Building Things Backwards

Buckyball Squid - Oh, Yeah!

2012-02-04T19:50:00.001-05:00

This is my favorite original. It's got physics mojo, relying on some kind of magnetic pole thing to keep the squid arms floating away from each other. I hung the squid head on a length of monofilament threaded and knotted through a plastic washer I made from a drink cap. I chose to hang the head and then attach the legs. When attaching the legs, you move them in slowly to give them a chance to tell you if they're going to freak out and stick to the next leg over. Don't let them. You know how it is - magnets.

Squid hole view. The head is a stack of 3-ball-side pentagons with a hole in the center.

Buckball Penta-Cannoli Torus

2012-02-04T19:38:00.000-05:00

Guy at work got a set of these as a present. They are ephemeral, occasionally frustrating, odd, and sometimes rewarding. Here's a 5 sided torus made from little cannoli shapes.

First make 5 of the pentagons. We left the hole in the middle. The shapes have 4-ball sides. The hole may help with allowing the cannoli tubes to flex when you place the last tube.

Here are the five. If they don't want to line up square, you may have to unzip your cannoli and flip it the other way. You know how it is. Magnets. The last one goes in tight; you have to simultaneously pry open the nearly-complete torus and make sure you get the match-up correct, too. Took me two tries.

Building An Awesome Fishing Joke

2012-01-31T13:39:00.000-05:00

I came up with this one at work today. It arrived suddenly, like a cleansing bolt of inspiration from the realm of the divine. You know what I'm talking about.

Q: What did the alien trout say to the fly fisherman?
A: Take me from your leader.

Genius? I leave it to you, dear reader...but I think you do well to consider the alleged source.

Inexpensive Meade 4.5" 114mm F=1000mm F/8.8 DS-2000 Reflector - Disassembly and Focuser

2012-01-09T21:37:00.001-05:00

This is a telescope someone gave me as a gift many years ago, purchased from a chain photography store. It's part of the DS-2000 starter kit, which comes in both refractor and reflector form, and has a computerized drive system. But I never got it collimated - or rather, I screwed up the collimation so badly that it saw poorly.

I have decided to clean it up and get it working, if possible. To do that, I'm going to have to take it apart.

There it all is, taken apart. Just do it. Three sheet metal screws hold the plastic end rings to the ends of the tube. Three machine screws hold the focuser to its port in the side of the tube. Three thumbscrews hold the three tines of the diagonal to their slots in the tube.

I read that the focuser is "lubricated" with something that is practically tar, and that this gunk will eventually cause the stripping of the cheap plastic gears. And I don't doubt it - that stuff was like...like...I can't explain it. Tar is a good word. First take the screws out of the square lid covering the gears.

Then you'll see a thin spring metal device that I believe is intended to push the shaft gear into the linear gear of the focuser tube.

Then under that, the gears.

This is about as complicated as the interface between two dirt particles, but there's one thing to watch out for, which is this side-play tensioner or what-have-you. It's a screw pushing a rubber nub into the smooth side of the focuser tube directly opposite the gear drive. You can see the nub just sticking out in the inside. If I lost mine, I'd make one out of a couple layers of bicycle inner tube glued together or something.

Here's the mirror! It's kinda ratty looking, but it makes your face look really big and is therefore fun to play with for a few moments.

I wanted to put a center mark on it. I'd free-styled a red sharpie dot on it when I first wrestled with it, years ago, but I did it when it was still in the tube and - whatever. It was ridiculous. Took me ten minutes to get rid of it with isopropyl alcohol and a series of cotton swabs. So I tried various techniques of marking the center, including this one. Thales theorem rocks, but actually I wanted a ring around the center so a laser collimator would still work later. Some people use those binder reinforcement rings, but WTF - I can do the same thing forty times harder, without spending $1.29. Right? Am I right? So I wanted to mark a circlish thing around the center and hit upon a genius method.

It's metal ruler with a stop, in the form of some vice grip pliers, attached so as to place the end of the ruler, when the stop is at the edge of the mirror, a fixed distance from the center.

In the center of the mirror you can see the faint lines of Pigma Micron 005 I used to delineate a square with chopped corners - an octagon. Then I stuck tape up to the lines and cleaned up the mirror.

Not very clean yet. It's amazing, after getting a nice camera and cleaning some old lenses, how difficult it is to clean optical glass. Some of the flecks are little grease spots that smear around but never want to leave - you almost have to nudge them off the edge of the mirror. Some of them are pits from either bad manufacturing or awful storage conditions (my bad). Some of them are scratches I put there. Some of them either change every time I look at them or are permanent. After about ten minutes of struggling, I got it as clean as I could and reassembled the scope.

I'll try collimating it next.

Installing an Acoustic Strap Button

2012-01-07T12:06:00.002-05:00

I'm doing this partly to take pictures with my new camera, and partly because I haven't blogged much lately. The one people who read my blog will be pleased, I know - you're intensely welcome and you know I like you alright. But also my project acoustic refret straight-pull conversion needed a strap button, and I don't like the idea of the thing that loops around the headstock. Why? Because I have strong opinions about things I know nothing about.

For guidance, I consulted this article on frets.com - frets.com seems to have stringed instrument mojo about stuff. Pointless aside: I also like the articles at Fret Not Guitar Repair, which has a wonderful name and great information, but the stuff she works on is way out of my class (search for "acoustic" on this blog to see an example of my class of work on my class of instrument). I pretty much drill holes in things and hack them up with cheese graters.

This is where I plan to drill a hole. Somewhere...on there. Too much toward the back and the guitar will want to flip forward, maybe, and too much toward the front and there could be a flying monkey attack. I'm feeling whimsical.

The button will go in the middle. But I've got to check that I won't hit any metal. Does this thing have a bolt on neck? I have to check, I cannot recall.

I'm no expert but I don't see any bolts here. Let's drill with abandon. I selected a bit that was about the size of the screw core and taped a stop to it so I didn't go shallow or through:

Then I screwed in the button, taking care lest I drilled the pilot too small and began to strain the wood.

That's ten minutes of work and I feel like a genius, plus my guitar doesn't fall on the floor when I get up, anymore.

Building a Watercolor Painting

2011-11-19T17:35:00.001-05:00

I've taken up art. I've decided I'm gonna back off on building/cutting/modifying objects for a while, except for the LCD monitor I'm going to attempt fixing in my next post. So armed with some supplies from the local art stores and a 1978 edition of The Watercolor Painting Book from the local library, I decided to do my own rendition of "Demonstration 10. Winter Landscape".

That's it. I call it "Early Snow" since I used way too much green in there.

Here's my Reeves paints, which I got in a set obviously. The individual tubes are marked for color fastness and one or two are not excellent, just good. A fact I will have to remember if I ever embark on a paint I anticipate keeping. And still, even with 18 tubes of paint, all the instructions call for colors I don't actually have. So I make it up.

Here's the paper. Commonly available Strathmore, cut into quarter sheets to conserve badness. There's enough bad art in the world and I don't want to create too much at a time.

Here's a nice shot of my brushes. Nice because in focus. I use them indiscriminately. I think I need one called a "rigger", though, for fine lines (originally rigging on ships, so I hear).

And finally during cleanup, my palette. The colors were pretty in the water, but don't show as well in the photo - nothing does, because my camera sucks. I cleaned the palette out completely because I'd crapped up all the little color blobs so thoroughly that not one of them was uncontaminated with barf gray.

Building art is fun. I'm going to do it again.

Third Attempt at a Homemade DIY Table Tennis Racket

2011-10-21T10:24:00.001-04:00

Why I Need to Build Another Racket
My first racket, when combined with LKT Rapid Speed 2.0 rubber on both sides, weighs 220 grams. That's 130 for the 7 ply fiberglass reinforced blade, plus 90 for the rubber and rubber cement used to glue it on. I played with it for an hour and it's too heavy. Okay for predictably looping the forehand, pleasant to smash with, but horrible for backhands, where the wrist is more involved. And because I didn't build up the handle enough, I always had the impression it might slip out of my hand and kill someone.

Who knew building a ping pong paddle could be so hard? I felt I had to do a few things differently:

Lay off the fiberglass. The fabric I have is too thick, I think, and it brings in way too much plastic resin. It's a theory.
Use clamps instead of weight to form the laminate. I need to drive more of the glue out, thin out the glue lines. Glue provides little strength on its own.
Less layers and a bigger, monolithic core.

I also rough-cut a piece of birch plywood to shape, to see how the weight came in.

Left to right: original 3 ply butt joined blade proof of concept, 80g; finished 7 ply blade, 130g; 2x LKT Rapid Speed with leftover rubber cement, 90g; rough-cut birch blade, 104g

Not good enough. So I began to calculate. The idea was to calculate the weight of a cut out blade based on a ratio from the 6"x10" whole board. That way, I could measure the boards going into the paddle and determine how it would turn out in advance. I used the birch plywood and the remainder pieces as my sample, and calculated a bunch of stuff from it.

These calculations are all crap

The problem is that the birch plywood I started with was not cut to the final 10" length, but 12". So my golden ratio of 0.57 was relatively useless. And I didn't feel like doing it again. I wanted action, not words! I still think this is a good idea, though. I really should do it.

So my next attempt was a 5 ply: 3/16" balsa core, two transverse 1/32" basswood plies, and finally two longitudinal 1/32" basswood plies. All this wood came from National Balsa, which has been my choice of suppliers so far. I didn't even pay for the balsa. It came as part of the packing, to prevent my 6" wide 1/32" thick basswood sheets from breaking. Sweet.

Here We Go
Per my new plan, this time I clamped rather than weighted.

Those are 1/2" granite tiles on an old desk, with a length of oak on top to keep the metal off the stone. The glue is two part epoxy left over from my guitar project. Next I needed a method to measure mass, or Earth weight.

This scale is a 500g model from Harbor Freight for ~$13. It works consistently.

Once the piece cured and I cut it to shape, minus a couple millimeters per side to cut the weight further and make it easy to fit my old rubber sheets, it was about 87 grams. Too much, so I hollowed the handle.

Blade with hollowed handle section.

I do all this work with a bandsaw, files, a Stanley SurForm cheese crater, and 100 grit sandpaper. While I have a router, I do not have a router table. That's why it looks totally unprofessional - I don't make templates and route around them.

Handles ready to be applied.

I decided I didn't need the end to be closed. I broke it out completely. The handles are more 3/16" balsa plus a layer of 1/16" basswood on top. The completed blade is a good weight, IMO.

Completed blade, 91.2 grams

LKT Rapid Speed rubber reapplied and trimmed.

Assembled racket, 175.4 grams

Not bad! Nearly 45 grams lighter than that beast I built the first time.

Playing Impressions
The completed paddle is in line with "real" paddles I've played with in the past. Again, the handle isn't thick enough, thus the hockey tape. I can flip the backhand much better than the 220gr monster, and it's only 5gr heavier than my friends preassembled Stiga Cannon. It is of course much spinnier and hard to handle.

I am not a rater player, I haven't even come out of the basement yet, so I don't know how this blade and combination rates. ALL? OFF? Who knows.

Now I have to get used to playing "real" rubber again. The old monster blade, at 130gr naked, will be converted into a sandpaper paddle.

Relative Paddle Weights

"Ping Pong, the Original" 4 pack of preassembled paddles: 135g - 141g
Stiga Cannon preassembled paddle: 171g
My second blade, the "beast": 130g
My third attempt, hollow handle: 91g

Second Homemade Table Tennis Racket Complete

2011-10-09T17:23:00.001-04:00

I put a couple coats of wipe on poly to seal the blade and prevent the handle from soaking up skin grease too fast. I'm not a genius at table tennis but I have a feeling this would be classed as a very, very rigid blade. Could be wrong. OFF, certainly, I'd bet. With 7 plies, two of them bias plies and two of them glass, and epoxy for the adhesive, it's definitely a beast.

I followed some instructions on the intertubes to apply the rubber to the blade using rubber cement. I got some thinner for the cement, and I probably should have used it, but working quickly with the un-thinned cement went okay. Apply one coat to the blade, two to the rubber sheets, let dry to tacky, apply, roll, put under a big book, trim.

It was the trimming that went horribly. I used a fresh razor blade and it kept catching in the foam and the rubber. I ended up using a pair of shears, going an eight inch at a time - and still, it's crap. Functional, yes! But ragged and crap looking. I supposed I might get better with practice.

See? Also this thing weighs about 10,000 pounds. I figure the blade started out heavy because I chose maple for the core.

I'll let you know how it plays. I expect to bring a lot more spin to our little table at work than anybody else, and I expect a lot of people to be irritated by it, including me. I plan on visiting a TT club an hour away sometime in the next month to play some folks who are above my level, and maybe get their opinions on my racket.

Second Attempt at Homemade Table Tennis Blade

2011-10-08T14:59:00.000-04:00

This time I'm going to do 7 plies, 5 of them wood, all glued with 2 part epoxy:

Center ply of 1/16" hard maple, lengthwise grain
Two plies of 1/32" basswood, 45 degree grain (from a 12" wide sheet)
Two plies of 8.9oz S Glass Satin Weave, Thickness: 0.0097"
Two plies of 1/32" basswood, lengthwise grain

This picture shows the layers as they will be assembled:

I assembled them painstakingly between two pieces of super-flat polished granite from a big box home improvement store, each covered with sections of black garbage bag to protect them for another project. Weight added to mash everything together.

I don't have an accurate scale but it feels kind of heavy so I'll skip the oak handles and use more basswood instead:

Use one of these when you sand. It cost about $40. The filter packs are replaceable. It handles particulates, some VOCs, some acid vapors, and other things I cannot pronounce. It works infinitely better than those silly fabric masks you buy by the dozen because it is comfortable, seals perfectly, doesn't get all soaked with moisture, and doesn't fog your glasses if you have them. That last point is worth at least $40 to me.

The handle halves were laminated separately on the same granite slabs using regular glue, then bonded to the blade handle with regular glue. I'm tired of epoxy at this point - shit sticks to everything and won't ever come off, forces you to throw tons of gloves and plastic and brushes straight into the landfill.

I shaped the handle using a rat tail file and 100 grit sandpaper. I finished it using 220 grit sandpaper. Careful when you use a coarse file, or even course paper - you can shred the grain. The laminations help with that, though.

What did I learn?

Use a half-template: one half of a paddle shape, flipped on its axis. That way your thing is symmetrical
Just buy one next time
I'm tired of chemicals. Every time I do a project I'm up to my ass in chemicals.

Building a Table Tennis Racket

2011-09-29T19:17:00.001-04:00

We got a table tennis table at work and it revived my old enthusiasm for the sport. I played in the 90's and I had a semi-custom paddle and everything. I wasn't very good but I enjoyed the hell outta it.

So naturally, given that I have a bunch of raw materials left over from building my composite guitar neck, I decided to embark on a journey: making my own wood/composite table tennis blade. Naturally this is going to turn out more expensive than simply having bought one from a store. But I guess that's not why I do this stuff.

First, a picture of a sandwich discovered on my little blue camera chip thing. I got a message from my HP 735 3.2MP 15x Photosmart camera that I'm running low on solid state storage.

I don't want to lose this. It's a metaphor for composite laminates:

Next, I assembled materials. The black plastic sheeting is part of a garbage bag, laid on top of an old mirror which I hope will provide flatness. The basswood sheets I have are only 4" wide and so I'm going to have to butt them against each other in a sort of alternating layer thing. The book is to push down on top. Good book, BTW, if you like solving "Mate in X" puzzles...lots and lots of them:

Next I put some wood down on the plastic, then a layer of fiberglass fabric on the wood:

Then I had a sandwich containing three layers of wood plus two of fiberglass, soaked in resin. Yum:

I added weight:

I let it cure overnight and prepared to cut the shape of the blade:

And I ended up with a slightly-too-flexible paddle that has epoxy puddles in the gaps where the butt-joined layers meet:

Not good enough. It's got enough rigidity in the long direction, I believe, but it flexes a bit too much across. I think that's because there are two long joints in the middle. I should have done two layers joined at the edges and only one joined in the middle, but I did it other way around.

I've ordered more wood and when it comes we'll use this one as a template.

The Meaning of Phrygian #6 - What I Missed

2011-09-29T18:46:00.001-04:00

In my last post I went through convulsions to derive the so-called Phrygian #6 from the major scale by means of an involved process. I left for later the question of what Phrygian #6 actually means.

I turns out you have to do is get the Phrygian mode and do what it says - sharp the 6th degree.

1. C Major scale with # of semitones between each degree:

C D E F G A B C
2 2 1 2 2 2 1

2. The 3rd mode of the major scale is the Phrygian:

E F G A B C D E
1 2 2 2 1 2 2

3. Sharp the 6th degree to "slide" the one-semitone interval over one degree:

E F G A B C# D E
1 2 2 2 2 1 2

4. Transpose to D:

D Eb F G A B C D
1 2 2 2 2 1 2

Having said that, I don't really like Phrygian #6. I wanted the regular Phrygian after all, because it sounds like it goes with my riffs better:

D Eb F G A Bb C D
1 2 2 2 1 2 2

Building a D Phrygian #6 Scale

2011-09-25T11:38:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I played around with a couple of power chord riffs in standard drop D that have root notes at frets 0, 1, 3, 5 and 7 (D, Eb, F, G and A). I got to thinking, what is that scale? So I went to JGuitar.com, which totally rocks, and set up my tuning to Drop D, then set the root note of the Scale Calculator to D and started calculating different scales until I found one that fit: D Phrygian #6!

Of course, how could I have forgotten? Good old Phrygian Sharp Six. I wanted to understand where that name comes from, so I searched for it and found this at Marc Sabatella's site. Mr. Sabatella writes:

There is no common term for the second mode of the melodic minor scale.

It doesn't tell me where the name comes from, but it is what I need to derive this thing from first principles without twisting in the wind for hours:

1. C Major scale with # of semitones between each degree:

C D E F G A B C
2 2 1 2 2 2 1

2. The 6th mode (Aeolian mode) of the major scale is the natural minor:

A B C D E F G A
2 1 2 2 1 2 2

3. To make the harmonic minor out of the natural minor, raise the 7th scale degree one semitone. The classical composers did this to ~~be difficult~~ make the 7th degree of the scale a proper lead tone, half a step away from the root. So much for the mathematical precision of the "music of the spheres". They were like, "Yeah that's a pretty good mode but you know what? Doesn't sound right for my song here. Let's just change it."

A B C D E F G# A
2 1 2 2 1 3 1

4. OMG! See that 3 semitone interval in there? Ugh! It sounds "unnatural"! To remedy that, they make the harmonic minor into the melodic minor by means of another little tweak: raising the 6th a semitone to "take up" the allegedly awkward-sounding 3 semitone leap between the 6th and 7th degrees.

A B C D E F# G# A
2 1 2 2 2 2 1

Another thing: that's the birth of a scale that contains two 1 semitone intervals that are only a single 2 semitone interval apart. Scales built from natural or harmonic minor scales don't have that pattern. Scales built from modes of the melodic minor scale do have that pattern. Useful side effect of all that goofing off with the minor scale. So next time you have a partial scale that goes "half-whole-half" and you start searching for a name, and you find yourself in a sea of Altered Locrians and Phrygian #6 goofiness, it might help to remember that you're simply perhaps in some mode of the melodic minor.
And finally: in the classical approach, you only play that when you ascend. You play the natural minor when you descend. Dicks.
Oh wait one more thing: When you read about minor scales to find chord progressions that go with them, you are given a whole pile of options. Where do they come from? It's all the chords that are diatonic to both the natural and melodic (and sometimes the harmonic) minors, chucked into a bucket.

5. The 2nd mode of this one-way scale is sometimes called the Phrygian #6 for some reason - that's for another time:

B C D E F# G# A B
1 2 2 2 2 1 2

6. Transposed to my chosen root of D, because that's the lowest, coolest note of a guitar in drop D:

D Eb F G A B C D
1 2 2 2 2 1 2

Note: It was helpful to bring in the flats instead of the sharps, to keep the accidental count as low as possible. Since the riffs I'm playing only contain the first 5 notes, the question of whether I want to have A go to B or A go to Bb is up to me, and I haven't decided on that yet. That will be a totally different scale!

Straight Pull Headstock Conversion, "Finished" but Unfinished

2011-09-20T11:51:00.001-04:00

I still have to adjust the nut slots and tweak the bridge and saddle, but this guitar is now playable in its new 3+3 straight pull configuration. We'll see about stability and durability. Here's a detail of the headstock with its battle scars. The new bone nut is in place, and the Sperzel tuners.

Here's the whole guitar:

Acoustic Guitar Straight Pull Conversion

2011-09-19T10:33:00.000-04:00

Straight pull means that the strings, when viewed from directly above, come over the guitar nut and drop to the tuner shafts without an divergence to the left or right. Fender electrics often have this arrangement, but it's far less common on 3+3 style headstocks. And I'll show you why.

For what purpose do I wish to do this? I've seen differing opinions, some of them strong. And the person in that link has a point. In any case, when the guitar nut is viewed as a dimensionless line, the string is only going in one direction: either it goes over the nut and straight "down" to the tuner, or it goes over the nut and "left/down" or "right/down" to the tuner. That's a fact. But to my mind, that misses a couple of points:

Straight pull just seems like it ought to be better, facts be damned
I like how it looks
The argument fails to take into account the actual geometry of the guitar nut, which is a vertical slot cut into the nut material. A string that goes straight "down" lays naturally in this slot. A string that goes left or right as well angles down into the slot from the front edge of the nut, then makes another angle from the back of the nut slot to the tuner.

Anyhow I'm doing it. If I screw this all up I'll simply saw off the headstock at the scarf joint and glue on another piece, or something.

First job is to determine the natural lie of the strings. I haven't been able to figure out a good way of doing this, really. I figure close is good enough for this cheap acoustic.

No, wait. The first job is to plug up the four holes that will be moved. I used 3/8" oak dowel glued in with that same hardcore two part epoxy I used to do the fiberglass layers on my electric.

Then I put tape across the last inch of the end of the headstock, put the bridge pins in place, made a loop in a piece of string, hung it around each of the bridge pins in turn and ran it through the correct slot in the nut, and eyeballed a line on the tip of the headstock. When the lines were pretty close to evenly spaced, I figured they were pretty close to correct (proportional string spacing or not).

Then I used a little piece of brass tubing from the torch tip cleaner kit that was almost the same diameter as the wrapping portion of the tuner shafts to mark the desired locations of the new holes. This is hard because each of these 3/8" holes will interrupt valuable grain in the headstock material, inevitably weakening it. So I staggered the hole locations.

Drilling simple holes when you don't have a drill press can be an adventure as well. Drill bits wander from starter holes; verticality becomes an issue. I solved the wandering problem by making a template from a piece of steel stock:

Yes, really. Then I measured from the holes to the desired edge of the headstock based on providing enough clearance for the tuner buttons to rotate. I then made a silly flowing profile and attacked it with a coping saw, because a tilt-back guitar headstock is not easily amenable to cutting on a bandsaw. Nice filled holes, huh? This guitar is looking better and better every second.

There are a million little holes on the back of the headstock where the old tuner mounting screws were removed, and where I misplaced the new tuner locator pin holes a million times. Since strength is an issue here, I'm going to fill all the small holes with raw epoxy puddles. I guess that should be strong, unless it's not. I have the option of finishing the edge and face of the headstock with veneer to cover up all the mess, but in order to do that I'd have to take away native grain and that concerns me. I think this is just going to be an ugly guitar.

Proportionately Cutting a Guitar Nut, Cheap and Naive

2011-09-19T10:08:00.001-04:00

I ordered a 1/4" blank bone nut from StewMac and decided to make my own. I'd never done that before. I cut it to length with a hacksaw and to shape with 100 grit laid on 1/4" plate glass. I've read that 3/16" of bearing area is sufficient.

I cut it roughly to height with the hacksaw as well. Since I knew that the original nut was a bit high, I used the one to draw a line on the other, placed the new nut in the jaws of the vise with just the discard area sticking up, and chopped it flush.

I used a tiny hobby triangle file to start the slots for strings 1 and 6. Then I was faced with the problem of spacing the rest of the strings. This was fun. I wanted to space the strings proportionately, which means that instead of being spaced evenly on center, they will be spaced evenly based on the distance between their edges. First, I needed a jig:

I obviously made that, and it was obviously cheap. I put six nuts on a small threaded rod and used them to enforce my desired string spacing. This works best, I think, on a traditional 3+3 setup lacking straight string pull. - the horizontal break angles pull the string into the adjustment nuts.

Then I calculated thusly:

1 and 29/64" between the high and the low strings = 1.453125
The total diameter of strings 2 through 4 = 0.114
The total space to be divided among the remaining five string gaps = 1.339125
The amount of space between each string = 0.267825
Multiplied by 64 to make it 64ths = 17.1408

I thus attempted to put 17/64" between every string - that means diameter to diameter or what have you. That way thicker strings get their share and fingers get the same amount of space around each string. Is the better? Who can tell? Measuring was hard with my eyes. Around a year ago I noticed that I have trouble at close range with tiny little 64ths of an inch. Luckily, I found this weird lens in the junk drawer of my tool chest:

It's badly scratched but it actually worked well for this task. Once I had the spacing, and believe me that (for me at least) committing to a measurement is a real act of faith, I marked each side of each string with a pencil. Not an ordinary pencil, but a pencil sharpened on a flat sheet of sandpaper to make a knife edge.

Then, as I said, I started each slot with a hobby file of small size and triangular cross section. This is nerve wracking in itself: I couldn't commit a deep cut until I was sure the groove had landed exactly between the two bracket lines. When I'd cut deep enough to just touch both lines, and that contact occurred at the same time, I had confirmation that I'd hit the center properly.

Then I finished the slotting with a cheap set of welder's torch tip cleaners, a trick I'd found in several places on the internet. I am unable to make the exact citation, and I do not know who originally proposed this solution.

They look like that. I just picked the one that looked next-size-up from my string using my untrusty eyeballs and my fingers (important). The large ones were able to hold up to the filing pressure, while the small ones need to be supported by your fingers wherever you can hold them. I settled on one finger from my free hand on the edge of the nut, and one free finger from my filing hand pushing down on the file right where it crossed the nut. It worked.

My next task will be more outlandish: straight pull conversion.

Fred Edge Dressing, Cheap

2011-09-19T08:57:00.003-04:00

This fretboard is bound by a strip of black plastic. I could have taken this opportunity to trim the frets to size and snip their tangs to preserve the binding, like you might for a good guitar. But I chose to extend the fret slots through the binding and do it the easy way.

You can get special tools to allow you to hammer frets over the body of the guitar, but why spend the money on that when you have a large hammer that can also be used for other things? That big one at the bottom: you can reach through the soundhole and support the fretboard with it. It helped that the fret slots were generous in width for the StewMac fret tangs.

I trim the fret ends with a regular end cutter, not a fancy luthier's model. My whole goal is to avoid buying specialized tools. When I cut, I push the cutter against the fretboard and then pull it back just a hair, to prevent the fret from getting levered out of its slot by the unsteadiness of my hand as I apply pressure to the cutter handles.

Then I was left with a row of spikes on both sides of my fretboard. When I built the neck for the electric, I simply ran a mill file freehand down the sides. The worst that happened there were a hand cramp, a bloody nick, and the occasional ding on the headstock when I ran the file too far that way. The acoustic presents one new problem, however: freehanding it is impossible because the file would repeatedly hit the guitar body where the fretboard goes over it.

So I made a tool that consists of two clamps holding a mill file to the edge of a board. The clamps are heavy, so I arranged them in opposite directions. The file descends only 1/8" below the face of the board, which is run along the fingerboard. It was heavy as hell but worked perfectly.

The black plastic binding took some damage so I sanded it down with progressively finer grits of paper until I'd taken off the damaged finish material and plastic fuzz. It's visible but doesn't interfere with function.

Fine Radius Adjustments on a Fender LSR Nut

2011-08-28T15:10:00.000-04:00

The action on the low-E string of my LSR nut was a little high. I think it's because the nut's supposed 9.5" radius doesn't match the fretboard's supposed 10" radius at the nut, or my alleged fret leveling job, which might very well have changed the effective radius of the neck. Either way, the low string was way high. I decided to explore a theory. No pictures because my crappy old camera won't focus on anything so small.

No warranty, expressed or implied. Proceed at your own risk. Good luck.

Here's what I did to lower the action on a string. Seems to have worked for me, except that this operation seems to have wrecked some of the springy retention ability of the retainer prongs. I will have to be careful when changing strings forever more. I think if I had removed the nut completely and taken the retainer finger assembly off in one piece, that might not have happened, but imagine what a pain in the ass that would have been!

Place the guitar on a nice smooth surface covered neatly in cloth. The little ball bearings, once lost, will never be found again if they bounce on something hard.
Loosen the string and pull it aside into a neighboring string slot.
Pry the retainer prongs back toward the headstock a little.
Use a slightly-magnetic awl tip to draw out the two ball bearings. Grab them between your pinched fingers before you lift them very high, and put them in a container.
Use a drill bit slightly smaller than the ball bearing cups to deepen the holes that hold the bearings. Measure forty five times and cut twenty times. Go a little at a time. You can't go back. How do you know where to put the holes? I dunno. I just leaned the bit into the corners ever so slightly and drilled.
Replace the bearings, replace the string, and tune to pitch. If you are convinced you need to go deeper, do so.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

Here's what I did to widen the string slots on the LSR nut. I'm using a set of very heavy strings (12's) and I've been worried that the low string was hitting the edges of the little exit slot.

Steps 1-4 above
Use the awl to pop out the little foam dampener on the headstock side of the nut, and place it with the ball bearings.
Sand away with a tiny rectangular file. Don't wreck the retainer prongs.

Your mileage may vary, especially considering that I'm just making all of this up.

Acoustic Refret

2011-08-27T16:03:00.000-04:00

First I had to get the fingerboard all flat. I've struggled with flatness before. This time I think I did better. Below you see my cheap aluminum level with a layer of fabric carpet tape plus a layer of 220 grit paper.

I use a solvent to clean the old tape scum off the level
I put on the carpet tape. It sticks like a beast so hold it at one end, line it up an inch off the opposite end, and lay it down easy.
I use a razor blade along the edge to cut the tape flush, then peel the backing.
I put on the paper in 11.5" strips, then use the razor the same way to cut that flush

I made sure the truss rod was loose all the way, then I sanded. There was a high spot at the soundhole end of the fingerboard, and another longer one from fret 1.5 to about fret 11. By the time I was done, all the fake black ebony stain had come off, and I'd taken enough wood off that the whole idea of putting on high frets to lower the action was nullified. Way to think it through, kiddo.

Also excellent: the nut, which is supposed to pop off easy, did in fact pop off easy, but it took some grain with it. I'll have to flatten that surface with a file.

Here is the first several frets. I didn't order enough fret wire because I messed up, and the next batch didn't arrive in time for the hurricane.

Acoustic Refret, Nut and Bridge Shave

2011-08-21T09:43:00.000-04:00

I've got an 80's Harmony acoustic, given to me by my brother. It has a terrible high action. The neck doesn't seem messed up, and the soundboard isn't too bellied out. I don't want to reset the neck because it's a bit of a big step that requires tools that would cost real money: steam and all kinds of things. I know I could slap something together from junk, but in my experience junk (and connecting junk to junk) costs real money.

So for my next project, I'm going to try to lower the action on this guitar - backwards:

Put gigantor frets on it
Redo the nut to compensate
Shave the bridge
Perhaps convert the bridge from an adjustable-height bridge, which seems to take up precious verticality, to a fixed height
Put in a brass plate below the bridge plate to prevent the string ball ends from tearing up the soft wood down there. StewMac wants $12 for this but I can make one for more like 20 cents.

Here's the old adjustable bridge:

It won't go low enough. I think I'll have to shave the bridge down too. That will come after the refret, once I see the action I'm getting.

Here are the strips of feeler gauge I'm using to protect the very soft fretboard against the heel of my fret-removal chisels:

I don't have a fancy fret-removing end cutter that's ground down so the cutting edges are flush with the flat face. These chisels work beautifully. I do guess that there's a slight outside chance of a truly horrifying accident, if one of the chisels comes loose, rides up the other chisel and unzips the flesh of my forearm. That would suck. But I didn't get the feeling that was likely to happen. There's not a lot of force involved in this; the trick is getting a sharp edge under the metal/wood interface.

I'll be ordering fret wire and replacement blank nut and and bridge this week.

The Armrest is Finished

2011-07-25T15:17:00.000-04:00

Here's the completed guitar. It was done a while ago but I didn't post for a long time. This photo was taken at work by a coworker.

You can see how the upper rest has been bent almost parallel to the body. I did that with a bench vise and a bad attidude.

What else did I learn?

More composites in the neck, or none at all. The neck is strong but I'm not sure it's much better/different than a wood neck.
Keep knobs farther away from the bridge. Sometimes during extended palm-muted riffing sessions, I find I've nudged the bridge volume down with the back edge of my hand.
I've always hated the G string - it sounds nasty on every guitar I've ever owned. But on this guitar it doesn't, because somehow the composite neck is eating those frequencies and damping them down. It's so pronounced that I've noticed the G string has less sustain than the others. This is kind of cool but I'm not sure it's all good. Some fret positions on the G string die out quicker than I'd like them to.
The balance of the guitar is excellent with respect to the leg rest. I record with this guitar exclusively and whether I use the strap or not it stays where I put it when I'm sitting down.
The arm rest is still a lot taller with respect to the bridge than most other guitars. But it works well.
The EMG 81 TWX and 89 XR pickups sound very nice. It's a pretty non-resonant, clinical sounding guitar and the pickups convey that accurately. I've never played any other EMGs so I can't tell you about the X thing. The guitar sound itself sounds sweet enough in neck single coil, fat and nasty in neck humbucker mode, brutal and cutting in bridge humbucker mode, and thin as all hell in bridge single coil mode. The neck single coil mode evokes enough of that strat neck thing that I'm very satisfied with it. The middle position doesn't do much for me; mixing the two pickups in single coil mode doesn't evoke any of the sound of mixed neck/middle on my G&L S-500. So...
Based on all that, next time I'd skip the dual mode pickups. The dual mode pickup in the neck position is probably more than I need, as well. I should have done single 80X/SAX/SAX, I think. That's just me. I love the strat single coil sound in the neck/middle positions, and I love humbuckers at the bridge, and that's all there is to it.
Battery life is nuts. I've had two batteries in there in the past 6-7 months, and I only changed them to see if a new one sounded different - it didn't.
I'm glad I made it funny looking. There are quite enough strats, teles, pauls and prs's in the world IMHO.

Even Dunner (or...How I Bent My Rod with a Hickey)

2011-05-18T20:16:00.000-04:00

So my friend Tom lent me his 1/2" Hickey EMT bender. I attacked the 1/2" aluminum rod with it. It was not pretty but here's what I ended up with:

That's one single piece of aluminum. If I can, I'll bend the armrest in toward the body more. But it's not happening tonight. How's it work? The leg rest is awesome. The armrest is a bit tall and it doesn't seem aesthetically pleasing, exactly. But hey. What're you gonna do? That thing's permanent.

Intonation - the 12th Fret Harmonic vs. the Open String

2011-02-20T19:02:00.000-05:00

The question I tried to answer today is, "Which is more better?"

Comparing the note at the 12th fret with the harmonic at the 12th fret, or
Comparing the note at the 12th fret with the open string

Today I set the intonation on my new guitar for the Xth time. I have a Peterson Strobostomp, which is good because neither my ear, nor a needle tuner, has ever helped me intonate a guitar. And I couldn't tell see much difference between the two methods. I think the reason is that if the intonation is already close, the harmonic and the open string are converging somewhat. Who knows? It's such an inexact thing. My favorite E-form barre chord sometimes sounds good to me, and sometimes sounds horrible, when played up the neck. That can change from day to day.

I tried hacking the G string compensation a little by increasing it arbitrarily, because it seems like the G is the primary culprit in spoiling my perfect chord. I've heard of studio musicians doing that when they know exactly what intervals, and where on the neck, they're planning to be. I think experienced luthiers, guitar techs and musicians consciously or unconsciously "sweeten" their intonation, and they're not telling me how it's done. I've read that experience musicians of the fretless persuasion (eg violin) adjust their intonation dynamically, like magicians.

I'm trying to work up a system for hacking intonation that works reliably, and when I do, I'll post it. It'll be something along the lines of:

Play your chord or group of notes where it needs to be
Strum repeatedly and silence different strings in turn, looking for the one that's ruining it most for everybody
Use the regular guitar tuners to nudge that string up or down a little at a time (basically make it out of tune) until it plays better with others
If you sharpened it, decrease compensation for that string beyond what is normal, and if you flatted it increase compensation beyond what is normal

Also I just realized that I might be able to do something using just the tuner: hold the chord up where I need it and, in effect, see how far from equal temperament perfection each note is. That's basically simple intonation, but maybe it changes the equation when all the strings are fingered?

I am a monkey.

Strange High E String Failure Mode

2011-02-19T12:55:00.000-05:00

I've heard it said of tremolo use and Kahlers in particular, that guitar string windings at the ball end should be soldered. I always wondered what the heck that was about. From what I have discerned, Kahlers have fixed saddles and wrap the string ball ends around a semi-circular rotating stop, similar to Bigsby tremolos and, in a way, to some wrap-around TOM (Tune-O-Matic) fixed bridges. And there, I thought, was the crux: something about turning a corner with the wrapped end perhaps caused problems.

Now maybe I understand.

I lost the ability to maintain tuning on my high E string on my new homemade guitar. Every time I did a bend, it came back low - and it's a fixed bridge. It happened over and over and over. I even loosed the Steinberger gearless tuner at the headstock, unclamped the string, grabbed the free tail and reclamped it with the slack taken up. It kept happening. Here were my theories, in descending order of probability:

string clamp mechanism slipping - but I didn't see any less tag end than I remembered having after the initial string installation
string stretching like all getout - but I couldn't imagine a string stretching that much without breaking
tuner shifting in the soft basswood of the tuner hole - but i saw no visual indication of it
adjustable saddle moving of its own accord - but I checked the compensation screw head and it was against the rear of the bridge
bridge moving - but the other strings were great

Then I measure the wrapping at the ball end where it comes through the rear of the bridge. I measured 19/64ths, worked the string by bouncing the guitar on it repeatedly. I measured 16/64ths, but I didn't believe it. I stretched the string again and it became clear: the high E string was getting pulled around the ball end and smooshing the wrap toward the ball end. In this picture you can see it:

Imagine for a moment that I had a camera made after about 2003, that could take a picture worth a damn. You would see that the green arrow is approximately where the final wrap used to be, and the yellow arrow is where it is now. Between the two is kinked-up string, unwrapped wraps that have wriggled out of the wrap zone.

From now on I will solder my strings, I guess.

The Guitar with the Finish (but not the Finished Guitar)

2011-02-01T14:47:00.000-05:00

After weeks of applying thin coats of wipe-on poly I got enough layers on there. The poly is not mirror smooth - that happens later, after the poly has cured (2-4 weeks, and/or until the smell disappears), when it's wet-sanded and buffed. Who knows if I'll even bother doing that? In the photos that follow, you can see the ripples in the poly.

The headstock with the Steinberger gearless tuners and Fender LSR nut. I've been slacking the strings, adjusting the neck relief with the truss rod, and re-shimming the nut each time. What a pain in the sack.

The battery is wrapped in blue electrical tape, both to prevent it from shorting any contacts, and because CVS batteries are Not Very Metal.

Six-bolt neck attachment:

I still haven't figured out how to bend the 1/2" aluminum rod. I'm working on that. It may involved annealing the metal with a propane torch (until the carbon in a Sharpie line fades out). I've located a machine shop very near my house, but I haven't given up yet; I've managed to do just about everything by myself so far.

Poly Wanna Slacker and Extreme Glueline Remediation

2011-01-09T13:25:00.000-05:00

So I've been putting wipe-on poly on the neck (about 10 thin ones or so), and, after letting the Danish Oil dry for nearly a week I put a couple coats on the body as well.

Then I got tired of the glue line on the sides of the body, so I cut a 1/4" x 3/8" fillet. You can see I dipped into a control cavity. That's cool.

I turned my router into a self-contained router table, and tie-wrapped it to the legs of my band saw for stability:

I clamped a guide to the band saw table to make a 1/4" strip of oak. I had to sand a 64th off it despite my careful calibration and testing of the guide. I set the strips into the side fillets with Titebond, which is way, way too thick for this kind of thing. I clamped up in the middle first to drive out the excess glue, which sorta worked, then used my only two long-enough clamps to get the all-important ends (I don't want glue showing there) and put weight on the middle with dumbbells.

This means I'll have glue to clean up on the body. I'm hoping the few light coats of poly already on there makes it not stick so good, and that the sanding required to bring the oak strips down to level doesn't wreck the danish oil finish.

I really want this thing to be done but those glue lines were bugging the hell outta me. I couldn't leave it like that. Couldn't.

Finishing Up and the Aluminum Silhouette

2011-01-01T16:50:00.000-05:00

There's nothing to photograph lately. But I've taken the whole guitar apart again to apply finish to the neck and body. For the neck: Watco Danish Oil. It's a penetrating, hardening type of varnish. For the neck: Minwax Wipe-On Poly (gloss). It's basically a pre-thinned poly that goes on in fine, controllable layers; I picked gloss not because I want the shine, but because satin finishes are "satinized" by the addition of stuff (silicates?) to gloss finishes. I figure it's better without stuff in it.

The world of finishing can be pretty confusing. You got shellacs, polyurethanes, other polys, varnishes, and multiple type of lacquer, including nitrocellulose lacquer which is traditional for old guitars. I literally surfed for 6 or 8 hours before settling on the two I picked.

Currently I'm sanding like crazy.

Also I took delivery of 4 feet of 1/2" aluminum bar stock. The idea is to make the rest out of it in the form of a guitarish outline. Unfortunately the stuff is hell to bend - I've got nothing that works on it, and I'll have to go in search of a bender. On the other hand, if it survives the bending process it'll probably be strong enough to handle the day to day battering a guitar gets.

More soon.

Closest So Far to Being Done With This Guitar Part IV!

2010-12-24T16:15:00.000-05:00

Okay, control cavity covers. Working with acrylic is a pain, but not as bad as the hardware store guy made it sound. I used a rabitting router bit to make the inset or whatever you call it, then I laid the acrylic on the cavity and drew the pattern, then I cut it with a hacksaw, then I sanded it until it fit as good as it's going to. The downside: doing these three cavities probably took me 5 hours.

You can see where the two cavities join. The cavities connect this way because my guitar-designing skills are not so powerful. And that shitty battery is fabulous-looking, no?

I made the front jack cover the same way but with aluminum. It's gnarly because I didn't want to buy a flat of aluminum wide enough, so I pounded a piece of angle flat. Yeah! Also note the switch mount. The dominant artistic theme that I'm trying to evoke here is "crudely-formed pieces of aluminum screwed randomly to a brown block of wood." I think I achieved that look perfectly.

The knobs are certainly not final. See the master volume to the side of the bridge? It's different because the other kind wouldn't fit there. Genius! Also those speed knobs look shitty on this guitar. I'll be searching for something a bit nicer. Or making them, more like. Another adventure.

Playing Impressions and To Do List

2010-12-18T08:11:00.000-05:00

To get the neck pickup working I had to flip a connector that I had wrong on the EMG pickup buss. Then everything was well. This guitar sounds good - the neck and body don't resonate much, so it has acres of sustain. Also because of the lack of resonance, it lacks a certain amount of "tone". It's a little too clean and plain. But you know what? I mean to do that. That's why I picked a composite neck, thinking that the two materials (wood and fiberglass/epoxy) would fight each other an resonate with nothing. It's why I picked a solid bridge. It's why I picked EMG pickups - for their low string pull. It's why the body is a large, very thick slab of what passes for mahogany these days.

I wanted a guitar primarily for high gain chord work, with massive sustain, that could do some nice cleans, and I think I got it. I've decided to concentrate all the controls in the main mahogany slab. That will give me the freedom to do whatever I want with the body shape, or even leave it the way it is (though I would like an leg rest and one for my arm as well). Why shouldn't my guitar be a block with little sticks hanging off it holding up wood bits like a Tinker Toy atom? Let everyone else build more Telecasters and SGs and LPS and Strats and whatnot. Make mine different.

Now I have to do a bunch of things, and in order not to waste strings, I have to remember to do them all at once:

Cut the humbucker springs by 1/3 or so, particularly the neck
Mount the pickup selector mini-switch (a DPDP on-on-on strapped into SPDT center-on) on a piece of aluminum near the master volume
Mount the output jack. It can't go on the end of the guitar because I want this thing to stand up when I lean it against something.
Route reliefs around the rear cavity edges to receive cover plates - at the same time I ought to clean up the cavities and make them even
Fix up a dead note up near 16 or 17 on the high E, where the edge of that fret is way too low. I missed this in leveling and I'm not sure how I want to fix it: I can re-level the frets (then re-crown them and re-polish them) or I can level just the upper half, sloping down gently, like some instructions say. The problem with that second one is that if I do that, and it doesn't get enough material, I'm in trouble.
Thin the back of the neck? I've got about 10/64s back of the truss rod, and the neck is thick. If I had had to force relief into the neck with the rod, it would be pushing on that material, but I think it's pushing on the other side instead (because the strings are acting on the neck well). Still, I think I'd rather be safe than sorry. The neck plays well.
Figure out what to do about rests for leg and arm

All Together Now! A Guitar is Born...

2010-12-17T13:29:00.000-05:00

I drilled a 3/8" hole with a spade bit from the neck pickup to the bridge pickup for the neck pickup wires. Like a true genius I allowed the drill bit extender to gouge the surface of my neck pocket. It looks crappy but no harm done I guess. Dang.

I drilled 5/16" holes for the control pots. The top one will be the master volume, and it will have a switch next to it. The others, behind the bridge, are individual volume/tone pairs for the pickups.

I routed like a fiend, using the same template I used for the pickups. I cleaned up some messes with a good sharp chisel (my new best friend in the shop). The bottom cavity is for the master volume. Are you wondering what that semi-circular relief is for? Thinking maybe it's clearance for a potentiometer? Think again - it's damage from an angry router bit that I prettied up somewhat. Wonderful!

Here's my genius pickup mounting technique. I made aluminum bits to span the pickup routes and function like a pickup ring does.

EMG solderless wiring is pretty cool. Again, the uninhabited cavity on the left is for the master volume when I receive it in the mail. And the pickup selector switch when I figure out how to mount one.

The guitar body assembled:

I played it. The bridge pickup is working and the neck pickup is not...time for troubleshooting. It sounds very nice, I believe. I'll reserve judgement until I hear the neck pickup.

Pickup Routes and Bridge Hole Fix

2010-12-16T15:07:00.000-05:00

I screwed up the location of the bridge. I had it about 2 mm too close to the bass side. This was forcing the roller adjusters on the treble saddle all the way to the edge, putting a sideways bend in the strings over the saddles, and pissing me off. So I got myself a 1/4" tapered plug cutter and made 6 plugs - because the plug cutter doesn't make them deep enough go all the way down the 1/4" holes I redrilled through the existing screw holes. Then I put Titebond in each hole, put one plug all the way down (forcing it with the end of a 5mm allen key and a hammer), and repeated with half off another plug (the thicker half - remember, it's a tapered plug cutter). About a 1/16 of an inch remained above the face of the guitar body as the glue dried.

The it was time to make the pickup routes. I found this very difficult. First I attempted to make a template from a piece of scrap drawer-front oak I had around:

The plan was to draw the pickup outline and, because I only have a 1/2" diameter flush-cut router bit, drill 1/4" holes in the corners first to more correctly match the pickup corner radius. Well, all that was doable, but when I routed the center of the oak, things went sour. I gouged it up, it tore chunks from the grain - it broke my template. So I set my sights on something a little more tractable: 1/4" luan plywood. Easy to work, I figured, and strong enough to run the flush-cut router bit against.

I didn't cut the pickup ears into the template. That I'd do later. I stuck the template to the guitar body with double-sided carpet tape (wonderful stuff, wish I'd discovered it sooner!) and pre-drilled the 1/4" corner holes. Then I went to town with the router:

Then I put the pickup into the hole upside-down and marked the ears. I used a 3/16" brad-point bit to rough out 3 small holes inline in the outline. Then I whacked it with the chisel, which I had to sharpen; the long piece of glass with sandpaper glued to it proved excellent for this, in fact that's what I'll probably use that glass for in the future - 3 or 4 sections with different grits.

I'm tired.

Fret Leveling

2010-12-12T13:02:00.000-05:00

My pickup-expectation paralysis broke finally, today, and I decided to make myself useful.

I used a cheap 24" foot aluminum level for this job. It has a nice straight edge, and it's just a bit longer than the fretboard. I got some fabric carpet tape, which is advertised as being easily removable. I already had some 320 grit sandpaper.

I put the carpet tape on the level 1" strips of the sandpaper onto the carpet tape. I adjusted the neck as flat as possible. I began to take run the level across the frets, making every (poor, I'm sure) attempt at preserving the conical fretboard radius. I got it to where nearly every fret had a flattened top except for the bass side of the second, and a couple up around 17/18. Those weren't getting touched. To go faster, I used the same course file I used for fret end trimming.

Finally, they were all flattened to some degree. Then I marked them with black marker and used my fret crowning file to make the fret tops round again. I'm glad I bought that one file. I couldn't have done the crowning without it.

Next is to dress the fret ends and polish the frets.

Here are a couple of sites that do a far better job of describing this than I can:

http://www.skguitar.com/SKGS/sk/fretcrowning.htm
http://www.fretnotguitarrepair.com/repair/acoustic-guitar/fret-leveling.php
http://www.stevesguitarsite.com/FRETLEVEL&CROWN.HTML

Attaching the Neck, Stabilizing the Basswood, and....Guitar?

2010-12-06T15:09:00.000-05:00

I took the day off today because I've got a couple days to burn before the end of the year. Also I was hoping the USPS would deliver the EMG pickups. Alas - they did not. My postage consultant drove right on by without even providing me with any junk mail. I swore out loud, loudly.

Saturday and Sunday I attached the neck using 10-24 steel threaded inserts from McFeely's. The reasoning here is that the basswood is soft and shreds easily: the last thing I need is for the neck screws to tear right out, despite the structure provided by the composite layers. I would use 6 inserts to spread the load even more. The thought of this operation had me sweating and twitching, because I would be drilling 6 large holes in the heel of my neck, the neck that has taken me 9 months to make, and there would be very little chance of going back if I goofed it up.

I drilled through the body into the neck, then widened the holes for the inserts. Driving the inserts in was an imprecise process and it pushed some of the upper-layer basswood around, but nothing fatal. I countersunk the body for the screws, which I alluded to in a previous out-of-order post.

Then I put some of that thin Zap CA around the threaded inserts and into the tuner holes to stabilize the soft basswood - worked fine, though I did have to run a solvent-wet neck bolt into the inserts to clear out some CA/sawdust crust. I also hit the screw holes for the LSR nut, but I tested that process on 1/16" holes drilled in a piece of junk laminate - I didn't want to find out that the CA completely plugged them. I needn't have worried. Thin doesn't even begin to describe that stuff.

So here we are, Monday. After I didn't get the pickups, I sulked for quite a while. My whole day - ruined! Waaaaah!

Then I got to work. Time to string this thing. I had a set of D'Addario 10s around for my S-500. I reinstalled the saddles that I removed from the bridge in order to screw the bridge to the body. I installed the LSR nut with all 8 provided shims, after reaming out the 1/16" screw holes to clear any wayward CA. I installed the tuners after reaming out the holes again with a 3/8" bit to clear out the CA crust. The tuners took me a while to figure out but ended up performing perfectly.

Then I tuned the guitar by ear to my S-500. I tightened up the truss rod to take out the relief put in by the strings (I'm grateful the strings are able to work the neck). Bridge:

Nut and headstock:

Truss rod spoke nut:

Neck bolts:

And...guitar?

How does it sound, without the pickups? Well, it sounds thin. I'm not impressed. But when I push on the body (into the carpet or the top of the work bench) to damp it down, it deepens up nicely. Clearly I gotta put some more heavy wood on this thing. I was toying with the idea of making a Steinberger inspired body, but that clearly is not happening, and not just because of the resonance. I'm not comfortable with how it rested in my hands. So it's going to get more guitarlike. But I do like the face that it's square on bottom, so it doesn't fall over - that's what I've always liked about the Vs.

Body Shaping and Headstock Thickness

2010-12-04T14:04:00.000-05:00

First I had to make the headstock thicker for the tuners. 1/2" wasn't going to give the tuner nuts enough to grab onto. I epoxied a layer of 1/16" basswood onto the face of the headstock in an interesting fashion:

I figured I'd add to the front face of the headstock because I already had some extra string break angle over the standard Fender headstock. This addition is raised and might look interesting. Why not? We'll see how it goes.

Then I set about to fix up the mahogany body. First I sanded the glue drippings off the join lines. Then I opened up the neck pocket for high-fret access. Then I evened up the end of the body. Then, because the body is 2" thick, quite a bit thicker than your average, I graded down to the neck pocket. I did this with the bandsaw and a 1/2" skip-tooth blade. For the first time I felt I really understand what a band saw is all about - this was like doing geometry, like sculpting with a laser. The combination of easily-sawable wood with a blade perfectly suited to the task is a dream.

The end of the body is about 1" thick, which is the thickness of my S-500 under the neck pocket. I re-cut the countersinks for the neck bolts.

Doesn't that look cool?

Mahogany Body and Neck Pocket

2010-11-27T15:23:00.000-05:00

I want the center core of the body to be a good solid type of "tone wood". I went to the local Ring's End and they had 3 feet of 5/4 by 6" mahogany. I don't know mahogany but this stuff looked nice to me, and it is moderately hefty.

I cut it in half and glued it to itself with Franklin Tightbond. I didn't do a very good job. That stuff went on like peanut butter and I slathered it. When I clamped, the boards started sliding off each other. I ended up drilling a couple of small holes in each end (very fast) and inserting some thin smooth bolts through the holes (tightly fitting), then piling a bunch of weight on the resulting stack.

The glue line is thick as hell. It left some annoying gaps around one edge. I'm going to have to fix this up somehow. But it's not going anywhere, I think. I know there's enough glue in the center. There's nothing simple for me - I can't even glue a board to a board without getting all turned around and confused.

Then I cut the neck pocket. I started by placing the neck on the end of mahogany, centered it, and drew some outlines in pencil. I freehand routed a quarter inch down inside these lines, try to draw good clean edges, until I realized that would never, ever work - I was going to put it into the wall and wreck the pocket. So, like usual, I made a jig:

I always make a jig. Viewed one way, this whole project has been an endless succession of single purpose jigs. I made this one by clamping those two long boards to the sides of the guitar neck at the heel, laying it on the body core, and clamping and nailing everything together like a Rube Goldberg device. You can see where I had to hack away chunks of the crosspiece to make some router base clearance. I extended the pocket about a centimeter to make room for the truss rod spoke nut sticking out the neck heel. Here's the completed neck pocket with the Freud 1/2" flush cut top-bearing router bit:

The neck fits well. Not only well - it fits beautifully. It fits so tightly and firmly that I feel like I have no right to such a wonderful neck pocket, not the way I cut it:

Then I ordered parts for the next phase: attaching the neck to the body and installing bridge/pickups. I'm going to use threaded inserts for this because I don't trust the soft basswood with bare wood screws. I had some brass ones lying around, and I'm glad I tried installing one in some scrap neck laminate, because it broke off at its drive screw slot. Brass is no good for this.

I ordered a box of 10 steel threaded inserts from McFeely's, 10-24 with a 5mm hex drive and 9/32 outer hole size.

I ordered two pickups through Amazon: an EMG 81TWX and a 89XR. These are both dual-mode pickups, each containing a humbucker and a single coil in switchable arrangement. They come with push-pull volume pots to toggle between modes, as well as active tone controls and all the wiring I should need.

TOTAL COST SO FAR:

$592 - Previous steps
$38 - 3 board feet of 5/4 x 6 mahogany
$24 - flush cut router bit
$5 - steel threaded inserts
$260 - EMG pickups
-------------------
$919 total cost so far

OUCH. I figured I'd spend about a grand. But actually doing it is totally depressing.

Nut and Tuners

2010-11-25T10:56:00.001-05:00

I finished cutting the nut slot to width for the LSR nut. I used a pull saw to get it close, and a file with masking tape on its short side to get the width correct (so I could take off material on the vertical face of the slot, without digging it any deeper). I used needle files to flatten the bottom of the slot. By the time I'd finished, the fit was tight but i'd undercut the slot on the bass side toward the first fret, just slightly. No big deal I think.

This nut doesn't have fore and aft pressure on it like a locking nut, even thought it might look similar. The nut has little pairs of ball bearings for each string to slide upon. So the two provided screws, tiny though they are, will hold it fine. The instructions say to use some weird-ass drill size, and only that size - the danger, according to the instructions, is in twisting the screw head off. I used a 1/16" which is a few hundredths too small, because I always think I know better. It worked fine. I put a little fishing reel oil on the threads before I put them in. I used all of the shims provided. If that's not enough, I'll make my own shims out of feeler gauges.

Then it was time to mark the location of the tuner holes. The first method I used worked very poorly: it consisted of push pins with fishing line between them running in the approximate position of real strings. It was too hard to eyeball the lie over the nut angle, and too hard to mark the lines on the headstock under the fishing line.

Next I made a jig to suspend a length of aluminum angle stock over the neck from the heel end, and taped a piece of paper to the neck with the correct string spacing (gotten from my G&L S-500, which has nearly the same dimensions).

I used my trusty 6" ruler to drop the vertical down to the paper on the heel end, and to the headstock in two places on the other end. This worked well because that ruler centered itself well in the ball bearings of the nut:

The I double-checked everything and made the lines:

You can see my attempt to sanity check the spacing. I put the line delineating the row of tuner hole centers across the string lines, then measured the distance between each of the holes. I was a little annoyed and disturbed by the fact that they weren't perfectly regular, and that more importantly that the intervals got bigger going toward the nut/bass side. Then I realized they should get wider because the string lines are a wee bit farther apart toward the nut, as they converge from heel to nut. Okay. Good enough? It had better be, let me tell you.

Basswood doesn't like to be drilled. It shreds a bit. The tuner holes are 3/8", as specified by the StewMac instructions for the Steinberger Gearless tuners.

I brought the neck upstairs to look at it in daylight, thinking that it was nice-enough looking to be treated like family, finally. It was at this moment that I nearly lost it: I realized that the direct line from the nut to the centerline of each tuner goes right through the string-clamping knob on the tuner to the left, if that clamping knob comes to rest perpendicular to the string lie! I was all like, "Oh BLEEPETY BLEEP BLEEP, you BLEEPETY BLEEPER!"

I was stumped and very worried. I searched the internet to little avail, but did discover many pictures of these tuners on standard Fender 6-in-line headstocks. I compared my headstock to the S-500, and it looked very similar, both in tuner spacing and cross-string angle. Yes, I could put some other tuners on there, but these things were bloody expensive! WTF? I clamped a string into the bass tuner and discovered two things:

Probably, if the clamping knob is perpendicular, I can muscle it around another quarter turn to make it parallel
Because of the peculiar spaghetti-slurping operation of these tuners (pulling the string down into a hole), the clamping knobs wouldn't always be in the full down position - room for strings to go under them

I'm relying on point 1, because point 2 depends on it - wouldn't want to tighten a string, dragging a clamping knob down into the next highest string and bollocksing up the works. I think it'll be okay.

The nearly-completed neck:

Next I'm going to start working on the body. It's time to:

get this thing strung up and arranged properly
pickups in
frets leveled
intonation and setup
take it all back down and put it into its final shape, which means headstock shape, proper contours, body shape
finished all wood parts with whatever stains or coatings I decide to apply

I'm ordering the pickups in the next week or so. The bill for that ain't gonna be pretty. More later.

Fret Not - Refretting a Brand New Neck, and Breakthroughs

2010-11-21T12:02:00.001-05:00

I knew putting the frets in would be fraught with danger, and that I would do a less-than-perfect job. Accordingly, I launched into it without even thinking and put the frets in with a plastic faced hammer after bending the fret wire. I forgot to round over the sharp edges of the fretboard. Some of the frets didn't seat well. I beveled the edges of the fret slots too deep in places. When I ran my file along the side of the fretboard, some of the frets rocked in their slots under my fingers. All kinds of little things went wrong. It was another low point in the journey.

Enough of uncertainty! I decided to remove the frets and refret the neck already. This time, I'd glue them in like a freak. I've read all about the right way to do it, and that gluing is not required. And how, if I ever want to refret this thing for real in the future, gluing can contribute to a bigger mess. I've read it all. It didn't work out like that, okay?

I tapped out the frets from the edges where they hung over, because I don't have a pair of end-nippers that's totally flush-ground. Of course the fingerboard chipped out in several places. All the chips stayed where they belonged except for one, by the edge, which I will fill later with an epoxy/rosewood dust mixture.

First I rounded the fretboard edges properly. Then I cleaned out the fret slots with a pull saw, deepening them slightly to accommodate glue in capillary fashion. I surmised that the reason for some of the unseated frets was inadequate curvature of the fretwire, especially near the nut; I had enough fretwire left (almost a whole 2 foot length) to increase the curvature and redo 1-5 new. Others I rested in a concave cut at the end of a 1x4 and tapped with the hammer to bend deeper. The rest just went in. There was enough grab left in the fret slots to hold them flush.

After I was satisfied that the frets were seated well, I put a fine tip on the glue and went off the hook. This stuff is so watery it wicked everywhere. I think it shows in the following picture: some of it went down the grain from deep inside the fret slots and popped out in random endgrains in the area between frets, like running down a wormhole. Amazing.

Well, they ain't going anywhere. Sure, it looks crappy. I'll try some toluene to clean it up. While the glue was curing, I made the rough cuts to widen the nut slot for the LSR roller nut, which is wider than a regular nut and pushes toward the first fret. I made the vertical cut freehand with the pull saw, and the bottom cut with a coping saw. I would never have done either of those things before I started this project, but I was able to do it and not screw it up. Yes, I'll be cleaning up the slot with needle files (very carefully). No, it's far from perfect. Yes, it will take me longer than it takes anybody else. But I'm going to cut a really good nut slot freehand, and it's going to work well and look nice when I'm finished. That's amazing to me. I'm learning a lot.

I discovered something incredibly new about filing today that's also blindingly obvious. While beginning the process of filing the fret edges flush to the fretboard, I started to get discouraged. It's a lot of work, and those frets are hard. Maybe they're not stainless, but they're not very soft either. But by running the file down the frets until they were all about the same height, I found it going faster than I imagined it would. I realized that when I took care to keep all the fret overhangs even, the file works on them all at the same time, and long even strokes do all the work magically. I knew that, but now I really know it in my bones. It's one of those little things that open my eyes a bit.

Currently I'm still evening the fret edges. My file is not attached to a board like those fancy ones you can buy, so it's not as smooth as it could be. But I'm using what I've got, which I got for free. After that I'll bevel them a bit (less is more - you can't put it back) and clean up some of the CA.

Bending Fretwire and the Start of Fret Installation

2010-11-13T14:45:00.000-05:00

Fret wire must be bent to approximately the radius of the neck at the fret in which it is to be installed. Most authorities suggest bending it a little tighter than that. In my case, I've got a conical (compound) radius neck that goes from 10" at the nut to about 14" radius at the end of the board. I settled on 9" as a good radius for the whole thing.

Bending fret wire is not a simple matter of grabbing both ends and pulling them together into a circular shape. I know, I tried it! What happens is that the wire starts to bend non-asymmetrically, so that tang that is supposed to go into the fret slot is not perpendicular to the plane of the bend. In fact, there is no plane of the bend, the thing starts to curl up. Above all the fret wire must be straight when viewed from the top, and a curlicue ain't gonna cut it.

Inspired by fret benders described at various places on the internet (themselves apparently inspired by this fancy StewMac version), I made my own. It's stupid looking:

The metal roller is two larger washers with a thin small washer between them - this makes a slot for the fret tang to ride in. The two rubber rollers are (I think) part of the suspension system for a ceiling fan. You would force the wire through the bent path so that its face runs against the rubber rollers and the fret tang rides in the metal washer roller. Unfortunately, when you try to use it like this, the crummy little axles (a 3" threaded rod and two 5/16" utility knife handles) go all non-perpendicular and the wire starts bending wrong and gets bound up in the washer slot.

So I made it a two-sided contraption with 1" pine for spacers and the roller axles going through both pieces:

Well, it worked! I guessed at the distance between the metal roller and the line drawn between the axles of the rubber rollers. The produced a radius of about 12" or so (estimated). In the next picture you can see the fret wire near a 9" radius line drawn on a plastic table:

Then I drilled new holes in the boards so I could move the metal roller about 1/4" closer to the line connecting the rubber rollers. Then I'd run the wire through the new configuration:

And tighten the radius in stages. Important? I don't know. Accidental? Completely. This second bending stage did the trick almost perfectly:

Then I modified my 60lb bag of tube sand (yes, tube sand - apparently we have that in Connecticut) into a 25lb bag of sand, to use as a neck rest when I hammer the frets in:

Very exciting! A whole day spent bending some wire - but it was free, and it could have turned out far, far worse.

Fingerboard Attachement and Neck Profiling

2010-11-07T10:49:00.000-05:00

I made a lot of progress and failed to document it. I got excited, and I wanted to get a lot done this week.

The fingerboard is attached to the neck. I first cut it almost to width. I put a staple in either end of the neck, pulled one leg of each out, and cut them into a low point. This helped to locate the fingerboard on the neck when I pressed it to the neck face. I then wrapped the neck with 3 yards of waistband elastic from a craft store - I got the idea from a StewMac how-to email, but I declined to buy a full pound of 40" elastic bands from them. What would I ever do with them? After that I placed a straightedge on the face of the board and weighed it down.

The back is nearly profiled:

I clamp the neck to the edge of the workbench like so, on a piece of hardboard with some carpet padding on it to protect the fingerboard:

The epoxy layers actually help the contouring process - when they're roughly parallel or diverging at a constant angle, you're making a regular shape. The neck is going to be a pretty pronounced vee shape. There are two reasons for this:

Easier for me to profile - flat is simpler than curved
I need to keep the neck thickness pretty high overall to keep enough wood/glass back of the truss rod, so the rod doesn't blow out, but that makes for a very chunky neck. I can get my hand around it better if I flatten the curve and make a vee
Bonus reason: it just happened and there's no going back

I'm doing all this work with the Surform loaded with a convex grater, and a round rat tail file with big teeth. It makes a giant mess, but the bits are heavier than air and thus far less dangerous.

Truss Rod Installation and Fingerboard Prep

2010-10-31T13:09:00.000-04:00

I installed the truss rod per StewMac instructions, with dabs of silicone at each end and a couple points in the middle. I didn't know how close to get on top-to-bottom clearance of the brass end blocks in the slots, so I shimmed them up 8 thousandths with two tiny sheets of steel snipped and filed from an old feeler gauge.

Since they were under the silicone, I figure they won't rattle. If they do, I can always remove the guitar neck, make careful preparations, and light the POS on fire.

The next day I cut the fingerboard edges to the taper of the neck. I did this by laying the face of the neck, which is just about to final width, on the un-curved back of the fingerboard. I centered it and ran a pencil down both edges. Then had a problem, because I wanted to use the bandsaw but didn't want the down-running blade to pull chips out of the fingerboard face. Even with tape I was concerned about that. So I transfered the lines to the front, which is inexact - the lines on back were a copy of the neck taper, but the lines on the front would be perfectly straight like my straightedge. Now, I made those edges as straight as I could with sandpaper and my Surform cheesegrater, but it's still not the same. So I resolved to leave the pencil marks when I cut from the top of the fingerboard.

It worked okay. Here's the neck with truss rod installed, and the tapered fingerboard:

Here's the spoke nut of the truss rod sticking out the heel of the neck:

I couldn't figure out how to drill a 3/8" hole into one edge of a 7/32" notch. For a week I carried the neck in my car, thinking to ask someone if I could borrow a drill press. I kept forgetting, and also wondered if there'd be a way to clamp such a long piece end-on - maybe by turning the work table vertical and rotating it out of the vertical axis of the drill, clamping the neck to the vertical work table at a careful angle? Then finally I decided to just make it happen freehand, even if I had to hand-ream the thing with a naked drill bit. I used an electric hand drill with a 5/16" bit that I placed into the deep end of the slot, measuring the center as carefully as I could. I used this bit a little like a drill and a little like a file. Then I moved up to the 3/8" and repeated the operation carefully. It worked.

This highlights another issue I have with any long-running project: fatigue. On the one hand, I knew I could get away with screwing up the hole in the heel of the neck a little bit, because it would hardly be visible. On the other hand, I could have done it much more safely, for instance by clamping a 3/4" thick piece of hardwood across the end of the neck and drilling through it as a proxy piece of wood (compensating for the empty slot). I didn't find out about that trick until after I used the drill.

I am most vulnerable to the temptation to take a shortcut when:

I've been blocked for some time from working on the project, either by technical barriers or lack of time, and I feel the need to "catch up" to some imaginary timetable
There seems to be no one correct, clean way to approach the task, and no way for me to decide between the two, other than by making somebody else do the work

Any project, large or small, can be seen as a struggle to take exactly the time required by me to do the job as safely and correctly as possible, no more or less. Once I start comparing my performance to some mythical notion I have in my head, I'm liable to go all freestyle. Sometimes that works.

I am a monkey.

Finalish Neck Thicknessing

2010-10-15T15:14:00.001-04:00

I wanted to make the headstock 1/2" thick, and main part of the neck 3/4". I could have done it a couple ways, I guess:

Band saw the wide way, then clean up with the router and thickness fixture
Route in increments until complete

I don't trust my band saw skills or my band saw setup enough for the first approach. The second approach, however, filled my entire basement workshop area with a fine sawdust. Why was I not informed about this? It's everywhere. Everywhere! In fact, I thought I would be working on this guitar until I died of old age, but now I think I'm racing against lung disease. Thankfully, I think that was the last of the major thicknessing operations.

Here's the nasty-looking step-down in back of the nut, which will need some serious work with the Stanley Surform cheese grater:

I think I'll clean up some of these messes and then see about finishing up the truss rod and attaching the fingerboard, in preparation for fretting.

Shaping the Neck to Almost Final Width

2010-10-13T09:29:00.001-04:00

The band saw I used was not accurate enough to make the neck sides perfectly flat or straight, and really blaming the tool is rather sad. It's because of me. So now I have to take the sides down. I use a Stanley Surform with a flat grater to get pretty close, and then 120 grit sandpaper for the final approach. However, the amount of surface area is key to sanding progress so I began to profile the back of the neck so I didn't have to flatten all that wood. Like so:

I made a thing to hold the neck on its side where I can grate it properly:

I grate the neck with a Stanley Surform. It gets pretty good traction if I apply a little pressure. I think the fibergass/epoxy layer gives it a hard time.

Summary of Guitar Build So Far

2010-10-12T16:22:00.000-04:00

This is the build summary so far:

1. Project overview and basic neck materials: Fiberglass, two-part epoxy and basswood
2. Making a heat box for curing the epoxy
3. Assembling and curing the laminate
4. How not to cut the laminate, part one and part two
5. And God created the band saw
6. A whole bunch of parts arrive
7. A guitar-like shape occurs
8. Flattening the laminate
9. Cutting the truss rod channel

Cutting a Truss Rod Slot

2010-10-12T11:44:00.000-04:00

It's time to cut the truss rod slot, because the back of the neck is still flat and the face of the neck is just about ready for the fingerboard. Next I think I have to thickness the back of the "thin part" of the neck down to 3/4", but leave the headstock material there, and once I do that, things will get rough in Flatworld. Once I do this, I'll never be able to lay the neck flat again easily:

The next operation after that will involve gluing on the fingerboard, profiling the back of the neck (into an approximate "C" shape) or both, and the neck will start getting lumpy, bumpy, rounded and so forth.

I had trouble routing this laminate before (see here), but I think that was because I took too much at a time. I've successfully routed into and through epoxy layers in my thicknessing operations, leading me to believe that if I go slow I won't start any fires. So I made a setup to guide the router:

I got the correct 7/32" router bit at Ring's End. I checked the aluminum for straightness. I took into account that my router base has a radius of slightly less than 3" (2 63/64" or so). I measured with a metal ruler that goes down to 64ths. As my grandfather never would have said, "measure 2,028,887 times, cut 2300 times." I tried to always keep the router pinned to the guide, but without pushing hard enough to risk moving the guide itself. I cut in small increments, about five passes. And still I screwed it up!

Excellent.

That's the truss rod, laying next to its future home. I created two problems, both recoverable:

The slot is about 1/64th to the right of where it should be. This is due to me being a poor craftsman and a bad judge of distances. But I've haven't filed the neck to its final width, and I have that much room over on the right if I want it.
I goofed up twice and the bit cut toward me in two spots. Not too terrible; I think it's visible in the image. I'm going to hide that under the fingerboard. This happened because I was trying to push back hard, but not too hard, while moving the router left, but not too quickly, while also thinking about how horrible it would be if I screwed up.

Whew.

Using the Custom Board Flattening Router Jig...Thingy

2010-10-09T18:30:00.000-04:00

Well! All I can say is, don't do this. Not at home, even. Certainly don't post it on the internet, because sure as the sun comes up, somebody is going to laugh at you. FYI, I had to take the two center braces off again (drilling out rivets and making new holes) to space the center part wide enough to fit the headstock. I am extremely tired of aluminum and pop rivets.

This silly little plastic-coated MDF folding table is the single best (usable by me) oasis of flatness in my house! You should have seen me with the carpenter's square, measuring the basement floor and every beaten-up old desk (there are two). This thing was a miracle where I least expected it. But it's not perfect, and certainly the board I'm working on isn't either, so when I clamped the headstock end, I had to weight down the middle to press the other end to the surface. The dumbbell weights are balanced across the neck on a piece of mild steel left over from a previous laughable project. This configuration gets me additional clearance for my router grips as I work from the side.

Then I put the weights on the end and did the middle. I came up with some reasonable flatness. It's still bowed down in the middle a little, and I have theories as to why, but I don't really care. I'm calling it good because it's even and reasonably consistent. I can adjust it with the truss rod, or externally, when it's time to level the frets. I will probably apply some 220-grit paper to my 1/4" glass and clean it up ever so slightly, then I'll call it good.

I got into the periphery of the epoxy zone at the boundary of this slice of 1/16" basswood - you can see the blue. I've got a couple of choices here:

Epoxy on another fiberglass/basswood layer and give myself some wood to glue onto (with the obligatory flattening step, which may not work because that much wood might well make the piece too thick to fit under my flattening jig)
Glue the fingerboard on with epoxy. Sounds good to me. If I find myself with a guitar neck that's so screwed up that I am facing the prospect of taking the fretboard back off, I'm pretty much going to be starting again probably.

This was a very tense operation for me. One serious mistake and I'd have been facing a total do-over, which isn't as bad as it sounds: I think I could get back to this point within a week if I had to, knowing what I know now (and having what I have now). But I really, really didn't care to find out. Now I've got to be doubly careful of those nice sharp corners. The neck piece is acquiring delicacy along with its flatness. Very strange.

Custom Board Flattening Router Jig

2010-10-07T20:57:00.000-04:00

I had an idea. I made a jig for my router that sits over the board and may or may not flatten the face of the neck.

I got some angle aluminum and 3/16" pop rivets and a pop rivet gun. I looked at the angle steel but it was not even remotely straight, and I have no good way of cutting it. I cut the aluminum with a hacksaw, as most of the lengths were longer than the 12" my band saw can accommodate. I made the bracket you see, minus the two inner struts parallel to the guitar neck. A bracket that wide would be versatile - that was my reasoning. It would be good for all kinds of flattening jobs.

It made a clean test cut, but the router dipped in the middle and the face of the test board was concave or cupped. So I added those two inner braces, 3" apart, to keep the sag down. Along the way, I put rivets in the wrong places, facing the wrong way, drilled them out poorly, you name it. In addition I somehow inserted the tip of a brand new hobby knife (#11) into the meat at the heel of my thumb, and my unused 3/16" drill bit got dull already.

Good times.

This is what the router would see, if a router had eyes and a nervous system:

I'm going to have to pick up a piece of 1"x3" or similar, find a truly flat place to stage this (maybe my dad's table saw table), and flatten at least a one-foot length. Only then will I feel reasonably safe in trying to flatten my guitar neck.

How (Not) to Flatten a Piece of Wood

2010-10-04T19:50:00.000-04:00

I want to glue the fretboard to the neck, but I want the neck to be very flat and true first. The fact is, however, this board is not flat. The fiberglass/epoxy layers are probably more compressed in some places than others, the basswood probably wasn't exactly 1/16" thick everywhere - this is how it goes.

Near the start of this in a post entitled "Disaster...Or Victory?", you can see that I set up my laminate on a sheet of 1/4" plate glass. This very typical and common type of glass is sometimes called float glass for its habit of being created on a pond of molten tin. Molten tin! So it's generally considered pretty flat. The idea was, lay the laminate up on a perfectly flat sheet, weight it down against that sheet, and you get a board with at least one perfectly flat face!

Well that didn't work out so good. Somehow it didn't happen, some entity or phenomenon got between my float glass and my laminate, and it just didn't work out that way. So I have to flatten this board. I'm naive so I figured I could just rub the board against some sandpaper affixed to that very same piece of glass, and make it flat. But only the actual neck part - the headstock is going to get rebated away anyhow. First mistake: I should have taken the headstock down first by sawing, to get it out of the way.

For a while I had the glass on a carpet and pushed down on the board, as I rubbed it around in circles. I drew in pencil on the board to see where I was taking off material - where the high spots were. After about 40 minutes at 120 grit, I did get to a point where the sandpaper had cleaned up the whole board, but all was not perfect. There was still a low spot in the middle of the neck! I hypothesize that by pushing down on the piece, I flexed it into contact with the glass, thus taking more off the part directly under my hand. In some strange way, the high parts escaped. Perhaps, also, the glass was flexing into the carpet. One thing I did right: I constantly swept the sandpaper and the board clean to prevent little piles of dust from glomming onto the paper, forcing the wood up over it. Here's the board with pencil writing on it:

But it was much better than before, clearly. I was still hopeful. Time to adjust my attack. This time I placed the glass on a long level and gave it some new sandpaper, still 120 grit. And - here's my innovation - I didn't press down on the board, I just pushed it gently from either end, back and forth. And I checked it with a straight edge regularly. And lo! it got even better. But all was still not perfect, in fact I had a totally new problem:

I don't know if you can see it here, but the left side is thicker than the right. The top may be flat, but the whole thing is canted over. My cheap but cool digital micrometer is AWOL due to a battery condition right now, so I can't tell you exactly how much. 1/3 of a millimeter? Something like that. Is this a problem? Well, two things:

The damn thing's still not straight enough. I want it about as perfect as possible, because if the fretboard goes on flat then in theory I will have to spend less time leveling the frets.
I don't want it tilted over. That irritates me. I'm building a simple guitar, not some fancy ergonomic thing.

I still have enough wood to stop and figure out what to do. Fender neck blanks are sold 13/16" thick, and this one is about 15/16". The only trick is I don't want to stop on an epoxy/glass layer, or partway through one, as that'll force me to change my choice of glue from Titebond to epoxy. Big deal? Dunno. And I'm not sure many machines will be happy cutting through a nasty layer of garbage like that.

In any case, I'm reaching out for help here while I've still got room to move. I'll post more when I get the guidance I need. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find answers to this on the internet. You're either supposed to use a giant plane with ninja woodworking technique, or you're supposed to have an electric thickness planer. Even to use the planer, I'd have to prop up the other side of the board (which is even worse than this one) artfully in a facsimile of a flat surface to give the planer something to push against. I suspect I'm going to end up with a belt sander and a sanding frame, or some homemade router rig set up on a table saw table.

I have discovered this: the concept of flatness is a human one. It is a state known only to water on the calmest of days. It's a strange place to be, knowing exactly what I think I want in a very geometric way, and being unable to arrive at that configuration.

I am a monkey.

First True Cuts, Or, Something Reminds Me of a Guitar

2010-10-02T16:49:00.002-04:00

With all the ingredients in place I decided to put a blade on the band saw and make my first meaningful cuts - all the previous cuts were to clean up the laminate, or test a theory.

I put the Lenox Neo-Type blade on the bandsaw, because it's 3/8" wide vs. the Zona's 1/4", and I have a theory that it would be more boxed in by the blade guides for these critical cuts. At first I thought it was too big, but it tightened in nicely. I used the blade tension indicator on the saw and left it right at the marker for 3/8" blades. Though I wouldn't trust that indicator with my life, it seemed to work pretty good today. I put the guides in pretty tight and set the bearings close behind the blade - they spun continuously while I was cutting, but hardly at all when I wasn't. I trued the table with a square and made a test cut.

Nice test cut, nearly perfect 90 degrees. Ooh la la.

I marked up the board based on the measurements from Warmoth and some double-checking I did with the LSR nut and the neck on my G&L S-500, which is different in length but not in scale or width.

Then I fired it up. I left the pencil lines, because there's no way in hell I'm getting away without sanding to the final width (after I profile the back of the neck, leaving much less to sand). With a circular saw you might slice right to your target, but me with a band saw? Not so much. I fed slow and carefully. There's an interesting hysteresis in making these cuts, because band saws cut at an angle to the theoretical line of the blade. When I turn too fast away from my current path, it takes time to get started on the turn, and then it overshoots, and then it takes more time to get back then I think it ought. And overshoots again, if I'm not thinking ahead. I think that's because the blade has a finite width (in this case 3/8") and takes time to go around corners. Splitting the distance and putting my line in the "natural" path of the blade must be a skill that I don't know yet.

I did alright. Good enough, I believe.

That old saw (odam!) about "just get rid of anything that doesn't look like a guitar" comes to mind. I am really happy with these cuts. These cuts don't suck. I was also worried about air voids in the laminate layers, but looking around the edge of the piece I don't see any such. It's a clean, tight wood/epoxy/glass sandwich.

Next up: I'm not sure. I have to think about it. Maybe cutting the truss rod slot while it still has a flat back. Maybe first beveling off the back perhaps 15 degrees (in effect, starting the shaping/profiling process early) in order to remove some wood, then get these edges straight and true and relatively final, while leaving plenty of flat on the back to easily cut the truss rod slot.

Also, this thing seems very strong. On the one hand, I have no idea how much an unprofiled maple neck of similar dimensions bends when you stand on it in the middle with the ends up on blocks, but this one doesn't seem to deflect much at all. I was somewhat surprised. Is that a good thing? Who knows?

It doesn't matter right now. Today was good, and I'm going to leave it that way.

Fender Neck Dimensions from Warmoth

2010-10-02T09:29:00.001-04:00

Finally, after weeks of fruitless googling, I found the magic place to get overall neck dimensions. This page is genius, absolute genius:

http://www.warmoth.com/Guitar/Necks/faq2.aspx

I now know how wide the heel should be, how long from nut to heel, thickness at heel, depth of neck pocket. I'm very grateful to Warmoth for having this out there. Without this, I'd have had to go to the music store with a ruler and still not bought anything; or I might have made up my own neck format. This way, if the neck ever breaks and I'm too tired to make another, I can get an affordable, premade replacement.

I hope Warmoth don't mind that I made up a cheat sheet for myself from their images:

A Little Like the Holidays

2010-10-02T08:45:00.002-04:00

I made some choices. I summoned my courage and ordered them. It was expensive. I had to keep reminding myself of two things:

This is a lifetime dream project of mine. I don't do this often at all. The last time I made a large non-essential purchase was about 3 years ago.
This gets me around half-way through the equipment purchases. After this I just need body wood, finishing supplies, and electronics.

Here we go: Fender-scale compound radius fingerboard from Steward MacDonald. The slot nearest the camera is the wider nut slot (1/8" I believe). I will have to widen that for...

Fender LSR Roller nut:

Steinberger Gearless Tuners will allow me to have a flat headstock and pull the strings right down to the headstock face (like a set of staggered-height Sperzels will do), increasing the break angle over the nut to prevent any strings from popping out:

Schaller 475, flat-mount, top-loading bridge. I've had one of these for years on an old Yamaha, screwed to a plate over the old tremolo cavity. It works well. Shown with included spacer!

StewMac Hot Rod double-action truss rod, with spoke nut adjuster. At some point I may analyze how these things work in a separate post. There are two brass blocks on either end, and the threaded rods go into them. They must be counter-threaded in mystical ways, because when you turn the spoke nut, the rods tension into a curve and the blocks follow. The spoke nut will be about flush with the heel of the neck. There will be a slot at the heel of the neck to allow adjusting the truss rod at any time through the strings.

Six feet of StewMac's widest, largest fret wire (in 2 foot lengths) and a medium/wide fret file to crown them. I got the biggest fret wire because I want this guitar to have a "light touch", and because after I get done "leveling" the frets I'll probably have to take them to a luthier to unscrew my screwups...these won't ever run out of material. The fret file is smooth on the flat sides and active on the edges, where you put them over the fret after you've ground it down and use it to restore the fret's round contour.

I also received two band saw blades, the first of which I talked about (and tallied up) in a previous post:

80" x 3/8" 14TPI NeoType Lenox from toolcenter.com. The make these from rolls of raw blade to length.
80" x 1/4" 14TPI metal cutting blade from a friend who works at Zona Tool Company. I may be checking this company out for one of their "razor saws" which look like inexpensive fine blades that I could use to help widen the nut slot for the LSR nut. They seem to have quite a lot of neat stuff.

So you see, I've chosen:

Flat Fender-style headstock
10"-14" compound radius fretboard
Super jumbo nickel steel frets
Fixed bridge

Now I really have to make this thing, no? Let's talk about cost:

Nut from amazon.com Guitar and Gear site (yes, seriously): $30
Fingerboard, bridge, tuners, fret wire, fret file, truss rod from StewMac: $300 (gulp)

TOTAL COST SO FAR:

$330 (this step) + $262 (previous steps) = $592

Wow. Well this fits in roughly with my estimate of about $1000 to do this thing. If wood for the body is about $100, and finishing supplies are about $50, that leaves me about $300 for electronics. Of course I could've purchased a better guitar for less, which was never the point. But still, it hurts. I feel like I'm blowing the yearly incomes of several developing-world citizens on a whim. There may be a special place in hell for that.

Big Choices

2010-09-26T10:32:00.002-04:00

I've got a piece of wood that may be willing to become a guitar neck, and I believe I have a way to cut it into shape. Now I have to qualify and quantify that shape. Right now I have to decide lots of things:

Scale length, which is the approximate length from the nut to the bridge. Fenders are typically 25.5", Gibsons are typically 24.75".
Headstock format/angle. Fenders generally have a straight headstock where the face of the headstock is simply milled down from the level of the fingerboard to provide the break angle for the strings, while Gibson and most others attach the separate headstock at an angle
Nut width, which is the width of the neck at the nut. Use of a Floyd Rose locking nut, Fender LSR nut, or the various species of compensated nuts will tend to dictate nut width, but a traditional cut nut has no limits.
Bridge width, which is the width of the string spread at the bridge.
Fingerboard radius, which is the curvature of the fingerboard. Fingerboard radius is implicated in the choice of bridge and nut. If I choose a flat radius (easier to implement and fret by far), I couldn't use most pre-constructed nuts, all of which have a finite and definite radius - there would be string height mismatch. For instance, Fender LSR nuts have a radius of about 9.5", which works with a 10" radius. Floyd Rose locking nuts come in limited radii; the originals were 10". Gibson-style Tune-o-matic bridges generally have a 12" radius.

The taper of the neck, as seen from the top, will be dictated by the string lines connecting the nut to the bridge, leaving something left over at the edges for bending. The scale length will dictate how far that bridge is placed from the nut, so it figures prominently in the geometry. The choice of radius may determine which bridge and nut I use, thus indirectly locking in the neck taper.

Scale Length/Fretboard Radius

I'm going with 25.5" because I want a compound (conical) radius fretboard: http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Bodies,_necks,_wood/Electric_guitar:_Fingerboards/Fender_Scale_Compound_Radius_Fingerboard.html

Headstock Angle

I thought I might angle the headstock back. Fenders are a little weird to me with their use of string trees to increase the break angle of the higher strings. There are a couple of ways to implement the angled headstock pattern:

One piece of wood - potentially weaker because the grain breaks going around the corner
Scarf joint - as strong as the joint and the glue used to make it
Finger joint - I thought I'd make one of these, just to be different

However, there are two issues with either the scarf joint or the finger joint, neither of them trivial in my case: cutting this stuff (as always) accurately, at a very low angle, and the wood consumption issue. As you can see from the following picture, a 10 degree angle will use up at least 6" of wood. I can just about spare that, but not a bit more. I can't begin to comprehend whether cutting a 10 degree angle the wide way across a 1" board is doable with a band saw, or if I would have to use a hacksaw. Either way, big adventure.

Most headstock angles range from 10-15 degrees or so. If I want to use an LSR nut, which is intended for use with non-angled Fender headstocks, any kind of angle might cause clearance problems with the back edge of the nut, in particular the rubber dampers out back (I could surely just trim those?). Floyd nuts don't care - there's a big ugly string tree behind it, pulling the the strings way down low to position them over the clamping surface.

On the other hand, my G&L S-500 Tribute has a non-angled headstock with staggered-height Sperzels and seems to work fine.

Nut Width/Bridge Width

Due to my choice of fingerboard, the nut must match a 10" radius and the bridge must be able to accommodate a 16" radius. The former rules out very little, but the latter rules out Tune-o-matics among other bridges. My mind swings wildly between a full-on Floyd trem setup and a simple, traditional Graph-Tech nut with a top-loading fixed bridge. In between I've conjectured the following:

LSR with Sperzels, generic height-adjustable top-loading bridge
Floyd-style locking nut with Floyd bridge stripped down and bolted to the guitar face in fixed-bridge configuration
This: http://guitar-bridge.com/hp135009/Guitar-Bridge-Hannes.htm
All the rest

I don't like string-through-body bridges because I imagine that the sharp 90 degree turn made by the string at the bridge causes tension to get stored on one side or the other, which when released results in tuning problems. I don't know this, mind you, I just made it up as a theory. There's a guy I know who mostly plays Floyd-equipped guitars and never, ever uses the bar, and says its because they never, ever go out of tune. My theory on that one is that the locking nut is responsible for most of that, and the spring tension compensates for changes in the guitar geometry due to expansion, contraction and moisture retention. But trems are not in my opinion great for sustain, and when you bend a string generally all the other strings ring flat. I could try a Kahler, but I'm scared of all the machinery - and they're just as expensive as a good Floyd.

Conclusion

So you see, I'm trapped in a nest of quandaries. The text above is only a bare beginning of a description of what goes through my head when I think about this. I don't have to hurry, but at some point I do have to choose.

Thank you thank you thank you

2010-09-23T20:02:00.000-04:00

I just cut the remaining gnarly edge off my laminate. I did it with a little 1/8" wide many-tooth blade that was probably included with the saw - it has teeth like a hacksaw blade. I did it without any modifications to the unit.

I had to put on a new bottom "tire"- that's the thing that goes around the 12" band wheel - because the existing one was flapping away from the band wheel at full RPM, which was a disaster waiting to happen. New saws have flat tires of urethane on uncrowned, flat wheels. This old Craftsman has a rubber tire stretched over a crowned wheel. I order the tire from Sears Parts. Getting the tire on was far less difficult than I imagined from reading internet accounts. The perennial (to people who talk about band saws on the internet) "glue or no glue" question remains unanswered. I didn't glue my new tire on for two reasons:

The top tire (original, AFAIK) stays on without any glue
The bottom tire may not be properly trimmed or tensioned yet.

Here's the gnarly bit, with the cut side facing right:

I have a new Lenox 3/8" 14TPI Neo-Type blade coming from the internet. The little 1/8" blade has probably given about all it can to the effort, and the wider blade will "clamp in" to the blade guides far better.

Cost to date:

Bandsaw = free
2x rubber replacement tires from sears = $33 with shipping
1x (80 in.) 6 ft. 8 in. x 3/8 in. x .025 x 14TPI Standard, NEO-TYPE, Metal Cutting = $20 with shipping

Total cost so far: $53 (this step) + $209 (previous steps) = $262

Oh my.

Band-Saw-O-Rama

2010-09-18T12:07:00.001-04:00

It's a band saw. It was almost free: the man who gave it to me had it given to him 15 or more years ago by a man who said, "It's yours, but if I ever need to cut something I'll want to borrow it back." I suppose this arrangement is transferable, at least to the extent that I don't want to cause problems for the man who lent me the saw.

I will call this arrangement "glending," as in, "I have a band saw that some guy gave me, but maybe he'll want it back someday - I can't give it to you, but I can glend it to you." How prevalent is this practice? I bet it's more common with tools than anything else.

There are two 12" diameter wheels on which the blade runs, so it's called a 12" band saw. This means that you can put about 12" of material to the left of the blade before your work piece runs into the housing.

The blade that's on here is 1/4" wide, made for cutting wood. After I got the saw into rough adjustment (Craftsman manuals are available online), I gave it a shot on my laminate. Well, not so good. It got about an inch in and gave up. There are several possible reasons for this:

The blade was dull already
The blade was not very dull, but it was not of good quality
The saw was poorly adjusted by me
I fed the work too fast
Plastic needs to be cut much more slowly

I did some internet research and I'm putting most of my bets on 2 (crappy blade) and 5 (special needs of plastic). Because that's what I've really got here: a chunk of plastic contaminated with wood. If I can cut the plastic layers, the wood will go along with it (as long as the operation doesn't involve any liquids that might destroy the wood itself). This is not just any plastic - it's got glass fibers in it, and the two-part epoxy matrix is pretty horrible in itself.

Band saw speed is specified in the US as FPM (blade feet per minute). Wood-cutting band saws generally go 2500-3500. Saws meant for cutting ferrous metals generally go 100-150. Non-ferrous metals such as aluminum go up from there. I've heard 700 FPM as an upper limit for plastic. I'll aim for ferrous metal speeds, as that will make make for a very versatile saw.

Between the motor shaft (at the bottom of the picture) and the drive shaft (the bottom 12" blade wheel) I have to insert some reduction. The motor is specified to run at 1725 RPM, no load. The diameter of the pulley on the motor shaft is 2.5". The diameter of the pulley on the driven shaft is 5".

1725 * 2.5 / 5 = 862.5 (this is the driven wheel RPM)
862.5 * (12 * 3.1416) = 32515.56 (this is the blade inches per minute - the second part is PI * diameter, which gives circumference of a circle)
32515.56 / 12 = 2709.63 (this is the blade FPM, which agrees with the Craftsman manual)

To get to 100 FPM I need a 27:1 reduction! There are a couple ways of doing this:

Keep the little pulley on the motor shaft, then go to a big pulley on an intermediate (jack) shaft, then go from a little pulley also on that shaft to a big pulley on the driven shaft.
Find some kind of motor that goes slower. A gear motor, or a DC treadmill motor, are two ways it's been done.

I'd like the saw to be convertible between 2700 and 100, for maximum versatility. This is going to require some backwards engineering, where I will stumble in the footsteps of people who've done this before, moving farther from my guitar again.

I am a monkey.

The Trudginger I Go, the Receedinger the Mountain

2010-09-18T11:26:00.000-04:00

I got a free band saw, but I think I have to modify it extensively to cut this wood-composite laminate I've created. This is a good time to reflect on the meaning of Building Things Backwards, and the process of acquiring "knowledge". Here I am, just trying to build a guitar. Yes, I got tricky with materials, but it doesn't affect the overall process. My process so far:

1. I got involved with composites
   A. I built a heat box to cure composites
   i) I had to struggle with foam and reflective bubble wrap
   ii) I had to build a heater out of lights
   iii) I had to test it for temperature range and stability
   B. I layered the composite
   i) I attempted to use weights to compress the stack slightly
   a) I discovered the need for a clamping jig
   ii) I discovered the practical need for a temperature controller
2. I had to cut this laminate
   A. I tried a table saw with a plywood blade
   B. I tried a router
   C. I tried a hacksaw
   D. I tried a band saw
   i) I tried a cheap, stock wood-cutting blade
   ii) I will try a bi-metal metal-cutting blade
   iii) I will try to slow down the band saw speed so as not to overheat the plastic in the laminate
   a) I will explore gearing down with pulleys
   1. I will diagram the entire machine
   2. I will discover what arrangement of pulleys will fit in the machine
   3. I will learn the mathematics of pulleys
   I) I will create more metal framing to support the new pulleys and jackshaft
   i) I will explore making the pulley tension adjustable so the machine isn't intractable
   ii) I will explore making the machine operate in both new and old configurations
   b) I will explore using a DC treadmill motor
   1. I will search the internet
   2. I will search tag sales
   I) I will learn to identify motor size by treadmill model
   II) I will have to bring home a treadmill
   III) I will have to dismantle a treadmill, preserving the parts I need

Maybe I'm not saying this well, or maybe I'm saying something too pointlessly obvious. My point, however, is that every time I hit a wall I have to dig backward in a tangentially-related discipline. Each time I do, I am going back in time to follow the tracks of other people who visualized these problems very clearly decades and centuries before I was born. "Band saw" to me means more than just a free saw that I have to recondition and tune up: it now means blueprints and engineering and pulley ratios and keyed shafts and pillow blocks and jackshafts. "Band saw", on a bad day when you have to cut something very strange, could be construed to mean, "All of engineering and physics."

I am constantly amazed by this process of blockage, regression, elaboration and breakthrough. I don't know if I'm getting closer to building a guitar, or farther. There is a part of me that is always discouraged at this process; that is also the part of me that would have settled for rediscovering fire after each lightning strike, rather than learning how create fire.

I am a monkey.

Wow, This Stuff Is Hard to Cut Part Deux

2010-09-07T13:35:00.003-04:00

So I had this idea that I might be able to cut this piece of basswood/fiberglass composite with a router and a small bit. This was a Very Bad Idea. The board (or more precisely, the epoxy in the board) nearly caught fire.

I was able to cut the ends off with a hacksaw, so I got a handle that accepts reciprocating saw blades and tried to rip the board edges clean with a metal-cutting blade. No dice; it will take forever. Mind you, wouldn't care if I only had to do it once, but I'll probably use the same approach to round off the back of the neck.

Plan C is to get a bandsaw. Bandsaws come in wood- and metal-cutting varieties. The former generally run the blade at 1500-3500 feet per minute, while the latter generally run about 150 feet per minute. Some saws advertised as being for both wood and metal compromise with a speed of around 500 feet per minute. Which do I need? Do I care to bet $500 on it ($300 used)?

I'm going to try to find an older wood-cutting bandsaw in disrepair that is good raw material. I will modify it with some extra pulleys to bring the blade speed down, and make it a two-speed machine.

Building Boilies

2010-05-02T18:20:00.002-04:00

Boilies are for carp fishing. To write about carp fishing on the internet, you have to write in a British English style, so I'll have a bit of a go at it, or what-have-you. Apologies to whoever in Europe may really have invented carp fishing; I can't read anything but English.

I've been thinking about trying my hand at carp fishing for a while, because it would be neat (for me, not for the fish) to catch a 20 pound fish. Then I starting reading about carp fishing (which until recently has been mostly a European deal), and got hooked on all the technology. You can fish for carp with corn on a hook, but you can also fish for them with boilies and other baits on hair rigs. There are many variations on the basic hair rig, like the pop-up rig (with floating boilies or bits of sponge sandwiched in the sinking bait), the bolt rig, & etc.

I decided to use this recipe from fishforcarp.com because it made sense to me. I didn't have any weird-ass professional carp-fisherman mulberry extract or anything, so I just got some banana extract (imitation, the sincerest form of gag-reflex-inducement) and molasses to flavor it. Left to right, I have semolina, brown rice, and soy flours, molasses, fake banana juice, and red food coloring:

I made a ball of dough:

I made little balls of varying sizes, from about 12 mm to about 20mm (you have to talk about boilies in the metric system):

Most of them I boiled for 2 minutes; they didn't change in appearance, so I neglected to post an image. But some of them I microwaved three at a time for 35 seconds per batch, and they became pop-ups (floating boilies). I want to try my hand at a snowman rig, because it looks and sounds cool. Yes, I do believe I will be the coolest kid in class if I can fish a snowman rig. Unfortunately, these buggers swell up when microwaved, and even my smallest raw boilies got huge -- but dammit, they float a treat:

I started out with hooks that are way too large (4/0) because I'm an ignorant Yankee. I figured out that I really need 8s, but settled on 6 because the size 8 hooks I found in my local fishing shop looked rather thin and piddly in the strength department. Tonight I will tie a hair rig, and tomorrow I shall go bollocks up the swim near my place of employment. I fancy I'll be skunked, for a full monty of reasons.

Cheerio!

Warning: jokes about balls, and floaties (as in "to pop a floatie", which concerns certain actions of the buttocks) are inevitable, if you set about to make boilies in the company of other human beings. If you are lucky, you'll perhaps have an exchange like this with a friend:

Me: "Watch out, they're still hot!"
Them: "Please! I'm not going to touch your 'boilies'!"
Me: [waiting for them to drink some flavored fizzy water]
Me: "I know you want to chew on my boilies."
Them: [fizzy water coming out of mouth explosively]
Me: [cackle like a duck]

Wow, This Stuff Is Hard to Cut Part One

2010-04-17T20:46:00.000-04:00

I wrapped up my future guitar neck in a heavy-duty plastic bag and threw a couple of dust masks into the car. On the way to my dad's house I stopped by a big box home improvement store to buy a saw blade with as many teeth as I could find. I didn't know what size saw he's got; most of the table/miter saw blades at this place were 10" or 12". I can either buy one and return it immediately for the correct item (my usual pattern) or do the right thing...so I called him up from inside the maw of the beast. Is it pathetic of me to say that sometimes, still, mobile phones strike me as new, strange and marvelous?

Why, yes. Yes it is.

He told me the blade on his saw is an 8.25", and that's the biggest that will fit. I was walking up and down the aisle, not seeing any such size: the table saw blades being too big, and the circular saw blades being too small. I finally settled on an inexpensive 7.25" plywood blade meant for a circular saw, advertised as working on OSB and plastic as well. Lots of teeth - check. Cheap - check. There's a really cool one that looks like it could cut through a bass boat, but it's over $40 and I'm on a budget here.

My dad's table saw is a piece of junk. Now please understand that this is a guy who literally makes his own wooden replacement garage doors, with the inset panels and all that, and he rebuilds windows too. He doesn't have a problem with this saw - I do. It's got a 1/2" arbor and everything else in the world is 5/8", so he hand-centers the blade under the washer. No, really. Really. The rip fence needs to be shimmed with wood slivers for the lock-down lever to work, and it doesn't quite go parallel unless you measure it and tap it into position. The guy grew up helping my grandfather build houses, and I think that back in the day they had to cut wood with their fingernails - that must be it, because I don't think it's possible to cut a straight line with this saw.

That's what makes my father's table saw perfect for this job. If we live through it.

We masked up and I put some work gloves on. We adjusted the rip fence to approximately okay and I fed the piece in slow. The board has two fuzzy sides and no frame of reference, so I quickly got off track and started digging into the wood. I gave myself more room and just took the plastic off. This is probably what wrecked the blade. It stalled out completely and began to burn the plastic when I tried to cut one end off:

You can probably see how that cut is a little toasty. By this point the teeth on the blade were actually rounded off. You could throw it at a bowl of jello and it would bounce off. As a bonus, the air was indeed filled with scintillating death, a glass fiber death cloud that could have shut down air traffic downwind for 200 miles (current events reference!).

So what now? I'm 25% done turning this into a presentable piece of wood, and the future looks like an endless serious of broken table saw blades, burnt wood, melted epoxy, and a small Superfund cleanup. I'm thinking three things:

Band saw! Someone else's band saw!
Don't cut the plastic next time
How on earth will I shape the neck, if simply cutting it is this difficult?

Total cost: $9 for a useless metal disc

Disaster...or Victory?

2010-04-04T15:16:00.001-04:00

I was going to put a piece of 4.25" x 36" x 0.25" plate glass on the short side of a level and do the layup on that. It's actually basically what I did. You can see one of the plastic layers I used to prevent the glass from becoming a permanent part of the guitar; before I started, there were two for complete coverage.

I mixed 8oz of epoxy at a time in one of the 9oz measuring cups, 6 of the main ingredient to 2 of the hardener. To this I added a couple of drops of the blue dye. Each 8oz batch of epoxy got me about 4 sheets of wood/cloth.

I put down the epoxy on the bare wood sheet, then put down the fiberglass, then more epoxy. I attempted to press any air gaps out each time I added a sheet of wood, using my hands as a roller. Keeping the epoxy, hardener and dye containers from being cross-contaminated and permanently wrecked was difficult. Each piece of cloth soaked up the epoxy well (called "wetting" in the trade, I think), but needed help with little wrinkles. The glass fiber strands from the edge of the cloth kept getting into my brush, onto my hands, and onto the piece, but it was manageable.

As you can see, by this point I've taken the glass off the edge of the level, because it wouldn't stand up properly. Each time I ran out of blue glop, I changed gloves and mixed up a new 8oz batch. By the time I had 13 sheets or so, I'd reached an inch thick and called it quits.

I already had the heat box set up in the driveway. I'd cut some hardboard to spread the load of the small (3 and 5 pound) dumbbell weights I planned to use in lieu of clamps; all of it was outside waiting for me. The plan:

Put the stack, already on the plate glass, onto the edge of the level
Run it outside and set one end in the opening of the heat box
Slide it into the heatbox, adding one weight at a time, the level on edge keeping the bottom layer perfectly, utterly flat for attaching a fingerboard!

What happened:

The sloshy, goopy stack of blue glop, satiny cloth and sheets of wood slid off the level and the glass when I added weight to it
My driveway is not very flat, so the bottom of the heat box wasn't flat
No matter what I did, the wood/glop/cloth slab would not stay rectilinear under weight

Oh my. I had to keep the sheets vertical, and I was getting a little stressed out - each time the stack slid wide, I imagined all my epoxy smearing out and air getting in there. After several attempts, and completely abandoning the narrow edge of the level for the broad side, I decided to use clamps to hold the sheets in line. I put it in the heat box and the lamp would of course not go on. Finally, it got that sorted - an outlet that was switched with the basement light! Of course.

During the long wait, I finished off Possession by A.S. Byatt in ten minute chunks while I bopped the curing temperature between 160 and 180F. At the end of nearly 3 hours, I'd had enough and called it quits. I had no idea what to expect when i opened the box; I'd fixed the sheets sideways - but had they all slid off each other lengthwise?

That's my super-excellent emergency clamping job, visible after the mess came out of the oven. There's the glass on top, and obviously somehow some space developed between the glass and the bottom wood sheet, because the ripples in the plastic sheet between the two are clearly visible.

In another interesting development, the clamps seemed thoroughly epoxied to my guitar neck. I was concerned with hitting them too hard with a hammer, lest the cast parts smash the glass, but I had no choice. There was glass fiber frizzing off it, so I took it outside with a framing hammer and bonked the orange parts of the clamp toward the ends of the board and they did come loose, but left their paint in the matrix.

That is one gnarly board. I don't even feel like measuring it today. The pretty, wispy fiberglass fibers are still there, lunging straight for my lungs, but they are now accompanied by some brittle, nasty glass fibers that seem to want to embed themselves in my skin and travel through my bloodstream to my brain. Seriously, I don't like this board at all. Part of me wishes I had not made it, it's so ornery.

What I learned:

Composites are sticky and messy
Composites are also hard-edged and brutal
I might never know if I put too much weight on the piece and drove out too much of the epoxy from the cloth
Build a clamping jig because even very flat, comparatively wide sheets want to slide off each other
Consider not paying so much attention to making the piece "perfectly" flat, because at my skill level it's not likely to happen

Next step: Trimming the board with someone else's table saw. The air will be filled with sparkling death!

Preparation for gluing a board to my head and having to to go the hospital

2010-04-03T17:23:00.000-04:00

This is part right before the rubber hits the road; it hits the fan; go time. If I don't prepare properly and have all my actions rehearsed, I will time out on the "pot life" of the epoxy and epic fail. The pot life is listed by the manufacturer as 20-25 minutes at 80F, but my work area is in a basement at 62F which should give me some extra time.

I first cut the fiberglass fabric into strips bigger than my basswood sheets. The cloth is 38" wide compared to my 36" long sheets, so that's convenient. Above I've placed a basswood sheet on the cloth for reference, scored that faint line to the right of the sheet with the utility knife, and am about to cut along that line with those heavy duty shop shears. The cutting goes fairly easily.

Now I've got 14 sheets of 8.9oz fiberglass cloth in a stack, nearly ready to pull from. My hands will be gloved and glopped with epoxy so I will stack them in such a way that each piece hangs off the edge of the last by about an inch. This stuff does not have a lot of diagonal dimensional stability, so I'm not at all sure I've cut along the exact line of the weave in each case. Don't care, I think.

Tomorrow. Powerful glue. Me. Adventures. A race against the clock. I've decided to just go and do the thing, no practice layup.

Bright light! Bright light!

2010-04-03T12:23:00.000-04:00

Time for a dry run of the heat box in preparation for the layup and curedown (that's a word I just made up to sound cool). I finished wiring the lamp assembly and tested it briefly:

This is four 75-watt incandescent bulbs. Saving energy here is exactly not the point. I made sure that the wide blade on the two-prong plug, which is neutral and identified on the extension cord wire by rough striations, is connected to the white wire of the double receptacles. This means the collar of the receptacles is neutral and the button at the bottom is hot. That's what you do; I read it on the internet. It's because the black/hot/narrow blade needs to be where you're least likely to run afoul of it, like when changing a light bulb while the lamp is still on.

I brought the heat box out into the driveway and ran an extension cord there as well. The chair that is holding up the door is for sitting in while I wait for nothing to happen:

The lamp assembly is just visible on the left side of the floor of the heat box. I fashioned the door, as planned, from two pieces of bad hardboard laminated together with spray adhesive. To that I attached two of the three aluminized bubble wrap insulation sheets by going around the perimeter with the heavy aluminum reflective tape. The third sheet I attached using the reflective tape as double-stick, folded in half the long way. This makes the third sheet a gasket that is puffy right to the edge; the first two sheets are mashed down by their connection to the hardboard. The hinge is more aluminum tape. It doesn't have to be good for a lot of cycles.

On this 73F sunny day the heat box went from ambient at 11:25AM to 180F at 11:42AM. The picture shows it a little lower because I'd unplugged the lamps 20 seconds prior, and I had not taped the door shut all the way around to make a tight seal (light was showing where the cord went in). This setup appears to have very little heat retention ability, but I am very happy with the result. There was no sign of overheating of the materials, the outside of the box felt comfortable to the touch, the wiring is solid, and I easily hit the target temperature of 160F.

Good day so far, I think. Next, I'm either going to:

do a practice lamination and cure of a small basswood and fiberglass sandwich, or
just dive right in, go nuts, and see what happens

I haven't decided which yet.

Heat Box Madness

2010-03-28T14:29:00.000-04:00

This turned out to be more of a hack-job adventure than I ever imagined. My brain hurt thinking about this stupid thing, until finally I just stopped thinking and started duct taping.

"Don't think, duct tape," works good for this job. And I wouldn't try it yourself until I report back next week to let you know if it got hot enough (I'm hoping for 160F) without melting (because it's made out of styrofoam, duct tape, foam insulation, and reflective plastic insulation).
I've read things like, "for every 10 degree increase in temperature the epoxy composite will cure twice as fast", and also that the composite gets harder the faster you cure it. So I built myself a "heat box", which is a box full of heat.

This is a view of the inside of the heat box. What you are seeing is a reflective insulation that I got at a big box home improvement store; it's like two thin layers of aluminum sandwiching a 1/4" layer of bubble wrap. The bottom of the box is hardboard, the kind of thing you can buy perforated to hang tools from. In this case it's non-perforated; more like the kind of thing you might layer a workbench with. I'll be sliding the clamped-up guitar neck around on that, so I wanted something that wouldn't tear.

The inside dimensions of the box are 48" long, about 14" high, and about 24" wide. Why? It's about the size of the material I had and could buy. The top of the box is 2" foam block insulation like you'd buy to insulate a basement, I suppose. I already had that. The sides are some cruddy styrofoam insulation from a kit full of 14" x 48" x 1" sheets - I would avoid that next time, because it crumbles. I put a layer of that on the hardboard floor of the heatbox, as well.

Note: you can sort of see how duct tape does not stick to styrofoam. It's really just serving as a binding around the outside. Fortunately, I bought some heavy-duty actual aluminum reflective tape (what I like to call "real" duct tape) to seal the inside corners. This stuff is great; hyper adhesive (almost annoyingly so) and strong in the long direction.

That's the front view, with the materials I'm going to use for a door on top of it: three layers of that reflective bubble wrap and two very junky hardboard sheets I laminated together. I figure I'll secure the door to the opening with a duct tape hinge of some kind and some mini bungee cords.

Finally we've got the "heat" part of the heat box. I've seen some trick setups on the internet involving water heater heating element controls with hysteresis whatnot optimization. I, on the other hand, am going to stick four incandescent light bulbs on this contraption, slam a meat thermometer through the top of the box, and turn the light bulbs on and off by means of a two prong plug. That's why I AM GOING TO CURE MY LAMINATE OUTDOORS IN THE DRIVEWAY, FAR AWAY FROM ANYTHING FLAMMABLE. You do what you want with your heat box; I'm scared of mine.

This is a flat, thin bar of plain soft steel like you'd make a strap out of to hang a garage door opener with. It's got holes drilled in it already, but I had to widen two of them to put the bulb fixtures in. The bulb fixtures are secured through these holes with brass lamp nuts, where are their own sort of beast. I will wire a two-prong extension cord to the black and white wires and secure the connections with wire nuts and electrical tape. I will fasten the steel bar to three pieces of 1" pine to hold it off the floor of the heat box and allow room for the lamp nuts and wiring.

Next weekend I fire this thing up, OUTSIDE IN THE DRIVEWAY. Wish me luck.

Materials list for the heat box:

2" x 48" x 24" blue hard foam insulation - had it already, leftover from an attic insulation job
11oz adhesive spray - $4.58
55yd all-purpose duct tape - $4.98
3/4 poly (styrofoam) pane kit - $13.70 (wouldn't use this again, in favor of blue hard foam)
2" x 50yd aluminum tape - $11.99

Materials for the heat lamp setup:

3/4" x 60ft blue electrical tape - $3.79
1-3/8" flat bar, slotted - $6.59 (this is the bar the bulb outlets bolt to)
7ft extension cord - $4.99 (will become the cord for the lamp setup)
2 weird dual lamp sockets - $5.98 + $5.98
2 brass lamp nuts to secure the lamp sockets to the flat bar
3 1" x 4" x 4" white pine segments - found in the basement
wire nuts - already had them

TOTAL OUTLAY FOR THIS STEP: around $77
TOTAL OUTLAY SO FAR: already $200. Oh my.

Here we go

2010-03-28T11:28:00.000-04:00

I've always wanted to build a guitar from nearly scratch, which to me means constructing the neck as well as the body. I've finally decided to do it. I've already started buying materials and assembling some of the materials I'll need to build the neck. I am making this up as I go along, although I have done a bunch of internet research.

I was going to build the neck from a laminate of carbon fiber and epoxy, plus some kind of fancy tone wood - initially, I was thinking mahogany. Then I checked out the price of mahogany and settled on basswood. Basswood? That's for making guitar bodies! Well, please consider a few things:

It's cheap - I got it from National Balsa Wood Company; here is the page for 36" long basswood sheets; mine are 1/16" x 4"
I just read yesterday that Parkers have composite-wrapped basswood necks, and people seem to like those alright
There's a good chance I'll mess up and have to try again, and like I said, it's cheap

In the picture of the basswood sheets, with my Samick jazz box for a size comparison (a good guitar, but I have no idea why I own it), you can see a stack of 16 sheets, each 1/16" thick. I measured the thickness of several guitar necks and they always come in under an inch (minus the fingerboard layer). Only after I ordered the wood did I realize that after I laminate stuff between the basswood, it's going to be thicker than an inch by some as-yet-unknown amount.

Next, after I checked the price of carbon fiber cloth ($30+/yard) I decided to go with fiberglass. Here's why:

It's cheap - I got it for about $7/yard from US Composites; here is the page for fiberglass cloth; mine is the 8.9oz S-glass, which is an upgrade from the "regular
There's a good chance I'll mess up and have to try again, and like I said, it's cheap

In the picture of the fiberglass, from left to right is the 635 epoxy, the medium duration hardener, a little jar of blue dye (my idea is to stain the neck blue, so maybe this will help tone down the epoxy stripes), some measuring cups, and the fiberglass itself - 3 yards of it.

Here's my parts list so far, along with cost:

Basswood from National Balsa:

Code	Item	Qty	Price	Total
116436B	1/16 x 4 x 36 basswood sheets	16	$1.76	$28.16

Fiberglass and epoxy from US Composites:

EPOX-635313 Medium 635 1/2 gallon,
  21.3oz $34.25
FG-6781-38  8.9oz S Glass -
Satin Weave Thickness: 0.0097"
4 yards @ 13.95/yd
TRA - PB001 1oz transparent blue tint
   (< .25oz/gallon) 5.95
CON-C08 25x 8oz graduated plastic cups 5.5

Total: I'm about $130 into this thing already. Wow.

NEXT: A "heat box" to cure the laminate!