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Oh, one more thing - an outside coffee table? Shellac is rather fragile for that - UK rain won't do it any good (but you're in Cyprus I think, maybe your rain is OK), and coffee mugs leave rings. And it's alcohol soluble, so wine and beer glasses are a danger. OTOH it's easy to repair.

I use T-Cut automotive rubbing compound. I reckon metal polish would work well. But leave it a couple of weeks to harden before you go down that route. I wet sand *very lightly* with P1,000 wet and dry, then the rubbing compound. Or sometimes I leave out the wet sanding. If you have no pores...

This what a dozen coats looks like - you can get shinier with a few more and then buffing with rubbing compound.

I reckon 5 coats is not even half way! If you scraped back to bare wood in one spot you'd see how thin the film is.

That's what I get with shellac too, though I wipe on thin coats. I think it raises the grain slightly, and because the coat is so thin it feels rough. If you sand back thoroughly you expose more wood fibres, so you're nearly back to stage 1. What I do is to sand back to smooth after coat 1...

I oversimplified! Some guitar makers do this to emphasise the figure, or so I've read many times. But I think they do it quite subtly (except on a few solid body electrics I've seen). Others like the natural figure. If I'm lucky enough to have highly figured wood, it's shellac and nothing else...

Could be, but then how do you transition to a tax system where your receipts aren't going to come in for another 20+ years if post mortem (I hope for me), or cope socially with a tax system which could mean I can't afford to retire to a smaller house if payable on sale? And I see someone else...

That's not how Corporation tax works - it's levied on profits. So Sales tax would still be deducted before calculating tax. The real problem here is which country gets what share of the corporation tax. For Amazon's UK sales, much of that currently goes to Luxembourg. There is international...

The way luthiers do it is to apply the stain and then sand or scrape. Long grain in the figure absorbs little stain so this goes back to nearly bare wood. End grain pulls the stain deep, so this remains stained. The result is high contrast. But it's easy to overdo it, so practice on scrap to...

I'd start by gluing the splinter back down, but I'd use hot hide glue and so get a near invisible glue line. CA glue would stick it down, but any residue would be very visible. If you have liquid hide glue, maybe try that?

I've watched a few of his videos but his style doesn't work for me - he makes every point carefully and repeats it several times, whilst I'd rather be told and shown just once and then rewind if I want to see something again. Others will find him very helpful and that he suits their watching...

Rather a guess here, because I don't make windows, but in essence humidity swells timber and dryness shrinks it. The movement is mainly across the grain, not along it, so the wood gets fatter and thinner, but not much longer or shorter. If you dimension and build when humidity of the wood is...

I'll have 'em please. PM me an email address to do PayPal.

Don't forget to think about your users. Tech developers can be really bad at this. I remember a bank's website from around 1996, when all the users were on dial-up. The home page was all graphics, and took over 20 minutes to load via dialup, though I bet it looked really cool in all the demos to...

I'm as much of an engineer as I am a brain surgeon, but isn't most of the load taken by friction of box against the wall, so your studs are mainly taking the tensile load of clamping, and only some of the bending load? Of course I have no idea how much, with luck a real engineer can tell you.

This ukulele back is finished in pure shellac, and I'm far from the world's best finisher so much shinier is achievable. My process is to wet sand, then buff up with automotive rubbing compound.

My rip saw had a rake like that, and when I posted my woes with deep resawing (a 13 inch board) they all laughed at me on here! Filed more aggressive, and I skimmed (comparatively) through the cut.

Oh yes, you have to buy resonator parts unless you have very advanced metal working skills! Mind you, a few years back I combined the ideas of tin can resonators with the tri cone concept to produce the world's first Tri-Can ukulele, powered by three Asda red kidney bean cans. It worked but not...

All those are used in musical instruments, and traditional finishes stick well to them. However, different finishes will change the appearance and thus the colour balance between the materials. You did save scraps of each to test finish on, didn't you? :) My choice would probably be two or...

Most of the swearing came after this stage - getting the neck angle right, setting up the cone so it sounds sweet and not like an old dustbin lid, and so on. I won't post all that here, but if anyone decides to make a resonator instrument then do PM me, I have hard won experience!