curtisa

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not worth it. Any new technique that changes the way you do something to make a process safer is worth it, even if it takes longer. I guess I'm more looking at it coming from the angle of doing the jointing differently to begin with, and reserving the fancier tool for the fancier job. Pick your fights, if you know what I mean

Hadn't actually considered it. TBH I still joint the traditional way - jointer, handplanes, sandpaper on a flat surface. The amount of time it'd take me to set up and run the CNC for a facing operation on two surfaces would probably take me just as long. I suppose if you're only looking to take off max 1/32" in 0.08" passes, you'd have to weigh up whether it was worth your effort and time to do it semi-autonomously on the CNC. Say you're jointing two pieces of timber 1.75" thick over 18" and running, I dunno, 50 IPM?: 18" / 50IPM x 60s =21.6sec per pass 1.75" / 0.08" = 22-ish layers to remove to reach the bottom of the cut (assuming you're cutting in both directions) 21.6sec x 22 / 60sec = 8min to joint one edge. Setup time (clamping down, aligning, zeroing, touching off, unclamping etc) maybe 10min per piece? Coding time maybe 15min? (8 x 2) + (10 x 2) + 15 = 51min. That's assuming your raw stock is straight and square enough such that it only takes one pass to fully joint each face. If you've already managed to get the raw stock that close off the saw or from the timber supplier, I reckon you could probably joint by hand in about three-quarters of that time. That's pretty long for a 1/4" shank bit. The longest one I have is 2.25" and the amount of 'singing' it does when making long-reaching cuts makes me nervous sometimes. Bit flex and any errors in spindle runout and eccentricity get amplified when the bit sticks out a long way beyond the collet. I personally wouldn't want to go any longer without switching to a bit with a bigger shank.

Knurled shaft pots/knobs should be 6mm (metric) only, with either 18-tooth or 24-tooth splines. I've never heard of a knurled shaft with an imperial diameter. Plain shaft with 6mm is sometimes possible, but rarely found. 1/4" is the most common, with or without a flattened section ('D' shaft)

It's hidden in the datasheet. Just because the primary image only shows the knulred shaft doesn't mean it's the only option in the series: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Bourns/PDB241-GTR02-504A2/?qs=%2Fha2pyFadugBjtae0A4tF2x1ifkPUCdG9wqcOQfNDgB6zspwqN9jnw%3D%3D https://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/bourns-inc/PDB241-GTR02-504A2/PDB241-GTR02-504A2-ND/3534198

Bourns come in both 1/4" and 6mm shafts. I've got a stack of imperial Bourns 500K pots over here. https://www.bourns.com/docs/product-datasheets/PDB241-GTR.pdf The first two digits in the product code following the 'GTR' bit defines whether it's a 6mm knurled shaft or 1/4" plain shaft - you want either the 02 (shart shaft) or 04 (long shaft) variant. You should be able to get them easily and in bulk from electronics wholesalers like Farnell, Mouser or Digikey.

Tidy work, very well executed If I could make only one eensy weensy hair-splitting suggestion it would be to lower the two pots a tad into the body so there's less of a gap under the knobs. Otherwise you're well within your rights to tell me to sod off I've had to snip off the ends of the slugs on a couple of builds too. Invariably it's due to me wanting to direct mount the pickups into the body, but for some silly reason some pickup manufacturers insist on making the slugs protrude deeper than the mounting ears.

He also says some pretty dubious stuff as well, such as that the tuners or the amount of plasticisers in the finish make a significant difference to the tone of a solid body guitar that they must be accounted for. Paul, while his company makes some very attractive guitars, is also an A-grade marketer and his Ted talk highlights that admirably Getting back to the original crux of your question, at this early stage in your building journey I think you're better served just exploring and enjoying the process of building a guitar for what it is, rather than getting hung up on what mystique (if indeed, there is any) is to be found in the marriage of a particular combination of species of timbers in a body or how much resin has crystalised in an ebony fretboard.

Thanks Ash

Finally, it's interesting to see the two 5 1/2's I have side by side. The restored one that was the subject of this thread is on the right. My original is on the left. If nothing else it's curious how many differences there are between the two (ignoring that my original one is now looking like it needs a good scrub in comparison). On first receiving the hand-me-down I had just assumed on looks alone that it was identical in age and origin to my original one. Sitting next to each other it's pretty plain to see that there's some differences between the two. Whether that's due to age, origin or some frankenstein-ing of some of the parts to make up one or both of these planes by somebody else I guess I'll never know: The casting of the original definitely looks a lot rougher. Also note that while the original has about the same thickness casting as the newer one, there's a ledge just behind the forward lip that steps down and reduces the thickness of the sole by about another 1/16" The shape of the top of the iron differs between the two. Also notice the difference in the quality of the chrome plating on the lever cap. The ledge in the casting on the sole is also present on the trailing edge, as is the poorer quality casting. The original one also has rounded edges to the tops of the sides, whereas the new one has square edges. The 'Made in England' casting differs in size: A little hard to make out n this pic, but the Stanley logo stamped into the lateral adjustment levers are oriented differently. On the left the letters are smaller and oriented vertically top to bottom. On the right the font is bigger, but the entire word is swung around 90 degrees and reads bottom to top.

Finally back in one piece. Question is, will it blend...errm...plane?

Actually, on closer inspection I agree with the OP. The Schecter PT comes in a twin humbucker variant, so I'd say he's just used some random bits of self adhesive film to cover the surfaces of a stock PT in that garish pink colour (zoom in on the controls in the second pic and you can see all the joins and overlaps). I dont think he's had to modify the body in any way. At the body edges he's just covered it in a non-continuous way so that the pieces don't meet where the surfaces intersect. As they wear through the edges get exposed as they appear to do so in the first pic. A black Sharpie pen will do the rest of the artwork. My guess is it's either the book protective material I mentioned earlier, or something similar like offcuts of vinyl wrapping used on cars.

I dunno. If you look at the first pic there's what appears to be a seam running along the tops of both pickups, and there's some kind of bubble on the edge of the body just above where the neck meets the body on the bass side. Could the material used be sheets of adhesive protective covering used for school exercise books? The trade name down here is 'Contact'. Not sure if that's the same name used elsewhere in the world. A couple of sheets for the front and a few long strips for the edges. I'm sure you can get it in neon pink...in fact I know you can, as someone managed to cover another guy's desk at work in the stuff as part of an elaborate prank!

Dunno. It still works the same as it always used to, just appears to be more watery than I remember. The chip breaker needs a little bit of work to flatten the edge that presses against the iron. In this photo you can see after a little bit of work that there's a bit of a hollow behind the middle of the leading edge and a knick at the right. The whole thing appears to be ground a bit oddly too, with the trailing edge curving away in the middle. No idea if this was how it came from the factory or someone's attempt at grinding a new lip on it: By elevating the diamond stone and sliding the chip breaker along its length it doesn't take long to re-establish a flat surface on the chip breaker lip. I'm not going to try and get rid of the wavy grinding job that was already there. As long as the immediate suface that clamps against the iron is sufficiently flat to 'seal' the blade and prevent shavings from working their way underneath it should work adequately I can now make a start on restoring the cutting edge of the plane iron. I didn't actually take any pics of the process, but over at the grinder I made multiple careful passes to remove the worst of the wonky grinding and restore a rough 30 degree angle to the cutting edge. It's also important to go gently while doing this as it's very easy to overheat the iron while grinding and remove the tempering in the metal and soften it. As soon as the ground edge starts appearing to go blue it's probably too late. At that point the metal can still be sharpened, but it won't hold a cutting edge for very long under normal use and you'll be forever honing it any time you want to use the tool. I also keep a small tub of water handy while doing this to dunk the iron in every second pass on the grinding wheel to keep the metal cool and remove the risk of bluing the iron. Flattening the rear of the iron is next. Again the goal is not to get the entire iron completely flat as that's only creating more work for myself (and making the iron flat where it doesn't actually have any contact with the work), but as long as the first quarter inch or so gets level it should suffice: Flipping the iron over I can now make a start on restoring the business end. My diamond stones aren't quite wide enough to take the full width of the 2 3/8" blade, but with some careful left and right shuffling I can get it all equally honed. I'm using the Veritas honing guide for this process as it takes all the guesswork out of keeping the iron at a constant 30 degree angle as I work it. Maybe some traditionalists will sniff at using a honing guide to resharpen chisels and planes, but I don't think there should be any shame in using a mechanial aide to ensure that every tool I use can be resharpened the exact same way every single time without fear of messing the cutting edge by accidentally getting the blade just a hair away from 30 degrees while honing: I'm not going to attempt to try and get that curved misgrind out, otherwise I'll be here forever. Again, it's the immediate edge where all the cutting happens, so that's the edge I'm chasing. In the below photo the right side has about 15mm that hasn't been in contact with the diamond stone: Getting smaller: And smaller: Gone!

You big tease. For the record, I'm not saying that any old flatsawn piece turned 90 degrees makes it quartersawn. There may be legitimate reasons why a truly quartersawn piece from a log would behave differently that I'm not aware of. But thinking about it in my rattly old head there doesn't appear to be much difference between the two. Another way to look at the interchangability between flat vs quarter, if you were to grab a layers of flatsawn stock from the log slicing operation, the slab that ran dead through the middle would be quartersawn at the edges. Properly quartersawn timber is expensive in comparision to flatsawn because it's wasteful. If you were to genuinely quartersaw a log into fret board shaped chunks, you'd have to rotate the log around its axis and cut everything in a bicycle spoke wheel kinda pattern. Dividing the circular log cross section up into rectangular chunks radiating out from the centre means that you can't maximise the usage of the whole log, as the wedge-shaped space between each rectangular piece gets thrown away. I'm trying to, but I keep on coming back to chocolate. Ommmmm...Nope, there I go again...

Zounds! What on earth makes you think I'm some kind of expert? Although, I'm kinda tickled that you'd think such a thing. Silly you... I've used birdseye maple for a fret board precisely once. I don't recall anything particularly unusual about its properties or working that made me think I'd never use it again or do something differently next time. Maple is an imported species for me though, so I don't use it terribly often. You got me curious enough to go to the workshop and check my modest collection of fret board stock. It's generally a mixture of flatsawn and quarter. The only piece that looks appreciably warped is an old board (flatsawn) I steamed off a failed neck, and I'm willing to bet that it looks the way it does because I wasn't being gentle trying to get it off, rather than it due to being flatsawn in the first place. Another piece I have is essentially a flatsawn piece of decking timber, a portion of which ended up on a build I did some time ago that has ended up having the most stable neck I've done to date. Make of that what you will. Based on the above very small anecdotal evidence maybe you could theorise that the original milling orientation of the log matters less compared to how well it dried? Flatsawn may have a tendency to cup and warp more as it dries, but once it reaches that equilibrium is it any more stable or strong? Dunno. I suppose you could even argue that if you took a flatsawn maple post with a 3" x 3" cross section, there's nothing stopping you rotating the post 90 degrees and sawing off your fret boards and calling the resultant pieces quartersawn. Afterall, the growth rings are no longer running parallel to the wide, flat surface of the fret board and are now perpendicular to it, which is pretty much the definition of what quartersawn stock is.

OK, now the knob polishing jokes can start Just Brasso, an old cloth and a few seconds whizzing in the cordless drill. It's odd what you remember about some things - I had a vague recollection from my childhood that Brasso came out of the can somewhat pasty and opaque-looking, but the Brasso I've got here is quite clear and fluid. Maybe they've changed the formulation of it over the years? Maybe the earlier formulation was known to induce memory loss, halucination and vague moments of thinking out loud in public forums? Maybe I'm a teapot? For true OCD-levels of anal retentiveness, I should also polish up the last few screws. The slot in the chipbreaker screw has been a bit chewed up in a past life which is a bit of a shame, but I guess it's just part of its history: Edging closer to completion now:

It's not clear that the original miswiring of the socket was by switching the tip and ring connections, but both hot lugs cannot simultaneously make contact with the tip of the plug if you pushed it all the way to the bottom of the socket (discounting the possibility that the socket is so completely faulty inside that all sorts of misaligment is going on under the hood to make it totally useless). @CC1's first photo shows his test plug fully inserted into the socket. What's more likely is that the original miswire was swapping the ground on the ring and sleeve terminals on the socket. Electrically it would be identical if you inserted a mono plug - the sleeve of the plug would make contact with the ring wiper inside the socket and the plug would get grounded as it should; the contact point of this ground would just be closer to the tip on the plug. Swapping the ground on the sleeve and ring connections back to the correct terminations changes nothing electrically, as the sleeve on the plug still gets connected to a ground once inside the socket (just further away this time around).

I had seen your linked tutorial before as well, but there's nothing in the text that indicates that the hollow behind the throat is desirable or should be left in place. From the article: Essentially, 'don't bust yer balls trying to get that last 1% of uneveness out as it won't matter much to the operation of the plane'.

Rust cleanup continues. The edges need to be done somewhat gently as the black japanning is just over the ledge and I don't want to chip off any if I can avoid it. There a re already a couple of minor knicks at the leading edge of the sole, but I'm not going to worry too much about it. I suppose I could drop fill them with some black enamel, but they'll then always look like repairs compared to the rest of the existing black: A final scrub with the nylon brush and some turps gets things as far as I feel is really necessary for this one. Not perfect, just enough for that 'scrubbed up old timer' look:

Haven't heard of that one. All the information I can find suggests that the goal is to make the whole thing flat. The wear pattern on mine in the photos above is decidedly off-centre, which looks to be more of a deformation rather than a deliberate attempt to hollow grind the trailing edge of the throat. You may be thinking of corrugated sole hand planes, which were specifically (supposedly) made to reduce friction?

The bigger chunks of that strange rust/paint on the edge of the sole can just be scraped with an old razor blade to get the worst of it off. I've seen some people use old chisels for this process, but my collection of chisels is small and get used for the woody stuff, and I don't have any that I'm willing to turn into doorstops just yet: Cleaning up the sole and flatening it out can be achieved at the same time. Here I've just got a sheet of sandpaper laid out flat on the jointer infeed table (the flattest, most solid surface I have at my disposal) and just repeatedly running th sole up and down until all parts of the surface being flattened are equally shiny. Any area that remains dull and/or rusty indicates more work needs to be done, as can be seen on the upper trailing edge of the righthand wing (is that even the correct name??). Cast iron vs sandpaper is a slow process, so frequent cleaning of the paper and changing it out is needed: The oddball corrosion spot has permanently stained this area, but again, I'm not going to keep flogging the horse to get rid of it completely. It's cosmetic only, so flat enough is flat enough: Internet opinion seems to be that the sole should be flatened with the plane fully assembled under the assumption that everything gets pulled around as screws are tightened. Considering we're essentially dealing with a C-beam made with 1/4" thick piece of cast iron I find it pretty unlikely that the clamping pressure of a couple of extra screws could influence the shape of the sole enough to make a difference (sod you, internets. I'm doing things my way). Nevertheless the rusty spot up the middle of the sole underneath the throat is evidence that the sole of this plane isn't as flat as it could be: But after a good hour of mindless scrubbing, we're getting pretty close to perfection. The hollow section behind the throat is now level with the rest of the sole, and there's only the faintest area of discolouration just above it.:

Turning my attention to the flaky varnish on the wooden components, by some careful scraping it all just peels off relatively quickly and easily. No jokes about polishing knobs please. It's a good idea to wear safety squints while doing this as the tiny flakes of old varnish have a tendnecy to shoot off in all directions while being scraped. It appears the pale band of unstained timber around the fattest part of the knob was always present under the old varnish. Will attempt to add a bit more unifying stain to the knob and tote once it's all stripped back, and then revarnish them to seal it back up. The earlier (more prized) Stanleys used rosewood for these parts, whereas the later ones apparently used beech with a dark stain. No idea if this applied to the UK-made ones, though. Whatever timber this is, it is fairly pale underneath but quite hard: A light sand with 320grit to remove any remaining surface imperfections. I'm not particulalrly interested in stripping all the original stain back to bare wood, as it will take me forever and likely result in significant and undesirable reshaping of the parts by removing too much material. I'm more keen to use the plane for it's intended purpose than admire it on a shelf: The stain I'm just a generic oil-based walnut-ish brown from the hardware store. Looks pretty ugly on first application but buffs off again to reveal more of the original character of the grain. A screwdriver and an old drill bit held in a pair of clamps make some quick and dirty stands to permit handling of the parts while applying the stain...and prevent me getting covered in the stuff while doing so:

If you've got a spare unsoldered stereo 1/4" plug you could plug it in and use the multimeter to buzz out each lug to be absoutely certain it's the issue. Technically it shouldn't make a difference to the operation of the jack, otherwise if you were to use that same jack in a guitar fitted with active pickups you'd be finding that the battery power would be lost every time you wiggled the plug. It's also entirely possible you've just got a dud jack. I've seen those long barrel jacks, particulalrly cheap ones do exactly what you describe over time.

If you're dead set on shielding everything as completely as possible, what about splicing extra lengths of shielded 4-conductor wire at each point along the pickup cable run where you need to break out one core? For example, you'd cut and strip the pickup lead where you need the red wire to take off, extend the cut end of the remaining three cores and shield with another piece of 4-conductor (minus the red core), seal the splice up with heatshrink and continue to the next stop. Fiddly, but maintains the shielding as far as possible.

How far away is the rotary switch from the other controls? If they're only a couple of inches apart I'd be tempted to just run shielded cable from the pickups as far as you can and just use the exposed tails from each 4-conductor cable to reach where you need it to for each control.