Guitar Nerds Anonymous

Needs a F#-bender, obvs... 🙃

ftfy ;)

Oh man this is an absolute beauty! Great job! The finished product is going to be something special!

The colour combo is rather, um, saccharine. I like it too. Pickups will be Bill Lawrence micro-coils, not exactly sure what to expect from them.

I saw this as a valid reason to order the little green Bosch drill press that happened to be on decent discount, and I've already got a router -- I'd definitely like to try making a guitar body at some point.

Love it!

where is the neck from?

I got it from ebay, they were available with some minor customization options for reasonable money. Doesn't look like the seller (DC Kunkle) is active anymore.

Ah cool. I got a regular telecaster neck from northwest guitars a few years ago, it was good (and cheap) but there's no baritone options there.

That's so nice. The pink tele's in here are really making me feel like I have a massive hole in my collection .

A massive pink hole?

Oh god. I don't want one anymore... :)

Hehe! Sorrynotsorry

It'd be nice, if once a project just went "as planned".

Glue-up was a huge fuck-up. The boards had warped after chambering and made a solid joint impossible. Im pretty certain there's enough stability in the joint to not come apart spontaneously, but I doubt it'll look pretty.

Was too wound up to take pictures.
More on this on Thursday, when I remove the clamps and start swearing again.

Hey man don't be so hard on yourself, I glued my fingers together at the weekend delivering the final touches on a restoration project that has consumed the last two weeks. I was attaching a headbadge to a cheap but sentimentally valuable Raleigh frame which turned out to be cracked.

That might be the first bike related comment i've posted on here in years.

bikes are so 2007

Sorry to hear that. It sounds like you think you've got a visible glue line down the centre line?

If you're painting in the end, meh - super glue / wood dust fill it. If you're going for a clear finish it's likely all going to be fixable in some way or another.

The boards had warped after chambering and made a solid joint impossible

Due to the change in humidity? If so, wait another few days before giving it a go?

Wah plugged in backwards?

Thanks guys. I'm no stranger to happy little accidents. I just don't like it when they potntially cost me a lot of money. :D

We'll see tomorrow how the joints went. Fingers crossed it's not as bad and I can continue.

Okay, it's bad. Real bad. But not bad enough to make me scrap it and buy new wood. I managed to get the joints tight enough in the middle, but that of course meant they flared up at the outside. How bad it is at the end will be visible once I cut it into shape.

Let's use this as a learning experience.

I put it on the scales before glueing and I actually saved 730g through the chambers. Not sure if that's worth all the hassle.

Behold my shitty glue joints:

1 Attachment

My old guitar building tutor used to say that almost any mistake could become an opportunity to practice some inlay or marquetry - this is possibly rescueable.

Caveat this with a big "if it was me"... Once you cut the guitar shape out (which you may as well do) you could maybe route a channel around the whole of the outside of the guitar, along that glue join but only a few mm deep. You might be able to then bend / ram a contrasting bit of binding wood or plastic in there. You'd only struggle to bend it around the horns, but heat will help there.

You'd end up with a stripe around the outside, which might be cool. It sounds doable in my head, obviously not sure about it in real life.

So what happened? Not enough clamps?

I used a fuckload of clamps, which didn't have enough pressure to get the planed-4-days-ago boards into shape.
Stuff that would probably have helped:

• more clamps
  
• more glue
  
• a planer
  
  

@christianSpaceman : That actually sounds quite interesting. Gotta think about that and how I'd do it.

That's a shame man, but it sounds like it's salvageable. I like the inlay idea.

I've been on an early ZZ top jag again. Learning the riffs and solos from Waiting for the Bus and Jesus just Left Chicago. Billy Gibbons is such a cool player. So many off little extra measures and off-kilter things in those early tunes but they kind of sound like straight up blues structures co he plays they so naturally.