Just the Time of the Year

Yeah, I know, I haven't posted in about a month. Things have been busy, and I've been too lazy to post on here, so expect another large picture post this time with explanations interspersed.

It's hard to see, but it is my completed blueprint of the '61 Gibson SG that I am attempting to copy.

A couple of weeks back, we put on a musical instrument swap meet. I traded for/bought some sweet items and essentially have all of the raw supplies for an electric guitar (minus the hardware) to build next year in class.

In electric construction class, I had cut, jointed, planed,and glued my piece of ribbon mahogany into a slab big enough to make my guitar out of.

Then, using this template created from my blueprint...

and this one for the neck profile and taper

along with this half template for my headstock

(and these boring control cavity templates)

I traced, rough cut, flush routed the shape out of that piece of mahogany

and cut the rough stock for my neck.

Here, I am gluing on the cream colored binding to the fingerboard.

And here I am getting a rough idea of where the truss rod will sit and how deep it needs to be routed to fit.

the binding with the tape removed

and again....I think it looks really nice.

the neck (with the routed truss rod)

 

the head stock with ebony wood veneer and routed down to nearly final shape

gluing on the fingerboard

while that is drying up, we work on finishing projects. These are two pieces of spruce that we sanded down and use to practice spraying toners out of aerosol cans. The goal is to get a consistent even color.

This board is our practice in spraying solid colored paints out of a spray gun. It is a "seafoam green" on top of a white primer. Personally, I think it is more robin's egg blue, but tomato/potato. this will eventually be buffed out to a high gloss.

we also had some practice making a color sample board brushing on water thin dyes and spraying gloss coats to cover them.

and this is a board using a dyed pore filler. this is probably my worst looking one as I accidentally sanded through the color and had to do a touch up that came out really blotchy.

things drying outside of the spray booth.

the color sample area.

Well, I took the clamps off of the now glued fingerboard and went about installing my pearl position markers.

looking snazzy

The "final" neck with frets installed. I still need to fit it to the guitar body, shape the neck, install the tuners, install the inlay, make the nut, etc...

Back to finishing! working on doing color matching.

sample swatches with ratios written in

I also get to do some repairs for a grade, so as a favor to a buddy, I'm giving him an overhaul on his Gibson Custom SG. This thing was being finicky after years of hard playing and I found a few things wrong with it. For example, the string spacing on the saddles were very off, causing tuning problems and strange buzzes. I slotted new slots in the proper locations.

The original nut was worn out from using the guitar's vibrato system, so I popped it out and made a new one out of a plastic/graphite composite, which will lubricate the string as it is de-tuned and re-tuned from using the vibrato arm.

I also decided to level out all of the worn spots in the frets

and dressed them up to be basically brand new frets

I gave this baby a good set up, and now it plays like a dream. Now, This weekend I need to finish up doing some work on my own guitar (it also needed a fret level and dress, as well as a set up).

I'm also planning on cutting out this inlay design of a vulture out of mother of pearl for my electric guitar build.

Its only going to be about 1.5 inches big and it will be going on my headstock

getting a sense of how it will look.

soon I should have my own version of this.

There's only 3 weeks left and I still have so much to do...yikes.