Official Luthiers Forum!

No apology necessary, Bobby. There are a lot of passionate builders and players in this forum. And I do have to say that in view of that and therefore of the potential for responses in this thread to become very heated, I think that the opinions given were pretty civilly metered out.

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"Building guitars looks hard, but it's actually much harder than it looks." Tom Buck

SO, I have the new dremel 9000, but the old school dremel 231 routing table. They did not match up, dremel sent me a conversion kit free of charge . Problem is it also didn't match up , but solved the mounting problem. So i am making a board to mount the dremel too . i had to cut a hole with a hole saw . so here is the set up , and the shim I made for the neck so I can route in on center . Also a picture of fall in Maine . Next set will be to make the accual route , perhaps I will make a video for the route .

WOW!!!!!! Ok I ran into issues . Pretty much I had to rebuild the entire neck. So I made the shim and tried routing the channel . The dremel router even after trying to do multiple shallow passes , liked to bind ( using a fresh bit and fastest setting on the newest and most powerful dremel set to the highest speed. It ended up going crazy, grabbing the wood and digging a hole so deep the back side of the neck was so thin it pressed inwards like a peice of veneer.

So on to rebuilding the neck. I saved as much of the routing dust as possible and put it into a pot. I made up a batch of hide glue and made a fiberboard mat of wood chippings , dust and hide glue. I lined the channel with this mixture . Until it was high enough to where the original route should have been cut. This then dried for a few days. I fit the trussrod in the channel, and put a strip of wood on top of it , using hide glue again. I had a strip of snakewood I had laying around so I used that. I scraped the piece of snakewood flush with the neck, and filled in any low spots with the tone woods shavings mix, then scraped again.

Now we have the chips and indented back of the neck to deal with . I filled the indent and chipes with other pieces of snakewood / tonewoods dust mix which by now has rosewood and ebony sanded down in the mix which also includes maple ,mahogany, and walnut .


scraping , sanding, and filling little gaps, until I was satisfied it felt great .

Of course none of this will ever be noticiable once the guitar is finished . Its such a stronger neck now , with reflief adjustment. Knocking on the neck in every spot like you would knock on someones door , the tone transfers so much better now as well .

fret board being reattached , and 2 days later fret board gouges being filled , using dust i scraped from the underside of the board .

9.5 radius block arrived, so I got to it on the fret board. Coming along nicely.

After recieving the wrong sized frets in the mail my new frets have arrived. So to the bat cave I go . The first slot was a little wide so I decided to use glue . The first one needed to be clamped but te rest were just fine on their own . I will let this dry, and get to trimming and dressing at some point .

Very interesting posts and just as different as people are.
I'm a basically a woodcarver and have restored many carved items that need restoration. In most all these cases, they are very old and important to restore as close to what is there and match wood/finish as well.
I don't have much experience in vintage guitar restoration...but I did (last year) completely rebuild my old 1964 Goya classical which had gone thru a bad flood and was a floater for quite a few days. I didn't have the heart to throw her away and kept it in the closet (basically cleaned up) for 20 years. Top and back cracked badly/ bindings fell out...neck stayed pretty good but removed the neck and I ended up routing the top off and replacing with a new top and bracing.. YES...I also replaced all plastic bindings with wood. Completely scraped /resanded and repaired back and sides and put her all back together and she looks brand new. Not what I would usually do to a vintage old guitar...but this one was toast and the only reason I even went to the trouble I did...was because it was my first guitar.

I took lots of pictures and measurements to possible build one from scratch down the road.

It was a project to see if it could be done at all. I enjoyed the experience.

Your project looks like fun. The experience you gain from this project will just make you want to do more.

Great advise from the forum....but do what you want.

K Bailey

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Wood Creations by Kent A. Bailey
EXCELLENCE IN SCULPTURE, CARVING, LUTHIER, ARCHITECTURAL MILLWORK AND DESIGN

http://www.kabart.com

Thank you, yes I would agree the advise I recieved is good. Like I said of course I would like to have kept this original, but it is what it is.

I have the neck refretted trimmed all the ends off and filed down. I'm not going to bevel the ends because I plan on having the little nibs ala gibson neck binding .

I also don't want to spend $75 on a crowning file so I am making one from wood using an oak dowel rod.

decided to make a little vid of cutting snakewood binding on my newly rescued 1950's table saw that was headed to the dump

Please take this seriously. Don't do that again without a splitter and a zero clearance insert in your saw. You're begging for a kickback.
Much safer to put the wider piece between the fence and blade and allow the thin piece to fall free of the blade.

Looks like a nice guitar. I used to have a Triumph but it had two wheels ....
All I can say is: EEEK!

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"Preoccupation with an effect gives it power and enhances the error"
from "Your Owner's Manual" by Burt Hotchkiss.

Thank you , I do take this seriously. You could not be more correct thank you for slaping me into reality. I will make a zero clearance insert before I use the saw again. I learned woodworking in highschool and we never used saftey equiptment like that back in the day, but they didn't used to use seat belts in cars either. Your advise is well heard and will be heeded. Thank you

I found this link , I will go about it slightly different because my throat plate uses clips. I will end up plaining the piece level with the table instead of going for the leveling screw route. But for anyone following this thread now or in the future , and do not use a zero clearance insert, here you are http://www.woodworkersguide.com/2010/04 ... ce-insert/

Anyway , bending this snakewood will be fun .

So I have been out of town for some time but I am back and working on my project. Upon returning , The crack opened up, I steamed it again and tried to close it but it wouldn't cooperate. This will really make your ladies undies bunch up. I routed a grove, and will inlay it with matching grain red spruce sourced from west virgina.

Since this a darker piece of the sunburst no one will see it anyway, but it was the only way I could close the crack. I know some "expert" will be on my ass like yor destroing it , but no this is the right way to close this crack. fudge original finish seriously go sip some tea with your pinky out. Ohh and a pictur for kids who read this in 75 years . This is our president! Yes we are much cooler than you will be in 2085! I hope who ever has this guitar by then because I will be maggot bait , is loving this repair because it will have held up.

Steamed this last night and it sat in form for 24 hours , this is the filler strip when the glue dries , I will plane and scrape this flush , should be prett invisable , we will see .

Now that's a crack repair.tapping on the wood there is zero difference in tone as well .

Nice save

Bob

Looks good Reeve!

Stormy outside , cut a bunch of holly and steamed it up. Holly bound neck. Needs to be scraped and made all pretty but I think the holly looks really nice

here is the back body binding , American Holly , wow that birdseye maple on the sides is sweet

Sorry, but that crack repair was lame. The splint didn't extend the full depth of the crack so it will not hold up for long.

It accually did , I tapered it and made sure it fit in their nice and snug I then steamed it , so you can imagine what the soft steamed wood fitting in there was like being clamped tight ,I also steamed the crack "shut" before fitting it in . It's not going anywhere trust me . At some point I should try to fit a camera inside to grab a few pics of that repair from underneath .

Nice touch with the holly binding, Reed.

Reed, just came across this thread, nice work man. Shame you are getting so many negative (lame?) comments on here but you seem to be doing a good job ignoring them and carrying on regardless. The purists have made their opinions known and once is probably enough.

After all practically every Stradivarius in the world has been heavily modified over time, backs popped many times, cracks fixed and modern (for the time) fingerboards fitted so they remained playable. And many have been refinished along the way and no one complains about that, still worth millions. Just because its fashionable at the moment to turn old guitars into expensive wall hangings doesn't mean it will always be so. If you can't play it (and I mean easily and cleanly, not just pluck the open strings), it isn't really an instrument in my mind.

Look forward to seeing it all back together, all shiny and with a new paint job and ripping up a few tunes.
Cheers
Dom