@nsj Yes, it's oak and mahogany. The oak was a whisky barrel top, horrible to work with, I'll not be doing again. I think the sunken bridge looks not too bad, what would you suggest to make it look i...

@boo It’s fair enough using Aldi sanders or similar, crack on. I use a cheap Draper random orbital sander that I bought a few years ago when I was painting my boat. I can attach my henry hoover to ...

@nsj Yeah I understand. I managed to get mine for £390 though so I was quite happy. It’s still a lot of money for a sander but not all sanders are made equal. 😆 I used to be a vehicle refinis...

Have accidentally deleted my entire "Robin's build #003" post, I thought I just resume from where I was. Maybe a short recap first. This is where it started. Attachment : 20210630_195020.jpg ...

Fast forward to now. Something went wrong when I was fitting the neck/body joint. I got a good clean joint but I must have altered the neck angle and height while I was doing it. So I've had to sink t...

@nsj I’m liking the look of this build, great shape and having a Floyd in as well tops it. I do have something similar in the planning. You are a great addition to this group and I’ll keep my eye on ...

That sounds like a good couple of hours work ... but worth it for all the extra enjoyment you get from a much easier-playing guitar.

We’re trying to design assembly techniques that emulate methods Gibson pioneered in the 40s, but without building a factory full of heavy engineering. Here’s the best tour video I’ve seen on the Memph...

Both pressings were aborted. I now had two slightly bent veneers with cracks. To continue the testing, we took the two cracked veneers and put a leaf of cross-grain poplar in between. Then we glued th...

We tried another piece of joined veneer, this time using the back mould. It happened again. Attachment : IMG_8873.JPG On the plus side, look how closely the veneer has followed the mould. Even ...

So soon I have a big pile of joined veneers. Attachment : IMG_8866.JPG

Now I need something to go onto the moulds. I’m kinda sorta following Making a Laminated Hollowbody Electric Guitar by Jim English, so I’m laminating 3 layers of 0.6mm veneer and one 1.5mm veneer. The...

And then an awful lot of copy-routing ensued. Attachment : IMG_8857.JPG

This time we took the thickness of the lamination into account, and used a bearing router bit to reduce the first layer of the side mould by around 4mm (oh look, is that a top template I failed to men...

The unanswered question at this stage was just how smooth that mould would need to be. We’re not using a huge steaming press, just a little vacuum pump. Will a 4-5mm lamination follow every bump or ju...

Why 3mm layers? Why six of them? Because 5 x 3 plus baseboard gives a height of 15mm and, according to Mr Bagpress (of whom more anon), if Gibson never bent their laminations more than 15mm, then neit...

Looking good @nsj. 👍 🎸🙂🎶🙏

It's very effective @nsj - works well 👍 I did some experimenting with the CNC with a similar idea - except I was just cutting the channel in the material and avoiding the step of having to f...

Yup No 5 for a fretboard for me. Thickness it, Make it straight, cut the fretslots. Then, setup the hand plane for smoothing, and take a pass on both outer edges of the fretboard, repeat, and take a p...

I'm having second thoughts on the recap & carve it approach. Takes an hour or two to assemble a guitar, and maybe 10mins to strip it all back - and only that long because I desoldered everything...