Okay @dwizum I gotta back up a bit here, sorry. apparently yesterday was far too busy for me, because I guess I missed everything that happened here on the ol' forums.
Let's go back to your early posts. Here's a pile of questions I had reading through this thread -
- Care to share where you purchased that and to what extent it lightened your wallet?
I bought this burl slice on ebay. The seller was roxy342279. They have a lot of buckeye burl but most of it is pretty weird shapes or sizes, or pretty rotten. I think those factors keep their prices way down below what most other vendors have for buckeye burl slices. At the time I bought it, I'd been watching for a nice piece at a reasonable price for several months, more or less casually. I paid $87 for this slice which I think was a screaming hot deal. I've seen guitar-oriented vendors selling single bookmatched tops for $400+. Although, most of the "instrument grade" stuff you see is probably much less punky than this piece. I feel like the bidding stayed down on this piece because people get scared by the seller pointing out that there was a large punky section. I'm not afraid of punk since I know I can handle it with resin or other methods and end up with a great result. I think most people casually looking at this stuff don't realize how easy it is to save punky wood.
So are you saying you "jointed" the edge in your sled before you resawed it? Why not after?
Jointing the edge of the billet before resawing serves a couple functions. First, it gives you a known-good edge. That can be helpful when resawing. The known-good edge goes down against the bandsaw table. I didn't show this, but I also planed one face of it flat (it was very nearly flat to begin with). Having one flat face and one true edge makes resawing a cake walk since you have good surfaces to hold against the fence and the table on the saw. This stuff sawed so easily, and so true, and my resaw blade leaves such a good surface finish on softer wood like this, that I didn't even sand or plane it off the saw, I went straight to the epoxy work.
Also, jointing before you resaw means the bookmatched panels are very close to being jointed themselves, if not perfect. I just drag them over a sanding board a few times to get a tight seam. It's easier to joint one thick panel than to joint lots of thin boards.
I'm guessing you still have another top from this billet, right? It was 2" thick and you took 1/2" off (two 'panels' of 1/4" thickness). that leaves another 1.5" of burl laying around still speaking to you, huh?
Probably two more bass sized tops. And I trimmed a chunk off the end of the slice that is probably 12 - 14" long, maybe a bit more. Plenty big enough for a few ukulele tops, or mini guitars, or pickups, or who knows what else. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the bass-sized pieces yet. Probably put them on a shelf and forget about them until they start speaking again. This particular bass is going on Reverb once it's done. I know this is probably sacrilege to say around these parts, but I don't really have the itch to build for myself right now. I have the original bass this one is a copy of as my main bass and I like it so much I haven't touched another one of my own basses in months. I do have faint brainstorm ideas about what I want to build for myself in the future, but none of my ideas include burl tops. It's not that I don't like them, I just don't have any ideas for myself that they really fit with.
Did you pull the two 1/4" panels off the same side, or did you take one off each side? I'm just wondering how the bookmatching worked out from how/where it was cut, more education for myself here.
They're off the same side, in sequence. That definitely gives the best match, especially with crazy burls like this. Because I didn't even sand them, the only "offset" between the two show faces right now is the thickness of the saw kerf, which is really small on my resaw blade, but it's still enough that there are obvious (but small) mismatches in the figure. Taking boards off opposite sides of a burl like this would make for a huge mismatch. The burl changes width by several inches over it's 2" thickness and the patch of steel blue grain totally changes size and shape.
Okay, pickup cavities. How did you go about cutting out those so you could save the tops like that? Scroll saw? Coping saw? How do you stay so straight on the cuts?
I cut them by hand with a jeweler's coping saw and a fine blade. Cutting through burl is really easy, even by hand. It only took a few minutes. Straight lines just by sight. Draw a pencil line, notch the start, and make the cut. Keep the "inner" edge of the kerf on the center of the line, job done. I size the pencil lines such that the outer edge of the kerf is right on the very edge of the nominal size for the pickup shells. That gives a hair of wiggle room that gets shaved off when the cavities are routed, since the cavities are slightly bigger than the shells. I taper the pickup shells top to bottom (like EMG and many other makers do) in order to account for the difference in size between the cap pieces and the cavities. So, the result is that the top surface of the shells is slightly under the nominal dimension, and the bottom of the shells is right on the nominal dimension. This sounds complicated but it works out easily in practice. I make the walnut "box" right at the nominal dimension then glue on the caps. The caps sit just inside the edge of the walnut box because they're slightly smaller than the box. Then I just sand a taper in to the side of the box until that slight lip disappears. Sometimes if the saw isn't quite straight or my cut line wiggles a bit I end up with a little void. I just fill it with dust and glue, it disappears into a burl like this. It's much harder to get "clean" woods like curly maple to look good when cut out as caps like this (ask me how I know).
So you glued the wings and top on pretty early in the build, huh? I ask this because I feel like I did this too soon and now I'm struggling to tackle things like side dots.
Yeah, this is just the basic process I've always used:
- dimension rough lumber for neck blank, glue it up, cut it to final dimensions, cut the "step" in the top for the fretboard, cut the scarf and glue it back on, true up the top of the neck, route the truss rod channel
- glue on headstock ears, glue on headstock veneer, rough cut the headstock to shape, rough cut the neck shape, rough carve the neck
- dimension the stock for the wings, rough cut the wing profiles, glue the wings on
- get the fretboard ready: resaw, thickness sand, plane the radius, cut the slots, cut the taper. Drill and glue in position markers on face
- get the body top ready - resaw, cut pickup cavities if doing so, glue up, rough cut perimeter, glue on the body
- route the cavities, route the body perimeter, roundover the body perimeter
- glue on the fretboard
- finish carve the neck, finish carve the heel, route the headstock, thickness the headstock
- side dots on the neck
That gets us up to about the point the woodworking is done and it becomes a game of finishing and installing.
I use a tiny hand held pin vise to drill the side marker dots. Mark with a pencil, dimple with a punch, then drill with the pin vise.
Thanks!
