Official Luthiers Forum!

Man she's looking great Chris and cool fret board markers too!

Nice saw Edward and you have to be excited about that!

Daniel here is hoping you can get back to guitar building soon.

SKIN bro I understand so here is hoping you can get your cabinets delivered, installed and get back to guitar building soon too.

Mark they sound very cool - I have to learn to build in batches too.

Thanks Padma I knew that you would know what I was talking about even though I also knew that you are not a slave to convention, me either.

Tom three at once - wow! Have a good weekend off my friend!

Let's see some more of what's happening in YOUR shops?

Thanks

I am still settling in to all of the changes I made in January but so far it is great.

Last night I bent the sides and linings for a Madrose/Swiss guitar that I am excited about. I am going to use the buttresses again and float the fingerboard (slanted 24 fret design again). I am eager to see if I can replicate the attributes of the last one I did like this which has been sounding very good lately.

I have an old LG-2 in the shop doing some very mild repairs for my neighbor up the street. It is a sweet old guitar. Very small bridgeplate and a crease behind the bridge but he says it has been stable for the 20 years he has had it so no surgery. The action seems to be not bad at all.

I also am setting up my first baritone. I had the strings tuned up the other day and finally got to hear it and was very happy, although first impressions can be unreliable. Here are a few shots of some appointments.

The customer had the headstock blank inlaid by the people he likes and I was hesitant about it but it came out great. Here it is:



Here is the rosette also. He had purchased one of those "Brazilian rosewood species" sets on ebay from Indonesia and I nixed it for the guitar (stability issues) but we were able to cut it up and use the pretty parts for rosettes, bevel overlays etc... It came out nice although it did have some serious drying issues with the finish. For that alone, I am not sure I would use it again. Luckily though here we seem to be okay.



I also just received my Caswell buffer and need to spend half a day setting it up. I have had a little guitar waiting for much too long to be buffed out and hopefully that can happen in the next week or so.

_________________
Burton
http://www.legeytinstruments.com
Brookline, MA.

Burton: Those details on that guitar have to be some of the nicest I've ever seen.An absolute fabulous sense of design, not too much but enough to really grab the eye....!!!! Very nice job,pictures when you are finished please.
Tom

_________________
A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

I agree! Just stunning!
How did you do the inner ebony "ring"??

_________________
Dave
Milton, ON

Thanks very much guys. I don't know how much credit I can take though. My customer came up with the tree and the knots and I sent the ebony blank out to Jason at Custom Inlay who installed the tree and decoration. My contribution to that part was choosing the piece of myrtle burl (which I am proud of!) for the tree to be cut from. I love the way the color changes as it moves from roots to branches and the swirling lines really add something too. I am happy with the purfs on the headstock and FB too. I used some nice curly maple for the outside lines but sandwiched between the maple lines is .01 fiber, .01 myrtle, .01 fiber. That tiny myrtle line hardly shows up in the picture but is really nice and delicate in person.

Dave, I assume you are referring to the celtic knot pattern in the tree? I have no idea how he did that. It may simply be filler putty in the myrtle. The detail is great though.

_________________
Burton
http://www.legeytinstruments.com
Brookline, MA.

Burton, I think he's talking about the ring around the soundhole.

_________________
Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Yup! (...apologies if common knowledge....mystery to us archtop guys!)

_________________
Dave
Milton, ON

Oh! That is just a piece of binding bent to fit inside of the soundhole. Not nearly as hard as binding an f-hole!

_________________
Burton
http://www.legeytinstruments.com
Brookline, MA.

Oh! That is just a piece of binding bent to fit inside of the soundhole. Not nearly as hard as binding an f-hole!

_________________
Burton
http://www.legeytinstruments.com
Brookline, MA.

Humf! For some reason , I was thinking it was more involved.
Always overthinking things!

_________________
Dave
Milton, ON

Just finished my fake versatile 8 pound wooden swivel vise

Parts list:

• 0.024 square feet 3/4" plywood (cut to various sizes)
• 26" of 1 1/4" beech dowel
• 10" threaded rod M12 or similar
• 5" threaded rod M6 or similar
• 1 M3 screw
• some nuts
• some washers
• some glue
• some hours of work (buying the original, 32 pound steel vise would have been much cheaper if y would pay me, let's say 10 $ per hour But you can't buy fun. - And anyway, I did my repair jobs for many years with a non-swiveling vise but I hope life will get easier, and fun will get funnier with it

P.S.
It works like a charm - just strong enough for my purposes but of course not as strong as the original green or red one.

Yo, Markus

thank you for posting this vise. A 1 cool.

To day I threaded a whole mess of 1/2 maple for making clamps and vises, so your post really has me attention.

Like the way you got them jaws swiveling and the guide dowels....very nice.

Like the offset handle instead of a Tommy bar. They can be a real pain.

Umm how did you resolve the horizontal rotation / swivel and lock?


icu
Duh
Padma

_________________
.

Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


.

... I'm honoured!


I'm looking forward for your tutorial on threading wooden threads ....eeehm ...I mean dowels. I have no idea how I would do this.


Yes, Tommy bars are a pain, especially for the neighbors below after midnight...
Installing the offset handle was fun. Some adjustments and precision (or vice-versa ) required (That's where the M3 screw goes).


It's easy: locking happens by friction! It works.

Hesh,

Looks like a coat or two of lacquer on the bricks, yes?

_________________
_____________________________

Kurt Thomas

"There's a first time for everything even if you do it by mistake."

...oh , of course the rotation of the whole clamping unit has it's locking mechanism:

Thank you Markus,

thats what I thought that wing nut was for.

Think me gonna go with a cam / leaver or sliding wedge...
Will post pics in another day or two.


icu
Duh
Padma

_________________
.

Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


.

Yes, good idea. Tightening well the wing nut requires more than one full turn which is a waste of time


Although I was going slow that's not really true... This morning I made a more careful estimate. Total "costs" of my vise and fun was ca. 25.- $ for hardware plus ca. 10 hours of "hardwork"

I agree - pretty cool Markus!

Kurt no lacquer on my bricks but now that you mention it why would anyone do this?

Beautiful work Burton!!

Hesh-
I always coat my guitarmaking bricks with Bondo before I shoot lacquer on 'em.
Brings 'em up to luthier standard, and also reduces the nasty brick dust.

Cheers
John

What, no epoxy fill?

_________________
Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Marcus, I was yery taken with your vise - nice work!

(0.024 square feet of ply seem a bit on the small side though?)

_________________
The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I am really surprised how much attention my low-tech non-gloss non-inlayd non-tonewood item is gathering! Thanks for all your comments!

Needless to say that I highly admire the stunning work of Burton LeGeyt, cwood8656 and The Padma (just to mention some instruments in this thread) and deeply bemoan the terrible incident in Terence Kennedy's shop? No, I feel that I should have commented all that earlier on.

I agree that Hesh's bricks at least should be shellacked. Only peruvian bricks are worse than non-porefilled northern hemisphere - bricks. But that's another story (a no-tool repair), I already have hijacked this thread too much...


No. Plywood here in Switzerland costs a lot of money, I couldn't afford more!
Nonsense - you're absolutely right, it's not a vise for fine tuning wrist watch parts . That must have been a typo on my calculator (dividing instead of multiplying) when converting square meters to something else The right number is 2.8 square feet (0.26 square meters).

Markus bro your low-tech non-gloss non-inlayd non-tonewood item is getting lots of attention because it is very cool!!!