avengers63

I'm at 4: 2 where I actually made part of it and 2 where I just assembled & finished it. I have 4 I'm currently building, one in the planning/hardware purchasing stage, and one I completely f'ed up.

I did the secont test block yesterday and I have the binding router issues all figured out. Here's the process: Tape the piss out of it, then run it through the router backwards. It's just that easy! I got the face & back on the other two bodies. I'm currently working on the sides of the neck before I get to the body sides. I'll post some pics of these if you like, but I thought since it's more of what you've already seen, it was fairly pointless. Hopefully, I'll be able to have the sides all glued on sometime this week and ready for the binding. Thanks. That's part of what I was going for - tastefully horrible. If I were somehow able to put some chrome countertop trim on it, it'd be perfect.

Burls are commonly very soft and unstable. How is this one? Did you use anything to harden or stabalize it?

NICE!!! Staining the ash like that makes it look like zebrawood. What did you use?

Please tell me you're NOT putting this one in GOTM this month. I think I have a fighting chance this time. If you enter, I'd be dead in the water.

Did you get your woods from this guy? The types you're using make me suspect, especially the anigre.

My new toy, and the heat gun I used to bend the sides. Don't laugh! 1) It's my wife's, and she uses it for scrapbooking stuff. 2) It saved me from having to go buy one. I like getting tools as much as you do, but if I don't have to spend the money, I'd rather not. I glued some cutoff formica onto some scrap pine last night. When I got home, I tested the binding bit. test block As you can see, the results were... less than stellar. Going fast caused more chipping than going slow, but both had it. Remembering the shop tips about tape reducing tearout when using the band saw & scroll saw, I figured "why not" and wrapped the end of it in packing tape. cut with packing tape This was MUCH better. Now, I need to do this all over again to prove to me that the results can be repeated.

+/- $56 for a 4'x8' sheet. I have no idea if the price varies for each pattern. In the near future, I WILL be trying this out on a strat and seeing how it sells.

All I can add to this one is with a power sander, you'd be LOT more likely to sand through, especially on the corners. And I feel your pain. I hate sanding the finish too.

Funniest thing I've read here all week. I really dig the looks of the banding as binding. I've contemplating that for a while. It's good to see that it wouldn't look silly.

Thanks for the link. I couldn't agree more. The edging would really complete the look. I really with it were a possibility for me. But... I did some heavy-duty looking into it a while back. The price is a little high, but I'm a cheapskate sometimes, so take that with a grain of salt. The real problem as I see it is cutting & shaping. I don't have anything to cut the edging, nor the means to bend it. But it ain't over 'till it's over. I still have a thought ot two, like chrome car moldings. Here's a mock-up of the one I'll be keeping. I loves me some Gretch puppies! body close up I bent all three sides last night as well. Right now, they're just taped on so they would cool down in place. It's surprisingly easy to bend. Tape the first spot in place, then point the heat gun at the corner while you're applying some light pressure. You can feel it when it starts to give. Just continnue around the corner when the bend sits flush with the curve. Tape it in place and go on to the next curve. It actually only takes 10-15 seconds to bend each corner. The only tricky part is that it gets REALLY hot! You need to hold it pretty close so you get the angle right and have adequate pressure, but if you get too close, you burn the prints off your fingers. My sister was in town this week, so I showed off this project to her. She thought black binding would look best, but it's her other suggestion that struck me mute. Remember that OMG pink that was used in the 50's? Like a bright Pepto-Bismol pink? She said to paint the neck that color. Sure, it'd be period appropriate, but.... dang.

I'm still not crazy about the knob placement. Otherwise, I'm digging this one. I especially like the Iceman-like trebel horn.

I honestly have no idea what grade it is. I didn't even know there WERE different grades. The dude at Home Depot told me about the heat gun trick to bend it, so I started experimenting.

That's a thought. The backing would probably dissolve, but again, that's what scraps are for. Thinking about it for a second, hot water probably isn't hot enough to get the plastic formica to bend. Consider that this is countertop material, designed to stand up to things like boiling hot coffee being spilled on it. Thanks for the thought, though.

Absolutely. The "racing stripes" add a ton of character to the piece as well. sapele & limba mahogany & maple bubinga, maple, jatoba limba & african mahogany

... or learned punctuation and capitalization. If you're going to be in this hobby, you'll learn how to do it sooner or later. Now is as good a time as any. Better to figure it out on a cheap POS than on a "real" one.

If you're anything like the rest of us, you'll surely go beyond yout original scope of work very quickly. This hobby is extremely addictive. Once we master one aspect, we eagerly go on to the next. With that in mind, I'd suggest you get the best tool you can afford to get, regardless of which tool you're looking at. It may be more than you actually need for right now, but when you try something new, you'll be wishing you had spent the extra on the better model. As for sanders, make sure it has a dust collection bag. Otherwise, you'll be blowing it into the air and coating EVERYTHING in the rool (and about a 5" radius out the doors) with a fine coat of dust. I was looking around my shop one day thinking to myseld "It looks a lot dingier than it used to." At some point, I looked up and saw that a bunch of dust had settled in the light cover.

Not true. How do you figure? If it has lines marked out for a 35" scale, they wouldn't match up with the placement of a 34" scale regardless of the actual length of the fretboard.

I got some formica glued onto the front & back of a body last night. Now I have a legitimate excuse to go buy a laminate trimmer. I'll be using a heat gun to soften the strips and mold them around the curves. I did some test bits last night to try and make it through the learning curve. It's a short trip from "soft enough to bend" to "yellowed & slightly burned" to "melted". And that's what cutoffs are for. I wonder how the binding bit I got from Stew-Mac is going to cut the formica. I dearly hope it cuts it instead of chipping & tearing it. More test bits to come.

Bloodwood & Longhi LPjr I've beem laying some lacquer on the body. I'm up to coat #3. I'm looking for somewhere in the 5-8 range. Last night I got some work done on the headstock overlay. My original thought was to inlay a longhi "J" into the overlay. But, seeing the abalone fret markers and the abalone sheets I have lying around, I thought the abalone would be a much better choice. The problem is that it's some of that cheap, thin, brittle Korean stuff. You can almost cut it with an x-acto, but not quite. It chips erratically. You can almost cut it with a thin coping saw, but not quite. It is just too thin for accuracy. So I got out the woodweld contact cement and glued it to some thin longhi cutoff I saved. (While it was out, I glued some formica to a Retrotron body, but that's a different thread ) The total thickness of the new piece was about 0.5mm LESS than the overlay. Carving out the cavity with that little of a base would be insanely hard for mo readon, so I just carved out the whole thing. Much easier in the long run. I used a basic drill bit and the drill press to hog out most of the material, then a thin chisel and sandpaper to get the rest. When it was time ot glue it in, I laid the thing face-down and evened it all up as flush as possible. See that part around the inside of the J? It broke off. I could have made a little piece, spending an hour carving and shaping it. Did I? HECK NO! Are you insane? I mixed up a bunch od bloodwood sanding dust I small chips into some wood putty and filled the hole. I then made a bunch of sanding dust and pressed it into the top of the paste. It dried into the top invisibly. I was also able to fill inthe small gaps with dust and mix it into the fresh glue. Camoflague is a good thing. The overlay is being glued onto the headstock, so this will never be seen. lying on headstock The next step is to temporarily fis it to the headstock and shape it. Then I can cut out the TRC part, glue the overlay on, and lacquer it all up.

It was rare seeing two teams give each other so many touchdowns - but I wouldn't call it a "treat" exactly. "Letdown" is more like it. From Maryland... 'Skin's fan. Sorry about the trap game. By "sorry", I mean "Eat it, Skin's fan". Honestly, I was expecting the Rams to win. New head coach in the middle of the season, two weeks to prepare & re-gel, nothing to lose... It had "trap game" written all over it. On the good side, I have 4 fantasy teams going. On any given week, I have a player or two going against the Rams. They ALWAYS have big weeks. Clinton Portis, for example.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...E:IT&ih=007 Bidding ends in about 30 minutes.

Avenger Prototype sapele Avenger body style maple & rosewood neck with custom sapele J inlay maple control cavity cover maple pickup rings Wilkinson tuners generic top-loader bridge DiMarzio Air Norton neck pickup DiMarzio Mega-Drive bridge pickup 3-position switch, 1 volume, 1 tone This is the first model of this body design. Clearly, I borrowed heavily from the Dean Cadillac, which in turn borrowed from the LP & Explorer. I intentionally used low-end hardware in some places, but I'm likely to upgrade later. The pickups are pretty twangy for humbuckers. There's a lot of pop & snap to them. The whole thing is pretty mellow. The sapele seems to peel off a bit of the trebels. When I was arranging the template, I saw some grain that I was hoping would show up in the final body. I'm very pleased to say that they did. In the trebel body horn, there is a bog bit that follows the lines straight out to the tip. On the bass side, the grain gollows around the bottom and the shoulder perfectly. The top has a substantial roundover. It's a very smooth transition on the forearm contour with no discernable edge at all. From that persepctive, it's very comfortable to play. I finished the whole thing in clear shellac. After leveling it, I buffed it out with steel wool. I wanted a smooth, matte, natural looking finish. Mission accomplished! control plate closeup pickups & rings bass side view trebel side view trebel horn grain full frontal

Tulip It's all finished and the wiring is done. Actually, it's been waiting to be wired up for a month. back headstock Repaint Like the Tulip, it's been waiting to have two wires soldered for a month. back neck Avenger Prototype I wired up all three Sunday while I was watching the NFL. We actually had two good games that were broadcast. One of them was the Rams getting their 1st win of the season. It's a rare treat. back headstock neck front close 1 front close 2 back close 1 back close 2

Cuz I KNOW I'd never line up holes in the neck pocket perfect. I'm keeping them, so I'll still be able to use them in another build sometime. Thanks for the heads-up. FWIW - it's a Kahler Flyer. IDK if that makes a difference in your statement, but there it is.