By: John Page
A lot has happened since the last time I wrote. The biggest bummer was while I was carving the back shape into the neck for 001 an 1¼” long by 3/16” wide black/green stain on the visible side of 001’s neck appeared… ain’t that a bitch! After all the time, energy and dollars committed to the beautiful neck of 001 this stain shows up… neck lost!
The stain:
Welcome to the wonderful world of guitar building. I talked to the customer, Eddie, and unfortunately he didn’t like any of the alternatives I had available to him, so I had to start the search for the right Brazilian fretboard again, as well as start the neck fabrication over. Fortunately, the amazing vendor I had for the Brazilian was able to send me several more fretboards almost immediately. In fact, one of the fretboards looked like it was a sequence cut from the original 001.
After receiving, curing and processing the new fretboards, I sent Eddie a couple of pics of the best looking ones. He picked the one that looked like the sequence cut from the original 001. So, I continued to process that fretboard and re-make the 001 neck blank. So that part of the problem was solved, but the neck was set back another month or so. Such is life. But I promised that this installment I would continue work on the body, so that’s what I’m going to do. The next installment I’ll cover the continuation of the new 001 neck fabrication.
I ended the last body installment with the chambered body assembly glued up and beginning its 30 day minimum cure. When that was complete I could start the multiple operations to rout, drill, sand, sand, sand, paint, fill, sand, paint, sand, sand… well, yeah, there’s a lot of sanding. Here goes;
I begin by pin routing the perimeter, neck pocket, pickup holes and control cavity:
The next thing I do at this point is to refine the rear contour that I band-sawed in the first series of operations:
Next comes a series of drilling operations. All of these require specific tooling to assure absolute accuracy. First comes the bridge mounting/string through holes:
Then comes the drilling of the string ferrule holes on the back. These holes are so close to each other, as are their counter bores, that the placement is extremely critical, and easy to spot if they’re off:
Here’s the tool to drill those holes:
Next comes the counter boring of the string ferrule holes. This produces a small shelf that allows the string ferrule to be recessed flush to the surface of the body:
Here’s a detail of the counter bored string ferrule hole:
Next comes control and switch mounting holes:
Counter boring neck mounting holes:
Then pickup wire access holes, neck:
Then bridge:
Then I decided that I didn’t like the tooling that I originally built for the jack holes. So, I had to go out and buy a new drill press and make a new tool. I’m really glad I did… it worked great:
One of my favorite features of this new drill press is its laser alignment… pretty cool:
The drilled jack hole:
After what seems like endless different set-ups and tooling to drill holes, comes endless hours of sanding. First comes the level sanding:
Then the final detail sanding, starting with 120 grit, then going to 220, 320 and 400.
Final edge sand:
Final detail sand:
I use a radius gauge while final sanding the edge radius to assure consistency around the perimeter of the body:
When I’m done with all of the sanding and final inspection, it’s time to stamp the serial number in the bridge pickup rout and sign and date the neck pocket.
Stamping serial number:
Signing neck pocket:
Signed and stamped::
After all of that it was time to stain the body. Eddie decided that he didn’t want the blue with black under lights that he had originally ordered. He told me that he was thinking of rust. I thought that was pretty cool and very unique, so I went to task trying to develop a rust stain that he would be happy with. After several e-mail photo samples, I decided to snail mail him the test piece so that he could see it in person. Here’s the piece I sent:
After a bit of discussion, Eddie went with the “Heavy Rust”, which he coined “Sunset Bronze”, but before I could stain the body I had to mask off the seam of the top from the back with fine line green tape:
Here I am staining 001 Sunset Bronze:
After staining and before painting:
After several days of cure I was able to start the finishing process on the body. Here the painting process is underway:
The painting process involves several paint, cure, sand cycles, which I’ve chosen not to show here because they all look pretty much the same… me painting, me sanding… snooze time (almost as bad as all of the drilling photos). So after all of the painting steps, the final is to let it cure for another 30-ish days before I buff it out.
In my next installment, I’ll pick up the second half of the neck fabrication. After that should be neck and body buff, assembly and final set-up and testing, so come on back… ya hear!
