Sound clips

I plugged in the Orange Amp tonight and hooked it up with my laptop. I recorded two little sound clips to give you an idea of the sound. The first bit is the intro of a song called Glycerine by the band Bush. The Amp was set to Overdrive to give it a bit more Rock:




The second one a song called Street Spirit (Fade out) by Radiohead. The amp was set to clean output.



The recordings are not of the best quality (and my guitar playing is a bit rusty since I build more than I play lately) but they give an idea of the guitars sound.

Little drawback

I had a little drawback last Monday on the neck of the guitar. But more of that later. There are some little jobs that need to be done on the guitar to finish it up. One of them involves adjusting the neck. But before I could do that I first had to make a hole in the head stock plate to reach the Allen nut on the truss rod. First I made some rough outline holes with a drill:

With the Dremel and a cutter bit I widened the hole till I could reach the Allen.

The neck can now be adjusted by tightening the truss rod. After the adjustments the neck looked straight and I strung it up again. Still there where some rattles here and there so the frets must be leveled. But after leveling there where still some high spots on the places where the leveling to place. Since this was strange we looked a bit closer and the frets that had this problem appeared to be loose!! After an inspection of all the frets it appeared that more then half of the frets suffer from this issue . We have to remove all the frets, make new once and glue those in to prevent them from coming loose again. This will take some extra time so I am thrown back a bit in time but hey, that is custom building.
Along with this job two other things need to be done. Making a truss rod cover and a heel cap. The heel cap will be made out of rosewood. The truss rod cover I already tackled. Since there was very little space under the string wood would really be an option since it had to made to thin an delicate. I had a plectrum which made (after some modifications) an excellent cover:

The letters which are on there say WWJD which means "What Would Jesus Do?"
I also bought a little practice amplifier, the Orange Micro Crunch CR3 along with a Fender Vintage Tweet cable. It works really great and gives a nice sound. I can even make the guitar Rocky by using the overdrive.  It also has a build in guitar tuner. Look at the little fellow:

It has a voice!

Yesterday I strung the guitar up for the first time! And off course, it sounds great! Before I could put the strings on first some jobs had to be finished. First the bridge position on the top had to measured out. I drilled a small hole underneath the bridge to feed the wire from the pick-up into the guitar body.

I picked up the wire inside and pulled it out the sound hole. Now the jack-plug could be soldered to the wire.

The metal wire you see in the image was used to pul a nylon wire to through the guitar out the hole where the plug should come. The wire was attached to the plug and than carefuly the plug was pulled trough the guitar and through the hole in the bottom of the guitar.

The plug was then secured with nuts. After that the tailpiece was installed and the nut was place in position. Also the tuners where placed back in the head stock and secured with small screws. Once finished with all these small jobs the strings could go on and I could hear the guitar for the first time. I can tell you I am really pleased with the sound and it will only get better over time when the guitar settles. It still needs some fine tuning but the results are promising. Some pictures of the strung up guitar:

Polishing

The layers of oil have been applied and fully dried. Now it is time for polishing to bring out the grain pattern even more and to give the guitar a satin shine. It will not have the high gloss you end up with most lacquer finishes but a more dim gloss. The material to use when polishing are beeswax, a cotton rag and lams wool. 

The beeswax is first applied with the rag. When a layer is applied you buff it up with the lams wool to bring out the shine. Because the wax dries very fast you have to do the guitar in sections starting at the top, then one side, the other side, back and finish at the neck. Then start over at the top etc. till three layers are applied. The pictures below show the end result. But it is hard to show the "real result" on a picture but you get an idea of how it looks.

And to end this post a try-out with some sort of photo shop software:

Oiling

After another 5 hours of sanding I have put on the first four layers of oil. The oiling process is pretty straight forward and goes as follows:
The first step is checking for left over scratches and dents. They have to be sanded away and then getting the surface as smooth as possible. The the guitar gets a good clean with a dry cloth. I first made the mistake to do it with a slightly damp cloth which resulted in the wood fibers standing up again. The fret board should not be oiled with this oil (it will receive a different kind of oil later on) so it is masked with masking tape. After these preparations the first layer could be applied.
The workbench should be covered with a soft cloth to minimize the risk of damaging the guitar.

The oil I used is Rustins Danish Oil. This is Tung oil based and easy to apply. Original mend for furniture but also widely used for guitars. The oil is simply wiped on with a cotton cloth. Could be an old T-shirt or bed sheet.

Then the guitar is hung up to dry. It is important to hang it and not place it in a guitar stand. When it hangs free the air can circulate around it which helps the drying process.

 The oil needs about 2 to 3 hours to fully dry. When you check if it is dry always check on the sides or the back. The top is soft wood which drys faster then the hard wood back and sides. In between layers the whole guitar is touched up with very fine OOOO steel wool.

4 layers are now applied and it still needs 2 layers. After that the guitar will be polished with three layers of bee wax. The oil really brings out the wood grain pattern.