It is currently Mon Mar 16, 2020 10:55 pm

All times are UTC - 7 hours



Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 1508 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 ... 101  Next
Go to page Previous  1 ... 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 ... 101  Next
Author Message
Post subject: two tone strat?
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 1:00 pm
Offline
Aspiring Musician
Aspiring Musician
User avatar

Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2008 10:09 am
Posts: 568
Location: Pembroke Pines, FL
Is there the possibility of one color on the back and one on the front?...now THAT would be unique....... :shock: 8)

_________________
Your Fender HSS Standard Stratocaster in Electron Blue was made at the Fender Ensenada Plant in Mexico in the Year: 2008.
Final Assembly Date: July 30th, 2008
Model Number: 013 4700 587
Serial # MZ8031252


Top
Profile
Fender Play Winter Sale 2020
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 1:33 pm
Offline
Roadie
Roadie
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jun 12, 2008 9:08 pm
Posts: 243
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
I don't know if this has been brought up yet as I have not been able to read every addition to this thread but I believe we may have a new Ask Ceri section in the Custom Shop forum. Well, as soon as the contract negotiations are worked out :) . Im seriously amazed at the quality of craftmanship displayed here. I wish I had some nice wood to send you.
Can't wait to see the final product Ceri.

Russ


Top
Profile
Post subject: Re: two tone strat?
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 1:44 pm
Offline
Aspiring Musician
Aspiring Musician
User avatar

Joined: Mon Jan 05, 2009 6:21 am
Posts: 362
Location: Zrenjanin, Serbia
Trauma wrote:
Is there the possibility of one color on the back and one on the front?...now THAT would be unique....... :shock: 8)


I was wondering the same thing! Kind of like the EVH Wolfgang, black on the back, and vintage white on the front, or any white as far as I am concerned. I like that combination! I love white guitars!
But, I am convinced that Ceri is about to surprise us all (as if he hasn't surprised us enough by now with resurrecting the "overflamed basswood body";or whatever it is) with his choice of colour(s) or colour combination!

_________________
"If you're on a path that's beaten, it's not your path." Joseph Campbell

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

"All that is impossible remains to be achieved."
Jules Verne

www.stratcollector.com


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 1:44 pm
Offline
Professional Musician
Professional Musician
User avatar

Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 3:31 pm
Posts: 2638
Location: Pacific North West, USA
Quote:
Since the back and sides of this body are going to receive a solid finish the color of the filler doesn't matter, so I am using a dark one just to make it easier to see, both for working and photographing.

Ah Ha! So now we have kind of an idea what your up too. Fun! Thanks for the tip on fixing the wood by the steam method. That one I will remember, as well as how to fill the grain. I have refinished a lot of bodies but never down to the bare wood. This was really helpful. Cherrio! Lok forward to the next "howbeit" sized installment!

_________________
Xhefri's Guitars
www.xhefriguitars.com
Image


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:12 pm
Offline
Aspiring Musician
Aspiring Musician
User avatar

Joined: Sat Oct 24, 2009 3:29 am
Posts: 305
Kick $@! Ceri! Excellent work my man. 8)

_________________
10-4 good buddy, over and out!


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:17 pm
Offline
Professional Musician
Professional Musician
User avatar

Joined: Wed Dec 31, 2008 9:31 am
Posts: 1282
Location: Hunterdon County NJ
Another great installment. That body sure looks great and I can't wait to see it finished. Touching up indeed :lol:

_________________
Image


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 8:26 pm
Offline
Professional Musician
Professional Musician
User avatar

Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2007 1:27 pm
Posts: 1151
Location: In.
Cant wait to see tomorrows episode Ceri. Once again great job.

_________________
"My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives." Blazing Saddles...


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 4:32 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:57 am
Posts: 13164
Location: Peckham: where the snow leopards roam
Kong wrote:
Ceri, shoot me an email...

Just a little headsup: Mr Kong and I have been chatting by email. He has a guitar that has, um, seen happier days and he thought I might be interested in it. I am, and having asked his permission I thought others might like to see pictures too.

Kong's Strat:

http://s388.photobucket.com/albums/oo32 ... at%20Body/

It's for Kong to tell you that guitar's story himself if he likes. He's asking whether I'd care to try my hand at it, and I'm certainly ready to have a go if wanted. However, a little matter of the Atlantic Ocean adds slightly to the difficulties so I have been suggesting he give it a shot himself - so we'll wait with baited breath to see what happens.

One way or another, I suspect we ain't seen the last of that red Strat...

Today's instalment shortly.

Cheers - C


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 6:33 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:57 am
Posts: 13164
Location: Peckham: where the snow leopards roam
SERIOUS WARNING (again): finishing guitars is slow and repetitive work over many days with not much to see a lot of the time. That's even worse when Ceri is behind the spray gun, because he is the slowest finisher on the planet. Also, this will be a particularly complicated and time consuming body to finish. So even more patience from everyone will be needed from this point than so far on this thread...

Anyway, here's another glance at the prepped body:
Image

Now, there has been some talk of "faux" binding, where a line is created around the edge of the body by masking a strip from the colored finish. I don't suppose Paul Reed Smith actually invented it, but PRS certainly are the leading masters of the art, and if you want to see faux binding at its best look at many of their guitars.

However, there are reasons which we are about to discover why you seldom see faux binding (or any other kind) on Stratocasters. It is true that builders of so-called "Super Strats" such as Tom Anderson and John Suhr often put faux binding on their drop-top guitars, but a close look reveals that they often bring their tops to a sharp edge, rather than a rounded Fender style one. Here's the reason why:
Image

That is "fine line" tape, often mis-named pinstripe tape (which is really something slightly different). That is what faux binders use to mask where they want their binding line to go, but even in that picture you can see a problem on the Strat's radiused edge. And it gets much worse round tricky corners:
Image

Take my word, that is after much effort to get it to stick down. It simply won't adhere to the wood when travelling round three-dimensional curves. And that is why PRS, Suhr and the rest use sharp corners when they faux bind – so the tape only has to bend in one direction at a time.

In fact, even on the flat this tape does not work very well with thin watery guitar stain on somewhat absorbent wood grain. Here is a test piece I did on the same sycamore as on the front of my project:
Image

You can see that the stain has penetrated beneath the tape in a way that makes it useless. One of the many amazing skills of the builders at PRS is laboriously scraping this kind of thing off, but with our non-sticking tape issue it is just hopeless.

However. I'm a cussed sod and I'm not to be beaten.

That tape may not stick down well enough on the curves for masking, but it will do as a guide. Here I have worked my way around the edge of the guitar drawing a thin, light line against the tape with a fine German Rotring pencil:
Image

That leaves us with a regular 6 mm wide line marked out all round the edge of the sycamore top. Now the (slightly) clever bit. Here is a product intended for artists - a latex based masking solution that you paint on with a brush:
Image

Taking appalling care I worked my way all around the guitar. Three times, in fact, in order to create a thick enough layer of latex - but not too thick, because then the surface tension on the rubber can tend to make it peel up at the edges. When done it looks like this:
Image

And round those complex curves:
Image

So now, depending how steady my hand was we should have a nicely masked stripe round the front edge of the body. That was amazingly tedious work, by the way. Took me well over an hour and half, and wrecked that little brush - once the rubber starts setting in the hairs you can never really get it out again, and there is no solvent that won't also dissolve the brush hairs. So don't use expensive sable brushes with this stuff!

One more little job to do before we spray anything at this bod:
Image

Long-timers here will remember when we first saw this body of Nikininja's - his "Refinish Chronicles" thread, back mid-2008:

http://www.fender.com/community/forums/ ... sc&start=0

On that one he took the original polyester finish off the guitar before putting on the blue nitro it was wearing at the beginning of this current thread. And he had what I have always thought a stroke of genius; he weighed the guitar before and after removing that polyester. His results were:

Guitar with polyester - 1887 grams
Guitar without polyester - 1690 g
Total weight of polyester finish - 197 g

So since then it has become a tradition with me to weigh my finishes, to see if I can beat 197 g / 6.95 oz. Lightness means thinness, and that's what we're aiming for in a nice finish. On the Blue Strat build thread I had the pleasure of shooting a nitro finish that weighed in at 52 g / 1.875 oz. Here:

http://www.fender.com/community/forums/ ... &start=135

Doing a different kind of finish here, so we'll see how it works out. Anyway, the nude body weight is now a matter of public record: 1934 grams...

A word on finishes. On that other thread I did a nice nitro lacquer, so since I have nothing to prove on that point I am here going to use my preferred finish of choice: waterbase. The environmental and health aspects of waterbase finishes are certainly appealing, but I favor them even more for their strength, hardness, thinness, durability, comparative non-yellowing quality and ease of use. They are also very flexible in their application. I can mix and match from all of these coloring products and many more besides:
Image

The German Mixol colors in the little bottles to the left are particularly strong and useful for guitar finishing, but I have one or two other tricks up my sleeve too, which I shall get to later. In that pic you also see some color tests I have done on off-cuts of my sycamore top wood, and in the large glass jars are some red and yellow stains I have prepared.

For those as are unfamiliar with finishing, here's a look at the equipment I shall be using:
Image

That is a 25 litre compressor, just about the smallest that will run an air gun (as opposed to an airbrush, which uses a much smaller compressor, but which is really not the tool for guitar finishing). I agonised about its purchase, worrying that I'd immediately wish I'd bought a bigger one - but it hasn't worked out that way. You'd struggle to paint a car or boat with it, but for guitars it is absolutely ideal. The two gauges on the end measure the pressure in the tank and the pressure being output to the gun. You can regulate the latter with the red knob.

The gun on the left is a real cheapy and I don't use it anymore. In practice you could easily lacquer a guitar from start to finish with the little red touch-up gun, but the larger one in the middle has in fact become my workhorse. Nothing fancy or expensive - absolutely fine for the job. The curly pressure hose is very cheap and feeble - but is actually much lighter and easier to use, so the yellow one doesn't come out that often.

Also, simple eye and lung protection. I mostly spray outdoors and waterbase finishes are far less toxic in their solvents, but still the air gets full of particulates and paint is made of all kinds of things including nasty metals such as cadmiums which we don't want entering our soft tissues. Safety is quick and cheap: let's use it.

We've seen folks with very enviable workshop facilities. Here is the fabulous glamour of my spray department:
Image

A grotty old blanket draped over the garden wall in the side passage where the wind doesn't get to, and my "lazy Susan" spray stand which I made during the Blue Strat thread and which caused a surprising amount of comment.

I forgot to photograph the guitar getting sprayed till after I'd already sanded the first stain, but just for completeness here it is in place:
Image

You'll notice that I masked the sides off, because we're starting out by staining the top. First I made up my stain by mixing canary yellow Mixol stainer with water. I mixed it quite thick because I don't want to do more passes than I can help - that glue line down the middle of the front is vulnerable to moisture until the wood is sealed. I’m spraying the stain at about 60 psi / 4 bar:
Image

I forgot to photograph it before sanding most of the dried stain off again, so it just remains to slightly lift the (very mild) flame of this wood, and of course round the edge where I can't sand right up to the latex mask. That's OK; some sort of burst effect may be coming along in due course... Compare it to the naked body in the pic at the beginning of this post to see the minimal difference.

I doubt that yellow was really necessary at all but I felt it might just slightly modify the next coat of stain - this red:
Image

Be clear, that is not how the front is going to end up looking. Tomorrow we'll sand it back and remove the latex mask to see how that has worked.

Cheers - C


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 6:55 pm
Offline
Hobbyist
Hobbyist
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jan 29, 2009 2:16 pm
Posts: 99
Location: Victoria, BC
I am so eagerly waiting for the next instalment. Great work as usual Ceri, you have us all on the edges of our seats.

That is a Brilliant colour!

_________________
"Who says I can't get stoned..." - John Mayer

- "Honey" 09 HWY 1 Tele (Honey Blonde w/Maple)
- 08 MIM Standard Strat (Burst w/Rosewood,SCN,DeltaTone)
- Super Champ XD
- Marshall Class 5 Head
- Norman Acoustic (MICan)


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 7:16 pm
Offline
Professional Musician
Professional Musician
User avatar

Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 3:31 pm
Posts: 2638
Location: Pacific North West, USA
Very cool C.......... I will be patient because I do know how finishing goes! :wink:

_________________
Xhefri's Guitars
www.xhefriguitars.com
Image


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 11:53 pm
Offline
Aspiring Musician
Aspiring Musician
User avatar

Joined: Mon Jun 22, 2009 1:44 am
Posts: 407
Location: NAU
:shock: Wow! :shock: You are brilliant Ceri.


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 6:21 am
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:57 am
Posts: 13164
Location: Peckham: where the snow leopards roam
Guys, as always, thank you for your very kind words. Much appreciated. :D

I can post my episode early today - for reasons that will become clear further down...

So again, here's the bod with its red stain. I forgot to mention that the color is made from mixing bright red with magenta in a 5:3 ratio. I sort of felt the magenta just added an extra flavor to the thing. Complex colors - that's what I like:
Image

Now we can pull that latex mask and the tape off and see how it turned out:
Image

And further round:
Image

As you can begin to see, it really worked pretty well. This is one of the little faults that will need addressing:
Image

And this is the only other one, down near the tail strap button hole (the binding line appears to get thinner at the top of the pic, but that is just where it heads down into the forearm contour. Not an issue):
Image

(Apologies for the color cast in these photos. I took dozens and these are actually the least bad - the red seems to do something odd to the color balance in my camera, and though I've tried tweaking it in Photoshop I don't seem able to do much to improve some of them...)

Those little blips shown are really the only problems to be found once the mask is removed. So, so much more successful than the test you'll remember I did with masking tape:
Image

So: very little corrective surgery needed, and what's wanting can be done easily with the tip of a scalpel. Gently scrape out those two bits, and generally tidy up the edge where it is a little ragged:
Image

Easy! Though I don't think we'll see the Custom Shop adopting this latex binding method any time soon. It just takes too damn long to apply it, and we will have to do that twice more before this bod is finished. That's about five hours just brushing rubber on - hardly economical in the "real" world.

Anyway. Next we take a cork sanding block and some P600 wet-and-dry paper, used dry. Gently sand at the stain till it has been knocked back by an amount we like to reveal the grain again:
Image

Once again, I need to stress this is not how the finished guitar will look. It is just a step on the road.

At this stage Dan Erlewine would have us shoot another thin coat of red stain to even things out, and then build a clear lacquer over the top. But I have significantly different plans...

Unfortunately, that is as far as I can go right now. We've hit a big problem. I woke up this morning to find this had happened overnight:
Image

As has been seen, that is my superbly appointed luthier's workshop - the garden patio. Some of the work has been brought indoors, but I really don't have anywhere to shoot lacquer inside, and as Mr Twelvebar will confirm, spraying lacquer in the snow just ain't happening.

I know that little smattering of snow is nothing compared to what many Forum users see at this time of year, but I'm afraid progress has to halt till the temperature rises.

Further, I have to go away for a long weekend tomorrow. Hopefully when I get back early next week the weather will have improved and we can get back to it, but till then this thread has to be on hold.

Frustrating - sorry!

Even worse for me than you, I assure you... :(

For now:

Cheers - C


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 6:35 am
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Tue Mar 11, 2008 10:08 am
Posts: 9034
Location: Louisiana
Very well thought out and executed my friend!! Looking better every day!! :) 8)


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 6:56 am
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:57 am
Posts: 13164
Location: Peckham: where the snow leopards roam
fhopkins wrote:
Very well thought out and executed my friend!! Looking better every day!! :) 8)


Thanks, Hop! :D

I was just getting into the swing of the finishing. Oh well... :(

I'll drag the thread back up out the bottom mud and carry on soon as conditions permit.

Cheers - C


Top
Profile
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 1508 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 ... 101  Next
Go to page Previous  1 ... 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 ... 101  Next

All times are UTC - 7 hours

Fender Play Winter Sale 2020

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum

Search for:
Jump to: