up the cuts at the steepest elevation changes, but that's to be expected. Binding this thing could be interesting!
  5. Here's the latest progress on the multiscale build Marked the headstock outline and glued on some ears. I cut off excess body material on the band saw, attached my body template and routed the body perimeter to shape. Here you can see there isn't a lot that the maple top missed. I need to make this bout around 1/8" smaller, the binding channel will remove the rest. Once the ears were dry, I rough cut the headstock shape and started to lay out the nut and headstock overlay. Here I have the headstock laminate clamped in place and I'm filing the edge that will mate with the nut. The file has safe edges so that I don't maul the fretboard surface. A nice fit. Headstock laminate is attached with hot hide glue and clamped mercilessly. More soon.
  6. Here's some work that I completed for the neck. I got the truss rod installed. I marked, slotted and radiused the fretboard. That's gonna be a pretty sweet looking board. I attached my neck outline template and tapered the neck. I wanted to use threaded inserts for the neck bolts, so I decided to try something a little different. I made up a couple of brass bars, then threaded the bolt holes (3 per bar). The holes in between are to relieve a little weight. The advantage of a bar is that there is no way it can loosen and spin. Of course, these do add weight. Next time, I'll just use a short bar for each bolt to save the weight. More soon.
  7. Sorry, I should have said. That's a vacuum bag. I use it when gluing up odd shaped pieces. It's perfect for curved laminations like this or any guitar top for that matter. It puts a tremendous amount of force on the pieces and the tops generally come out completely gap free.
  8. I have a sneaking suspicion that I might run into problems trying to use that.
  9. Man, you don't know how true that is! Plus, I'm running out of room to put these damn things. I'd actually like to start selling them at this point, but my big hangup now is coming up with a brand/company name. For some reason, my mind goes completely blank, and the ideas that I did come up with haven't been well received. So, if you have any suggestions, now is the time.
  10. Body shaping, continued... With the elevation steps cut, it was time to get things ensmoothened. Poplar is a relatively soft hardwood, so I hit the steps with 80 grit on my ROS. This only took a few minutes to nearly blend it all together. And done. It doesn't look like much here, the lighting sorta flattens everything. Next up, I rough cut my top and thinned it way down on the drum sander. The upper bout has a fairly drastic curve, and I didn't want to break the top. I got the top aligned and fastened it down at the neck pocket, pickup and control pot locations. Using short truss head screws for this. Before I glued the top, I sprayed the outside with water a couple of times to allow the outer surface to expand. This really helped it to lay down pretty well. Then I threw the whole thing in the bag and crossed my fingers. So, a couple of things about the maple top that are now pretty obvious. First, the overall color of the guitar will be white, but I'm going to attempt a transparent white on the top. (I have a plan, but wish me luck on that) Anyway, being the mizer that I am, I used a piece of curly maple that had some worm holes in it... cuz hey, it's getting some translucent white over it anyway (the holes were filled before the glue up). The other thing is that the body is so wide that my piece doesn't quite reach to the wide point of the lower bout. It won't miss by much; but remember that I'm using very wide binding... so the body will need to be reshaped, just a little bit... likely about 1/8-3/16". It shouldn't be noticeable when I'm done. More soon.
  11. Thanks, Chris! I really hope this one turns out well. I'm getting pretty excited to see how it comes out.
  12. Thanks, man. It took me longer than I care to admit to formulate the plan. To be brutally honest, I wouldn't have had to come up with this cock-a-doodie scheme if I wouldn't be such a cheapskate to begin with. I could have just glued on a 5/8" thick top and carved that down instead of carving the secondary wood and using a drop top. About the same amount of work for the shaping part, but I wouldn't have to worry about potentially breaking the drop top. SMH Anyway, this basic technique worked great on the Les Pauls, so figuring it should work for this bass.
  13. It's been a while since I've updated this thread, so here we go. The body shape started with the RD shape as the inspiration. But one of the things that always bothered me was the "chunkiness". To combat that, I decided to do some sort of profiling to the body wings. I always loved the tapered wings of the Firebird, but I wanted something a little more curvy, or carved looking. The big factor that I needed to keep in mind was that I intend to use a maple drop top on this body. So, the carve has to be more linear and can't use curves. In a nutshell, it can have elevation changes, just not curves in and out from the center. To put it yet another way, I can probably put a drop top on a partial cylinder, but I can't put a drop top on an inverted bowl. Since I've used the "topographical" routing technique to make Les Pauls in the past, I figured I'd do the same thing on this build. I drew out the body profiles with a cross section at each bout, then transferred the measurements to the body using 1/16" elevation increments. I used some scrap wood to use as routing guides. I started on the outer edge with a total drop of 1/2". Raise each step by 1/16", rinse and repeat. And this is how it came out. The middle section remains flat for the bridges and pickups, the rest will get smoothed and blended together. I'll need to thin out the top before gluing it to be sure I don't have issues in the steeper sections in the top bout. More soon.
  14. I made some progress on the neck today. I decided that I should get the neck profile drawn out on both sides of the blank. Since this is a multiscale, it's not a mirror image from one side to the other. So, drawing it out should help me to keep my brain wrapped around it a little better. I started off by drawing in the "long" treble side of the headstock. I'll be making the headstock thickness 1/2", then adding a 1/16"ish laminate on top. I marked out the bass side, then wrapped things around the blank. This creates a compound angle. There are a variety of ways to cut that angle, but I thought I'd give the router method a try. So, I created some ramps that were attached to the sides of the blank and offset from the face by equal amounts. This is part way through the procedure. And done. I left it over-dimensioned and will bring it down to final size with hand planes. This was an incredibly messy and time-consuming process; but hey, it was my first compound angle headstock. Next time, I'll just rough cut it on the band saw and tune it up with hand planes. It will be far faster, less mess and just as accurate. I then cut the overall thickness profile and also the compound angle on the back of the headstock. It took about 3 minutes total. More soon.
  15. I took the neck blank out of the clamps last night, squared up one face of it and sent it through the drum sander to clean up the rest. Came out great. I also cleaned up the maple drop top at the same time. More soon.
  16. Well, thanks a lot to both of you, I appreciate it! Nice job on that Strat!
  17. I left the neck clamped up today and moved it into the house since it's only 50F in the garage. That's a lot of glue, so I'm just gonna leave it be for a few days. I made a little more progress on the body tonight. First I rough-cut the body. I left it waaaaay wide to allow for boo-boos in an upcoming step. More on that in a later post. I also got the top center seam jointed and glued up with hot hide glue. Clearly I needed more clamps. More soon.
  18. I've got nothin' but respect for butchers and mechanics! And plumbers. And stone masons. The list is endless, really.
  19. I'll be honest about this; the thought had never crossed my mind.
  20. Here is a little more progress to report. Jointed and glued up the body blank. Flattened it on the drum sander. Ready to cut out the body outline. Prepped material for the neck. Hard maple, mahogany and bloodwood. Clamping jig and glue ready to go. All clamped up.
  21. Thanks! I actually just draw and fair the lines freehand. This leaves the lines looking a little "sketchy", so I match up the French curves to the drawing so that I can put in solid lines. If you look closely, you can see that I note the curve number around the perimeter for future reference. I really need to buy one of those flexy drawing tools like you're talking about, that would help a lot! The way that I go about this is that I start by drawing out a centerline and an accurate outline of the neck. I mark the nut, 12th fret, end of fretboard and the scale length. When I work on the body, I divide it into "quarters" and use a sheet of printer paper for each quarter. (aligned along the centerline, then taped at each far end) Then, I can make changes and try different ideas and just flip the pages back and forth to see how they work together. As an example, here is an earlier version. And then I changed out the treble side horn. And this is pretty much where I ended up, but before I solidified with the French curves. You can see some of the other outlines peeking through the paper. Once I was satisfied with this, I taped the pages together and traced it onto a single piece of paper, which is the picture you see above with the French curves. I then slid that new copy under the main drawing and traced it yet again which completed the overall outline of the guitar. Sorry, that was probably a lot more information than you wanted.
  22. Yeah, it's cool stuff. I haven't actually machined it down yet, it's still just in rough blanks, but a lot of guys use it. According to the Wood Database, black and white ebony is actually a different variety (or whatever you call it), but it is a true ebony from the Diospyros family. https://www.wood-database.com/black-and-white-ebony/
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