# Les Paul Style Guitar Build



## D_W (2 Jan 2022)

First post - building a carved-top guitar, and other than knowing what the top will be (a bookmatched solid carved rosewood top), the rest is up in the air. Not for lack of wood, but because I also intended a one piece carved rosewood neck, perhaps over either a lightweight mahogany or limba back. However, the rosewood neck blank that I bought "dry" is wet, and I have another 8/4 rosewood bit as well as a couple of maple carved wood top sets, so that can be for another later build after it's both dry and confirmed to not have bad seasonal behavior.

The neck for this guitar may end up being laminated curly maple - I have plenty of mahogany neck blanks, but long term stability in a les paul style guitar is better with laminated maple necks (dips, body hump, twist). 

So, thus far, all I've got cut is the resawn top set. 

8/4 quartered rosewood is uncommon enough that getting a perfect set that doesn't have some flaws (this set has a couple of small wormholes and the crack that's glue stabilized here) may not be realistic, so I'll work with what I've got here and try to mitigate the flaws or locate them where they won't cause a problem when the top is carved. 







This wood is relaxing a little bit while I see if and how it moves over a couple of weeks. It won't matter once it's glued and laminated to a body, but I don't want it to go bonkers between being joined and then attached to a body. 

The basis for copying this will be an older style les paul copy from tokai (older style meaning that tokai's copies - some of them - are more faithful to earlier angles and proportions of original gibons than current gibsons are, and they cost less - so to buy one, take measurements off of it and then resell it yields a better guitar and the outlay/risk of a big change in the market is less. tokais aren't sold in the US due to the fact that they copy the gibson peghead scroll, so if one wants one at hand at a reasonable price, dealing with japanese dealers or japanese auctions is a good idea. Sellers in the US price them about the same as gibson (or try- about double the price in japan). Buying a 60s les paul at this point to refer to is out of the question - they can be as much as a car, and there's probably some fraud with fakes or unmentioned modifications or refurbs. 






It seems more interesting to make one of these with a rosewood top, but we'll see - maybe the fact that there are few (other than a bunch of gibsons made mostly with flatsawn rosewood 40+ years ago) is a sign.

This thread will progress slowly as I've got other stuff in the works and the first four months of the year is always more than full time at work. The goal is to do much of the work by hand (though this guitar type was designed to be made with power tools), not have the guitar look like it was made by machines, but also do the work neat enough that it doesn't scream "lumpy and sloppy...made by hand".


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## thetyreman (3 Jan 2022)

look forward to seeing where this goes DW, I have never seen a guitar especially an LP with a rosewood top.


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## D_W (3 Jan 2022)

Thanks, ttm - you can look for "brazilian rosewood top les paul" and you'll see the run that gibson did. I think they were 70s - but most of them are flatsawn and they do have a bit of a 70s aesthetic. I think they also cost about 8k, but I'd love to have one just because I like that era of gibson's stuff better than anything from the early 90s on. Unfortunately, it (the 70s era) used to be poorly regarded and now it's climbing in value, anyway. 

Point I'm slowly getting to is you can buy a billet of rosewood like this that would typically be cut for acoustic backs and sides and it'll cost something not cheap, but affordable (about $200 per billet - but you have to buy it when you see it and hold it for later - not always something easy to get), and little more than really primo figured maple sets at retail (quartered with even end to end figure is generally $150 or so, with what gibson calls 2A or 3A being only about a third of that, but that's gibson and all large makers - $150 top sets will be reserved for guitars that cost a lot more). That gives us as individuals the ability to make a guitar out of uncommon wood (And still pick and choose density and resonance and not just make a boat anchor) for about the price of a beat les paul studio faded (assuming good hardware/pickups and "real" binding (celluloid or wood binding instead of plastic binding). 

It always takes me at least two iterations on something new to not bungle things up (or learn parts where I didn't buy templates and it would've been a good idea). The world of hobby guitar making is heavily focused on little jigs, router bits and bobs, tons of sanding, and things like dremel inlay tools. I have decisions to make about those things because there are legit some things that are hard to do entirely by hand (like getting a perfectly clean binding channel or a truly hand-done carve top - I'm on the fence here as I have a template set to rout steps and then finish them off by hand. I just don't like trading planing and chiseling for the router, but sometimes the result dictates. I don't like sanding, either, but curved surfaces like this - they would look interesting with scraper marks, but maybe not good. 

The potential to do one of these out of common cherry is there end to end, too - a budget build. It'd be interesting to see what it would sound like - probably much the same.


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## D_W (3 Jan 2022)

little to do today other than jointing rosewood boards and bringing them into the house (shop is about 45 degrees -glue will be TB1 for the entire guitar. I don't plan on having any glue lines thick enough for the glue to "ruin resonance")

I don't know what gurus teach beginners to do when jointing, but I often see "sharpen a lot and really thin shavings, check a lot". This isn't good advice in the long term.

These boards were sitting in the vise and raffo came by - I had jointed the boards by eye and though they were close, but he took a look and they weren't that close (that was a week or so ago). Just before joining boards, I match plane - no straight edges, no squares (I'll show something in a second with a straight edge, though).

A dead flat plane or one with a slight convexity, through shavings (and not terribly thin ones - a few here at 3 thousandths solve everything, nothing thinner should be taken because anything that changes how consistent the shaving will be starts to make a gap).

The plane is just a type 20 #6, a supposedly undesirable plane. The iron is 1095 steel, but it doesn't matter -the stock iron would've been fine (you probably thought 1095 is for saws!!).

Cap iron is set but not ultra close - but close enough to just be engaged, and then a few through shavings. that's it. Any changes needed (like if you have low ends for some reason) should be extremely minor - there should be no visible gap anywhere and the glue line should be invisible even without hand pressure.

How long does the match planing take to do this? If the plane is in hand, less than a minute. Those are all of the shavings from cleaning up whatever I'd left the boards as after resawing. 






I have no clue if i'm planing with or against the grain - it doesn't matter, and it shouldn't - the match of the grain is far more important. And I shouldn't have to take dainty shavings to avoid tearout - goes back to the point above - it's easier to get accurate work very quickly with a slightly thicker shaving than thinner - as soon as you feel the plane getting a continuous shaving from end to end, you are done. If the edges are low, the shaving will be weak at one of the ends.

When you take this strategy to things like cabinet panels, match planing them at speed is a thought free process - none will ever show a glue line and you won't have to check anything nor care about grain direction.

This is a significant economic gain from the double iron over single iron planes - I'm sure that the reason that the double iron eliminated single iron planes is economic - everything other than the thinnest final smoothing and really coarse jack work is twice as fast (and the jack plane can be used with difficult wood if it's really needed).

The mark between these panels is just a saw kerf - I resawed them by hand with a hand saw and wished I'd have tensioned the frame saw by the time I was done as they relieved a little when cut (the frame saw tension is so much higher that it doesn't care about that kind of thing).

The panels one on top of the other:






The left side of the blank is ugly, but I glued the whizz out of the cracks to stop them - that will not end up on the guitar as the blank is way over long and the straighter grain ends up on the guitar. The tip of the glue will end up in the neck pocket of the guitar (which means that wood will be removed). Can only hope that there's nothing else hidden, but if there is, it'll be dealt with while working. You can see the little worm holes. Kind of a disappointment, but the wood will be very dark. I'll make them match the wood wherever they are - they'd be a lot harder to hide in lighter wood.

AT this point, the blank is way over thickness. For anyone who is chancing upon here who uses power tools, you'd probably get these two halves close to perfect and then glue them. Hand tools goes the other way. I'll glue these with relatively little tension and then thickness the whole setup just before it gets cut out and glued to a guitar body.






pretty close to flat. The top board is sitting back a little from the edge so as not to cast a shadow in the prior picture - but the board itself had cupping tension in it so the individual boards already aren't flat.

Lots of wood to work with as the top is nearly an inch thick and the finished thickness will be closer to 9/16th.

it's very nice to be able to glue things without much clamp tension and to be able to match/joint rough boards by grain and without using squares or straight edges. These boards have undergone a pretty significant temp change and humidity and not moved, so there's not much risk gluing them now vs. waiting to the day they get stuck on a body blank.


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## D_W (3 Jan 2022)

This top has good resonance, too - though it appears audio files aren't allowed. resonant wood is generally better (stronger midrange sound, though it's an electric guitar and you can EQ 90% of the sound). Dull woods good for tools (Don't translate vibrations to the user) and musical woods are pretty much opposite. energy is absorbed by the wood in dead/dull woods and passed through it in resonant woods. Since this is resonant, I'll make sure the hardware on this guitar isn't heavy (something more like vintage les paul, and not like the current stylish thing which is inserting big metal gromets to make production better and to keep bridges from tipping (this guitar will not have a high bridge height that would allow that - manufacturers like a higher bridge height on a guitar like this because it gives lot of room for sloppy fit - if the bridge is set to go lower on a guitar body so that it's not teetering on posts, then you can quickly have a maker's error where the strings can't get low enough to the guitar. Gibson changed the neck angle to force a higher (easier) bridge some time ago. The japanese copy that I have doesn't have this - it's more like vintage. 

A finger tap of blanks reveals resonance - the wood sounds a note after the tap - not like a marimba, but a lower ringing pitch. Dead wood like beech will generally make a thwack, though even beech may become musical if it gets old enough. 

Maple is far more resonant than beech, thus you don't generally see beech on good guitar necks.


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## D_W (4 Jan 2022)

so, I have to decide on body wood. I've already got four pre-cut les paul body blanks (that I cut and set aside as future light weight high resonance les paul special types). They are one piece honduran, but they came from a supplier here in the states who showed a nice clean flatsawn (quartered would be great, but that's not common with honduran these days, especially not in suitable density vs. heavy heart type that's good for furniture) piece and then sent something that was cut right next to the pith, and I don't want to spoil the rosewood with that.

I don't think limba will look right with this, and I also don't like to stain things, but I have a very suitable piece of limba in the right density range - I got it two years ago when some guy was selling wide limba on ebay. $170 for a board big enough literally to make three guitar body blanks and still make a couple of guitar necks.

So, having never actually seen it yet (never took it out of the box, which keeps it from getting filthy) other than the listing picture, I busted it out. It varies between dead quartered and 10 degrees off. So, quartered by anyones' reasonable definition.

So far, I'm thinking ceylon ebony for the fingerboard (a supplier threw one in for me with another bigger purchase), rosewood for the top and limba for the back. The limba that I've gotten is always soft for its density and filled with silica. This probably isn't any different - that almost makes a challenge to find one more abrasive wood for the neck.




limba is kind of ugly unless you luck into pure stuff without the demarcation line (much of it is worse yet looking like it sat in dirty water and then dried).

I took the to (rose)wood out of the clamps and planed one side after cutting off the excess on the yucky end. I don't like coloring wood but the limb and rosewood will be odd enough that I'll come up with something with micronized earth pigments to get a better match with the limba and bind the top and bottom with tortoise celluloid binding (to avoid corner denting).

Finish is most likely going to be a very thin french polish on everything as there's large pores everywhere. Not a fan of the porous look on guitars.

at any rate, the glue seam on the rosewood (one of these is the blank and one is the offcut). 







This is an illustration of my fascination with flattening a plane that you'll use for jointing (I do it for all of mine). This is basically a one minute joint. It avoids so many visual and glue up issues to have it this crisp.

And the glue line on the top of the blank (the flat surface) - it's right in the center of this picture, just above the wormhole. 




that's only about 3 inches of surface, maybe it'll be easier to see over almost the full length of the blank (I actually don't have any idea where it is in this picture, but it's there).






And a picture of the shavings - sorry about the blur




Rosewood doesn't necessarily plane nicely like pine, but it does plane nicely for its hardness. Very pleasant work. The point of the cap iron here is to prevent more damage than will come out with regular smoothing. The point of the cap iron on the smoother is to do the same thing, but then with a turn of the adjuster, not do anything at all (the last passes are always too thin for a shaving to lift - using the cap iron lets you get there safely and not cause a problem by accidentally taking a thick shaving with a wild adjustment.

This board isn't finish planed, just flattened on one side. If it's flat through a temp change this week, I'll plane the other side unless I cut a body and do the interior routs first (at that point, there's no great reason to wait).

super primo planes used on this are a mexico stanley smoother and the type 20 #6 with a shop made iron (it doesn't matter what the iron is, though).


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## thetyreman (4 Jan 2022)

I did some research on vintage les pauls, apparently the posts and thumbwheel on the TOM bridge that hold it into the body used to be machined from solid brass which they haven't really done since the 50s, 




and also they used aluminium for the tailpiece which all is supposedly to make a big difference on the tone, I was thinking about making my own brass posts and thumbwheel just to see if it makes a difference if I ever make my own les paul but I'd probably use the gotoh one pictured here, thought that may be of interest to you.


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## D_W (4 Jan 2022)

Yes on both of those. I don't know who I'll buy the hardware from (There's gobs of it - faber makes a brass saddle bridge and then a matching steel post and brass wheel set to go with it). The bridge and tailpiece and posts look like they'll be a little over $100 in something of decent quality - not where I want to shave costs, though. 

The tokai guitar above has vintage spec bits on it including an aluminum tailpiece and brass saddles and the direct-drill posts rather than the heavy inserts. All of those things should make the guitar a little brighter (which is what people suggest for the aluminum tailpiece). I'm not that concerned tone-wise, you can always faff with electronics, but resonance and not wasting string energy in overweight cheap zinc cast parts not what I'd like to end up with. 

Thanks for bringing it up, though. I haven't looked for hardware in a while, and I guess with covid, it's maybe not a great idea to assume that everything is in stock and that I can order it 3 days before installing it. 

pickups will mostly likely be duncan antiquities - they are good at not losing the top end, so if the lighter tailpiece does something with treble, it won't be lost in a high output wax potted pickup that's more mid-strong.


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## D_W (4 Jan 2022)

I'll stop posting such routines as joining boards shortly, but last night while waiting for my boy to get ready for bed, I just planed the back side of the top set. The initial excitement about getting back to working wood and gazing at joints is due to the fact that I did mostly forging/grinding/heat treating last year (and will continue to mix that in). 

I would imagine nobody is thinking this, but if I saw one tight joint, I'd want to see the other side, too. Especially since this joint was match planed with a lightly cambered blade. I don't get into the guessing at what a thousandth will do - some tiny fraction of it ends up in the joint. 

This board relieved itself a small amount when I resawed it and the saw followed, so one of the two boards was a bit cupped on the back side. I hate that (if you work by hand, you start noticing that nothing really ever seems to be a deal stopper, it's just when you do one thing to be lazy (i didn't tension the frame saw and just used a 28" rip saw to resaw this bookmatch) and then something else happens. Rosewood is slow enough resawing that the frame saw would've been faster including the tensioning time. So, errors of dimensioning lead to effort, but this board set already has surplus thickness (with a little more to come off later). If thickness were critical, I'd have used the frame saw regardless. 






I'd have liked the dark heart on the outside of the guitar top, but the wrinkle at the edges (which will not appear in the guitar as the upper bout is narrower - it'll just be cut off) would've made that look odd, and maybe even profane. I think oil and pore filling before finish will probably make all of it very dark. 

This is after smoothing (the shavings shown are just the full amount needed to follow the 6 (used as a try plane). I didn't even think to fetch the wooden try plane, but it would've been faster for this - no matter, woodworking has been so infrequent for the last year vs. metalworking that it's just a pleasure to plane. 

Notice how the joint above disappears as the grain straightens, When you try to follow the line, your eye actually sees something that looks more like the joint (even in person, and close) and you guess wrong at where the actual joint is. 

Before this, the flattening - planing wood to thickness is always nice if the board is in good shape and the plane stays in the cut. I don't plane diagonals. I stand behind the vise and plane through the board with the plane askew, left and right handed. With the cap set properly - the plane enters the cut and just stays in it. You get the same effect while planing as planing diagonals but there's no short cuts and you're planing long grain, not diagonal. The laziness in resawing creates extra work due to the fact that the plane is in and out of the cut on one side - on typical cabinet wood, I'd have just jack planed the whole thing until there was enough for a try plane to stay in a continuous cut, but this is fairly expensive wood and leisure work. 






Another look at the back side of the joint (notch cut out top right only so that I could get an offcut large enough to make a peghead overlay or five). The back side joint may look even better than the top, but too late - I cut the notch already - it'll be fine either way. 





A closer look at the new mex stanley (this isn't a plane I normally use, but it was on the bench from getting a look at the iron - that is literally the stock mouth with the frog set flush with the casting). I'd rather have the casting support all the way down the bevel than close the mouth. 

And before this, the shavings from the try plane - they typify what you're looking to do working by hand - the shavings show a little evidence of being worked, little tearout, but not cap set closer than it needs to be (that'd be needless work). The surface of the wood after this was just quickly smoothed and would be fine for french polish (I'd have refreshed the edge and done another pass if this was actually a surface getting just oil and wax, but one side of this will get glued to a body and the other will be top carved. It's not going to move enough to worry about planing it before use - the wood is quartered.


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## D_W (5 Jan 2022)

well, I've kind of cornered myself. Having bought a huge quartered 4x4 rosewood blank that was supposedly dry, it's not - so in terms of woods for guitars, I've got tons of quartered wood (to be able to cut blanks for bolt on guitars, etc) but little musical stuff that's flatsawn. The large blanks that I have are all khaya or honduran mahogany, but I don't want to use that on this guitar and may not ever use it (long term experience with later mahogany in guitar necks isn't that great, and the old growth stuff wasn't so good compared to laminated maple necks like you'd find on a gibson L-5). 

So, I have a big flatsawn piece of 8/4 walnut, but it's not as straight as I'd like (it was pennies, though) and a whole glom of plain flatsawn 4/4 maple and some curly that's probably soft maple (but it's 15 years old and dry and stiff). 

so, we're going to go tasteless and use it and I'll resaw and plane some thin walnut to go between the maple laminations. This maple was planed by the seller from rough - I don't really like that - it takes wood that would end up near full thickness in a lamination and makes it closer to 13/16", so you can lose as much as an eighth. The walnut laminations between the maple should help deal with that to prevent awkward situations (like a tiny piece/lamination along the edge of a neck). 






This is the kind of board that I generally have no idea about. Interestingly, in another thread, charlie mentioned this busy wood when it's just laminated together on furniture - it's hard to use unless it can be used not touching other maple. 

Ideal candidate for laminating because the edges can be really wild with figure and the lamination will eliminate the instability that comes along with intense varying figure. 





Laminating things is also where it would be nice (to make the thin walnut strips) to have something like a drum sander, but we don't roll like that here. No longer have a bandsaw, either, but not a big deal. The "dry" rosewood neck blank sits in the background. So far, the "dry" blank has lost a pound and a half of weight in about 3 weeks. 

I also have a sinful amount of castelo boxwood, which isn't a real box, but it feels like box and is musical. It would make a sublime neck, but the seller sent it as air dried and with a thin coat of wax, so it's not worth the risk cutting it. 

In furniture making, wood moves a little bit. In guitar making, you try to use only old wood that's stayed straight or get new dry wood that's ideally sawn. But ideally often isn't good enough. I will rough this neck out early and mortise a truss rod groove so that it can sit through some weather changes and see if it twists. 

This picture below is a QS sapele roughed neck that came from a luthier supplier. It was very dry, but notice the twist. Any visible twist at all is absolutely toxic (selling a guitar you don't want with a neck twist is like selling a car that "works great except second and fourth gear don't work"). This picture is looking down the neck - the camera won't focus near and far, but this actually looks far worse in person (it is worse). 






Upper mid guitar companies who make one piece necks on acoustics usually rough the necks and then put them in piles. They check later to see if a neck is straight - if is, good to go. The necks that have moved get dimensioned back to straight again and checked later. Usually if they move twice, they're getting close not having enough wood to be sized further to remove movement and they're pitched. 

When you see instability problems in guitars, it's usually lack of care - I've fixed a lot of fretting and body hump problems in gibson guitars made in the last 10-15 years. Not impressed. 

The sapele neck above probably has enough to correct, but when a neck blank costs $80 (and enough to make two necks) and you're investing a lot of time making a guitar, it's probably better just to pitch anything that twists. I've had two guitars that twist seasonally - maybe at some point they'll be old enough that they stop moving, but who knows - I sold one and the other is a neck I made that just hangs - which is how I learned that you can saw something as ideally as you want (or even rive it and then finish), even older wood and then have it move. 

A little twist in one direction (bottom side of the guitar at the nut moves toward you) doesn't have much effect on playing sometimes (setting up the guitar and ignoring it will actually create higher low side action and lower high side action - which is nice, but it's still toxic to selling


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## D_W (5 Jan 2022)

I probably didn't do a great job of explaining two things - why do I want flatsawn wood? To come up with something that doesn't look flatsawn once laminated. 

And the sapele blank - at the time I cut that (a couple of years ago) I was going to make a les paul special on the quick (which is a slab guitar and not carved top). It wasn't twisted when I cut it - but it is now. 

As far as the laminated maple goes, got lucky - the curly board is hard maple, not soft. Soft or bigleaf (west coast) is more common in guitar wood - the hard maple does tend to look like this board (unruly, not nice even figure end to end). 

not as much time at lunch - so a chance only to cut the boards into bits that will be laminated, and then give them a skim with the same #6 plane . I've bought a lot of planes over the years - one of them is a nice toolmonger kit infill about the same size as a 5 1/2 - the 6 is a good fit for this work (I contemplated getting the infill out since there's not that much planing on a guitar and it doesn't matter - it's hard to make use of it on furniture if you have wooden planes to do the pre-smoothing work). 

At any rate, sawn with handsaws, and sawed a bit out of the walnut board (it's also somewhere around 10 years old - the grain not quite what I was looking for, but will make the bands between the maple laminations very thin - like some less than a tenth, so it won't be discernible. I just don't think the super busy wood laminations will look that great if they're against each other without a strip visually breaking them up between. It's not like the billet is that wide so resawing thin laminations off of it by hand won't be that difficult. 

Plane setup comes into play here - any "real" maker would just drum sand these to even thickness. Curly maple planes easily with a plane with the cap iron set and getting wood to a dimensional target quickly requires not having the shavings torn (the more tearout, the less is removed - if you have tearout at one end and not at another, you're working against yourself). 

The dark film on the wood before planing is metal dust. I've never noticed this kind of ambient dust to affect planing (But big shavings that fly off of the belt grinder and stick in a bench or board definitely make their mark in an iron edge).


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## D_W (5 Jan 2022)

(just in case anyone has an interest in hand tools - it takes about 10 seconds extra, maybe fewer, to get the cap set. The plane goes longer between sharpening intervals with it set and on wood like this, the planing occurs about twice as fast and is predictable and smooth...

...all of the little bits about this, and how it works with ribboned mahogany, etc, are why I think the biggest gain of the cap iron was economic. There's never really been a situation where you couldn't find some other way to get the wood to the same point, but it's just exercise planing like this once everything is set - you plane - when the wood isn't even yet, little bits come off - as the wood is flat to the plane, those bits turn into continuous shavings. When they have no breaking in them, then you know you have a uniform surface and you're done. The plane stays in the cut and everything is smooth, productive and predictable. 

The iron - still the same one - 1095. I thought at one point 1095 may not make a nice plane iron, but it makes an iron that's just below O1 in wear life, and a point or so harder. It's kind of nice. What made me think it wasn't that great is that if you try to make an iron out of it and use vegetable oil to quench, it'll never get quite right. Very plain water hardening steels need a specialty quench oil to get full hardness and then the behavior of the steel is a lot better. 

I get really particular when making and experimenting (tools) and I'll notice things like which irons wear slightly longer, sharpen somewhat better, nick a little less easily. But by the time I get back to doing this stuff, I find that the efforts to get those things right has made things workable with plenty of margin..

...and in this case, with a dirty old board that's only taken 16 years to figure out where it should be used. 

I remember getting this board and getting a scraper plane (or three) and torturing myself with it. Who knew lord stanley was still making a plane in 1960 that planes it really well with ten seconds of effort.


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## baldkev (5 Jan 2022)

Watching this one!!! 
Ive stopped learning for a bit ( too busy ) but want to get into it again soon. Want to pick up a duesenberg les trem for my l.p, to see what they are like


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## D_W (5 Jan 2022)

I've not tried anything like that, but if I build 10 guitars, they'll go weird after a certain point. I want to build violins in the future, too, but we'll see. I have wood aging for them. I don't play violin, either. 

Never was a huge fan of the bigsby, but dangelico has a pretty high quality maker in korea that made a model called the NYSD9 with a bigsby (very close to a les paul copy, but arch on both sides and chambered) and I got one as nobody seems to love those guitars for as well as they're made. It's a treat to play. 

I ordered another LP copy from japan over Christmas. I may be killed when it shows up, but it'll be a good basis for an all black lacquer LP custom copy if this build doesn't go so foul that I'm convinced I should go back to making chisels and planes. 

If anyone is ever critical about wood you've had for a decade (my wife hates the idea that I don't get a box with supplies for each project and have nothing else around), the chance of making guitars is good defense. When you have wood that's moved none over 15 years and has gone through that many seasonal cycles, it's so much safer than my "kiln dried to 8%" sapele sample above. 

When it's tools, I think for the most part I can make wooden planes and chisels as well now as they can be made in the styles that I like. There is so much market for factory made guitars that I'm not sure I could ever match the workmanship even on a korean dangelico (and doing things by hand, to get the visual consistency is maybe not a reasonable goal compared to a factory where much of the work is jigged/cnc and the work that's not is being done by very talented workers who get a lot of repetition). 

Korea guitars used to be the low end in the US, and now there are a couple of small contract makers there who can do really good work (and indonesia is the location of choice for low-cost factory making - even China can't compete with them).


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## baldkev (5 Jan 2022)

If you like black l.p's......
This is a 2009, raw power, which is all maple i believe.....


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## rwillett (6 Jan 2022)

I play the guitar (very, very badly) and am thoroughly enjoying this thread. I will never make a guitar in my life, I'd be lucky to be able to put a shelf up, but its great to learn from other people, even if I will never use the knowledge. 

I would love an early Telescaster, but as with all these things, the costs of them are beyond me, unless I sell one of my kids and a kidney or two. I'd never be able to play it to more than 1% of its capability, but it is (to me) a work of art.

Rob


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## thetyreman (6 Jan 2022)

whatever you make DW, you've got some really nice pieces of wood there to choose from, that flamed maple looks a lot like what gibson would have used in the late 50s for the bookmatched tops on a lester paul.


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## D_W (6 Jan 2022)

thetyreman said:


> whatever you make DW, you've got some really nice pieces of wood there to choose from, that flamed maple looks a lot like what gibson would have used in the late 50s for the bookmatched tops on a lester paul.



Yessir - lots of those were hard maple and not necessarily as perfect looking as the bigleaf maple matches that you can from canada and the western US. I don't know the reason gibson chose hard maple, but they may have liked the sound better (I read an account from Ted McCarty where he talked about them trying combinations early on - they tried all mahogany and 100% maple and ended up between for sound preference. Changing the top to something softer can change the sound profile slightly). 

The stories from gibson as told by mccarty, at least for the early period of the les paul (late 40s maybe until about 1960 when they ceased production until 1968 to find somnething that would sell better) are interesting. They were generally low on money much of the way along and didn't sell that many of any of these guitars for lack of buyers. IIRC they'd have been a couple of months' pay for an average person at the time (thus 150 or something of the 59 burst that everyone loves so much now?). 

A friend and I bought some figured wood when I first started, and the maple is left from that. I have a lot of odd stuff like that, but only one large supply of "plain wood" (cherry). I think cherry would actually make a good guitar, but I don't want to make something low budget on the first try. I'll make an all cherry les paul special in the future (I have an all cherry telecaster style guitar - first guitar I made - a bit ugly but it sounds great). 

Those maple boards taught me about lumber dealer upcharges. The rack for the wood said something like $5.50 a board foot. We selected boards and when the office had rung us up, we had a surcharge for "musical grade" and two surcharges for width wider than 6" (as in the width was on average two upcharges wider). Ended up being about $10 and not all of it was that vivid. I made panels for a blanket chest way back then that I still have yet to finish (two of those boards glued together are pretty ugly as either board is pretty, but where they glue together is clash - only really nice with a bookmatch from 8/4 instead of gluing two thinner boards together).


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## D_W (6 Jan 2022)

Some progress last night (this kind of thing is great for a hand tooler - you put a little together for 25 minutes or whatever and then go back to what you were doing (so good over lunch, waiting for the kids to finish baths, etc). And it gives you time to think between when you haven't made anything identical (I've only made fender style stuff so far and it's a lot less complicated - it's kind of the bailey plane of guitars - fender that is - and I can't actually think of a reason that a les paul style guitar is better than fender other than changing scale and electronics - except the les paul guitars look nicer. 

....and mccarty said something along the lines of gibson wanting to put something out that would have higher *perceived* quality. Gibson already had carving machines and fender wasn't able to do something like that, so they built a guitar that has an angled neck and a carved top. When made right, it's kind of like a mid-grade mercedes vs. a toyota. You can like the mercedes a lot better, but it's difficult to argue that the basic function of being a car is better in a mercedes than a toyota (the toyota will be less trouble and cost less to fix). Neck to body fit on gibson guitars and differential shrinking has been providing the wrong kinds of thrills for a long time, and the truss rod doesn't influence the neck on the guitar, so adjustments don't always work as well as one would like without physically modifying the wood on the guitar. 

Anyway, resawing the walnut for strips between the maple. It's a lot easier than one would think to do this - I timed the strips - 6 minutes each. That sounds like a lot, but remember, no bandsaw setup, no dust collector switching around, no unintended wander. My bandsaw (a jet 18x) never worked right when I had it and I found out when I sold it that the top wheel had 7 or 8 thousandths of error out of round. I could've probably fixed that with duct tape over a tire, but it never cut smooth and the cut wandered often (and the back and forth of the blade would always hammer the guides out of setting, so you couldn't just fix it by setting guides). 





Add a minute between cuts to plane the surface of the blank. I think this kind of dimensioning work is useful because it's pleasant and it makes cutting joints really easy. It becomes easy very quickly and gives an opportunity to learn to saw with both hands. To keep from wandering, I saw some on one side, then take the saw out and saw from the other side left handed, then back over to right handed. Walnut is really easy sawing, too - that helps you stay patient. Someone who did two of these a day would likely be able to make this cut as or more accurate in half the time. 






I forgot to take pictures while planing, but this is the frass left behind. To plane these strips, you just hold one end with a hold fast and then plane from the center out, then turn the thing around and plane the other way (cap iron!! no need to worry about planing direction and no need to take super thin shavings). I check progress after that and remove the uneven spots - target a couple of thousandths of difference (two strips, so all are just about .085" - if they differ much from that, you can actually see it - like more than 2 or 3 thousandths and you see it easily). 





The take the entire glom and glue it together (there's not much wood to the actual neck and tenon - so maybe I'm being a little over careful here and will have some work to do to trim this back, but I wanted to be able to plane it against stops and get something reasonably solid to clamp. 




Making stuff like this is where having a drum sander would be nice - you could just whizz the pieces through it and they'd be identical thickness if you want, and then glue. It probably took an hour total to cut all of these pieces out, plane them to reasonable even-ness in thickness (including the maple bits) and then glue them. 

I'd also rather get better at doing this stuff by hand, and getting a drum sander isn't on the list.


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## D_W (6 Jan 2022)

baldkev said:


> If you like black l.p's......
> This is a 2009, raw power, which is all maple i believe.....



Indeed, I do like the black LPs - and I like the white ones, too - but the white ones show every single lacquer crack or check that happens over time. I only like the studios and customs, though - paint other than gold top on a standard is a little weird looking. 

I'd love a black or white studio pre-CNC neck finishing with an ebony fingerboard, but they have gone up a lot in price. I'd love even more to have a pre-2000 white or black LPC, but one in good shape is now treading on $4k, and that's the price of a used collings.


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## D_W (6 Jan 2022)

Next step with the neck is to rip is to cut away most of the excess wood, but not all of it, and plane the neck surface flat and planar so that I can hang the neck for a couple of weeks and see if it moves with temperature changes. I hope the fact that it's laminated will make that a no. 

I vaguely recall hearing that some folks will hang a neck for a year before they do anything with it, but I've seen most neck blanks that move (at least the fender type) do it when left unfinished within just a few days.


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## D_W (6 Jan 2022)

short lunch today and just enough time to trim the neck blank down, plane the top flat and look at the joints. Trimming is just done with a regular carpenter's rip saw leaving some extra height so that if there is twist in small amounts (hope not!), it can be removed.

It takes a little while to trim something like this with a hand saw - maybe ten minutes since it's hard maple. I had to sharpen a saw that I like to use for this (a 6 tooth rip saw instead of something more coarse), but when you work by hand, sharpening a rip saw is about a 5 minute process out. I don't use a specialty saw vise, that's a waste of time to fetch - just two boards and a machinist vise and then file in a rhythm like you're a saw filing machine so that each tooth stays consistent and you don't get yourself into a situation in the next half dozen filings where you have to joint the tooth line (that's a waste of time). Also, take off only what's needed to space out the interval where adding set is needed - it's only every five or so filings. Usually end up filing a rip saw once in each cabinet type project - keeping them sharp is like keeping planes sharp. Crosscut saws are a little less sensitive to fresh sharpness, so they get filed far less often (and they don't cut nearly as many feet). 

Secretly, since I work mostly by hand, I always wonder when something really stupid will show up, like undulations and a big glue line or some such thing. Not much glue came out of this setup given the amount that it used, but the wood probably absorbed a lot of it, which isn't a bad thing as ...well, if the surface isn't wetted, the glue won't bond. 

By "a while", I mean like ten minutes of sawing - on something like mahogany or walnut if the whole neck was made of it, half as much sawing or less would've been needed - maple 1 inches thick ...well, maple in general is a very smooth wood that doesn't rip saw that easily for its hardness. You start to notice a pattern of which woods work well by hand for their given density and durability. For example, rosewood is harder than hickory. Rosewood works more nicely than hickory despite that. Ebony is harder than persimmon, but persimmon is really resistant to tools sometimes for its hardness. So, you don't end up using woods that are cheap where you wouldn't notice this. 

I got my hands on ceylon ebony for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Holy cow, it looks like ebony but works like rosewood - a little quick reading found that in the past, it was the preferred version. Well, it works like rosewood, except it will take scraped detail like ebony - it's heavenly. Too bad it's uncommon now.

Fortunately, nothing about this screams some piker did it with hand tools in his garage. at least not yet. Marking it out against the template. My peghead isn't quite as wide as the template and I think gibson's peghead is actually bigger. However, my peghead shape will be a little different to get the top two holes closer to the middle of the neck for a straighter string pull (gibson guitars can have an issue with tuning stability because of that - it's solved by lubricants, but why bother). at this point, just marking center in the blank and tracing the outline of the template (these templates are awesome - who says I don't like modern tools. There are dudes who have CNC lasers that cut these things out and you could do without them, but they're super handy. Each small set is only something like 40 bucks and spatially, having a pattern is far better than measuring. ). 







It has to be at least carefully planed now to visual flatness so that I can monitor twist. Nothing gets measured here, just by eye. If twist is less than a couple of thousandths (which is visible) then there's no issue. it's smooth planed at this point, though I realize now that no part of this surface should ever show - however if this becomes the final surface, no tearout is a good thing as it would be visible against the fingerboard. 





Now, aside from hand mortising the truss rod groove tonight or tomorrow, it's just a matter of sitting - so it's back to the basement (which is 60 degrees - the shop is less and below the glue's cure temp requirement of 50. It's probably near done, but who knows). 






The figure is a bit much, but it'll be a surprise from the back side and i'll probably stain it- we'll see. The fingerboard. I think almost for certain, I will use a peghead overlay to match the rosewood top ( plainer and straighter grain from front view is nice so as not to distract from the actual design lines. )

This is, of course, hypothetical - I'll ruin and need to redo at least one thing before this is over.


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## D_W (9 Jan 2022)

Not a whole lot interesting done - need to mark the neck blank a little more closely and cut the truss rod groove today with a mortise chisel that I have sized exactly for the two-way truss rods that I like to use. I'd guess the original truss rods were just threaded one way rods, but had a 1976 les paul last year that had no relief and no tension on the truss rod to let off. I hate that. 

I read from "experts" (self appointed tycoons) that a two way truss rod deadens the neck and makes a guitar sound no good, which is fine and dandy, except the loudest most resonant solid body guitar that I have has one of them in. I don't think it amounts to much compared to wood, but having a guitar that needs neck relief and can't get it is a problem I don't want to solve later. 

At any rate, the whole power tool idea is , who knows what - I think complicated. To find an older square sided or nearly square sided mortise chisel and mortise the groove by hand and clean out the bottom with a router plane is *easy*. It takes a little longer, but it's a safer operation (I don't have such a thing as accurate power tool set ups here and want nothing to do with a bunch of router based jigs beyond basic guitar templates. I think the only place a router will be used on this guitar is binding channels. I get the idea that you can set up router templates and make a whole bunch of something exactly, but ...I don't know, doesn't feel like making to me and the result can always be a little sterile looking without being any more accurate.

A look at the limba after cutting and then spokeshave and scrape. On something like limba that chips, I cut pretty far away from the line and then use one of the dandy ridgid OSS machines to sand closer to the line and then use a shave and scrapers (opposing diagonals) until the curves feel good. Since the top of this will need to be sanded and I always and the neck, I'm not married to the idea of no sanding on this guitar, but at this point, other than to use an OSS as a safe remover of bulk, it's not time yet. 

The last limba blank that I had was dead. This one emits a nice big "bong!". No guarantee that it and the rosewood top will communicate, though - but since it's an electric guitar, it doesn't matter that much (as in, you can take two pieces of very musical wood, glue them together and not have a particularly musical result. 






Inside bits of this so far just drilled out and then pared back with a large gouge. The world of tycoon luthiers is hyper about how clean their routers make internal cavities. I can't get into that - they don't show on the guitar and it's just a strange thing. If you ever see any videos like "trogly", etc, those folks take guitars apart and comment about how dull the CNC mill bit may have been if it leaves an internal burn mark and then comment on it as a sign of workmanship...

.........who cares. How resonant is the guitar. How good is the hardware and electronics? How does it intonate, how good is the tuning stability? How good is the fret work and is the nut cut well so that the guitar is smooth playing and good intonating. 

Whole thing upside down on the rosewood top, brought in from the shop and getting above 50F so that the top can be glued on (brown spot on the neck is just a shadow from the lamp cord. My basement is not the typical american bright and whatever finished living room looking space - it's got copper colored carpet (which matches dirt nicely - seriously) and it's warm and dry, but the walls aren't finished and there's no sofa. Currently fighting the wife about getting most of the basement finished out because I don't want to lose it as actual useful space. There are enough rooms upstairs for everyone to be in separate spaces if they want to, so I can't get into the idea of the kids needing an escape area downstairs at the expense of me losing a space that can get dirty. 






Pretty big nibs still let on the front and back of the guitar - I still size everything with a hand plane and it's nicer to have something to grab than it is to ding a sized curve and have to move it back and then refair the curve. Once I decide on the final neck angle and map out how thick the top will be to get slightly under 1/4" top thickness around the edges (so that the binding channel goes slightly into the limba), then I can final thickness the top and start to work on stuff on it. 

This is my plan, anyway - being careful. 

Had a hell of a hard time finding the actual joint on the rosewood top at the butt end because of how cleanly it's joined, but marked it with white pencil. Still on the fence about coloring the limba and maple - I like wood without color and it's definitely true that it's easier to put on a clear topcoat (or something like super blonde shellac) over an oil when there's ivoroid binding involved.


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## D_W (9 Jan 2022)

Separately, I don't know what the dark trash line is on limba, but when you sand or file or scrape it, it's stinky! For anyone who hasn't used it - it's not spalt. It's actually a little harder than the light wood.


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## D_W (9 Jan 2022)

i'm not usually one for peer pressure, but since I have the dandy ridgid OSS, I put a smaller spindle on it and sanded the inside of the control cavity a little cleaner. I'll leave the unseen bits of the pickup cavities sloppy to make up for it, but the neck is going to fit a little firm without glue (this is the opposite of manufactured guitars, which have some slop in the neck joint for adjustment while gluing and often lots of glue, but the CNC leaves very clean pickup cavities).


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## D_W (10 Jan 2022)

So, I've slotted the neck and fitted the truss rod (which will make the guitar look asian. I never looked close enough (Which is dippy as I have two les paul copies behind me right now), but gather that the slot is cut and the truss rod is through a hole and not through a slot that terminates in the peghead (as in, the relief for the nut is milled into the peghead, but the rod itself comes through a hole so that the nut sits on wood. 

So, I'll have to work backwards a little bit as the style of TR that I'm using is double action with a barrel that takes a hex key rather than a nut on the end of a threaded rod. Work backwards as in bridge the are that I've cut/slotted. The nut for a les paul is stout, so it's maybe belt and suspenders. 

Next thing to figure out while I wait for ivoroid binding is what pickups. 

I have gold and nickel duncan antiquities. It's not that important right this second except hardware choices need to be made and I think limba and rosewood might look good with gold hardware. 

Using nickel finish hardware makes for a whole lot more options, though. What did gibson use with rosewood? Google will tell me. 









Gibson Les Paul Custom "Norlin Era" Electric Guitar 1970 - 1985 | Reverb


The Gibson Les Paul Customs of the Norlin Era can be diamond-in-the-rough finds for players with a keen eye.




reverb.com





looks like gold (even though some of them have the plating worn off of the pickups). 

There are so many options for bridges in nickel that this is a bit of a bummer, but I do think gold looks better. The carbon steel machined bridges in a sonic comparison just sound dandy, though. Far better than pot metal or vintage ABR-1 style with nylon saddles. 

Probably only can tell the difference due to the comparison, though. 

Milled steel bridges are also expensive ($150 or so plus posts plus tailpiece for western made bridges where you really actually know what you're getting.


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## D_W (10 Jan 2022)

My three favorites for pickups, for anyone who is into the guitar thing more than the building - are 57 classics (if potted is desirable), duncan antiquities (just love them - i'm guessing by the sound that they're unpotted), and burstbucker pros. I may have all three on hand in gold because there was a depression in the guitar market before covid and you could get used pairs of pickups sometimes for the retail price of one - just from the nutballs who rotate pickups and hardware on their guitars constantly looking for something that may or may not be there).


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## Sporky McGuffin (10 Jan 2022)

D_W said:


> the neck is going to fit a little firm without glue (this is the opposite of manufactured guitars, which have some slop in the neck joint for adjustment while gluing and often lots of glue



I've CNC'd a few of my guitar builds, and there's very simple choice of how you want the neck to fit. 0.25mm difference and it's a snug interference fit without any finish. Then add the thickness of the finish you'll be using and you sill have that snug fit - enough that you pick the guitar up by the neck without glue or screws in. 

Gibson have sloppy neck fit for quite different reasons - not because they couldn't have a snug fit.


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## D_W (10 Jan 2022)

I don't know what their reasons are specifically, but I'm guessing because it allows them to move the joint a little before they clamp it. 

I vaguely recall seeing a video at collings of a joint fitting and it was more or less airtight - anyone wanting to do that could do it. 

The reason I don't know gibson's wants or needs is I don't know what the order of operations is in terms of locating bridge posts (I'm guessing that's done in CNC before the neck is attached - as in, necks and bodies are interchangeable). an amateur builder working by hand is well served to be careful about the centerline (and on something like a fender guitar, attach the bridge last so that it's dead center). 

For years, gibson had problems with necks having strings on one side or another or pickups not properly lined up with strings - even some of the gibson custom guitars would have the high E string close to the end of the frets (it seems to be less the last couple of years, but I actually left comments under their youtube video as they'd show a $5200 limited run les paul at high resolution with the strings way off center. 

I can't believe buyers wouldn't send guitars back over something like that. 

(collings and gibson aren't very similar in the way they operate, so it's not really a fair comparison - as in, gibson is heavy on marketing and automated in production. Collings is CNC heavy but there is a lot of hand time and slow fitting done to supplement - they just make better guitars than gibson does in terms of workmanship).


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## Sporky McGuffin (11 Jan 2022)

I seem to recall from the factory videos that Gibson don't use a lot of CNC - more duplicarvers and suchlike. 

Anyways, sorry to distract.


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## D_W (11 Jan 2022)

Sporky McGuffin said:


> I seem to recall from the factory videos that Gibson don't use a lot of CNC - more duplicarvers and suchlike.
> 
> Anyways, sorry to distract.



Goodness, no problem at all - all of the forums are dying for topical discussion. 

You may be more right than I am. At the outset, McCarty decided they'd put a carve top on the LP for perceived quality (i probably said that here already? I don't remember now, posted in more than one place). Gibson had duplicarvers for archtops (Which still got their quality wood - the LPs have iffy wood even in 1959 as the archtop guitars and mandolins were probably higher priced - and much longer running), so they employed them on the guitars. From seeing heritage factory pictures, the tops were done with duplicarver and then combination hand and machine finish (maybe I should say jigged or not jigged). the guitars were less identical because more of the work as done by hand (like the neck profile sanding and the transition at the heel and the peghead to neck - that was done freehand on a belt sander. 

Fast forward to now, I believe most of that is gone. I don't know exactly what year, but early 2000s, things started going to CNC - especially for necks, and some of the designs on the lower priced guitars (figure up to like LP studio types and then some of the guitars like the LP sig T (which wasn't inexpensive) give the sense that order of operations have been changed - as in, on some of them, the neck is made and the fingerboard is glued on afterwards - no profiling to match the fingerboard and neck together. I haven't had a standard newer than about 2000 - I'm afraid of what i might get, and gibson went back and forth doing things like putting two piece bodies on standards despite price tags around $3k, and changing woods and then geometry (i think just before they went bankrupt, a new standard was somewhere around $3400 here, before sales tax. It may have gotten to $3699). So, I've had mostly Sig T Les paul or lower guitars, but all have been a bit off in feel since around 2006. 


( should say above, too, I'm talking about kalamazoo with the heritage comment, and not after gibson abandoned the factory and it became "heritage". The early bits of quality decline started with flattening the carve on the les paul tops so that they could be linearly sanded quickly, and then for whatever reason, the pickup bobbins and pickups changed so that as far as I know, the early 70s pickups literally couldn't hold enough wind to sound like the PAFs, but before then, the les pauls didn't sell that well, anyway, so it's not like they were abandoning the 59 paul that had sold so well, or the 68 custom when the 69 went to a laminated mahogany neck (that could very well have just been to address stability issues). 



(there's follow up later with CNCs more or less drilling and routing the bodies). Surprisingly, there is still a lady rounding the necks of the guitar, but I wonder which guitars those are as some of the necks I've had were sharp on the corner (whereas in the old says, the neck came out of a pin router setup and the profile was pretty much cut and finished at once after that on a belt sander). 



I don't know if it's in either of these videos, but in one of the earlier ones, they showed a lady binding les pauls with ABS binding and then scraping. Fantastic, skilled and super fast. I've only used celluloid binding ,and it doesn't go on like that!

There still is a lot of hand handling - (I didn't watch the whole long first video, I"ll admit - just skimmed it to see what gibson is doing now - the issues that my more recent gibsons have had (aside from the lower models feeling devoid of hand shaping and checking, which is probably the case as they're dirt cheap for somnething made in the US) is stability - neck/body differential and fingerboard movement. On the lower end guitars, some were manufactured with a step (the fingerboards narrower than the neck) where you can see glue or bare wood, and as long as it's not too drastic, gibson calls it in spec. They could make these guitars well overseas with lower cost labor, but won't do it I guess for brand reasons. 

The plek process improves the mid range guitars, but the one I have now was plekd and the improvement was eliminated pretty quickly by uneven fingerboard drying and body hump. 

(I think the CNC roughing, though, has made them all more dimensionally similar, but it also means if there's a problem on a run of lower cost guitars, then the whole run has it. E.g., the SG faded guitars are a shade too thin and the jack touches the back cover on them (since the SG plugs in on the front). I bought one on sale and quickly resold it - when you turn, the jack touches the back plate and jimmies the cord around in the jack and you get loud popping through an amp. The guitar that I got was drop shipped from gibson - 8 months after the reviews were filled with complaints about the problem. Same with the open seam on necks - the faded LPs are a good basic setup to work from (good pickups, OK hardware, good weight, they're actually mahogany) if you're willing to finish profiling the neck yourself - they're so cheap that I've gotten more for one scraping the neck and fixing the problem than reselling them unchanged.


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## D_W (11 Jan 2022)

So, neck slot open under the nut or not. I hadn't thought about it, but the bell shaped truss rod cover screws into the wood where the slot would be. On the higher quality LP copies that try hard to do everything the same as gibson, the truss rod is the same, and the slot is the same (it doesn't go under the nut and a hole is bored through the end of the neck where the rod comes through with the nut on the outside . Probably also where the nut gets tension on the neck?

At any rate, on the asian copies that aren't made to copy everything about a les paul (like epiphones, etc) the slot is just milled straight through, the nut sits over open space and the truss rod cover butts up against the nut to cover the slot. Screws are to the sides. The peghead overlay can also cover the top of the slot, even if it's there (I think most of the lower cost guitars are just painted, and haven't looked more closely at the gibsons - they may be slotted for the nut to make it look like the painted top is a peghead overlay. My tokai copy (not a cheap one, but relatively accurate copy) has a maple overlay or some type of thicker veneer on teh peghead, and isn't just lacquered). I could've looked at this a little more closely before mortising the slot and still used the two way truss rod, but drilled a hole through the end of the peghead so that the neck would be wood across the nut slot and no open space.


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## D_W (11 Jan 2022)

A whole lot of wood to remove yet - no twist with the changing temps yet, and with the slot roughed, fair game to start taking a lot of material off anticipating only 

When you mortise the slot in curly maple (or anything, but esp. curly wood), the top part of the mortise does get a bit ragged and the inside of the slot is straight off of the chisel - none of it shows, though, so it doesn't matter as much. 

I couldn't do this 10 out of 10 times with a router and jig and not have something wander.


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## Sporky McGuffin (11 Jan 2022)

Interesting stuff on Gibson - ta. I suspect the one I'd seen was probably pretty old. 

I also meant to say that it's nice to see an LP-style build that avoids including authentic design flaws such as the one-piece neck.


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## D_W (11 Jan 2022)

Sporky McGuffin said:


> Interesting stuff on Gibson - ta. I suspect the one I'd seen was probably pretty old.
> 
> I also meant to say that it's nice to see an LP-style build that avoids including authentic design flaws such as the one-piece neck.



I love the look of the one piece neck, and was going to do it with rosewood, which isn't exactly authentic. I just have had about 100 guitars through here (and 80 back out) in the last 5 years or so and presuming gibson ditches poorly behaved wood between rough milling and then the finishing area later, I've had to do way more correction of things due to wood movement than one would expect on guitars 5-15 years old. It's not like they're the only ones with problems. 

However, the 76 les paul that I had was still straight with no body hump (three piece maple neck) and even in yamaha copies (which are 40 years old more more, so you get a good idea of what the necks do), the ones with very nicely sawn one piece honduran mahogany necks (like the SL700S) have that same body hump. If it's minor, it's really easy to file away - I could ignore it and file some fall away on the frets later if it happens. But I'm more curious to see if I can prevent it..
...on 8 collings guitars, I've never seen a single one that had unwanted wood movement. 

I have an idea to limit body hump further, too, which is to make the neck joint relatively tight and glue only the top half of the tenon so that if the top and neck shrink differentially, I won't end up with a tenon that is confined at the lower side - as in, if either part shrinks more than the other, maybe a small gap opens up on the underside of the tenon, but there's so much tenon in a longer tenon that it won't matter for transmitting vibrations. 

Collings is so open that you can ask them questions and they'll just answer them. They voice their solid body guitar blanks, which I couldn't figure out what they were doing - someone else asked them in an email, and they said they start with mahogany from a specific area (the density is always about the same), but the blanks still don't sound identical, so they drill narrow slots in the bodies until they more or less return the same note. That way none are tight, but they don't have kind of the hollow sound that chambering yields- they all still sound like unchambered bodies. Instead of making warranty threats, too, when I asked if I could change pickups, they sent me measured drawings to open up the slots on a guitar with filtertrons so that it would take soapbar p90s. I was shocked. I think you can't operate a large company like that, though. They know nobody is going to copy their efforts on the bodies - but I will and would if this limba body was "high and tight" sounding (fortunately, it's not).


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## D_W (11 Jan 2022)

A little more over lunch and a pause for now (top thicknessed to the point that it's ready for being routed and then the arch carved, end nubs sanded off). 

Neck roughed out and lapped (I would've preferred planing this, but I already have the lap and its quick and easy). Surprisingly, stuff for toolmaking (a decent strong 4x36 sander with good belt tension and the plane lap are very useful here, but the power sander is more of a rouging tool. Nicholson super shear run over the curves after using it to fair everything so that I can't feel any undulations and the condition of the surface will require less follow up than heavy hand sanding with a block. 

obligations over lunch will cease guitar work for a week or so. Very cold and dry here, even though the top is glued to the back, there's a small check that started in the rosewood, thus the glue spot. Most of the bug holes are gone with planing the cap down to a little over 5/8". Thickness on older ones seems to be all over the board, but the tokai copy that I have is closer to 5/8-11/16 in thickness (guessing, accounting for side binding going down into the body a little bit). 




at this point, I'm realizing that I wish the center lamination had been a little narrower as once I trim the neck to final width, it's going to look a bit like one fat man in the middle two skinny girlfriends to the side. Or boyfriends for the progressives. 

Work conflicts over lunch will be good in terms of seeing whether or not the neck moves at all over the next week. If not, then it's green light for the other stuff as I found hardware and the binding arrives friday according to the magic of the internet. I will cut the heel and neck tenon more precisely after sorting out the top carve and bridge location. Chicken or egg thing here, but as long as two finished parts aren't brought together, I don't think it will matter which one is final sized first. Lots of extra fat left on the neck yet in case of twist, but that will hopefully not be needed.


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## D_W (11 Jan 2022)

Sporky McGuffin said:


> Interesting stuff on Gibson - ta. I suspect the one I'd seen was probably pretty old.
> 
> I also meant to say that it's nice to see an LP-style build that avoids including authentic design flaws such as the one-piece neck.



Not that it's important, but gibson puzzles me. I had three gibsons from 2013 at one point - all at once. Two had gross necks, and the third had a nice rounded neck (the third was a nighthawk). the other two were LP signature T and a faded LP. To fix and cover a huge glue seam and deal with a horrid neck carve, I just scraped the neck back myself and then gave it a light french polish. 

And then later on, I got a beat up brown "faded" les paul (or whatever they called it when the finish was straight off of the spray gun). It was from 2007 or so, was heavy (the later ones all had weight relief) had a nice fingerboard and a nice natural neck profile. 

I can never tell what they're doing, but either the people are changing constantly or the process or both. 

On something like an ES 335 that they're working on in the video, I'd expect that to be one of the last guitars to lose some hands-on attention as every one I've ever picked up had a "70s japanese" neck (nicely rounded and you don't have to have huge hands to play them). And they're expensive and hopefully aimed at a more exposed buyer)


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## thetyreman (11 Jan 2022)

for the binding I think they use acetone so it part melts into the wood to stick it on, you probably know that already though but worth mentioning just in case.


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## D_W (11 Jan 2022)

I use an acetone-based glue and then pure acetone if a spot needs a little help. But, yes, for celluloid acetate, that's - to me - the easy way. I have to heat it to get it to work around tight areas, though. 

The lady binding les pauls (which look like ABS to me) is moving at speed gluing and binding something that was soft and foreign looking to me (when I first got celluloid, I didn't even know there was such a thing as soft pliable ABS binding). 

I'm still on the fence a little, but think top and bottom of this guitar will be bound due to the fact that the limba in this case isn't that light, but limba is soft for its density and if the back is rounded over, it'll soon be full of dents. It'll look strange top and bottom bound with single ply ivoroid when the peghead isn't, though, but it's not a gibson guitar. I guess the peghead could be single bound, but haven't bound a pehgead before.


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## D_W (12 Jan 2022)

So, i did get some unexpected time mid day today waiting on someone else:

The excellent glue joint has come back to bite me. Can you find it? I didn't find it that easy, and after this had to get a steel straight edge and locate it in two points and make a mark. It's important at this point now for template alignment so that not too much screwing around is needed when fitting the neck. I don't want to measure alignment as it's a visual standard, but don't want to have strings going down the neck of the guitar with uneven relief from the edge on both sides. 





It's not actually visble on the guitar in any part that will remain, and the light line on the right is just a track from thicknessing the top. 

Certainly, it will be visible on the end? Not immediately apparent. But I found it later changing angles/light (on lighter woods, this always works more easily, but I guess not on rosewood. 






For giggles I planed the front of the guitar down to a 4 degree neck angle (3.8 is the target - I have no way of measuring 3.8 vs. 4 other than kentucky windage.)

The templates that I have are for a router (I think). I really don't feel like using a router, so I gouged and then spokeshaved off to the first line and tried to visualize the profile of the curves that will follow. I need to do other things to the guitar before getting heavy into that but realized that I don't make these and while I put a few topographical marks on the guitar with a pencil, it would be very dumb to start going any further as I couldn't visualize what's actually on my other guitars (and they don't necessarily have the profile I want - newer guitars are flatter than the older guitars. I'm on the fence, but google will help out. Back to the holding tank for this stuff, though. Using the router templates would be wise and safe, but it would also be totally unstimulating. I want to cut this by hand, carving, scraping and planing. I'm not going build half a dozen of these things over the next year or two and cut them all with a router template - it's like going to the dentist and doesn't feel like woodworking. If the results turn out to be lumpy uneven doo, well, I made this choice. Imagine how nice this would be to carve in a wood 1/3rd as hard. At least rosewood works nicely for its hardness. 






(much work will be done to take care near the edges to make them relatively even so that the binding doesn't end up going on wavy)

(from the picture above, I this is where the joint ended up being - I know it's in between two of the dark rings)


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## D_W (14 Jan 2022)

sneaking time here and there....





More push back and hollowing of the raised field at the edges before binding - on the fence about coloring the limba. If not, I think tortoise is a good binding choice instead of ivoroid. coloring the limba is a bit of a pain as the dyes that I have don't make it look that great and I know it looks wonderful by itself with buttonlac (but against the rosewood and the maple neck, maybe some clashing. 

Will make some kind of travishing tool pair or pullable shave as most of this has been spokeshave and then card scraper. Evening out the side height and then adding binding on the top will help with the carve, but pushing the carve back a bit further before fairing the curves into the top would also make it easier to add the binding. 

Pickup cavities just drilled and roughed with a chisel so far. Will finish them to size and then either gouge/chisel the inside or use a trim router to match the tip side of the cavity and leave a clean bottom - not sure yet. Looking at pickup cavities is a popular thing to determine workmanship in a guitar, but I can't get motivated about it being important.


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## D_W (15 Jan 2022)

After a bunch of scraping and shaving while waiting on someone over lunch yesterday (work was to leave no free lunch this week, but thanks to waiting on other people, I got stranded a little, giving some time to work on this stuff and then a little more scraping last night, I've gotten off track a little on the shape after the first go around and figured there's no fighting it at this point, just make the lines look as nice as possible. 

With most of the roughing done (binding will follow after I cut the neck pocket, which is fast approaching), I sanded some of the contours with coarse paper to consolidate and remove unexpectedly lumpy areas. the contour is similar around the body until you get far enough up on the lower bout that the sides tuck in, then it has to narrow proportionally. But I can see the way this looks, the bell that's left there is a bit out of place, and needs to be cut down. Next picture after this one shows why - but basically the issue is that there's a curved surface with a flat part above it, which is unnatural looking. 











Looking from the side makes it a bit more obvious - the curvature is pretty even around the body, but the bridge will end up around where the top arrow is, and the combination of curve to large flat area is ugly. So the "hill" at the belly/bottom of the guitar needs to be shaved down Nothing really gets done to the top as the front is a flattish area where the fingerboard comes on and the pickups and bridge are in the middle and break up the look of the flat are. On a les paul, that are is nearly flat. On some chinese copies, I've seen the bell go up after the neck comes on flat with a dip in the middle. They look really terrible. 

It'd be lovely to get the first one perfect but this kind of thing is how I like to work - see what you're doing so when you work out a method that works with your tools, you know what you're doing and why. It's not going to look terrible, just a different contour than I expected and no violin rout at the edges as the expanse is a bit too wide and shallow. 

The edges look a bit uneven to the eye, but I'll fine them up just a bit before routing the binding channel. 

Not being able to see the center joint is becoming a pain now that it's not flat!! each time I need to freshen the centerline I'm not totally sure, so I've notched the top on the back of the body - my only real observable part of the joint is the unmatched grain at the top of the neck pocket and that's going to be sawn/chopped out. I know people like to rout that with a template, but no thanks. Me and routers have a history of ruining things. 

Leaning toward coloring the limba now and not the neck, and binding only on the top with ivoroid. I have keda dyes (they're aniline) but not premetallyzed or whatever you call the transtint types. I also have micronized pigments (which would be more of an opaque stain) and would rather use those, but can't locate the bags of them now as they're something I rarely use and i'm sure I put them in a box somewhere for fear that the bags would break. Micronized pigment isn't the kind of thing you want to drop.


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## the great waldo (16 Jan 2022)

D_W said:


> So, i did get some unexpected time mid day today waiting on someone else:
> 
> The excellent glue joint has come back to bite me. Can you find it? I didn't find it that easy, and after this had to get a steel straight edge and locate it in two points and make a mark. It's important at this point now for template alignment so that not too much screwing around is needed when fitting the neck. I don't want to measure alignment as it's a visual standard, but don't want to have strings going down the neck of the guitar with uneven relief from the edge on both sides.
> 
> ...


the joint looks like a couple of mm to the left of the red arrows!
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (16 Jan 2022)

Indeed, it does, but it's actually in the light bits between the dark. To find it, I had to take two visible points elsewhere at the neck and pickup cavities and follow a starrett straight edge.


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## baldkev (16 Jan 2022)

Looking great david


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## D_W (16 Jan 2022)

An unexpected (sort of expected), and unwanted challenge arrives. The router base for the binding channel that goes around the top of the body is flat. There's a couple of different fixes available - a dremel tool that people describe as inaccurate (not sure I want to cut binding channels with a dremel tool, anyway - already blew the money on bearing bits that will cut a channel specifically for 1x6mm binding). 

the other fix is some kind of trick thing that stew mac makes that puts the router on a linear rod with a rounded base (I had already thought of the second part but never considered confining the router to a linear movement range up and down to keep it perpendicular). Stew mac already pretty much doubles any chinese tool, and their little contraption to hold the router up with an addon plunge base is $400. No thanks. I wonder if there are repair people and luthiers who buy most of their stuff from S-M- if there are, they must be broke. 

So, I need to turn something in the lathe that will fit on the bottom of my router and I'll judge vertical by eye (which may be a disaster for most, but I have a pretty good freehand sense of that stuff. Whatever goes on needs to seat on the top of the guitar reasonably well but not reach in so far that it will interfere with the top contour on the sides. 

It would take me hours to mark (With a purfling gauge) and neatly cut the binding channel and any misstep would be permanently viewable (which is a bigger problem than the hours.....but I may do that, anyway - cut by hand instead of making a supplemental base for the router. )


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## Simo (16 Jan 2022)

In case it's of interest.. here's a slightly more budget friendly alternative to the Stew Mac jig (shipping is from China) 









Binding Router Jig | ElmerGuitar.com


The router carriage drives your router up and down vertically and smoothly, it follows your guitar body when you cutting the channels, so you can always get perfectly squared binding channels, and fits your bindings correctly.




elmerguitar.com


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## Setch (16 Jan 2022)

Looks like you've decided against tortoise bindings now, but if you do go that route, I'd recommend a narrow white/ivory strip inside the tortoise.

The the colour variation in tortoloid is very transparent in the light areas, so if you use it over a dark background like your RW it will look very plain, and not very "tortois-ey".


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## Setch (16 Jan 2022)

My solution for binding a LP was a simple base for the router to sit on, mounted on a block about 2 inches tall, bolted to the bench, with the router overhanging so you could pass the guitar over the router base. 

Idiotically simple, but it worked. I think if you Google the Setchell carved top jig you might find someone's version of it. My blog where I documented it is long gone.


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## D_W (16 Jan 2022)

Simo said:


> In case it's of interest.. here's a slightly more budget friendly alternative to the Stew Mac jig (shipping is from China)
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Thanks, simo. It looks like Elmer guitars pretty much copies half of the stuff on stew mac's site, but there's no guarantee that stew mac came up with all of it. I just did the binding channel by hand which will encourage me to not fo it again by hand as note I'll have some extra repair work to do and some recontouring of the outside to do to come back to the binding where the channel got a little deep.


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## D_W (16 Jan 2022)

So, I did this by hand because I don't wake up to make router tools. It's generally good, but there are a couple areas of wander that may force a darker finish for the back wood. Ultimately, I'm not satisfied with the result but I'm happy with myself for being willing to experiment .







Sorry, I didn't get pictures of the bad areas, but will show them after I get the binding on, which won't be until after the neck pocket is cut so that i can flush the cutaway joint with the neck.


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## D_W (16 Jan 2022)

I cut that with one of my paring chisels. The effort to make those as well as possible paid off. They were totally indifferent about paring the rosewood. Paring marks removed then with a safe edge file that I use to make chisels.


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## rwillett (17 Jan 2022)

Utterly wonderful. 

If you fancy shipping it to the UK for a while (10-20 years?), I'll give it a good test and check it all works. There is no charge for this service. After this time, I might even be able to play well enough to do this justice.

Thanks

rob


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## thetyreman (17 Jan 2022)

can you show us the purfling tool you used for this? I'd be interested in seeing how it's done.


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## D_W (17 Jan 2022)

thetyreman said:


> can you show us the purfling tool you used for this? I'd be interested in seeing how it's done.



I'll take a picture - you'll be unimpressed!

The pictures of the edge shown are better than some of the other ratty areas in tight curves, but I have some material to move those back and do them a little better. 

This guitar is teaching me a bit of a lesson - but the hope in the end is even if I "learn a lot from it" (as in, there's ratty things, or bits I had to do twice)....that I'll...learn a lot from it. I can't ever make one of something and the magic of making 6 is that by number 3, you're making twice as fast (even by hand) and the rework is a small fraction. 

(I think the trim router and fixtures to do this is far more practical as once everything is lined up, you get a perfect little slot with very little damage to fix and the bearing on the router makes the channel just the right depth whereas I should've probably taken a break somewhere in the middle of this.


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## D_W (17 Jan 2022)

rwillett said:


> Utterly wonderful.
> 
> If you fancy shipping it to the UK for a while (10-20 years?), I'll give it a good test and check it all works. There is no charge for this service. After this time, I might even be able to play well enough to do this justice.
> 
> ...



By the time I'm done, it may take rubber cement to hold it all together!! But no worries, I'm not a good player, either. Played in a cover band in high school, but the bar is pretty low - and was back then. Classic rock was attainable and the biggest thing is have a good charismatic singer (We did...definitely not me), learn the parts and don't stop playing. Now, I have guitars I should absolutely not have at my playing level (a collings CL deluxe is perhaps the most wonderfully made production guitar I've ever seen with the little bits that make makers woo - like the ability to remain perfectly straight for 15 years with no sign of movement anywhere on the entire guitar....). 

Maybe the biggest statement is that I can easily make a guitar that doesn't limit my playing even though it's not going to be nearly as good as a collings!


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## D_W (17 Jan 2022)

The group of tools (I did use an incannel gouge for some inside curves, but forgot to show it here, that's a bit risky as the rosewood is much harder than the limba and cutting a thumbnail of limba out would be easy).

The little plane shown works a treat, but I would need two along with another in short radius for the cutaway. Limba in this case is less forgiving as that plane goes by on the rosewood as it can push fibers to the side and past the lower mark.

The process is just to mark lines on the side and top reasonably deeply - same issue on the inside curve appears - no matter how small your marking gauge, it needs to have a radiused face. Years ago, I bought a mini wheel gauge from LV and then after getting that and the shoulder plane thought "how dumb am I to be buying these trinkets?"

put it away, and then yesterday, remembered that I had it and brought it out and ground it (rounded in one dimension so it fits the inside curves). It works OK - for that job, you just need something that works Ok.

I'm on the fence between making some little planes like the one shown, though, a set of four - two regular ones and two tight radius, left and right with nickers and a fall away fence. It wouldn't take long and much of the work here would be eliminated.

The pricey router setup would be better in terms of speed, but this little plane was enjoyable to use - it just wasn't quite as clean as paring close (across the the guitar, not down from the top toward the back- you'll overcut something sooner or later and if you fence the chisel with your fingers and it's sharp, you can pare very cleanly and then use a safe edge file.

Long story short, it was an adventure in just fetching stuff and seeing if it would work. the paring chisel worked the best. as you can pare the groove and then slowly move over to the marked line.


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## D_W (17 Jan 2022)

It's all turning into a little bit of a mess with misfit things - the tenon isn't as tight as I'd like on the surfaces end to end (so I think I will solve that by laminating a shim to the part that's a bit narrow and working back to snug), the fit of the neck heel isn't that great, but it's OK, and the binding channel is a mess in places. 

Thanks to not thinking bout the templates, I used the templates blindly for the neck and they are done to a 5 degree neck angle. I want something lower, and combined with not quite as need as needed work on the top part of the guitar where the heel meets, I had to move the shoulder of the neck back about a tenth to get a flush fit all the way around. 

At that point, I laid my neck out and measured it and where the nut was was at 24.65 inches. I thought "great, it's probably a 24 5/8" template set, because there aren't many 24.75" neck les pauls. 

Nope -24.75. I left some squish room at the top of the neck blank (it's still fat all over and I think that won't be a problem, though. We'll see. The worse the mistakes get, the darker the finish 

I was aiming for 3.8 degrees with no particular thoughts about accuracy, though, and the top slope of the body is ....a tiny hair under 4 - that's at least a good result.


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## D_W (18 Jan 2022)

Setch said:


> Looks like you've decided against tortoise bindings now, but if you do go that route, I'd recommend a narrow white/ivory strip inside the tortoise.
> 
> The the colour variation in tortoloid is very transparent in the light areas, so if you use it over a dark background like your RW it will look very plain, and not very "tortois-ey".



I think I may not have responded to this. I agree with what you say - you lose the effect of the binding if it's too close to the guitar color, and the pattern itself gets diluted. that's part of the draw to some extent, and I realize that's not general taste.

I lulled myself into thinking this would be easier to do mostly by hand than it is (fenders were never made to be done mostly by hand, but there's generally something flat to reference in them and binding the slab top even with just a paint remover gun, acetone and celluloid is pretty easy.

I'm not going to react to this by not doing it by hand again the next time even though that would be the smart thing - after failing to make the binding channel as neat and even depth, I'm more apt to take on the challenge of making hand tools that will assist. famous last words.."it can't be that hard to figure it out".

I had a contract made USA dean guitar at one point - one that was sort of a copy of the PRS double cut design. I found it interesting that they bound nothing on the guitar....

it had an ebony fingerboard and it took me only about 8 years to notice that the fingerboard was actually bound. This was before I ever built guitars, but you can hide fret slots without binding pretty easily on ebony if you want to...that's my defense, at least. It had black binding so neatly done that it was hard to see.


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## D_W (20 Jan 2022)

I experimented with something yesterday that I don't figure most would be comfortable with, but after cleaning up the cutaway area (it was already a bit fat of the template, and the binding channel cutting was worst there, so I used the OSS and cleaned up most of the channel and recut it). 

But then, I realized that I have a right angle battery die grinder (which seems to me to just be a battery powered VS router in drill form. 

I realized that I can actually cut shy of the bottom mark freehand with the bearing bit. I don't think most people would be comfortable with this, as there's no depth stop. Then, thinking this morning, I figured I could clamp a depth stick to the side of the die grinder and round its profile a little bit so that it won't contact the carved top in from the edge. 

I suppose that some may place this bit onto a guitar and lose control of it , and obviously, eye protection is needed. The operation is two handed by necessity for accuracy and control, so there's probably not any personal danger. 

I'll fashion a depth stick later today and see how it works on a test piece (this guitar already has a binding channel that's cut a bit deep, so nothing is needed - but that will create extra work contouring the body sides back to the binding when it would be nice to have things very slightly the other way (the binding channel more accurately cut and just proud of the guitar sides so that the binding can be scraped back after affixed. 

This type of experimentation is a large part of the fun for me. 









18V ONE+ HP COMPACT BRUSHLESS 1/4" RIGHT ANGLE... - RYOBI Tools


18V ONE+ HP COMPACT BRUSHLESS 1/4" RIGHT ANGLE DIE GRINDER




www.ryobitools.com





(This is the "die grinder". It's surprisingly good, extremely strong, and not cheap - about $100 just for a bare tool, but it has decent speed control plus four ranges topping out at 10k through 24k rpm. The binding channel bit takes such a small amount out that I didn't even feel the bit trying to do anything untoward on a climb cut just faffing freehand, and then used it freehand to cut near the line on *rosewood* inside the cutaway with no issue. Without anything other than the bit, though, you have to have a careful hand so as not to cut past the line and not let the thing wander off the side of the guitar, and then you still have to pare to the depth mark. 

with a stick on the side of the die grinder, no mark will be needed at all, and as much as I'd like to cut everything possible by hand, too much handwork after cutting the binding channel may leave the sides of the guitar looking less good - care will be needed to make sure that the recontouring, even though it's a very small amount - like a fraction of a mm doesn't leave marks. 

Neck is fit and cut to size width wise, so next thing to do is bind the body and prep for making the fingerboard and shaping the neck. Neck fit seems decent - we'll se how close it ends up being to straight (Center line all in place and not oddball string or pole piece issues like you can find on a gibson where the strings can be off to one side of the neck and or not over the pole pieces on the pickups).


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## D_W (20 Jan 2022)

make fun if you want, but this is all it takes to do the archtop - wish I'd have thought of it earlier, but only the troubles otherwise forced me to think a little bit. 

Just a piece of softwood profiled for a contact point and you keep the contact point against the top or something (careful around corners) and keep both hands on the tool. 

a quickgrip clamp is plenty to hold the thing in place (there's a sliver or rubber drawer liner on the fixture to keep it in place against the router side). 

Would've saved a lot of effort and yielded neater results. Took about 10 minutes to think it out and make it out of spare junk wood - may make another one with a foot with a larger area and at this point, I prefer using it to the router alone as I can see what it's doing and going out of square won't happen (I don't have a router table with a 1/4" collet, so just running the flat top guitars around a router table like you would a pin router isn't going to happen).


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## D_W (20 Jan 2022)

For the folks who can built something great on the first one - coming up with fixes like this - i often wonder what it's like to be that guy. So far on this guitar:
* pickup cavities are a little sloppy, even for me (that's just laziness)
* I had to slip the neck cavity to make sure I will have a tight neck joint on the sides and no rotation of the neck (this isn't a big deal)
* the binding is going to be squirrely (it took that to initiate thinking harder about the hand router - and then the theory of spontaneous junk springs a solution forward) *
* the top carve is over done in a few areas, especially in the belly area - it should be tucked in at the sides and more gradual and convex almost to the edge on the lower bout - I ended up chasing that belly in a bit too much, but that's just learning
* who knows what else will come up. I'll be manually cutting and making inlay from sheet for the fingerboard (which I haven't done to this point - it shouldn't be something that gets screwed up that bad, but we'll see. I guess it's a lot easier to just keep making fingerboards until one is good. 

I've got little interest in building one of anything any longer as the first one is always a "throw away". Hopefully not literally in this case, but it's the thing that teaches you what problems you'll have and then number 2 is almost always improved 90%.


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## D_W (21 Jan 2022)

So, let's call the body a lost cause other than a learning experience (still has a chance to be a nice playing guitar, but cutting the binding channel manually, etc, not a great idea, but at least that spawned the die grinder setup idea for the next time. You can really bury a lot of time trying to fix sloppy binding work and it'll probably never quite look right).

On to the neck while I fill all of the binding gaps and try to get at least to a point that a dark finish will hide most sins.

I like somewhere around 0.88 for nut thickness (for the uninitiated, lower 0.8s is a thin gibson neck and above 0.9 is getting pretty tubby). that includes the fingerboard which will probably end up a little above 0.2. the neck blank hasn't moved at all (it really has no excuse to as old as the wood is) - long story short, hand roughing starts by guesstimating what the shapes will be and where not to cut.
depth at nut and depth near 12th fret (not exact yet - everything is 5 hundredths fat as I always overcut something) cut straight through with a float and then some waste chiseled away to give room for a spokeshave and then waste away the stuff in the middle.

I *always* overcut the center of the neck a little if not paying attention so I went about 2 hundredths past where I'd need to be around the 8th fret (but courtesy of the 5 hundredths cushion, no big deal.

I a ruler is a must. It'd be interesting to have a custom sized belt sander to do this, but not that interesting.







after this point, then I partially profile (still left fat - everything is fat a couple of hundredths)the endpoints with a rasp. will do the heel and volute later after establishing this a bit fat. I don't know of a good way to do that other than chisel/rasp. I've seen gibson employees do it with a low radius belt sander idler, but I'm not willing to do that - it doesn't take long to do by hand.





Then wasting between the marks as evenly as possible - this is over in a flash. If I got closer to finished profile, it probably wouldn't be a big deal, but I'll do that later.


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## D_W (23 Jan 2022)

aside from some filling below the binding channel to clean up some nits where the binding and body meet - I'm at a sort -of-standstill - as described above (they are not of the type that can just be left at this point as I don't know the color of the tone on the side and back (it will probably be on the darker side - thin coats of dyed shellac and then clearer top coats) and can't just plan to fill them as part of the coloring.

Still need to cut the step routs on the cavities on the back (where panels will lay in), and then rout the outside roundover. 

The neck is at a point where I need to decide what order I'm going in - having no clue what the "right way" is, and maybe some disinterest. I think at this point, I will make the fingerboard and profile it after it's on the neck. Fretting will occur then, also, and not sure yet about binding, but probably also after on the guitar for the fingerboard. Someone doing this with pretty good control/jigs/cnc, could likely do this all after the fact - i'll have to think further - what I don't want is the les paul style binding over the frets - it shortens the fret length and the nut width on my neck is undersized by about a hundredth or two before getting the fingerboard and side binding on.

At any rate, I sometimes cut fingerboard blanks - they never actually stay flat, but close is nice. I was going to use ebony, but I'll save it for a nicer guitar and also maybe in favor of not having too many different colors. I've got a few quartered rosewood fingerboard blanks that I sawed several years ago and marked one up off of the template for fret size and inlays.

I should've just done block inlays, I like the looks of them better, but wtf...might as well stick to the LP standard pattern more or less.

The gist of the following pictures is that I used a budget steel router bit on a dremel tool with a plunge base to waste away the centers and then chiseled. I can tell the difference between my chisels and early 1900s buck chisels in rosewood. Mine are better. Is that arrogant? They are definitively better in rosewood - I grind them neatly and make them hard and fine grained on principle but didn't expect to see something where it made a difference other than that. In this case, the lands are fine (but still there, it's important that they be for corner strength) and both my later file chisels and 26c3 can chisel to the line in dry rosewood and then twist out the chips without any issues. The buck chisel doesn't fare that well, but you can of course resharpen it. The trick in this case is I used a 1/8th chisel in some of the finer inlays and I haven't made myself one yet (but I have for other people - I guess I'll do it sometime).

You can see that the inside are sloppy - I cut them overdepth so that I can bed the inlays on something - will decide what later - and so that the precision of the "dremel" plastic router base doesn't come into play. They're not that overdepth, but I didn't want to push the inlays in for these pictures. Inlays are celluloid, cut from a flat sheet. You can buy precut ones, but I didn't. I number them as I don't finish the neat part of the rout (corners, etc) until the inlays are being fitted.

I hope this celluloid isn't super fresh - it shrinks over time.

Collings makes all kinds of stuff for their guitars out of ivoroid, but it shrinks a lot and they do the roughing, let the stuff sit, and then make knobs and pickup rings out of it literally at least a year later. They're awesome. I'm just trying to get a playable guitar - I'd love to match their workmanship later, but it sure isn't going to be on the first 2 or 4 builds. I still want to do a good job on this, though, even though some other parts of the guitar are ugly (the fact that the top carve is overcut in the lower belly is something that just can't be hidden, though. It's going to look funny.

Unfortunately, the camera takes the sparkle out of the celluloid, but I love the gawdy look of the aged celluloid. Maybe when I grow up, I'll make some out of shell.

To size the celluloid, the wonderful drum on the ryobi OSS is useful (Freehand, of course) - and I trim the flat sides down from the overfat original mark with a nicholson supershear. Having all of this garbage around from toolmaking is just wonderful for guitars. The neck is to size with the template. Later, I'll trim the width to the actual guitar needs, and then plane somewhere around the thickness of the binding off (just under that) times two. I've always just cut frets freehand with a dovetail saw (you just have to pay attention - no jumping out of cuts) and then planed the profile onto the neck later - celluloid planes nicely).

You can mark all of the fret slots while the fingerboard blank is still square, too - I don't. That's just what smart people would do.

Themarking knife used to cut the fret slots is literally a $12 buck pocket knife. Double bevel is nice here. I just held the template against the side of the fingerboard, punched in a tiny knife line, calculated the difference in width end to end and used the edge of the table and a caliper to hold the neck half of that in from the edge (as in, if the difference is .546, then the caliper is set to 0.273 and you hold the square in place and mark with a few light strikes.

I will cut the frets lots before profiling the fingerboard, though I've done it both ways.

As far as cutting frets goes, I don't have a saw that is set just for fret cutting, but I have four dovetail saws and I'm sure one of them will cut almost exactly the width of the fret slots. If I don't have one that does, I will adjust one so that it does. It's nice to make things work rather than have to constantly buy garbage.


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## D_W (23 Jan 2022)

My good friend George gives me grief sometimes about not just buying a pre-slotted fingerboard blank (he's got a specialty setup to cut fret slots with a thin blade, though), but I just never trust the vendors to make grain straight like this. I think this kind of straightness shows care from a maker -even though the guitar won't show perfection. 

It'll probably take me about two hours total to have cut all of the cavities and sawn and fit the inlays - someone making guitars for a living could come up with a setup to blast through this, but that's not the objective here. I'm trying to become a walking ball of feel and skill that is adaptable because that's what makes making fun.


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## the great waldo (23 Jan 2022)

D_W said:


> aside from some filling below the binding channel to clean up some nits where the binding and body meet - I'm at a sort -of-standstill - as described above (they are not of the type that can just be left at this point as I don't know the color of the tone on the side and back (it will probably be on the darker side - thin coats of dyed shellac and then clearer top coats) and can't just plan to fill them as part of the coloring.
> 
> Still need to cut the step routs on the cavities on the back (where panels will lay in), and then rout the outside roundover.
> 
> ...


Hi D-W 
Thats nice pearloid, may I ask where you got it from ? 
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (23 Jan 2022)

philadelphia luthier supply. 

Lots of choices in the US, as well as directly from china (but chinese supply stuff isn't reliable if looks count. OK for plain celluloid bindings, but things like sheet, etc, often show up different # of plies than the listings say, different colors, different thickness, etc. 

Trouble in the US is the larger retailers consider any amount of celluloid hazmat (some ebay sellers do not). 

I think the sheet of this is good for 3 guitars' worth of inlay and is about $30 (good thickness so that when the neck is profiled to 12" radius , there won't be any uglies.


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## the great waldo (23 Jan 2022)

Thanks for the info. I've had some pearloid from them a few years ago and it was good. In fact most of their stuff is good and prices are reasonable, the only problem being getting hammered by the shipping and duty taxes here in europe which adds up to about a third on top of the whole order including the shipping and noe that the UK has left the party i'm double stuffed. I remember before September 11 getting celluloid was no problem after that the airlines wouldn't fly it. One of my suppliers in the uk offered me all their celluloid binding at a giveaway price as they wern't allowed to store it because it was a fire hazzard.
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (23 Jan 2022)

It definitely catches fire easily - cutting, high speed sanding, whatever - it starts to smolder and doesn't want to stop. 

There was a fellow in the US (arthur hatfield) years ago who ran a business making high quality mastertone style banjos - he burned his shop as I recall cutting binding from sheet (I guess that's less expensive - he ran a tight operation). 

(looks like he's still working, though he lost a lot and was burned - his person - enough to be out of commission at the time.)

as a hobby builder, I guess if celluloid gets hard to get in any quality at some point, I'll try to beg some off of older builders (it seems everyone has a pile of everything - professionals at least - when they wrap it up) or just buy figured maple and make inlays from wood.


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## the great waldo (23 Jan 2022)

I had a similar occurence years ago when I was cutting a spacer for a p90 pickup on my bandsaw. It started to smoke, luckily I had cup off tea on the saw table and managed to dunk the part in it before it went up in flames !! Also had an ocasion where a roll of tracing/drawing paper started to glow red and burn leaning on a water radiator. That really surprised me. It must have had some kind of laquer coating on it to combust so easily as the radiator wasn't to hot and was sealed.
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (23 Jan 2022)

When I was a boy, I lit a few guitar picks on fire, surprised by their vigor burning. 

Earlier today , just to test how easily it would combust, I cut four inlays on a spindle sander (no issue). Then, I tried cutting them on the idler of a medium speed belt sander and to my surprise, one started to smoke and quickly started to propagate on its own (as in, instead of just smoldering out, it intensified on its own without a flame and I pinched it (which probably wasn't smart - I have a bucket of water next to my grindres). 

I just read an older article about celluloid nitrate that when it smolders, it can propagate on its own and increase temperature and light on its own. The smoke that comes off of it is explosive and toxic - but that was a 1969 article. Whatever the case is, I'll stick with the low speed sanders, and fortunately, they're in my grind area where I always have a dip bucket for grinding hardened chisels.


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## GuitardoctorW7 (24 Jan 2022)

D_W said:


> aside from some filling below the binding channel to clean up some nits where the binding and body meet - I'm at a sort -of-standstill - as described above (they are not of the type that can just be left at this point as I don't know the color of the tone on the side and back (it will probably be on the darker side - thin coats of dyed shellac and then clearer top coats) and can't just plan to fill them as part of the coloring.
> 
> Still need to cut the step routs on the cavities on the back (where panels will lay in), and then rout the outside roundover.
> 
> ...


Nice job thus far looking forward to seeing (and hearing) the end result. 
I recently replaced the fingerboard on my 1972 LP Deluxe that I've had since I was a kid. The reason being an silly person re-fretted it years ago and for whatever reason planed the fingerboard, which destroyed two of the inlays "Don't worry I made new ones with Aryldite and silver paint!"... grrr!
A few years later I made friends with a great luthier called Graham Wheeler down in West Sussex (he's worked on guitars for EC and Midge Ure and is a top guy). He had some 60's pearloid sheeting and made new ones to replace the botched inlays and did a much nicer re-fret, but it always bugged me that the position dots were half moon shaped as the board had been reduced from about 7mm to just over 3.
So Graham is my mentor in my future retirement career and current hobby of Luthiery as well as my friend. During lockdown I told him I was going to remove the fingerboard put a mahogany packer behind it and rebind it to hide the repair and replace the inlays with reproduction ones from Historic Makeovers in the USA. He laughed and told me not to or I'd be in a whole world of pain and he was right. The old board just crumbled in to a hundred pieces even with every fancy silicon heater and specialist removal tool available.
So now I was left with a beautiful guitar that was intrinsically scrap. HM wanted $1500 + shipping to repair it, and considering the amount of work involved that's a fair price, but Graham told me to have a go myself. "You can't f**k it up and if you do we'll sort it."
So here is a couple of pics. One of the completed board and one of it on the guitar. There was a slight back bow with no strings on and a loose truss rod, which comes out under tension. So She's strung over pitched, just to let her settle down before I dress the frets properly and make a new nut.
A lot of work but so satisfying.
I agree with you about the binding nibs, as does Graham. Gonna re-fret my 83 335 later this year and remove the nibs.
Good luck
G


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## GuitardoctorW7 (24 Jan 2022)

GuitardoctorW7 said:


> Nice job thus far looking forward to seeing (and hearing) the end result.
> I recently replaced the fingerboard on my 1972 LP Deluxe that I've had since I was a kid. The reason being an silly person re-fretted it years ago and for whatever reason planed the fingerboard, which destroyed two of the inlays "Don't worry I made new ones with Aryldite and silver paint!"... grrr!
> A few years later I made friends with a great luthier called Graham Wheeler down in West Sussex (he's worked on guitars for EC and Midge Ure and is a top guy). He had some 60's pearloid sheeting and made new ones to replace the botched inlays and did a much nicer re-fret, but it always bugged me that the position dots were half moon shaped as the board had been reduced from about 7mm to just over 3.
> So Graham is my mentor in my future retirement career and current hobby of Luthiery as well as my friend. During lockdown I told him I was going to remove the fingerboard put a mahogany packer behind it and rebind it to hide the repair and replace the inlays with reproduction ones from Historic Makeovers in the USA. He laughed and told me not to or I'd be in a whole world of pain and he was right. The old board just crumbled in to a hundred pieces even with every fancy silicon heater and specialist removal tool available.
> ...


Silly person FFS!! really???? he was an ar***hole but I d I o t was a nicer term


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## D_W (24 Jan 2022)

GuitardoctorW7 said:


> Nice job thus far looking forward to seeing (and hearing) the end result.
> I recently replaced the fingerboard on my 1972 LP Deluxe that I've had since I was a kid. The reason being an silly person re-fretted it years ago and for whatever reason planed the fingerboard, which destroyed two of the inlays "Don't worry I made new ones with Aryldite and silver paint!"... grrr!
> A few years later I made friends with a great luthier called Graham Wheeler down in West Sussex (he's worked on guitars for EC and Midge Ure and is a top guy). He had some 60's pearloid sheeting and made new ones to replace the botched inlays and did a much nicer re-fret, but it always bugged me that the position dots were half moon shaped as the board had been reduced from about 7mm to just over 3.
> So Graham is my mentor in my future retirement career and current hobby of Luthiery as well as my friend. During lockdown I told him I was going to remove the fingerboard put a mahogany packer behind it and rebind it to hide the repair and replace the inlays with reproduction ones from Historic Makeovers in the USA. He laughed and told me not to or I'd be in a whole world of pain and he was right. The old board just crumbled in to a hundred pieces even with every fancy silicon heater and specialist removal tool available.
> ...



Looks great! I've never had to deal with repair people, but did sit through a guy in DC (as in the capitol in the states) giving me a lecture about refretting a guitar in a little over an hour, and about how it would've been a terrible job because he charges at least $500 for a refret. I think the repair industry is filled with a lot of shysters who are trying to make a solid career by stretching out repairs, and then on the other end of it, I guess everyone can hang out a shingle and when I was younger, I never had a tech explain what they were going to do when I took a guitar in (which may be because they're just guessing, and you're left with a bill and an improperly repaired guitar). 

Looks like you did a fine job. There's little to the fingerboard part of a guitar, and really a lot of it, that's more than just careful woodworking and taking the time to get a good result. 

Had a similar fingerboard on a yamaha les paul style - about the same age as your deluxe. Pulled the frets on it and it broke out like it was powdered in some places, but I stuck it out and repaired the spots and replaced the acrylic inlays with celluloid (not a fan of the stickiness of the plastic under fingertips). 

My favorite les paul so far was a 1976 LP - but things have gone up. I got a kalamazoo 1976 paul that had been resprayed from japan for about $1950 several years ago. I ended up selling it in favor of keeping a collings instead, but for all of the nonsense talked about 1970s les pauls, that one was straighter than most I've had and the later 70s t tops had some snap - it sounded great. I kind of wish I'd have kept it, but there are space limitations. 

I get the fact that gibson can just size the fingerboards with frets sanded off flush and then slap binding on them and scrape/file/sand the binding back and avoid doing the fretwork, but I've noticed that a lot of famous players have their guitars refretted with that removed. It'd be easy to set up and do the frets that way for us, too - it's just a trim router with a flush trim bit and then some filing - laziness tempts me, but I'll do the frets frets the right way in the end. Love a freshly refretted older guitar - even though the used market seems to hate when any older guitar gets fresh frets.


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## baldkev (24 Jan 2022)

Is the body really that bad that you cant salvage it? 
Great work david


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## D_W (24 Jan 2022)

baldkev said:


> Is the body really that bad that you cant salvage it?
> Great work david



oh, no. I'm complaining because it won't look good. The top rosewood was $200, though, so I'm not pitching - realistically, I have to make a couple of meh guitars to learn where I'll have problems and then go on from there. What I'll have to do with the later hand done tops is draw the topographical lines with the templates and still do them by hand, but make a contour template for three parts of the belly and that will avoid the trouble - as I chased the low belly back early in this process, just a little rounding was all that was needed, but I took the lower part of the belly out most of the way and that was that. 

I've got other little aesthetic nits and a nut that's going to be pushing it to be close to the gibson standard size (1.695") - whatever it is, I'll deal with it. As long as it notes clear and sounds decent, all will be well. 

Hopefully, the second will be 75-90% better and the third will be good all the way around.


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## D_W (24 Jan 2022)

I was curious what this thing will weigh - I'm not that excited about limba, but I could get it in quality that I can't find mahogany. I can find mahogany in one piece bodies, but the flip side is that it's unstable and I don't think the drying is as great as the vendors say (as in, maybe it was kiln dried, but a lot of it is flatsawn and it has a lot of moving to do with a couple of seasonal cycles). 

At any rate, before I make a point - limba is soft for its weight. which is strange. it's often light, but this blank isn't overly so (it's not heavy either, but for what should be a little harder wood, it takes deep dents no matter what touches. I guess the protection against that when it wasn't unstylish was a heavy lacquer finish so that you had to hit it pretty hard before you could crack the lacquer). 

gibson complained about it splitting (I'm sure it could, but everything probably does compared to mahogany). 

to my point if you can make a resonant LP around 8 1/2 pounds, that seems to make very nice strong mids, and the guitar has some personality without plugging it in. Get up to 10 pounds or over and it starts to be more like a piano (all of this can be mitigated pickup output faffing). 

This guitar is looking like it will be almost exactly 9 pounds. I doubt the rosewood is much heavier than hard maple (I measured a neck similar to this stuff and it was 5% more dense than hard maple - it's not like cocobolo or gombeira or something that can easily get past the density of water). 

9 seems good enough (that's just taking the guitar and a pile of hardware and other parts and slapping them on a scale). 

What's left to come off of the neck can't be more than a couple of ounces. 9 pounds is a pleasant surprise - it has some chance to be musical whereas plain lighter limba that I've used for a telecaster is dead like a sponge (I think I said it earlier here, despite that, it's fine when plugged in - the electronics are telecaster, the scale is telecaster, it sounds like a telecaster).


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## GuitardoctorW7 (25 Jan 2022)

D_W said:


> Looks great! I've never had to deal with repair people, but did sit through a guy in DC (as in the capitol in the states) giving me a lecture about refretting a guitar in a little over an hour, and about how it would've been a terrible job because he charges at least $500 for a refret. I think the repair industry is filled with a lot of shysters who are trying to make a solid career by stretching out repairs, and then on the other end of it, I guess everyone can hang out a shingle and when I was younger, I never had a tech explain what they were going to do when I took a guitar in (which may be because they're just guessing, and you're left with a bill and an improperly repaired guitar).
> 
> Looks like you did a fine job. There's little to the fingerboard part of a guitar, and really a lot of it, that's more than just careful woodworking and taking the time to get a good result.
> 
> ...


I personally think a standard re-fret (unbound rosewood board) should take 2 -3 hours at least, and more depending on whether it's bound and what problems get thrown up, and in a modern age if you're paying for a skilled luthier to do it £60 an hour is not unreasonable + materials. VW charge me that to work on my old Golf!! When I was younger the guitar repair guy was like a God with a mystical power, and there were good and bad ones a plenty. Graham my luthier friend, is very old school and is great at what he does and needs minimal kit to achieve great results. He chuckles at all the Gizmos I buy (mostly StewMac) but for me it's a case of better tools in unexperienced hands so I achieve a comparable standard.

I agree prices have gone crazy, but a lot of that is down to chancers on eBay there's so much nonsense talked these days, perhaps there always was? All Gibsons in my experience, and I've played a fair few, are unquantifiable, if you get a good one you just know and I still can't work out where that mojo comes from, there are as many bad ones out there as there are good ones. You have a Collings and they're everything Gibson should be, but you'd have to go down the Custom shop route to get anything near Collings' quality and consistency. I recently bought an Ibanez George Benson and have never played a bad one of them and the Ibanez factory always seems to excel in quality control too. So it's not unreasonable to expect consistency from the "major" players

Oh and don't get me started on relic-ing guitars FFS! build a perfectly good instrument then run a sander over it!....grrrrr

You'll hate me for this, but I bought my Les Paul in the early 80's for £250 ($337) at a time when you couldn't give them away as it was the era of the Super Strat. I've always tinkered with my guitars and my LP pickups are coil tapped (via the tone pots) it was something you did to improve the guitar, nowadays the Vintage Police would string you up. I still can't get my head around the re-fretting thing too. Frets are like tyres, they wear out and need replacing. Having a 59 Sunburst that's unplayable is a nonsense to me, but the majority of rich collectors aren't really what I'd call players, Joe Bonamassa being the exception. I suppose if I could afford a £500,000 guitar I'd pay the very best to fret it Gibson style, but the nibs aren't a deal breaker if it's fretted well, and plays like a dream.

I think a healthy trait that has emerged these days is that the 2 camp ownership (Gibson and Fender) snobbery has gone. There's many fine commercial makers out there now like PRS, Duesenberg, Suhr and Collings to name a few. There's also some great younger players that blow me away (Joey Landreth, Ariel Posen) and I have YouTube to thank for them. I also have YT to thank for Tom Woodford (twoodford) he's a great Luthier and a mine of information.

I'll let you get back to making sawdust


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## D_W (25 Jan 2022)

Sorry, I misspoke - that was for a fret level, crown and polish with some claim of doing treatment to the fret ends that nobody else could do. I noticed this claim from some high priced repair people - who may have gotten a market. That they do something better than everyone else, and I suppose they snag customers out of fear mongering by claiming that they always get guitars from customers whose guitars were ruined by someone else. 

I agree with you on the fret job. It only becomes eventful if something is damaged or a prior repair was rubbish, but as woodworkers, we have a leg up on understanding things that won't happen (as well as old wives tales about fingerboards cracking because someone left linseed oil on them 10 minutes too long). 

I hear you on the level of playing - my interest in daily playing went away in about 1995, and since then, I've only noodle. The building and setting up is a draw for me - I still play just a little, but wouldn't be able to cut out the building and work for something like a gig in a small cover band (the bar for the 10 gigs a year cover bands here is low, and I'm sure the pay is, but it was low when I was a kid, too - not a problem). 

I started playing in 1988 - I remember getting my first "good" guitar in 1989. The shop owner was an ibanez and gibson dealer. I didn't understand the guitar market back then, but basically in my rural area, if you had ibanez and gibson guitars, you were dominant - you got both ends of the players. Same guy (interesting guy, hardly charged any markup - gibson guitars were always 42% off of retail) had marshall, laney and crate and some others at the time (ampeg for bass, and for a short period for guitars). I recall a les paul standard being something like $1100 at the time and not sure what a custom was, but they were expensive. That guy had a brown 70s les paul custom (Brown as I remember it at least, not sure what it was) and he would let kids like me take it back to the amp room to try out amps. I could hardly believe it (the other shop in town wouldn't let kids *touch* guitars without a parent standing over them, and they scowled at me while I walked around looking at guitars waiting for lessons to start). My point with this is stuff was expensive back then and my dad gave a hard "no" to anything new from gibson and I ended up with an ibanez MC150PW. At the same time, I'd call it an OWT at this point, I constantly heard that all 70s gibson guitars should be avoided - but never remember the slightest bit of unpleasantness about the brown custom other than that les pauls aren't as player friendly as an ibanez musician. 70s standards back then were about $300-$400 and customs were $600-700. 

About four years later, someone brought a brand new LP custom back to the store where I took lessons. I wasn't allowed to touch it (even though I was about 16 and probably could've begged my dad into buying it by that point as I was out playing and getting paid somewhere around the equivalent of $100 a gig now) - the brand new LP custom was put up on a rack without being fastened in, but I wasn't going to press my luck, and someone had already replaced the bridge pickup with a duncan and no cover. $1800. I thought that was a bit high and said something to the guy behind the counter that I would like to buy it if they could come down in price. He gave me a scowl (older guy with a tie more into renting band instruments to elementary school student parents) and said no. A week later, it was gone - my guitar instructor knew I wanted it and said that a collector came in and dressed them down and got it out of them for a little under $1100. I'm guessing it was something like a 1992 black beauty or whatever they called the black customs back then. I still resent that guy. 

The perfect shape MC150PW was $295, which sealed my fate as not getting gibson. It's taken some time for me to find a good one the last several years - I finally got one near perfect this year: $1100. Two others in the past two years bought at a lower price turned out to have fatal issues and I parted them out. Here's the kicker. The pickups on the last one that I parted out brought the same thing in dollars as the whole guitar with case did when I bought mine around 1989 (or my parents bought it). Those pickups are relatively low output paf-ish pickups - probably 7.5-8k ibanez super 58s. We didn't like them in the 1980s because the output made them middling in a live mix. Suddenly now, they're super desirable with bunches of folks, but especially jazz players. 

I kind of wonder what the next trend is. 

(I don't remember anyone with a fender strat back then - only low cost strat copies - everyone wanted to be slash or steve vai, one or the other. the second store where I took lessons sold fender and fender amps, and partially their fault probably (favoring band instruments and sheet music), not many of them. )

A big decline in commodity electric guitar stuff is something I could see in the next couple of decades - I think only constant internet advertising and escapism drives the buying now..

...separately, if I'd have seen how many good players there are all over the place on YT now, I may not have played long as a kid!! In the 1980s, it was hard to get good instruction on anything above and beyond the pentatonic scale - maybe a couple of 45 minute tapes (but they were expensive) and expensive tab books - certainly wasn't any easy way for the average (poor) person to slow video down without shifting pitch.


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## D_W (27 Jan 2022)

cocobolo - no implication in these (they need a bit of hand finishing on the metal bits yet), but I got this wood from a clockmaker. Big pieces for cocobolo - quartered, 1.75" thick, 4.2 inches wide, pin straight and nearly 40 inches long. 





as the design talk is intertwined with the guitars, two things on my chisels with this guitar-wood handles bug me - the handle design is boring, but I choose it because it is the most practical in use. I've made a bunch of prettier styles but these are for someone who will use them. The second is that the bolsters are big, but I am forge welding them, and that is less for parers (I guess I could file these back) and more that the bench chisels are the same style. 

I'm on the fence as to how to assign these boards to guitar necks as they're not thick enough to make a les paul neck without building up the heel (which looks cheap, and if I turn them 90 degrees to laminate, they will be flatsawn orientation. 

The other option is to use them for fender necks (which are not so common at this point in cocobolo - especially quartersawn. 

One thing is clear and in how this goes into guitars, the properties of the wood are different than fresh cocobolo. It is dusty and dry instead of oily (I would guess the oils oxidize) and the wood works nicely and saws like a dream. It still has the peppery itch that cocobolo has (LN stopped offering cocobolo handles eons ago because the workers sanding handles got sensitized to it quickly and that was that. It doesn't help that it's become much more expensive, but there's visually interesting bits to it. 

The chisels themselves are the same as the rest - they are only a little over a tenth of an inch thick, but you can mallet them as hard as you'd like with no ill effect. I set the handles on them into a rosewood block, and very firm strikes - which also gives an opportunity to see if the edge holds up (the top one being an exception - I haven't yet cut a bevel on it. The cocobolo is dry and musical, though, and it would be a shame for it not to make its way into instruments. It wasn't prohibitively expensive, but more than indian rosewood costs at this point. It's far harder and more dense, though. 

This is the underside of the wider chisel's handle - it looks like fire. It would've been nice to have it on top, but when setting the handle, it was straightest turned a bit more. 






back to the guitars....


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## D_W (27 Jan 2022)

I have just one thing to rout yet - the backplate of the pickup switch needs a step. I'll get to it. I don't have a proper size template for this so I freehanded it and then cut to the edge on the other cavity with chisels. 

Then, roundover rout on the back and copious sanding, which is something I never do outside of guitars. The interesting thing is limba planes cleanly, but 120 grit paper on a festool 125 and the wood is all hairy and torn. It's so soft. 











The neck is getting closer to full size - I will install some kind of design at the top of the peghead other than just being round, but haven't decided yet. I need to thickness the peghead a bit further and install a rosewood overlay to match the guitar top. to do that accurately, I think I will need to install the fingerboard first, and that's OK as I'd prefer to finish the rest of the neck shaving and measurements with the fingerboard installed, too. So it'll be a little bit before I get the fingerboard installed and back on this. 

I turned the edges of the peghead template in toward the center a little and reset the gibson-ish lines so that the third and fourth strings will be just a little closer to a straight string pull. I think I will make an inlay in the peghead with my initials, but in celluloid, and will do that I don't know when - probably before the neck is installed would be smart.


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## the great waldo (27 Jan 2022)

Inlay before fitting the neck, it makes it much more handleable. Youv'e got some nice curly maple there, it costs an arm and a leg to get American maple shipped to Europe Spiral cutters work much better with figured woods as they reduce splintering. That won't be seen under the fingerboard anyway. Good job so far.
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (27 Jan 2022)

the great waldo said:


> Inlay before fitting the neck, it makes it much more handleable. Youv'e got some nice curly maple there, it costs an arm and a leg to get American maple shipped to Europe Spiral cutters work much better with figured woods as they reduce splintering. That won't be seen under the fingerboard anyway. Good job so far.
> Cheers
> Andrew



Oh, that's not a spiral cutter issue, the truss rod groove is mortised with a chisel and gouge. But you're right. Id never have left it that way if it were to show. If doing it by hand, I'd have been forced to saw the sides of the groove first. 

Curly soft maple is cheap here. Getting good curly hard maple can be harder, but the neck in this case probably doesn't have more than about $25 worth of wood. It's a local wood here, though. 

Thanks for the suggestion on the bit, though. It's a sign that I'm very lazy on non show items.


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## D_W (28 Jan 2022)

Fingerboard with inlays -admittedly, I have done nothing in researching how inlays are bedded and won't cut the cavities deep next time. I used contact cement here to build a bed and these are basically flush (i'm lacking a good enough bit at this point - need to get a dremel bit of decent quality rather than a rotary bit that came wiht my chinese dremel tool). 

It'll be OK, I think, and if it isn't, I'll just make another one. While Phil-a luthier supply has such nice celluloid, I bought three more sheets. 

Started cutting these inlays with the ridgid OSS and a super shear at first, and realized by the end that they're far faster to cut in this style with an incannel patternmaker gouge on the side and a coarse sandpaper lap for the sides. Tried pulling the celluloid over a plane, also - it just gets a little fiddly with the smaller inlays. 

Reason for the copious glue bed is that these are now along for the ride profiling. 

Cut the fret slots with a dovetail saw that I'd made that is about right for fretwire no set on a .018 plate - the fuzz around the teeth from sharpening brings the slot up to a good size for the frets. If one or two is ever so slightly loose, CA when placing frets will take care of it. 

one light stray cut above the fourth inlay - not deep enough that it'll remain after profiling the neck, I often have a headache and focus issues and really cutting these carefully freehand is getting a bit old. I'll make up a small miter box dedicated to this before making the next fingerboard, and slot the fingerboard while it's still square. 

Not sure when I thicknessed this fingerboard but realized i never checked to see if it's uniformly thick and sure enough, it varies about a hundredth in thickness from the thinnest to the thickest. Will address that after the inlays dry. - it's going to end up being about .23" at the center, which should be fine. 

12" radius is the target - not into compound radius, but did do a fender neck with a 10-14 setup years ago and it turned out OK., Technically, it's a good idea. Practically, it doesn't really result in lower action unless you really do everything perfect from one fingerboard to the next. The lowest action I ever see on any guitar is always on a collings (at least of this style) and they're just a simple 12" radius. Unlike most other guitars, they're made stable enough to hold it, too. 






will pore fill this thing with linseed oil and dust after profiling. 

the clamp is on the only inlay that needs a little persuasion to stay flush. If the glue dries and pulls the inlays in a little bit, I'll just do whatever is needed - the neck of the guitar itself has five hundredths of extra room (thickness) at this point.


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## the great waldo (28 Jan 2022)

Watch out using too much glue as it will soften the celluloid and then shrink it as it dries below the fb level if your'e unluky, and this could take a week or so to happen !! One hundredth of an inch is not much and a bit of sanding should level things up. Whats the point of the pore filler? or is it just for around the inlays, in which case I would just put a drop of super glue in any gaps,sand and the dust should fill it, you might need to do it a couple of times.
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (29 Jan 2022)

that around the inlays, but also on the fingerboard - when the pores are filled with linseed oil and sanding dust (which slowly dries to hard), the color matches a little better than I've had with CA (though hopefully the whole fingerboard will get dark enough to hide that) and if some gets in a fret groove, it's easy to get out.


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## John Brown (29 Jan 2022)

I am in awe of your work rate.
Genuine question...
What is the motivation for making a Les Paul copy? I can see why a manufacturer might want to, for selling to the impecunious, but if you're building from scratch, for your own use, why not build something to your own design?


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## baldkev (29 Jan 2022)

D_W said:


> Cut the fret slots with a dovetail saw that I'd made that is about right for fretwire no set on a .018 plate


Cool, any photos of the saw? 


John Brown said:


> I am in awe of your work rate.
> Genuine question...
> What is the motivation for making a Les Paul copy? I can see why a manufacturer might want to, for selling to the impecunious, but if you're building from scratch, for your own use, why not build something to your own design?


I once sat down and tried to sketch out a few different bodies, but weirdly they ended up resembling existing guitars.... maybe thats my subconscious getting the better of me, but if you end up with something tesembling a strat, that isnt a strat, it might look like you failed miserably to copy a strat 
Theres a lot of body shapes out there, would be difficult to come up with something unique


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## D_W (29 Jan 2022)

John Brown said:


> I am in awe of your work rate.
> Genuine question...
> What is the motivation for making a Les Paul copy? I can see why a manufacturer might want to, for selling to the impecunious, but if you're building from scratch, for your own use, why not build something to your own design?



I will eventually work out some designs where the body of the guitar isn't so obviously made to be machine made and duplicated (for example, the sides of the body are 90 degrees, but there's no reason they can't be compound curves). I don't want to make mistakes on those guitars, though, so working through some established patterns to get the hang of things that I want to do well later). Making copies (for me) is a little bit harder, too, so it presents a challenge to try to do all of the elements (and learn something while doing them) and not leave out stuff that I think doesn't matter. I don't think binding on the neck is very useful, but in a manufacturing setup like gibson has where everything is the same size, you can make the necks and fingerboards separately and it's not such a nuisance as it's proving to be. 

the smart way to do this stuff is to follow either original process, or go find the copious videos where people are using the templates directly with routers, or using tools designed to do the binding (like the expensive stew mac tool). To find a way around it is kind of a nice challenge. When I start making bodies with hand tools only, there will be fewer straight lines and 90 degree areas on them - with hand tools, there's no great reason to bother with that stuff.

On these early guitars, if I do just OK, but with good hardware and wood (and don't copy gibson's peghead scroll), I think it'll be easy to sell anything I don't want to keep, though. Original design guitars, even when really great, sell horribly.


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## D_W (29 Jan 2022)

baldkev said:


> Cool, any photos of the saw?
> 
> I once sat down and tried to sketch out a few different bodies, but weirdly they ended up resembling existing guitars.... maybe thats my subconscious getting the better of me, but if you end up with something tesembling a strat, that isnt a strat, it might look like you failed miserably to copy a strat
> Theres a lot of body shapes out there, would be difficult to come up with something unique









Just a typical dovetail saw pattern with high hang. I made this as a saw with a tall plate and finally ground off most of it a few weeks ago and filed teeth into it. with a tall plate, it was beyond useless. You can't tell quite so easily from the picture, but the teeth are a little sloppy - it seems to be no hindrance - it's blazing fast cutting (they're a little sloppy, but the height is pretty even). Out of laziness if it's necessary, I'll correct the teeth with subsequent sharpenings. 

I made this saw with the tall plate long ago as I'd already bought a saw with a short plate (chris schwarz used to talk about the virtue of a tall saw with a thin plate - I'll bet there are a lot of people with 16" tall plated Lie nielsen saws who don't find them very useful). The apple from the handle came from a fantastic blank that someone sold me (it's dead quartered). I've never been able to find good clear big quartered turning blanks of apple since then. 

Mike Wenzloff used to sell folded backs - this is one of them (the ones that didn't have his brand on are crude with a lot of cracks, though - I think someone else was bending the backs for him and they didn't anneal the brass enough - it's fine, just unsightly and makes the spine look dull, but the saw has been dropped numerous times (I had no regard for it and wasn't careful with it when the plate was tall). the opposite side is chopped off on the top horn - I'll reshape it. I see some lines that could be a little better on the horn, anyway). 
...........


As far as the design goes, once bound by functionality, it does start to seem really like every guitar is some combination of les paul, SG, telecaster or stratocaster. 

PRS? SG with an arch top or les paul with SG horns, however you'd like to view it. 

All of the HH guitars from the 80s like van halen used, and the Ibanez Jem/RG pattern? stratocaster. guild bluesbird - les paul. 

Point being that it becomes pretty hard to have a comfortable bout shape, good access to the neck, and a decent look without stepping on the established designs. The minor things, though, like more sculptural designs not quite so bound to being flat on the body with 90 degree sides, though - that's definitely fair game. I like the idea of a guitar with a carved top that has crisp lines like an F style mandolin.


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## baldkev (29 Jan 2022)

Thats cool 
Ive got a brass backed tenon saw that i bought second hand ( ebay, a tenner ) but although it looked virtually unused, it pulls to one side. I need to look into resharpening and setting teeth ( never done it, disposables had arrived when i started my apprenticeship, i dont recall anyone having a disston etc in the 90s, it was all the orange jack disposables! )


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## D_W (29 Jan 2022)

I've babbled on at various points about it getting easier at some point to just make your own tools. I think that's the case - but there's a learning curve to get over. I'm glad to have this saw (it works better than most vintage saws strictly because most vintage saws aren't in great shape and they are stepped up to new-ish performance by replating). 

I can see why saws like this wouldn't be that great on a site, though. One of my favorite little junk saws for outside work is a short black plastic handled tool box saw with really big impulse hardened teeth. It's murder on fine work, but it's a dandy pruning saw and would be great for blasting through cuts on plastic pipe or 2x4s. And if you bend a tooth on it, you can just get another one for $15. 

it's absolutely not necessary to make saws to cut with, though - there's a gaggle of gents saws that are probably fine for frets, and stew mac- at least at one point, seemed to double the price of one an call it a fret saw. At the time, I just went through my saws (which aren't that many, but I knew the plate thicknesses) and cut a few grooves and found one that frets fit in tight without being too tight (too tight, and the little bit of extra tension from each fret can put tension over the entire fretboard and bow it.


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## D_W (30 Jan 2022)

Everything together may be "too much brown now with the peghead overlay roughed out and glued on (some refinement will be done, and then tuner holes drilled - there's space at the top of the peghead for inlay and some design at the tip (yet to be decided) that isn't just ripping off another peghead design. 

But it may have been more interesting to make the fingerboard out of castelo box for contrast - all of the brown is starting to look a bit 70s - as if maybe the body should be stained avocado green to go along with it, or harvest gold or some 70s fridge combination.


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## thetyreman (30 Jan 2022)

make it a gold top? lol that would be painful to watch, I like the natural colours...


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## D_W (30 Jan 2022)

The gold top would also expose the kind of funky contour, too. I'm hoping the darkness of the rosewood will hide that a bit. I'll let it be what it'll be - it's more or less a learning tool on the first one, and life would be tough if someone wanted to make something completely new and not learn something. 

So, while I've made a bunch of other guitars, they're a completely different style and the differences in the details on this guitar all the way down to simple things like work holding and marking and measuring, just totally different. 

I'll learn in this case that it's like shoes, shirt and pants. If you wear two that are the same color and something else, it looks normal. If you wear pants and a shirt with the same color/pattern and then shoes that look identical ...kind of weird. But shoes matching a coat with different pants between wouldn't be so odd.


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## D_W (30 Jan 2022)

I love the look of the gold tops and black and white customs, though, and all three were probably made to hide wood with visual issues.


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## baldkev (30 Jan 2022)

Looking great david, and the chisels


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## D_W (30 Jan 2022)

Those chisels are sitting in a "Safe space" before they get boxed and sent out. There are supposed to be 3, but the third looks like this (I can't remember if I typed it here). You can see the issue from hardening and tempering in the last inch and a half - oops. That's not coming out any way other than grinding, and then it'll be undersized. 

paring chisels definitely have a chance of warp, even if you feel like you did everything right, so this one will be a shorter version that stays in my rack. 






My shop is a disaster from all of the guitar stuff sitting on the bench and those two chisels have both been dropped (the bigger one twice) resulting in tiny dents on the handle, so they're just waiting there to have the measurements taken off of them so they can be shipped (I want thickness measurements, etc, so that when I make the third, it is similar in thickness and feel and the handle is between those two (since its size is). 

I wish I had enough time to make guitars 3 hours a day and chisels 3 a day. Maybe in 10 years or so.


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## D_W (30 Jan 2022)

neck is bound and little things that need to be fixed (aesthetics) are just mounting up. I didn't check this binding and at the far end, the first inch of length is thinner than the rest of the binding, so ...oops. 

I've not seen that before (a fat end, I've seen, but thin, no), so it's one more learning experience. 

Fortunately, so far, nothing is a matter of structural issues, but the little aesthetic nits are everywhere. Hopefully the rest of the neck shaping and finishing goes OK and the frets don't bow the neck (I use the modern two way truss rod, though- it already had a tiny bit of back bow after gluing on the fingerboard - it's nice to not plane all of that out as it was more than I'd expect. ).


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## John Brown (31 Jan 2022)

D_W said:


> I wish I had enough time to make guitars 3 hours a day and chisels 3 a day. Maybe in 10 years or so.


Maybe fewer, or shorter forum posts would help.


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## D_W (31 Jan 2022)

Try not to clog up my threads. I'd prefer suggestions from people who actually make things.


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## D_W (31 Jan 2022)

finished shaping the back of the neck for the most part over lunch (which doesn't take long) but also experimented with logo ideas.

That's the part I'm not sure about. Should the logo just be initials, like I do on the chisels? Not sure yet. Thought about maybe inlaying a celluloid rectangle with letters inset, but that kind of thing isn't too common on guitars. Not a huge rush, just needs to be done prior to gluing the neck (or should be) which probably won't be until the end of this week. Not real big on the branding thing, so something unique but not tedious would probably be better (and not something that would cause a cease and desist if I ever sell the guitar on reverb - so not stealing of things like cartoon character faces).


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## John Brown (1 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> Try not to clog up my threads. I'd prefer suggestions from people who actually make things.


I do try not to, but sometimes the temptation is too strong.
Right now I am forcefully resisting the urge to suggest suitable branding motifs.
I did actually build an electric guitar from scratch around 52 years ago. It wasn't as fancy as yours, but was apparently a delight to play, although made from random pieces of timber.


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## D_W (3 Feb 2022)

Nut rough fitted, peghead narrowed and recentered (oops) and tuner holes drilled.




(Drilled after the picture, I guess).


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## D_W (3 Feb 2022)

Looks like this was before the peghead was corrected, too. Issue with things being of center was due isn't the laminations as a reference early on, but they're slightly out of square.


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## D_W (3 Feb 2022)

lunch provided an opportunity to do a little bit of sanding and and get an idea of color with linseed oil - fairly pleased with the color (the rosewood is second growth stuff with kind of light color...until it gets oil on it. It will get deeper and warmer as the top coat will be a thin french polish of kusmi buttlonac. 

Everything is fitted on the neck except for frets, which will be this weekend. A lot of hours of work left getting things together and set up properly and located (Bridge, etc). I prefer a french polish process to spraying - it's forgiving and you get to look at what you're doing while you're doing it. The rest of the drilling and fitting of electronics will be post shellac and then I'll touch up any issues remaining.


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## D_W (3 Feb 2022)

and, the neck. 

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, I did something out of square at some point and didn't notice it, so the peghead laminations are a little unbalanced. Note for next time. 

pondering now if the finish should be a lighter colored shellac than buttonlac to preserve the brightness of the figure. I don't think it matters too much.


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## D_W (4 Feb 2022)

I glued this thing together this morning. About 6 large drop of titebond for all of it, just what I wanted. about the top half to 2/3rds of the tenon on each side and just a small line under the fingerboard to the top of the guitar to get a good connection sonically. The lower part of the tenon is unglued and so is the bottom. I doubt I'll be so lucky, but my thought is this will minimize body hump with seasonal changes and the natural shrinkage of wood over time. 

The joint was as good as I could've hoped. It's sloppy so that it's easy on and off (like fraction of a sheet of paper sloppy), but with a thin bit of glue on both sides, it was suddenly tight enough to slip into place with satisfying hand pressure and no left or right movement and no up and down or levering out. Just dandy. 

I used light pressure from two quick grip clamps and then hung the guitar so I could do "real work" for work without any distraction. It's lunchtime and the joint is set. I just need to flush the neck and cutaway joint now (it's very close) so there's no step and then give this thing one more go with linseed oil. I will use just a little bit more when starting the french polish. I thought about fretting the neck first at least above the tenon, but then changed my mind. I'll make a cradle for the neck so that that's not harsh work. I have so many modified files and such for toolmaking that I already have a "safe edge and safe corner" mill file to file fret ends off. toolmaking and guitar making are such a nice pair of things to go together - there's a lot of tooling overlap. 

I may horrify some folks saying this, but I intend to do all of the drilling for bridge posts with a cordless drill freehand - they'll just be marked with a punch so that they don't wander. I am uncanny good (famous last words) at freehand drilling with two visual references in two directions - and tend to have a better outcome with it on stuff like bridge posts than I do trying to jig something. While I've followed little in terms of typical making rules, working by hand and eye and doing a lot of toolmaking has made this guitar about 90% successful so far (everything wrong with it is aesthetic only). 

Make fun of the orange carpet if you'd like. I have a dry basement that stays in the 60s in degrees F all year. the carpet is a copper rust color, and I do metalwork in the shop through the door, so it hides the dust both when it's new, and when it's not! I've fought to not renovate the basement of the house into nicer space because it would pretty much push me out of the house and everyone upstairs has their own room to sleep in as well as enough space to have their own room during the day. I'm not into the idea that they now need to push me out of my work and storage spaces. I've seen it too many times through my friend's dads (my parents didn't operate that way - they used their spaces to do work if they pleased, and didn't try to make 5 different sitting rooms in one house at the expense of being able to do things. 

(the body isn't really as dark as the picture - just overhead lighting. It'll be interesting to see if the brown gets a little deeper with french polish. I will use buttonlac -99% sure - on all of it, which will tone the maple and the limba a lot closer to each other - they're a bit clashy now, but it's all on the back side of the guitar, anyway). 

My theory is this - when you do a french polish, even if you fill pores with pumice or whatever you'd like at the outset, unless you use something filled and truly non-shrinking - you'll be doing a follow up french polish in a few months.


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## D_W (4 Feb 2022)

poor resolution on the front picture, I guess. The inlays are crisp and clean - the fuzzy edges are just part of the image compression.


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## thetyreman (4 Feb 2022)

looking very nice indeed!


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## MickCheese (5 Feb 2022)

I love it. And, thanks for the write-up.

Well done.

Mick


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## rwillett (5 Feb 2022)

Looks great. 

I love the off hand way you describe highly complex details.

this should be a training course for asping luthiers.

rob


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## D_W (5 Feb 2022)

french polish begins - buttonlac. I actually for a second wanted to use blonde shellac, but the blonde that I have is very old and it's dissolving "gelly" so far. What's not gel texture in the jar is actually fine, so I may strain it if it hits a stopping point, but I'm glad it didn't work...

I forgot just how much I love the tone of buttonlac. It's not a "fake vintage" tone, but it has sort of a vintage look right away. It's not a "fake vintage" tone because it's literally the tone of the shellac itself without anything other than being processed into buttonlac. 

If you're used to refined flakes, it basically looks like a floured soup, but it doesn't go on hazy. 

I have sprayed guitars with no real issues before, but I don't really love the process - the french polish process, on the other hand, is divine and with my setup, it takes about the same amount of time (i'm sure crosslinked WB finish that I generally use if spraying is more durable, and it's definitely easier to lay a lot of it on and then sand back - the process just doesn't feel like working something). 

This is just the initial work to try to push shellac into the pores. when I linseed oiled the guitar, I also smashed sawdust into the limba, so the pores were maybe not as deep as they would be otherwise. 

The maple is never going to get a full french polish anywhere the hand goes - it's just a thin finish to prevent the neck from getting filthy and I may not even give it a full pore fill. I don't like thick finish on guitars, but my least favorite thing of all is to pick up one of those heavily lacquered 80s guitars and feel and hear a sccreecccchh as your hand sticks and you miss notes. 

As a uniform thin finish gets built up on the limba, the limba will warm to a more even tone. The super wonderful thing about buttonlac also is that it's been around for eons, so if there's a desire to refresh it in the future, it will literally be a couple of hours total to refresh the entire guitar and shellac will stick to itself through oil, so there's no real hyper "oh my god!!! is there something on the finish that I couldn't see!!!!" stuff. The linseed oil was - certainly - not fully cured from yesterday but I've used linseed oil itself as the rubbing medium for french polish, so who cares. It's so dandy for a hand woodworker.


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## D_W (5 Feb 2022)

I've struggled to come up with an idea for a logo. I don't want to just put my initials on it - i'll do that on chisels with a stamp, but don't really need a logo on the guitar. 

But I have an urge to put a black and white cookie inlaid in the center top of this one.


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## D_W (5 Feb 2022)

rwillett said:


> Looks great.
> 
> I love the off hand way you describe highly complex details.
> 
> ...



I think there's probably two parts to this - I try not to make things complicated if they don't have to be. I get that whatever backwoods method I come up with may not be suitable for a wider public, but I think the method itself (not so much what's being made) is something other folks might like to do, which is just to have a good idea of what you want and then figure out how to do it and be willing to make a few of something to do it well. It feels like you own the making then, and lots of verbal bits and bobs that you just feel or sense - no need to define.

there's an underlying important point, that while I don't know really how to make a guitar, I do know what is in good guitars - I think it's got to be very hard to decide you want to build something and then make it something that you'd like to know about but don't (lots of people building guitars when they don't know what makes a good guitar - so they're probably making decent guitars, but there's something missing unless they have a constant feedback loop). 

I hope to make good guitars. I do already make good tools, but like this, not the way someone would do it professionally. It hasn't been necessary, there, and would be limiting.


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## Sawdust=manglitter (5 Feb 2022)

Excellent work!!

Nothing wrong with initials as a logo, i use my initials as my ‘makers mark’…


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## D_W (5 Feb 2022)

I'd like to inlay it in celluloid - not that what you showed would be impossible, but it would be tough!! I need to make a small fretwork setup to cut celluloid sheet. 

I think in most woodworking goods, though, initials or initials and town/county are a good way to go (stylized, of course). 

I'm chickening out until the guitars are of note.


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## baldkev (5 Feb 2022)

Looking fab David  
Keep up the info, if people dont want to read, they can look at the pretty pictures


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## D_W (6 Feb 2022)

I wouldn't say things move fast now, but all of the finish work will take a total of a couple of hours - the pores are generally filled on the rose wood and I'll save the rest for later. 

(the back and neck will get half an hour of french polishing later, and then if the guitar was set to be finished, I'd do another round, but will save that for later to take care of any scratches, etc, that may occur while installing hardware and frets). 









Same guitar, same time - just an indication of how different the guitar looks hanging with a light accross the room or on the desk with, I guess, the white towel confusing the phone re: light level. I think at the end of this, just going over the binding a few times with an alcohol filled rubbing pad with some oil will eliminate the need to scrape the binding clean - I like the tone that it's taking with the buttonlac. 

The guitar feels very light and resonant - hopefully it stays that way. 

Whereas I thought the buttonlac would make the rosewood look darker, it's starting to bring out the contrast in colors in the rosewood (forgot to get a picture of the peghead overlay, but it shows the same thing).


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## D_W (8 Feb 2022)

Frets in...this is something I could stand to improve a bunch on the next guitar .
Leveled after this, and little spatters of glue removed with solvent.


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## D_W (8 Feb 2022)

A view of the pore filling. After I file the frets (and I'll do it again after I finish polishing them), I use 400 grit paper and work a small amount of linseed oil on the fingerboard. This is not a normal thing, I'd guess, but I like the way the fingerboard feels better with the cake of dust and linseed oil dried in the pores. 

Since I have a relatively roughshod way of installing frets and I'm making the fingerboard by hand, there can be small gaps under the frets here and there. They are unsightly, but as long as the fret is tight and level, i can't tell any sonic issues (my loudest solid body guitar is one I've made, and none of the other seem to suffer anything). 

At any rate, the cake will fill the gap under the frets (we're not talking about gaps of half a freight height, just small gaps from irregularity of fit or fingerboard or whatever. This is one of the reasons I install frets with a drop of CA glue at each end and in the middle. By the time the frets will ever need to be replaced, I doubt the glue will have that much hold - but I'm also unlikely to have to replace any frets as I have too many guitars and building them soaks into the time playing them. 

I did half of these as hammer installation and half with a press. On a fender neck where the fret tangs go to the edge of the fingerboard (unless a small bit is nipped to fill the fret ends on the side of the fingerboard with a color match to the fingerboard), I haven't found a difference between malleted frets, and pressed. On this guitar, I tapped half in and drove them home with a caul/clamp (a press) and those did go in more evenly. I won't go into the factors, but I guess that will become the default method forward along with perhaps making a radius double iron plane fixture to make the fingerboard radius a little more accurately. Whatever the case may be, I'm not buying anything to do it - that's not the point of these exercises - it's to be a builder, and not a buyer of fixes. 







If you look at this picture, the left two frets haven't been sanded/caked yet, the others have. If this is left alone, it stays in pretty well and the oil hardens or the cake dries out and stays put as the oil goes into the wood. This could be done other ways (CA glue would work fine), but this is quicker. 

I will come back later with a much finer paper so that there are no visible marks. This is a good time to do it because I sometimes leave marks on the fingerboard that need to be sanded off (from the corner of the crowning file). 

The crowning file itself is a good lesson in staying away from screw mac. it's basically a rounded parallelogram with diamonds that I got directly from china. I haven't bought screw mac's version (which costs five times as much), but I doubt it's made in the US and if it's hosco (japan), then it's already 30-40% higher at screw mac, anyway. 

The $14 diamond crowning file has done a lot of work over the past 5 years, more than just level crown and polish (because of my less than perfect fret installation, the file gets to do about 30 minutes of solid filing on a guitar like this one). 

These frets are jescar jumbo - something like .056" tall and .110" wide (there are various jumbo sizes and these are probably taller than vintage jumbos). I always feel like I need the extra height in case I get one in lower than others, but they still end up having a lot of height. These are still around full height and may be obnoxious to play due to the high height. 

If they are, I'll make a guitar with lower frets later just to have options. I don't like tiny frets, though, either and admit that a medium fret looks funny on a les paul.


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## D_W (8 Feb 2022)

I don't know that anyone here is actually following any of this to take suggestions on making guitars, but if anyone is, before I level the frets, I check all of the ones that are sitting up a couple of thousandths to make sure they're fully seated. If you don't, you can end up leveling a fret that's not in tight, and guess what you have later when you seat them - one low fret in a sea of frets that isn't low. Not so good. 

I don't accelerate the glue on these frets, so I also do this while seating the fret. It's quite a while before the glue is dry and the couple that I had to pull out and reseat didn't tear up the fingerboard. When I was younger, I was too cheap when making things (mostly airplanes) with CA to purchase the debonder. Now, a couple of drops of it on the end of a napkin allows any CA that shoots out of a fret bottom to be wiped off after the fact (off of the fingerboard) so that I don't have to spot sand to remove it. 

That cheapness was a habit I learned from my dad - it's not always functional. My dad would never dream of making a guitar that cost $1000 in materials to make, though (a lot of that cost is in the hardware here, but the wood could be cheaper if someone is afraid of spending a lot on wood).

Fender guitars are a better idea if wanting to build as cheap as possible - the little things add up on this - like $120 bridge and tailpiece combinations (a much cheaper option could be used), and pickups, pots, switches totaling about $300 (even with the pickups being used). Suddenly, blowing $200 on rosewood for the top doesn't seem like that big of a deal.


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## the great waldo (8 Feb 2022)

Put some paste wax on the fb before putting the frets in (rub it in across the grain to stop too much going in the fret slots) and don't rub it too much. And thatll make any (most) glue spatters that appear pop off when they are hard. Try and make the fret slots not too tight as strangely enough the frets tend to pop up when being hammerd in, maybe not so if a fret press is used. Cheers.
Andrew


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## D_W (8 Feb 2022)

Agree with your comments - if I have a flaw, it's being a little afraid of some things, so I've always made fret slots a bit too tight. Not below the thickness of the bottom of the "T" without the nibs, but pushing things a little bit. That's one of the reasons that I use a two way truss rod, and in the case of this neck, for whatever reason, it developed a little bit of back bow (in the future, I could avoid that by planing just a bit hollow), and the frets pushed it to need another half turn of the truss rod. But I've done that before. 

You hit the reason that I didn't install wax - I was afraid of getting it in the slots, but it probably wouldn't matter if I got a little in them due to the tightness. 

Thanks for the suggestions - I'm inclined to use a different saw or add just a little bit of set to the saw that I"m using.


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## the great waldo (8 Feb 2022)

I learnt the trick abouit not too tight frets slots years ago when I refretted a really nice 335 1964 that I had to do twice because the frets just didn't want to stay down. I used some slighty narrower tang tretwire and the frets went down and stayed down. I noticed that on some early 60's German semi acoustics that the tang had no teeth but the frets stayed ok on the fb and remarkably caused no problems and didn't pop up over the years. Guitars and wood make things quite unpredictable. Nice build so far.
Cheers

Andrew


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## Inspector (8 Feb 2022)

I'm not a musician or a luthier but is there a reason you don't do the inlays, grain filling and possibly waxing the fretboard before cutting the slots and fitting/setting the frets?

Pete


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## D_W (9 Feb 2022)

I think I did the inlays on this one just with scribed shallow saw cuts or knifed lines only (can't remember) , but I did mark the lines first so as not to have wobbly looking inlays. 

But the rest, at least for me, is because I know I will mark the fingerboard one way or another fretting or polishing the frets, so I like to leave all of the final treatment until tool marks (even though they're usually shallow) are out.


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## the great waldo (9 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> I think I did the inlays on this one just with scribed shallow saw cuts or knifed lines only (can't remember) , but I did mark the lines first so as not to have wobbly looking inlays.
> 
> But the rest, at least for me, is because I know I will mark the fingerboard one way or another fretting or polishing the frets, so I like to leave all of the final treatment until tool marks (even though they're usually shallow) are out.


You want to watch out that you don't overradius the edges when doing your FB camber. Your bass side looks a bit overcambered and your fret ends don't look like they're seating well. You might get problems with the strings catching under the fret ends, or if you file over the fret ends you might lose some of your fb width because of the fret and chamfer. IT's a pipper getting a nice radius on a fingerboard as there is a temptation to plane down the edges more than need be as it's easier/quicker than removing the wood from nearer the middle line. By the way I would be more tempted to use danish oil insread of linseed ( although in all honesty I would'nt use any filler at all on a fingerboard)
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (9 Feb 2022)

That's definitely an issue when setting the radius by hand - but I think the reason is that I can get the radius set well, and then the finish sanding causes those to get rounded over a bit. I have two frets on the high side that as they are can catch a high E string. On the low side, I chased the ends in halfway into the binding as I had (not thinking) radiused the top if the binding over (which is the bulk of visible gaps). 

For folks who start from flat stock, I'm curious as to how this is done precisely as even finish sanding overradiuses the edge a little bit - thus the desire to make some type of custom plane to radius the fingerboard in a single pass (that may be wishful thinking). 

This one will work out, but it may require some supplementation under a fret end or two in a mixture of fine dust and hard glue. Not the kind of work I prefer doing.


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## Inspector (9 Feb 2022)

Not your cup of tea being a power tool, but for those with deep pockets there are sanding jigs that can do the work. How well I have no idea. 
Maybe something along the lines of a shooting board with a version of the radius jig.  

Pete


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## D_W (9 Feb 2022)

not sure, but I would guess that the commercial stock is done on a profiled drum or something of the sort as they're very crisp. 

I think the place between "by hand" and "near fully automated" can be a bit of a no-man's land. 

I was looking at guitars the other night on ishibashi and noticing how much more crisp a lot of low to mid cost work is on guitars now. Some of the relatively expensive kramer guitars from the 1980s (that are still 1000-1500 used) have pretty crude woodwork on them in places.


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## D_W (9 Feb 2022)

the great waldo said:


> You want to watch out that you don't overradius the edges when doing your FB camber. Your bass side looks a bit overcambered and your fret ends don't look like they're seating well. You might get problems with the strings catching under the fret ends, or if you file over the fret ends you might lose some of your fb width because of the fret and chamfer. IT's a pipper getting a nice radius on a fingerboard as there is a temptation to plane down the edges more than need be as it's easier/quicker than removing the wood from nearer the middle line. By the way I would be more tempted to use danish oil insread of linseed ( although in all honesty I would'nt use any filler at all on a fingerboard)
> Cheers
> Andrew



Actually, it occurs to me (just looking at the fret ends on the way to the head earlier - the gap is so small on some, and generally over the falling-away binding, that it would probably be smarter to mix acetone and ivoroid on the couple that didn't burr down to the ivoroid as I chased them back - that is, just the tip where a gap just around a hundredth or a little less is there, there are fortunately no large ones after chasing them back) - and fill just the tip with ivoroid/celluloid to close the gap. The frets are in solid - I can't spring any of them at all, not even with a stick - so that'd probably do it. 

(I do know the whole filling in of the pores is a little odd on the fingerboard - it's just personal preference. I don't like finish on rosewood fingerboards, but I don't like big pores, either - even if they're on a brazilian fingerboard.)

I just got another idea for solving some of the fall away issue - center mark a fingerboard, leave it over width and then linear sand or plane the sides to final width after radiusing. that would get rid of the part that falls away slightly. I'll have to be a little smarter about rolling the edge of the ivoroid in at the top, too, and make sure that if it leans in a little, the very tip doesn't get radiused over or beveled to clean off "Scuzz". 

These are the pains of being a "not very good maker", but also why I no longer in my mid 40s have any interest in planning to build 1 of anything. I can make better planes than guitars, so the urge to make an absolutely obscene radius plane is definitely there, but it'd be about a 15-20 hour commitment to make a nice one out of rosewood - cracking a nut with a sledge. ...

I will do it after this guitar, who can resist.


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## D_W (9 Feb 2022)

(at one point years ago, shiraz - the grizzly guy - had pictures of his own guitars all over the webpage along with a link to get a centralized gallery. They were very ornate and looked tightly made, but the style was not my cup of tea!! 

AT that time, the site started to get all kinds of pastes and polishes and other guitar making bits and pieces, but it looks like there's less of it now. 

My view of design and search for tonality and resonance is that even if you're kind of a mediocre maker (like me), once you fix the little nits on a guitar, it still has some style and long term viability looks wise, and has a little bit of sizzle on the playing side. 

Or to put it another way, I hope the design and the materials/core bits are always a step above my ability to execute so that there's something else to carry the guitar along. If the hardware doesn't sap the vibes out of this one and nothing else really goes majorly wrong, it should be really resonant. Didn't stray far with hardware and pickups (duncan antiquities), so those shouldn't be a problem, either. I will be building a few guitars now - figuring on maybe 4-8 this year depending on time allowed and how busy day work is - that always wins if it creeps into extra hours on a project basis. And also what's built, as I could pop out a bunch of les paul specials and fender style guitars pretty quickly. 

Truth be told, I've always kind of liked a good les paul special style guitar a little better than the carved top les pauls, whether it's something like an actual gibson LP special or a collings 290 (the latter is super dandy, but the price of them used has gone through the roof).


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## baldkev (9 Feb 2022)

Bet you cant wait to play it! One day I'll get round to doing one. I guess I'll do a pine one first to see where i screw it up. Ive got a lovely bit of spalted beech which I'll turn into a guitar one day ( sure, it wont necessarily sound good, but it'll look pretty cool )


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## the great waldo (9 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> Actually, it occurs to me (just looking at the fret ends on the way to the head earlier - the gap is so small on some, and generally over the falling-away binding, that it would probably be smarter to mix acetone and ivoroid on the couple that didn't burr down to the ivoroid as I chased them back - that is, just the tip where a gap just around a hundredth or a little less is there, there are fortunately no large ones after chasing them back) - and fill just the tip with ivoroid/celluloid to close the gap. The frets are in solid - I can't spring any of them at all, not even with a stick - so that'd probably do it.
> 
> (I do know the whole filling in of the pores is a little odd on the fingerboard - it's just personal preference. I don't like finish on rosewood fingerboards, but I don't like big pores, either - even if they're on a brazilian fingerboard.)
> 
> ...


I use a stanley 60 1/2 block plane to do most of my radiusing and finish up with a 10" or so block with abrasive glued to it and some elbow grease. I've got some radius blocks which I sometimes use to get started but I prefer the straight block or plane (depending on the grain of the particular FB) Your'e a pretty good maker. I've seen a lot worse over the years. I had an interesting hand made Tele a while ago. The customer asked for a setup, I tried to adjust the truss rod at the body end which had one of those box ali sections with a rod in the middle. The metal nut on the rod seemed worn and wouldn't grip in a Gibson style truss rod key so I cut a slot in the end of the metal poking out as a last chance to use a flat screwdriver to move the nut but no luck. I did notice the rod pushed in a bit and thought it miht be broken so I gave the end of the neck a tap on my bench and a piede of concrete reinforcing rod fell out about 15 " long, I'd never seen that before and I musay it did make me laugh. 
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (9 Feb 2022)

baldkev said:


> Bet you cant wait to play it! One day I'll get round to doing one. I guess I'll do a pine one first to see where i screw it up. Ive got a lovely bit of spalted beech which I'll turn into a guitar one day ( sure, it wont necessarily sound good, but it'll look pretty cool )



If it's electric, as much as I like resonance, there's not too much difference (like very very little). I have an overweight stratocaster copy that's ash and bubinga. It's dead as a doornail and sounds like a piano. With a set of low output single coil pickups, you can't tell that it has endless sustain because the pickups are too weak to pick up the tail end of the signal. Long story short, if you make it reasonably well and put good pickups and pots in it, it'll sound good through an amp no matter what. I play relatively little anymore, but often unplugged when I do - so my desire for a sizzling guitar is biased by that. It's embarrassing to say, I guess, that when I was younger, I played a lot and didn't care anything about the little details like that. It's probably a lot like expensive woodworking tools - they're fascinating, but if you (me) do a tenth of the work you'd do if you were just excited about building, is it better to have them?

I'm interested in seeing how this thing sounds, but wary of this or that wonk to fix yet that i'm not aware of. This is about the point where on a telecaster build, I start moving fast, leave the finish thing and rush to get the electronics in the guitar and slot the nut. I'm trying to avoid that - it's always tempting as soon as something is nearing playability to leave bits of it rushed at the end.


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## D_W (10 Feb 2022)

Not that it's that important (only for me in this case), but I soaked an offcut of celluloid in acetone until it was soft (this is a typical thing for connecting binding or fixing binding problems), like really soft, and stuffed it in the ends of the frets and then knife off whatever hardened outside of the fret. 

Not a fix I want to have to make, but it worked better than I would've expected (there's nothing you can catch a fingernail on in fret ends and the acetone evaporates very quickly leaving a "hard" fix fast).


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## D_W (11 Feb 2022)

No updates at this point - we're in "the slows" where I sit down and run a series of french polish or fix small issues of finish near binding that's hard to french polish. I hope to get the remaining holes drilled for the knobs and switches, which on nice carved top guitars, follow the contour of the carve. 

So, my carve is a bit flat at the belly where the knobs will be, but it's still not flat and I work freehand with driling (same with the bridge and tailpiece holes - drilled by "visual jig" (using squares in two directions as reference and then checking visually with the drill. It's just safer for me with more feel and ability to circle around the guitar and make sure everything is relatively lined up in ever direction. )

I don't much care for wiring guitars - it's not like you can't do it without knowing much about soldering, there are patterns everywhere. I just think it's a pain because I like to know everything about every component (which usually results in me making *everything*, and I don't know much about the internals of audio pots. I'm open to making pickups in the future, but not quick and cheap from kits with plastic bobbins or cheap wire.


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## D_W (11 Feb 2022)

lunch time check of the finish build so far (this whole guitar has all of about 3 ozs of shellac finish on it, and probably a third or more of that is still in the pad). Translation, there's less finish there than it appears and that does equate to not having the luxury of finish depth like you'd get on a high thickness lacquer finish.

The aesthetic nits continue to add up, though - I realize that while the neck is in straight, the right side has a bit of curvature and I think there's more to the right side of the fingerboard than to the left when viewing down from the nut and overhead. That means that there will be enough space on the bottom side for the high strings - no problem - but high side (low strings) is still going to have some excess space and it will be visible - there's just a little too much real estate.

That will make the neck look like the bridge is off center, but it's actually the neck. Fortunately, just aesthetic, but it's part of making the first one where you just go through and make it and learn where you'll have problems - they're always different kinds than you'd expect (I was much more concerned about bridge height being too high or too low, or who knows what else - now I know a couple of places where the fingerboard needs to be more accurate, places I didn't really expect.

red line on the second picture is an exaggeration of what I somehow didn't see when sizing the fingerboard. It occurs to me now that not only does the fingerboard need to be good size, the neck and then the width of the binding all have to be consistent (the binding is 1mm thick, so by that, I mean you can't have 0.7mm on one side and 1mm on another to fit on the neck).


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## D_W (12 Feb 2022)

question for people who have built or thought much about how stuff is done on a les paul - is there a specialty stepped bit used for the pickup switch hole? The switchcraft switches have *very little* thread depth and I'm guessing that hole is stepped and not just a bit flat area only 1/10th of an inch thick. The step between the threaded part and the cylinder below is pretty large, so a regular stepped bit would make two steps before it bridged that gap in diameter. 

I didn't look over at screw mac yet, and I haven't taken apart my two LP copies. I gave the polish one more once over on the top and am ready to install hardware and electrics (will hit the french polish once more in another month or two as there will probably be some pore shrink.


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## the great waldo (13 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> No updates at this point - we're in "the slows" where I sit down and run a series of french polish or fix small issues of finish near binding that's hard to french polish. I hope to get the remaining holes drilled for the knobs and switches, which on nice carved top guitars, follow the contour of the carve.
> 
> So, my carve is a bit flat at the belly where the knobs will be, but it's still not flat and I work freehand with driling (same with the bridge and tailpiece holes - drilled by "visual jig" (using squares in two directions as reference and then checking visually with the drill. It's just safer for me with more feel and ability to circle around the guitar and make sure everything is relatively lined up in ever direction. )
> 
> I don't much care for wiring guitars - it's not like you can't do it without knowing much about soldering, there are patterns everywhere. I just think it's a pain because I like to know everything about every component (which usually results in me making *everything*, and I don't know much about the internals of audio pots. I'm open to making pickups in the future, but not quick and cheap from kits with plastic bobbins or cheap wire.


I've been making my own pickups for about 10 years now and it's not rocket science to make them, however getting them to sound as you want them to is like making an acoustic guitar and knowing what it's going to sound like at the end, if you cna do that then buy some lottery tickets. Wiring guitars is not difficult but there can be unseen traps (poor components dry joints etc) that can lose you a lot of time in troubleshooting. By the way what's cheap wire?
Cheers
Andrew


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## D_W (13 Feb 2022)

Cheap wire that sounds off in pickups being modern coatings and a thicker gauge. My thoughts on pickups are what you mentioned...I can follow the instructions for making a humbucker, but if getting them to sound like lollars or antiquities is a crapshoot, then, I'll probably do what I should do and not get into that unless boredom sets in.


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## D_W (13 Feb 2022)

following up on my question yesterday -switchcraft (and of course, then a bunch of copies add on) makes a deep threaded nut in case you don't want to have a thin threaded area with the tall switch. It still seems a bit odd to me that the tall switch has such odd thread length, but rather continuing to make the rosewood under the switch thinner, I've just ordered the deeper nut instead. 

I'm always a bit shocked how expensive the switchcraft switches are but they must not be that easy to make aside from the cheap short height import copies. Once you pay shipping and tax, you can be ballparking $30 -$35 just for the switch. I've never liked where the switch is on a les paul, but not going to change something that significant in design. 

I've wired the pots and waiting to put them in the guitar - everything else but the nut is on right now (ran out of braded wire, so I'll have an excuse not to rush too fast and get the nut set and fit nicely. 

In the world of convenience, there's someone in the US who makes a prewired switch set along with pre-wired pots, and you can be out $160 just for a wired switch, pots and a specialty pair of capacitors. I think the total take or jack, switch pots and wire will be about $60, but I could be plus or minus a few bucks there. 

It's definitely cheaper to build fender style guitars as a lot of the cheaper components are better quality (especially the fixed bridges - there are decent quality fixed bridges for $15, and with some regularity, used pickguards with custom wiring and pots already setup are as cheap or cheaper than just the cost of the pickups just because someone decides they want to change the stuff in their strat or tele.


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## thetyreman (13 Feb 2022)

switchcraft are expensive but very good quality though, well worth it imo, they are built to last, for a guitar of this quality it is needed.


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## D_W (13 Feb 2022)

They are the only switches I buy - I'm just whining. I have a couple of switches that have come with epiphone sets, and they look OK (not sure why I still have them), but I like taking old guitars apart little enough not to save the $10 there. 

The cheapest the switchcraft switches are here is about $17.50 each if you buy 10, and not enough more than that for fewer to make it worth it to me (bad habit in the past of thinking I'll build 10 of something, buying ten and building four.


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## thetyreman (13 Feb 2022)

I think this is going to be a great guitar! look forward to seeing it, would love to hear how it sounds too.


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## D_W (14 Feb 2022)

thetyreman said:


> I think this is going to be a great guitar! look forward to seeing it, would love to hear how it sounds too.



I'm a rank player - we'll see how it goes with the guitar getting up and going - and see if the signal is clear (it should, be, but one never knows).


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## D_W (14 Feb 2022)

not a huge fan of aged/relic'd pickups, but the used buyer can't always be that picky about the style, especially when people seem to want the antiquities to look old.

I can't actually think of anything that I want to see having a relic or antique look, and can't imagine what customers would've thought of the originals had they been shipped looking like that.

However, the buttonlac at this point isn't completely finished (still needs to shrink one more cycle) and will mark easily - and who knows when I'll take it apart again to do the final buttonlac and surface treatment (no abrasive of surface finish has been given to it other than off the french polish pad - maybe the look of the pickups fits.


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## D_W (14 Feb 2022)

late lunch. Knobs on - pots in - put the pots in backwards first time. Will need to change my layout board , but that's easy now that I have a guitar laying on a chair with the back open...


wiring..,if you ground everything every which way, there's so much wire!!

Not sure, but it sounds like it's working properly. Bridge is unslotted and I think I need to augment one of the post holes (not going to do that before I find out if it intonates where it is, but it's ABR-1 style so if it has to be moved, it'll be invisible), and I need to install the nut. going forward, I'm going to start prefabricating some of the wiring assemblies so there's less to do with the pots in the guitar, because it's a mess.

I can tap the pickups (they're unpotted, so you can get a little noise out of them tapping them - not sure if potted will do that, but I think they would) and they're on the right knobs and switches and I can tell the tone knobs dull the tapping noise.

Tomorrow or later in the week, I should have the nuts done and strings on the guitar and then we'll see if there are gremlins in the wiring at all (or if anything's noisy) as well as any correction needed on the frets. Getting a little worn out buying things, but need to buy a hard case. half of my fender guitars roam the room with no case and have dents all over them (not fender, I guess - fender style that I made). This guitar won't escape cosmetic damage forever - but I don't find that to be a real minus - it's like tools. I made it, it's OK to not sit around in sweatpants in the middle of a room with no hard objects in it. I don't think this one could break with a fall given the laminations, but not going to test it.


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## D_W (14 Feb 2022)

last pictures until done (nut and bridge work). 

I did notice (this isn't unusual) that the fret work was slightly uneven, though this isn't because something is moving around or loose. When you seat frets (this is my experience, at least -anyone is free to disagree) but they don't all seat at the same height, the first go at leveling the frets gets things 90% of the way there. I have pretty good eyes, but sometimes I see things that aren't there looking at frets (as in, one fret having a better polish on the back than another or some dirt or coloring can make one look higher than another. I think a couple of the fatter frets were still a little higher than others (that is, the ones that had more removed from them) and a quick once over with a file showed that. 

So, I redid the leveling. 

It may not be the leveling where this occurs, but also the heavy profiling done to re-crown the wider frets. 

At some point, I may need to get a file with a more pronounced crown than the one that I have as I'd prefer such a thing ,but my narrower file with a more drastic crown isn't wide enough to handle .110 jumbo wire. 

So, boring details. It should be OK in the end. My eyes don't see anything now other than slightly uneven fret ends. But that's just something to work on next time. 

This is also a version of something I said here or elsewhere - when you're more experienced, it's not the "more" things you do that make the difference, it's avoiding the unnecessary things. Frets have to be pretty good when seated by hand to be perfect after the heavy first work, but they could be closer. We are talking about frets that are high by less than a sheet of paper (well less), but one never knows where those will be and if they'll cause a bent note to choke even if everything else is clear.


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## D_W (14 Feb 2022)

One other aside - the case thing. Jeez, six months ago there were a bunch of $75 decent LP cases. 

I just went to amazong and I see the "Douglas" case is $117 (including shipping) plus tax, so it's getting into the range of $125. 

I did a google search and I see that Rondo had these cases listed for $69 not long ago. But they must see the opportunity to take a bite out of everyone during covid with inflation as the links say "this item no longer in stock" or "this listing is no longer up to date". 

And then you go back out to their main page - same item number more expensive. 

(for anyone who doesn't recognize rondo, they retail off brand stuff, some of it is decent, and the cases look fine....but they're right up against branded cases now. Two years ago, I could get gibson factory cases for about $145, or TKL canada cases for that or slightly less. I didnt' track them down...but they're probably up, too, and gibson probably uses chinese cases instead of canada now, anyway).


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## baldkev (14 Feb 2022)

So of a chinese gibson is a chibson, that makes yours a dwibson!


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## D_W (15 Feb 2022)

Until I can get the nut fitted and get it to play, it's a turdson. 

Which, isn't a bad name for it given that it's brown. And fortunately, unlike walnut, it won't get lighter over time.


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## John Brown (15 Feb 2022)

Nuts are a PITA, in my experience (one guitar from scratch half a century ago, but have re-nutted a couple of acoustics). It's easy to go just too deep with a slot, and have to start again or resort to baking soda and super glue, which I can't believe lasts that long, unless you never have to tune the guitar. I remember thinking that next time I'd devise some trick, like using a shim, either under the nut or over the first fret. Is there an standard strategy for this, or is it just down to patience and precision?


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## GuitardoctorW7 (15 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> late lunch. Knobs on - pots in - put the pots in backwards first time. Will need to change my layout board , but that's easy now that I have a guitar laying on a chair with the back open...
> 
> 
> wiring..,if you ground everything every which way, there's so much wire!!
> ...


Looking good thus far, can't wait to hear it. If you are going to pot the pickups in wax it'll stop the covers squealing at high volumes. My 71 LP Deluxe used to do that until I potted them. It has the old Epiphone mini humbuckers which I rewired with 4 conductor wire, and replaced the tone pots with switch pots for coil tapping. I was advised not to by"gurus" but they actually sound great, bit P90 ish. I did all that when I was a kid and the guitar was only 10 years old, sacrilege to do it to an old girl now, but she was my main work guitar. Good idea to make a template and pre-fabricate the loom for neatness, I just rewired my 335 and it made life a lot easier. Stewmac amongst others do ready made looms. Switchcraft are expensive initially but are made to US military spec so will (usually) last a lifetime. Good luck G


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## D_W (15 Feb 2022)

These will remain unpotted. I have some lollar imperials for future guitars - I haven't played much in the last 20+ years, and it'd take me a long time to get the focus back to even be a mediocre cover guitarist (never was good), so the potting isn't really a concern (I do hope to get back to playing a lot more, less to gain new ground, but more to relax and explore a little bit in terms of things I never did when I was younger (chet style, etc, and play slow - which is all I'm capable of - learned the hard way!!). 

when I was younger in a cover band, I used a guitar with potted pickups, though. I didn't know they were potted, I just knew it wasn't noisy live. when levels get high, I kind of like the sound of potted pickups a little better, too - a little less bitey. 

I don't mind coil taps or splits and on a working guitar, they would make a *whole* lot of sense. Especially if the bridge HB had a lot of output and would still have a good bit split (one of my favorite pickups if I had one all around choice is the duncan p-rail. They're ugly, though!! but the single coil sound is good, the p 90 sound is good and the humbucker combination with the two tied together is also good. 

As an example of how little I play these days, I have to intonate this guitar yet, but played about 5 minutes this morning, and the tips of my fingers are sore. I tip my hat to good players - just too lazy and untalented myself - a good player has to be more focused and conscientious than me. 

(by the way, one of the finest sounding guitars I have ever had came with split coils - well, two - the SG3000 from Yamaha, and the SL800S (the latter had split pots and the humbuckers had a nice crispness and the split sound was great. I kind of wish I'd have robbed the pickups and pots from the guitar, but they were a little old and decrepit. I find the wiring of that stuff a bit confusing - already found that my layout board was reversed just with the simple 50s wiring, which is what caused the problem when putting the pots in yesterday- the tone pots were in the volume spot and I had to redo it. I'm sure I could've wired the whole thing from the start in the guitar, but it just makes for too many things to keep the soldering iron away from. I don't even like the connecting of everything after the switch is wired separately and the pots are connected/grounded - there's just a lot of wire in there, especially if it's braided or heavy waxed (if it was just plastic coated, I'm sure I'd melt through it, though). 

This has been a fun build. I look forward to doing this for a while between sets of chisels and other tools. The result is better than expected in some ways (it will intonate!!) and some of the little detail work that's inconsequential at this point isn't as neat as I'd like, so there's room to improve. 

I still think a les paul special design is just as good of a guitar and could be made to sound the same, but the carved top is there, so I will try to improve on the aesthetics of the top carve as I move forward. 

I've got a sinful number of pickup sets now - maybe 15? One of them is a gibson plug and play type set of burstbucker pros. After wiring this yesterday, I kind of thought that those PCB and connector setups are sinfully ugly, but it would've saved a little bit of time. Not headed in that direction, though- everything will get better with repetition.


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

John Brown said:


> Nuts are a PITA, in my experience (one guitar from scratch half a century ago, but have re-nutted a couple of acoustics). It's easy to go just too deep with a slot, and have to start again or resort to baking soda and super glue, which I can't believe lasts that long, unless you never have to tune the guitar. I remember thinking that next time I'd devise some trick, like using a shim, either under the nut or over the first fret. Is there an standard strategy for this, or is it just down to patience and precision?



I do it by eye. It's not uncommon for me to go too low on the high strings and have some sitar-ish type sound (not really that type, but the ring and no ring on the first fret). 

But toolmaking makes nut fitting a little easier. The LP bone nuts that I got (cow bone probably, and almost certainly from china) are over-tall and a bunch has to come off of the bottom. The tops are neatly made, but the radius is a little flat and it leaves you with a choice - the choice I take is just to leave the top as it is and take some off of the bottom and then try to sink the strings only a little. 

Nut fitting and slotting is probably a 20 minute process for me. Now that guitar companies are using plek here, a lot of the better guitars have good nut work done (the collings nut work is divine - but they may finish the process by hand - everything they do is divine), but the lower cost guitars (like satin finish gibsons) can have reaaallly high string height, and the same with some of the $700-ish dean type guitars (which I'm not a customer of in general, but I've had a couple). You get to finish it - it's strange that in the world of guitars, you'll get $400 off for not having a gloss finish, but nobody is willing to pay an extra $50 for someone at the factory to do good nut work. 

The difference for me in how I make my guitars and what I'd have to do if I ever dreamed of selling them is a bunch of aesthetic things I don't care about. I want to do the frets more neatly, I want to do the binding more neatly, but much of the rest of the aesthetic bits, I just don't care about at all. I want good wood, a guitar that's stable, resonant, that the electronics are good and work right and that the feel is smooth. 

And apparently, a tubby neck (comparing this paul to the two that I got to reference).


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

Maybe tomorrow - but at some point, I will bust out the history les paul, a collings, a tokai HLS 160 and just strum something repetitive to compare the sound of this (my) guitar. 

I haven't gotten the collings out - the tokai and history guitars are great guitars, but they are not as acoustically snappy. 

The collings is a standard that I'll never build to. Famous last words - it'll be quite a long time before I can do things like they can with all of the little details. 

Aside from the little aesthetic nits, this guitar is better than anything I've gotten from gibson, though. 

It'll be interesting to see if the snappiness comes through on a phone video. 

I could use a little free time not dominated by building (as when I start building something, it becomes encompassing other than work and kids and I cannot sit still anywhere and not go do some building), but I have to admit I go through a little minor slump, like a mini depression, when I finish a project that takes a considerable amount of time. 

The other option is like I was when I was younger - I could sit and ponder "what I'll do later" for very long periods of time and have no issue with it. I'll take activity and thought over that these days. I guess that's just adulthood, huh? If you have stuff on your plate, just sitting somewhere without something to do leads to thinking about what needs to be done.


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## the great waldo (16 Feb 2022)

John Brown said:


> Nuts are a PITA, in my experience (one guitar from scratch half a century ago, but have re-nutted a couple of acoustics). It's easy to go just too deep with a slot, and have to start again or resort to baking soda and super glue, which I can't believe lasts that long, unless you never have to tune the guitar. I remember thinking that next time I'd devise some trick, like using a shim, either under the nut or over the first fret. Is there an standard strategy for this, or is it just down to patience and precision?


Patience and precision + good eyes glasses etc, a little trick I sometimes use is that I overtighten the truss rod so the neck is pulling back. If your going for the ultimate low nut cut this can sometimes get you out of trouble if you go one swipe with the nut file too many as when you release the rod it should raise the slot as the neck pulls up. I usually try and cut the nut to the tuning so e sharp should be when fretted on the first fret and so on. Nuts and laquer dings are a complete PITA !!
Cheers
Andrew


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## thetyreman (16 Feb 2022)

John Brown said:


> Nuts are a PITA, in my experience (one guitar from scratch half a century ago, but have re-nutted a couple of acoustics). It's easy to go just too deep with a slot, and have to start again or resort to baking soda and super glue, which I can't believe lasts that long, unless you never have to tune the guitar. I remember thinking that next time I'd devise some trick, like using a shim, either under the nut or over the first fret. Is there an standard strategy for this, or is it just down to patience and precision?



I use a special pencil that is sawn in half, which is scribed onto the nut from the fretboard, this is your maximum depth line, it works very well, then you have a reference line to cut the slots to.


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

the great waldo said:


> Patience and precision + good eyes glasses etc, a little trick I sometimes use is that I overtighten the truss rod so the neck is pulling back. If your going for the ultimate low nut cut this can sometimes get you out of trouble if you go one swipe with the nut file too many as when you release the rod it should raise the slot as the neck pulls up. I usually try and cut the nut to the tuning so e sharp should be when fretted on the first fret and so on. Nuts and laquer dings are a complete PITA !!
> Cheers
> Andrew



If we are not good people in life, we will end up fixing lacquer dings on edges in eternity, and drinking the drops quarter fingers of beer left behind in the sun from wasteful drinkers. 

I see the nut as an opportunity, though - it pretty much makes the intonation on a guitar and it's fairly easy work if you're willing to cut one low and then fill it to get it dead nuts. I used to try to use a shim, but it's not accurate enough, and then there's always enough time between guitars that I think "I'll bet that could go a bit lower" and buzz on G or B. 

Fortunately, i only play about 5-10 hours a year some years, so nothing bothers me that much about guitars.


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## Cozzer (16 Feb 2022)

John Brown said:


> Nuts are a PITA, in my experience (one guitar from scratch half a century ago, but have re-nutted a couple of acoustics). It's easy to go just too deep with a slot, and have to start again or resort to baking soda and super glue, which I can't believe lasts that long, unless you never have to tune the guitar. I remember thinking that next time I'd devise some trick, like using a shim, either under the nut or over the first fret. Is there an standard strategy for this, or is it just down to patience and precision?



If you get a chance, search for some recent videos by Sam Deeks on youtube.
He's switched from bone to Tusq nuts, but has adapted them to be adjustable, as the nut is one of the "top three" adjustments to be made.


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

thetyreman said:


> I use a special pencil that is sawn in half, which is scribed onto the nut from the fretboard, this is your maximum depth line, it works very well, then you have a reference line to cut the slots to.



I'm slow enough that I didn't follow this initially, at least not immediately and then forgot about it. 

Now, I realize what you're talking about - a good idea - this is similar to the method that I use to mark moulding plane irons on new moulding planes so they can be ground identical to the sole (ground/filed and honed) before hardening. Smart.

I've used tusq, corian and bone. Corian is nice and hard (and I have corian on hand), but it's definitely fragile. Bone can be, too.


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

Let's replace the original post with one through a small amplifier, just chords mostly on neck pickup. Unplugged was nothing but pick noise and missed notes / not picked hard enough. 

Neck pickup:
1) tokai HLS 160 (1959-ish copy, but obviously not expensive - mahogany, maple top (veneer over hard plain maple), mahogany neck
2) my guitar (rosewood over limba, maple neck (hard maple)
3) History GH-LCV- maple neck, maple top, mahogany back, les paul custom style. Pickups a little darker

All relatively similar in weight with #1 maybe being a pound lighter. Pickups very similar for 1 and 2, except #2 pickups are unpotted.


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

..... (deleted info, out of date after changing video above)


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

I'm not trying to make a tone wood claim, but the hard and tight nature of the top and neck on my guitar may actually push it toward more top end and less mid and low (it's more like piano and less warm). Guess I'll need an EQ to give it more bottom end!

I like the sound of the tokai the best out of all of these.


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## Ttrees (16 Feb 2022)

"_*Dun'dulandon,dun'dulandon,dun'dulandon"*_
Congrats on the new axe, sounds good.


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

One with a little drive (still same little travel amp - about the size of a takeout container. Too lazy to uncover anything bigger - most is under amp covers and not hooked up (heads, cabinets) because I no longer play on a regular basis.



Very short, excluded the "history" guitar as the pickups are ceramic or something and not similar sounding.

First guitar in the second video is the new one, second is the tokai HLS160 (really like that as an inexpensive vintage les paul proportion guitar, and it's not heavy - especially the bridge pickup).


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## baldkev (16 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> SG3000 from Yamaha, and the SL800S


Do you still have the yamahas? I havent looked lately, but the 80s ones were very highly priced here a few years ago, apparently very good guitars.

I used to look out for the ibanez 2338b in case i ever found one at a good price ( they sell very quickly )
I dont play bass, but id like one of those


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## D_W (16 Feb 2022)

I sold the SL800s - strange story - buyee (proxy from japan) packed the guitar in a box the same length as the guitar and the neck broke. I repaired the neck and sold it for a fairly low price. buyee did "protective packaging" so I didn't have it insured, and when I got it, they attempted to stiff me. I asked that they at least return the $20 packing fee since they sealed its fate (literally) in the box. They said no, I contested the packing fee through paypal and attached pictures and paypal made them refund the entire thing (So the guitar ended up being "no cost"). It was a fantastic guitar (the cost from japan back then was $330 plus proxy shipping because it had a chipped nut. Crazy price - great pickups, back was true honduran mahogany, laminated maple neck. 

I don't have as great of a story about the SGs - they were expensive in the upper range in the 80s, and they're still really expensive. I have the SG (the us version labeled "SBG" behind me that some dude put a kahler style trem on and I've been slowly fixing it. I have the original pickups but the guy who had it was a metal guy ("no permanent marks on the guitar", is what he thought. It has screw holes in the peghead that I've filled from the locking nut that went with the trem, and his luthier ground off the tailpiece posts. So I've been trying to piece together getting the thing back close to stock. The posts from yamaha back then were a strange size - it's a mess. It was expensive, but it's good. 

I also have a SG700. Which is a good guitar, but the neck is mahogany and it has done what mahogany does over the years - moved a little. Sounds great. Bonkers that the two were different in price by a factor of three or four. 

Long story short, I wish I wouldn't have bought the SG3000 guitar even though it's interesting. It'll be hard to get back the $2k that I paid for it used, but I'm a pushover when buying stuff. I figure the guy didn't know what had actually been done to it as his comments about the wiring didn't make sense (i think the coil split has been replaced by a switch that makes it go between series and parallel). The guitar has a duncan custom custom in the bridge and the original spinex pickup in the neck (with the other spinex bridge pickup in the case compartment - fortunately). 

All that said, it's hard to get a guitar from the late 70s or early 80s that's totally straight and the SG3000 is still straight. The maple neck les pauls that I've gotten from japan (and an ibanez artist) have all been straight. The guitars that had genuine honduran necks have had a pretty poor record as far as stability goes over 40 years, but they could have the frets pulled and neck reprofiled and would be fine for a few more decades - I just hate to go to the trouble on guitars that are $300-$500 in japan. 

SG700 from ishibashi was all of $605.


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## D_W (17 Feb 2022)

I have to admit after making this, I'm surprised how rigid and piano like it is in the mids. Almost like it would be better off voiced with something between strat and les paul pickups. Since the back wood is resonant and carries a low "bong" well, I figured it would be strong mids and lows, but I guess the maple and rosewood together are just a bit too tight. 

Rather than throw it out, though, I'll figure out what it's good at and let it do that (it sounds fine, it plays well, but I expected a little more mid oomph along with top brightness. To be fair, Gibson did experiment with a bunch of woods when they made les pauls and they said if they made everything out of maple, it sounded like a piano (long sustain, not as much resonance or low end). 

So, the next guitar is going to be a "tweener" - a junker between nice guitars, more or less. One that I make fast - not intentionally sloppy, but not complicated and with fast production. I haven't decided yet if it'll be an SG or a les paul special, but I think it'll be the latter (SGs are a little thin in the mids, too, unless they have a heavier heel). The tweener is going to be made of something softer for the neck and body is up in the air, but it won't be heavy. I have some low quality mahogany blanks that stew mac sold (they didn't tout them as low quality - they're just flatsawn blanks that you can tell are from small trees, and they cupped and moved around an unsavory amount the first year, but they're about 3 years old now and I maybe wouldn't put them in a nicer project because they look cheap - I guess now is a good time to use them. 

I'm thinking cherry on the neck, and maybe something unusual for the fingerboard. Like castelo boxwood. 
(I have made three guitars with cherry necks so far and they're all pretty middle of the road sounding - not dead or odd and you couldn't pick them out of a sound comparison like you can the rosewood and maple combination here). 

Anyone with guesses on what the issue is here? I think it's probably underestimating how bright and rigid a rosewood top would be, even though it's not the hardest rosewood I've had, it's harder and more dense than maple - especially if the maple is bigleaf.


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## D_W (17 Feb 2022)

(maybe i'm imagining it, too, especially with gain - when I go back and listen to the short video, I don't hear as much difference - in person, it's pretty stark from the guitar...

...still going to build a fast dumpy les paul special to see how it comes out if I build one in rhythm without too much thinking. Just check each critical aspect twice and go. 

I was concerned about intonation on rosie-paul here because I marked frets with a pencil and cut them with a handsaw, and it wasn't really a problem. 

"junky paul" is going to be all cherry. I have a somewhat punky table blank that is just a bit light for cherry and that will allow making the body in one piece. Aside from hardware, I will try to build it out of nothing expensive (shifting focus a little bit). It'll be interesting to see how the cherry table blank comes out as it's a 3 1/2" thick blank, so I can hand resaw parts out of it in any orientation that I want for neck bits. The body will be flatsawn and kind of ugly. 

Years ago, I bought this slab of wood to resaw cherry neck blanks out of and I did resaw them quartered - one of them twisted a little, and I still have the tele that occurred on....90% finished. 

I like the idea of a LP special with simplified electronics - one volume, one tone, one switch - but will have to look up wiring info. All of the knobs on a les paul look nice, but I don't use mid position that much, and don't blend volume when I do, and don't blend tone. 

That should be no surprise given my playing - i won't ever be recording and the only thing I'm ever faffing with is volume to back off gain, usually not even tone.


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## baldkev (17 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> To be fair, Gibson did experiment with a bunch of woods when they made les pauls and they said if they made everything out of maple, it sounded like a piano (long sustain, not as much resonance or low end).



Mines a full maple, body and neck. The sustain is great, my guitar teacher was impressed. But yep, its got classics in it and sounds very bright.

Interestingly, look at this:
( in response to your question about the cherry )








Musician Builds Electric Guitar Without a Body to Determine Where a Guitar's Tone Comes From


Musician Jim Lill built an amazing bodiless electric guitar between a bench and table to determine where a guitar's tone comes from.




laughingsquid.com


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## D_W (17 Feb 2022)

The cherry that I have is almost half punky (it's not really, but I think the tree was down for a while and then the log harvested). I remember building my first telecaster, which wasn't very neatly made (with the D/A truss rod, even went through the back of the neck and had to plug it). 

Put a set of duncan vintage style telecaster pickups in it and a high quality pot/switch setup and it sounded exactly like a tele. I'm not sure why I was surprised. 

As long as the strings are vibrating, the pickups should get it - it's an electrical thing. The only time things go wrong is if the wood does something to prevent the vibration or change the movement of the string, and what you hear in person is maybe a little that and 90% of what the body is doing with the strings. 

So, I hear that 90% here and the rosepaul sounds bright, but then I go back and listen to the sample and maybe I should relax. I think guitars that have glassy tone are better with low or really high output pickups, but at the same time - it's the 5-10% of the effect of change in string movement that gets to the amp. 

And I think I could also roll the tone back a little on the rosepaul and it would be a little quieter than the tokai, but then the sound profile is similar - even on a tinny cheap amp. 

(I recall reading that gibson attached a bridge and nut to a railroad track and didn't like it (long sustain, flattish sound), but I think they were listening to small differences over and over and you start to train your ear to hear little things and think they're bigger than they are). 

Long story short, I'm guessing there's just a little there in A/B, but the fact that I put the later video up yesterday and almost forgot that I'd played the rose paul first, and had to listen closer than I'd have expect to to be sure of the order. I think a bigger difference between the two through the amplifier is that the neck pickup is a little dead on the tokai and the bridge pickup isn't higher output, but is a little more snarley. 

I think the tokai was about $900. It's a really nice guitar for that - DHL and tariff make it more like $1200, though. And I've had tokais that weren't that great, so it's not a real safe bet.


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## D_W (18 Feb 2022)

baldkev said:


> Mines a full maple, body and neck. The sustain is great, my guitar teacher was impressed. But yep, its got classics in it and sounds very bright.
> 
> Interestingly, look at this:
> ( in response to your question about the cherry )
> ...



revisiting this - your special is maple neck and baked fingerboard, maple top, but still mahogany back, correct?

I hate to burst bubbles of people who have really high trim guitars, but some of the best to play les pauls I had (after correcting instability) were les paul faded with BB pros. They had weight relief, a mahogany top (two did have ratty maple that was very plain and poorly stained), and at least some had rosewood fingerboards (all of mine had mahogany necks, though - they were too old - I did try a tribute, but it had some geometry problems from making and wasn't as well made as the special faded versions). 

Long story short, they had mahogany backs, some up to 3 pieces, and the ones in the 2010s had horrid neck profiles with harsh corners...but that's solvable in an hour with a card scraper, and at the time, those guitars were $550 used. 

They were crude looking but there's really nothing better about my guitar for playing and mine doesn't sound any better. I had a late 1990s or early 2000s standard, too, with what was probably a 498/490 combo (this was back when I was playing more, never a very good guitarist, but more of a "songster") - I liked the faded specials more. 

The BB pro guitars (all of them) definitely all had a clearer sound, though. I didn't keep the tribute long enough to think much about it (it had very uncomfortable neck corners, so I turned it back around and resold it). 

The early days of reverb here and federal allowance to use a straw figure when doing taxes if you didn't track sales tax made it very easy to literally go through 80-100 guitars over a couple of years. They showed up at the door, and I had to go 4 tenths of a mile to ship something out and could list a guitar in 10 minutes on the bus. Pure indulgence, and probably a combination of discontentment/unhappiness and curiosity at the same time. But I like what I learned from it and it was aided by minimal losses...

..a little TMI.....back to the point, though. The only thing those guitars were missing was someone belt sanding the edges/corners of the neck round, and I card scraped them....I absolutely love the look of the black customs, but appreciate the stripped down specials more.


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## baldkev (18 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> revisiting this - your special is maple neck and baked fingerboard, maple top, but still mahogany back, correct?



Nope, full maple....
Its a 2009 studio raw power in black. 
No binding or anything but its a great guitar. I had a tribute studio for a few months ( p90s ) but i sold it on again


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## D_W (18 Feb 2022)

ahh, never heard of anything like that. 

Three of the "fadeds" that I had, or I should say two were modern weight relief, (not sure of the years, but I think 2007+) - and red, but I think there were brown versions at the same time (terrible neck profile as you could tell the guitars had no hand time on them and the fingerboard didn't match the neck width- there was a bare step). 

Third of the group was earlier, 2005 or so and mahogany with maple top, no weight relief (9 pounds or more), same burstbucker pros, but the neck was a regular studio neck. 

On recent higher trim guitars, I see the very CNC looking neck that looks like it gets very minimal sanding (wonder to some extent if it's a combination of cost cutting as well as wanting the necks to look perfect). 

At any rate, I'll go look at the raw power models. A les paul made in non-weight relief hard maple would probably be pushing 10 pounds. I'm curious.


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## baldkev (18 Feb 2022)

Theres different 'raw power' versions.... just to be complicated. I think it was 2013? They did it again, but this time with maple neck and top cap instead of all maple. And ive got a feeling there was a different one before the 2009 ones


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## Cozzer (19 Feb 2022)

For any viewers who might not see the point in the discussion about instrument weight, let me assure you that it is important!
My Gibson is (reputedly) the heaviest Les Paul ever made, weighing in at a massive 14lbs.
(When I say 'my', I don't mean just my particular beast! I mean the model range of that year!)
I've had her since '76, and it is - was? - my "go to" gigging and recording machine for many years, but as I got older, and my straps got wider to spread the load, I found that I was developing a really painful neck during and after any performance. Not just the odd twinge, but a constant stiff and painful neck that would last days. 
I'd liken it to having to stretch my head/neck a la Del Boy, and even then It didn't solve the problem!
Four years ago I started gigging with my ash Strat instead - it's like a feather in comparison - before switching again to a slightly weightier Dean Soltero. The neck profile, and the fact that it's humbuckered suited my purpose better.
Another aspect of weight to consider - and is often overlooked - is balance. I once owned a guitar that was so "neck heavy" it meant that my left arm ached for hours after playing, just for having to constantly lift it up!


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## thetyreman (19 Feb 2022)

the older I get the more I like lighter guitars, got a bad back thesedays so it's become more important, a charvel guitar I played last year was fantastic, so lightweight and easy to play, maybe the best 'stock' guitar I have ever played, mexican made one, I think guitarists are more bothered about weight now than they used to be, I have a p-bass that is unbelievably heavy weight but sounds great, apologies is that's too off topic.


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## D_W (19 Feb 2022)

baldkev said:


> Theres different 'raw power' versions.... just to be complicated. I think it was 2013? They did it again, but this time with maple neck and top cap instead of all maple. And ive got a feeling there was a different one before the 2009 ones



Yeah, this caused me some confusion yesterday, but I expect it of gibson. One model one year will have no weight relief, the next year, it will have their most drastic version. One year it'll be maple top, the next year mahogany, and then one year, it'll have some hand time on the neck, and the next, it'll be like the two later fadeds that I got and the tribute les paul (which looked OK from about 10 feet or further away, but looked like someone painted it with liquified sugar close up and had the same mis-fitting fingerboard that the last two fadeds did. 

I looked the raw power studios up yesterday and saw listed models from 10 pounds 2 oz down to 7 pounds 5 oz.

And then as you mention, one of the versions was just a natural topped les paul with a mahogany neck and rosewood fingerboard (like a les paul classic spec guitar), but it was listed as "raw power" and I thought it was mis-listed. Nope, it wasn't.


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## D_W (19 Feb 2022)

Cozzer said:


> For any viewers who might not see the point in the discussion about instrument weight, let me assure you that it is important!
> My Gibson is (reputedly) the heaviest Les Paul ever made, weighing in at a massive 14lbs.
> (When I say 'my', I don't mean just my particular beast! I mean the model range of that year!)
> I've had her since '76, and it is - was? - my "go to" gigging and recording machine for many years, but as I got older, and my straps got wider to spread the load, I found that I was developing a really painful neck during and after any performance. Not just the odd twinge, but a constant stiff and painful neck that would last days.
> ...



it's a whole lot like tools - when I make rosewood necks for teles that are in the 8 pound range, I use necks that come from a guy here in illinois. They look fine (once they're covered in buttonlac, you can't see the wide rings that easily) but they're only a 5% more dense than maple, so the guitar isn't out of whack. 

In the 70s, gibson must've been winding through mahogany heart boards that hadn't been used for carvings or something. I'm wary when someone lists mahogany blanks and says it's too much work to calculate density (some listers in the US do that). It's almost without exception just because the blanks are heavy. There was a vendor on the west coast here selling one piece mahogany blanks that were overly dense for $30, but they wised up and now they just list them as heavy now. At the time those were 30, I could find quartered khaya all day for $90-$100, so I didn't even think about it. Things change!!


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## baldkev (19 Feb 2022)

D_W said:


> Yeah, this caused me some confusion yesterday, but I expect it of gibson. One model one year will have no weight relief, the next year, it will have their most drastic version. One year it'll be maple top, the next year mahogany, and then one year, it'll have some hand time on the neck, and the next, it'll be like the two later fadeds that I got and the tribute les paul (which looked OK from about 10 feet or further away, but looked like someone painted it with liquified sugar close up and had the same mis-fitting fingerboard that the last two fadeds did.
> 
> I looked the raw power studios up yesterday and saw listed models from 10 pounds 2 oz down to 7 pounds 5 oz.
> 
> And then as you mention, one of the versions was just a natural topped les paul with a mahogany neck and rosewood fingerboard (like a les paul classic spec guitar), but it was listed as "raw power" and I thought it was mis-listed. Nope, it wasn't.



I'll weight it later


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## baldkev (19 Feb 2022)

It weighs 8.5lb's
Thats quite light?


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## D_W (19 Feb 2022)

If the back is hard maple and it's regular thickness with an arch top, with no weight relief, I'd ballpark it around 11 pounds. 

So, 8.5 pounds is some weight relief. I don't know for sure what maple is on the back of the guitars, though. Maple types that are common here:

* hard maple (acer saccharum) - SG 0.71
* silver maple (acer saccharinum) 
* red maple (acer rubrum)
* bigleaf (Acer macrophylla)

The first three are common on the east coast and north central US. Bigleaf is a west coast wood (it may be sold here, but one would wonder why). 

High loose figure tops (quilts, big huge even curl) are usually bigleaf. 

I didn't mention SG of the last three because they're all about the same hardness - like cherry or a little softer. I think they're all around the same density - similar to second growth mahogany. 

Long story short, I don't know which gibson uses and without getting a chance to put a dent in something, I can't always tell wood with finish on it hard vs. soft. 

(the less vivid figure or tight disorganized figure like the neck on the rosewood topped paul is usually hard maple - soft maple might have that, too, but I can't imagine anything other than hard and bigleaf being used for guitar tops).


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## D_W (19 Feb 2022)

(gibson did so many weight relief types, too, that 8.5 could be one of the soft types with a little weight relief, or it could be hard maple with a greater level of it. They mostly look like drilled holes to me in their stock photos so some CNC machine probably just goes through and drills them all identically). 

8.5 is a nice weight for a les paul that will be played unplugged - nice weight in general, I'd say - it's about what collings nails for their CL deluxe (which doesn't necessarily sound better than any other les paul, but they make one after another near identical in weight, feel and acoustic tonal qualities and resonance - something they actually do on purpose). 

One other comment about hard maple - I don't know that I've ever noticed any difference in density with any that I've bought. It's heavy for a guitar wood. It's all seemingly similar. Mahogany is so all over the board it's hard to tell what you have sometimes. One sample can have specific gravity <0.5 and another of the same type (whether it's cuban or honduran) can be heavier than maple. I don't know enough about it to know why, but it's not just ring size - as I have a billet with large rings that's still really heavy.


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## baldkev (20 Feb 2022)

I read that the natural finished raw power guitars have very good tops, but the painted ones dont ( as it wont be seen )
Timber density is funny, some lumps of oak can be pretty heavy and some quite light


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## D_W (20 Feb 2022)

baldkev said:


> I read that the natural finished raw power guitars have very good tops, but the painted ones dont ( as it wont be seen )
> Timber density is funny, some lumps of oak can be pretty heavy and some quite light



Rule of thumb with guitar finishes is the nicer the wood, and more even it is, the less tint. Wood that is missing figure at the edges or has something to hide gets a burst finish, and so on. The customs were apparently started to get rid of wood with flaws (the early ones were all mahogany). 

Same with back wood - dark tone paired with tobaccoburst can hide a subpar top or a top with knots or color issues at the edges as well as dealing with bad back wood.


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