Andyjr1515

Thanks, folks! And so to the carve. First is to mark it out. This was scaled up from a fairly flat-on photo: Now the top is glued to the back, there is little to no chance of, say, a whole knot becoming dislodged. However, the brittleness and variability of the wood was going to take some patient, steady work. The thing I always think kills a DIY SG-style is when the faces are rounded and the chamfer edges aren't crisp. There are a number of ways of maintaining that but, for what it's worth, these are my main tools for the job: Spokeshave with a very sharp blade and set for quite a light cut for the rough-cut external curves, curved medium micro-plane for the rough-cut internal curves, flat and freshly re-burred cabinet scraper to smooth and flatten off the faces. For carves like this, I have in the past used just a scraper, but with this timber, even a teeny scraper burr has a tendency to dig in. For the horn cutaway, pretty much just the micro-plane, but being careful to cut down for the upper edges and up from the lower edges to ensure no chipping along the all-important edges: Grateful for a sunny dry day for this - too many poisonous particles flying around to do in the cramped cellar. Mind you, haven't heard the neighbours moving around for a while... And the first rough carve is done. Here it is lightly dampened to show more closely how the finished figuring is starting to develop: And while I was doing this, a parcel arrived from David Dyke. Sounds like we might have an ebony fretboard blank As always, thanks for looking and for the encouraging comments and suggestions. Always much appreciated - especially for a build 'from the dark side'

I like that mint green! Very cool...

Oh dear....oh dear....oh dear

I'm looking forward to them being done, but a bit nervous of the doing of them - it's quite a fragile wood when you get the grain-direction of the cut even slightly wrong.

And now it does look more like a guitar I'm pleased with the joins - certainly, with many hints and tips from the good and knowledgeable folks here over the years, I'm getting a bit better at it! It's like this pretty much all the way round. And see what I mean about 0.6mm of maple still being fully visible. So now it looks more like a guitar. The next step is to make it look more like an SG. The chamfer carves start tomorrow...

And to the other rear wing. This is the one that has the control chamber and the pickup routs incorporated. Note also the maple veneer acting as the demarcation: This particular piece of Sapele was a little bit cupped and so the clamping was going to be particularly important. I first used a couple of sash clamps to hold the joint with the neck tightly. Clearly, it is important not to crush the 'hoop' left by the removal of the control chamber material and so, here, the sash clamp was fixed from the inside of the chamber to the outside of the other half. So I could get maximum clamping force, I also cut shaped cauls from the offcut to be able to clamp all round the edges and with some hefty ply cauls underneath to protect the yew top: It's going to start looking like a guitar soon

I read on the MS Admin stuff that they are planning to add more windows on MS Teams relatively shortly. (Might be like Covid-19 testing, though)

So I now have a top glued to the neck. Quick check that everything is still square - both on the neck/top assembly and the mahogany. And an orientation of the grain: The upper back - that doesn't have any cable routs or control chamber stuff - then is cut to a 4mm oversize shape, a strip of maple is glued to the join face and then the 'you can't have too many clamps' ritual Note the side clamps to secure the join with the neck, the central blue clamp and caul to get the side fully home and then the smaller clamps and curved protective cauls to ensure that the side joins are fully gap-free. That's enough for today. It's Saturday. A weekend Gin beckons... Wonder what's on for tomorrow - or pretty much the same

In all of my previous neck through builds, I have glued the rear wings to the neck, sorted the cable channels, etc, and then added the top. This sort of thing: The big disadvantage - particularly with the equipment (and skills!) I have, I find it very difficult to get the gluing area completely flat. And it does need to be completely flat, otherwise the edges of the top are liable to end up with gaps. So this time, I'm going to do it the other way round - glue the top to the neck blank and then add the prepared wings. So first, I needed to add the demarcation stripe between the top and the back. I'm using standard maple veneer: Although it's only 0.6mm thick, it does show through well and is one of those things that always adds a bit of extra class to any build. The back wings to through-neck joint will have the same feature. Then, because I am weird and I use the top as my routing template for the back (although I may well not use a router on this one at all), I filed and sanded the tooling marks off the edge and brought it to its final shape and then glued and clamped it onto the neck: Next job will be preparing the backs. Stay safe and thanks for looking

For a first go - and with this the first time with Teams for many of us, it was pretty successful. And I got to stay on it the longest 😎 Thanks for organising, @Richard R

Natural. Gloss varnish

Trouble is, the bar with the red phone disappeared very quickly and I had close the app too! Not terribly intuitive first time round

Done this time?

Off now?

MS Teams, @Oldman

I saw jebroad?

I'm in ( I think)

Did any of this work, @Len_derby ?

There are tools that don't get used very often but when they do, boy are they useful! Take the Stanley No.80 Scraper Plane, for example. I think this was around £15 from ebay a few years ago: My task was to remove the bookmatch band-saw dints, tearout and chatter. I didn't want to use a powered sander because of the potential harmful dust, ditto with hand sanding (and it would take a full isolation period of time to do it!), hand-scraping better but hurts my arthritic hands and some of those dints are quite deep; normal planes a no-go because of digging in an tearout. But the No 80 is absolutely perfect. Decent surface removal but no tearout at all. Once it was almost there, I wiped over with a damp cloth to spot the dints that still showed. Great way of seeing the sort of colour this is going to be, too Can't wait to see what those grain lines are going to do once I start carving the chamfers

And early mockup number 2:

For a slurry and buff, @JohnDaBass , I've never used more than a 3oz bottle. It should be plenty. If you were doing a full gloss build-up method (quite difficult) then it would use more, but the slurry and buffs I do usually take not much more that 1/2 a small bottle.

I daredn't do anything WITHOUT a volute. Said nameless lives close enough to here to arrange for a mob with burning torches to come round for a visit! Lots of squaring up, etc, today. This is clearly essential because the neck squareness will affect the squareness of the top, which will, in turn, affect the fit of the back wings. Again, I find a hand plane as good as anything to take teeny amounts off the main faces to ensure they are completely square to each other: Once that was done, I needed to pop a 0.5mm extra depth in the trussrod slot. Then I was able to cut my notch in the neck blank for the top to slot into: Yes, John, there IS a volute. So tell the mob to stand down - again! And this time, make sure they know the difference between standing down and burning down! MrsAndyjr1515 still hasn't forgiven them... So basically, the top of the notched face (incorporating the neck angle) will sit flush with the two rear wings: And then the joined yew top will lie on top of that, leaving the top face flush with the top of the neck. And, talking of the yew top, I also squared up the gluing joints of that - and it's glued and clamped as I type And that means that the main components are getting close to assembly

I got caught up in similar stuff. My conclusion is that it seems to: - need you to have a Microsoft Account & password - I think it also needs you to have a Skype account Both of the above can be done for free if you don't already have them. Then, at the end of it, you will also need Richard's invite link. I can't be sure about this because, in true MS style, the questions it asks along the joining journey are ambiguous and confusing and take you to screens that don't seem to have any relevance to what you are doing. But I think that's probably the issue, @Len_derby The reason I think it's that is that I originally tried to kickoff using my ajrguitarmods hotmail address and that's what Richard originally sent on the Teams invite. But on the Hotmail address, I have neither a MS Account or a Skype account. I then hit similar problems. But for my private email, I have both a Microsoft account and Skype and when I tried with that address it let me set up the MS Teams Account. I then I could click a revised invite link from Richard (who had sent a new one linked to my private email) and that allowed me to log into the team room. Hope this helps

It didn't take terribly long to cut but - because the neck incorporates the neck angle which means you need to know exactly where the body is going to join - it took an age to draw, calculate, check, recheck and check again! But the side profile of the neck blank is now cut: And, hang it, let's have the first mock-up

Looks good