Paul M
Forum Replies Created
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Home Depot epoxy is probably 2 part 1:1 resin and hardener. West system is 5:1.
I believe 5:1 is superior for strength for epoxy (the resin is the strong stuff, so you want more of that).
West has been around forever in the same formula so it’s very very commonly used which makes it the standard.
They make pumps for it to mix it in the proper ratio but the quantity ends up being more than you need for guitar stuff I mix it in 5 gram increments (5g resin 1g hardener) on a little druggy scale from Amazon. It pays to get the ratio as close to perfect as possible. Usually I do 10g.
You can use it for whatever you normally use glue for. Things to remember is that it isn’t reversible in any way like hide glue, it can make a huge mess, it’s somewhat toxic.
What I really like a lot is the West G-Flex gel which is a 2 part but almost as strong as regular west but slightly more flexible. I think that’s probably a good thing for guitars in that it will bend before failing. It’s easy and fast to mix. Definitely get the gel not the liquid.
I do use west for some finishing stuff and the Amine Blush part of west is an annoying issue. I will probably switch to system 3 because of that.
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I’ve converted a few people to this:
https://taytools.com/products/complete-drill-press-sharpening-system-bundle?_pos=1&_sid=b9fc94629&_ss=rTo be honest I think this is far superior to any other method. I’ve tried a lot of different things with mixed results and a lot of inconsistency. This is stupidly easy and insanely fast. My tools are very, very, very sharp with minimal effort.
I can take a shitty ebay chisel with rust and have it shaving sharp in maybe 5 minutes with minimal elbow grease. The secret is that cubitron paper which somehow just does not get hot. Tool doesn’t get hot. No burning the edge.
Total genius. Everything else is garbage to me. I have some other sorts of paper on glass that I use sometimes to really polish a back but I don’t use it all that often.
If you want to go totally nuts, you can squeeze some of this on MDF and use that as a final hone and you will be mirror sharp in seconds.
taytools.com
Drill Press Sharpener Ultimate Starter Kit with Sharpener, Jig, & Flattening Kit
This is the Complete Drill Press Sharpener Starter Kit, which includes: Drill Press Sharpening System: Includes 2 arbors, 2 discs, leather strop, honing compound, and 15 Cubitron sanding discs. Chisel Sharpening Jig: Solid oak and features a 25-degree ramp Chisel … Continue reading
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Watching a lot of Ted Woodford videos helped me a lot. He is very good and there’s just a volume of videos so you can see a lot of the same repairs in different ways.
I did two harmony rebuilds based on his 7 part harmony series.
I have some guitars that have had hard lives after I refretted them 6 times.
Working on cheap Chinese shit can be helpful. Sometimes the necks are so warped you finally give up. I had a scalloped strat neck I bought new on eBay and refretted over and over and finally I had sanded it into being only slightly scalloped. That went in the trash.
Fender stuff is better to start with. It’s harder to fuck up and it is more obvious what is going on. Teles in particular.
Making a few teles never hurt anyone. It is NOT EASY to make a great tele but it’s one of the easiest Lutherie tasks and you can learn a ton figuring out how to make one. Particularly from scratch. A tele neck is the world’s simplest neck but also not a simple thing at all.
I think mostly owning that early on you will do harm to the things you touch, so go in and do your harm and get it over with.
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Upright bass fingerboards often have a LOT of relief so you can’t really clamp it flat. I’d be more inclined to put a beam on the back of the neck which in general is flat to keep things straight. Or something. I don’t know. But don’t put something super flat against the fingerboard.
You def want to scrape all the old glue off both surfaces.
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I know you tried different filament but it looks like damp filament to me. Have you tried drying it or taking a roll right out of the bag?
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I use these bits on my CNC to cut fret slots. No idea about cleaning out slots but they work great, are cheap and last a long time.
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1) you can’t fix everything at once. Or at least, I can’t. For me early on the priority was to finish guitars without being too self critical. You need to finish instruments and see what your faults are. So for 2 years my priority was to make and finish the coolest instruments I could and not really get too stressed about faults. I wasn’t trying to make mistakes but I didn’t get stressed.
But as I went I made a list of things I wanted to fix. And I would try to focus on a few of them with each guitar. I don’t think you can totally change everything you’re doing at once.
For instance, at the moment I’m pretty happy with my guitars in general but my binding is absolutely terrible. My focus coming up this year is to really get better with that.
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I’ve done this twice.
TBH I think it’s pretty silly. It’s really hard to get a precise idea of exactly where the string is in tune at any time, I don’t have a good strobe tuner but still, just getting a string perfectly in tune with itself I think is sort of a challenge. +-5 cents or so.
Anyway, I read the Gore book and the math is just kinda nuts. I found a spreadsheet online and it was still Greek.
Here’s what I did. I think it works and it’s simple.
So in my understanding, the saddle intonates the fretted notes to the bridge and the nut intonates the open strings to the frets.
Steps as I did it:
1) The nut is like 2-3 mm closer to the bridge than it normally would be.
2) rough the nut in to approx the right height, but leave the path horizontal (don’t round the slots back towards the headstock for the first 3mm or so because you will cut them back and you don’t want them to be low)
3) Instead of doing the open string/12th fret kinda thing to intonate the saddle, tune each string to the note on the 4th fret. Then press notes further up the neck as high as the 16th fret and get an overall feeling as to where the saddle needs to be. I find that it can be pretty inconsistent, some notes will be inexplicably high or low, but you’re trying to see the average.
4) intonate the saddle as you normally would.
5) now retune the guitar to the 4th fret notes as you did before (and check the rest of them going up and get an average of where they are. Play the open strings. They should be out of tune and tbh I can’t remember if they will be sharp or flat. But anyway, take your dremel with a little ball bit and slowly cut back the nut slot until the open string is in tune with the fretted notes.To be totally honest it is super hard to tell if this works or not because I think the guitar is such a fucked instrument intonation wise that it’s kinda silly. It’s like if you get this perfect and then you start playing, the strings will move enough to put it out of perfect tune pretty quickly anyway. You get a good 3 minutes of perfect intonation.
Not an expert, not even sure if this is a way to do it but the guitar sounds good.
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I do a light coat of Zinser spray shellac on the back and sides, mostly to keep it clean and make the wood pop a little bit. I don’t do the top and I would suggest not doing it. It’s going to add a minuscule amount of weight and dampening and I don’t think there’s a good reason to do it.
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The Gore books are a pretty practical building guide for any sort of guitar as well. The methods are fairly low tech. It’s a good reference.
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there’s this stuff too:
https://mywoodcutters.com/clean-armor-wood-finishing -
I think I asked Jeff Jewitt about these sort of finishes and I totally forgot what he said.
It would be good to ask him about it.
He is such a helpful person with finish questions. I absolutely know nothing about anything and he was super patient with every question I asked him.
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I emailed you!
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For cleaning all the dust out of the guitar I build I put a vacuum blowing out the back end into the guitar and blow all the chips and stuff out of the guitar. Not sure if that’s kosher for an old guitar but it works for me.
I’m going to upgrade to a Ryobi shop blower soon. This is also how I clean the dust out of my shop, open the windows and blow it all out.
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I am super happy with the split coil sounds on a Mustang I made with the Duncan Jazz/JB humbuckers. Maybe I’m an idiot, I think the split bridge sound sounds pretty Fendery/Tele like. I’ll stick to my opinion. I’m mostly a neck humbucker jazz player though so…
I have a ton of switching options on that guitar with a Freeway Switch and a push pull pot for phase.
But you could do a regular humbucker sized Jazz pickup in that tele plus a Duncan tele bridge sized Humbucker…looks like they don’t have a JB but they have this one:
https://www.seymourduncan.com/single-product/little-59-teleYou’d have a lot of options, split coiling the bridge and/or neck etc. Personally I think having both the splits and humbucker sounds are a lot more useful than the series/parallel thing.
Push pull pot could give you phase switching if the guy is into that.
seymourduncan.com
Little ’59™ Tele Pickup | Seymour Duncan
Full sounding, medium output humbucker P.A.F. pickup tone that drops into the bridge position of your Telecaster.
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I am putting a compensated nuts on a guitar I’m making, I sort of wish I hadn’t but I am. It was an experiment in experimenting.
My understanding is limited but basically the idea is to compensate on the lower frets for the stretch of the string against the nut.
Again as far as I understand it, my plan is to get the nut height relatively correct. My nut is 2mm forward of where it normally would be.
Then I’m going to intonate the bridge saddle but not with the open string. I will do a bunch of fretted notes in the 5 to 12th fret area. So the bridge should be in tune with the Fretboard.
Then, with the bridge in tune with the frets (and out of tune with the nut) I will take a Dremel with a ball cutter and slowly cut away the front of the nut till the open string is in tune with the fretted notes.
I think this will work. I sure AF hope so.
If anyone sees a flaw in my plan let me know.
Ultimately I think the difference with the compensated nut on a well built guitar is pretty small. Trevor Gore talks about using it to fix the intonation on guitars with badly cut fret slots that are out of tune with themselves.
Hope that helps.
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if the fit is tight, I wouldn’t worry too much about the filler. The filler could make it a bit harder to install the tubes, depending on how tight the fit is. My fav shop epoxy for this sort of stuff is West G Flex gel. I think total boat has an equivalent.
If you are only using it to glue the tubes in, I would probably feel fine with the gorilla glue two part epoxy. I wouldn’t feel great about glueing the fingerboard on with that stuff but the rods wouldn’t bother me too much.
I glue the fingerboard on as the same time I do the rods so I use the same glue for both.
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I think @ianloothgroup-com recommends the Loctite Gel CA glue for this sort of thing. You might want to consider a “scoopie” kind of repair if it’s bad. I dropped a clamp on a finished guitar and took a big dig out of it. I did a scoopie. It is ok. Definitely visible. But that glue worked well as it doesn’t soak into the grain AT ALL.
Definitely a lot of practice and grain matching.
I think the challenge is that the repair is so thin and the scoopie is so thin, most of the repair is glue. But in truth it’s barely noticeable.
It’s in this picture, it’s about 2″ up from the bottom and 2″ to the left of the top seam, it appears as a slight discoloration. It broke my heart but ultimately it was ok. I had to refinish the whole top.
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Ok. If you’re talking about joining the faces of what you cut on the joiner, I would proceed with caution. A joiner and flamed maple is going to likely cause insane tear out. Depends a bit on the joiner but that’s probably one of the hardest woods to join.
In general that’s a job for a thickness sander.
If you’re talking about joining the edges that’s a bit easier.
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Just to be clear, if you resaw it, the two pieces you slice will definitely be bookmatched? Maybe I’m misunderstanding you but wherever you cut it, it will be bookmatches on that line.
If you haven’t done a ton of resawing before, I’d definitely practice on some scrap. Use a micrometer and see how consistent your piece is. I would practice a lot.
Maple can be kinda nasty in general because it burns and is pretty hard. Ideally you get your two pieces exactly the same thickness because it’s not super fun to thickness sand.
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Mostly acoustic.
One thing with guitars, I think we think about them like violins made in Ghippetos workshop by a lone craftsman, but in reality many of the greatest guitars were and are made in factories and oftentimes with people specializing in one job and doing it all the time. I know Bourgeois works this way, one person doing most of the binding, one person doing the necks. So it’s immensely challenging to equal that standard when you’re making 10 guitars a year, 10 necks, 1 a month or so, vs the guy who is making 12 necks a week.
Not easy.
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yeah he’s great in general and the book has a lot of info.
I’m just always looking for a book where I’m trying to answer a general guitar building question and it pretty much isn’t that book. His bending method is interesting though.
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Mottola’s book is comprehensive but the method is really idiosyncratic and aimed at beginners…I dno’t find it to be all that good a reference for general building. Just my opinion.
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Guiliano’s method is a lot easier to understand than Gore’s, I am not smart enough to do the math for Gore.
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Josh, you’re thinking of using it on Acoustics?
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It might be colloidal.silica that they mix it with but it’s blended so well there is not of that whiteness that colloidal has…it seems to dry in a pretty amber color.
I love that stuff. It’s expensive for larger areas but it’s super handy for anything small.
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unless someone suggests otherwise I would suggest the 655, same stuff thickened, it will stay where you put it and you won’t have to worry about it running all over the place.
I still think JB Weld is worth a look though. Only issue with the thickened ones I think would be getting them deep into your hole…they might work in a very wide tipped syringe, you’d have to pack it down in there.
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No actual experience here, but JB Weld is supposedly tappable. Might be a bit harder than West, at least without additive.
650 is the thin Gflex, I really love the 655 which I think is the same or similar but thickened to the consistency of toothpaste. It is awesome for most lutherie stuff other than it costs a lot more than the standard West.
I think the 404 filler might be good for this with regular West system 105.
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<div>I used PLA. Obviously not idea for heat but it looks pretty ok, I’ve used it off and on for maybe 6 months.</div>
