trv's Spalted Maple LP-1SS

[wazkelly]

Looks pretty good so far.

[rook]

Wow. That looks killer!

I can't find the blemish you speak of, all I see is a guitar body that's going to look amazing.

The burst with the spalted maple is gorgeous.

[DarkMark]

I can’t wait for part 2! Looking sensational.

[Sonic Mountain]

Looks lovely. I agree with Simon that some clears will do a lot to even out the touch ups.

[trv]

Thank you for the kind words everyone!

Looking great. I think you were wise to tape up the binding. A shame about the scrape but there's a very large chance you'd have added more than one scratch if scraping the binding. Plus, scraping the binding when it's covered in black paint (or any opaque colour), is very difficult and it's very easy to overdo it and scrape paint off the body (which means more touching up).

When the paint's dry, I'd suggest wetting the touched up area with turps or white spirit. If the colours blend together when wet so you can't see a difference, you should be fine once the clear coats go on.

I meant well when I masked the binding, but despite my efforts in the end there was still a lot of scraping and touch-ups!

Thanks for the tip Simon. I'm not terribly familiar with turpentine or spirits, I actually would have thought that they'd remove the paint all together.

[trv]

Looks lovely. I agree with Simon that some clears will do a lot to even out the touch ups.

Thanks Sonic! I'm a fan of your builds. It blows me away that you've just about built five guitars in less time than it took me to do one!

[trv]

AUGUST 2017

One thing I knew I wanted to try and do during this build was inlay a logo into the headstock. I decided to make an overlay for the headstock and inlay into that as opposed to doing it straight into the veneer. I bought a 1/4" maple board, planed it down to 2.5mm thick, and also picked up a 1.5mm thick sheet of pearloid white celluloid


At this point I also started applying a few thin coats of Tru-Oil to the top of the body to protect the finish.

[trv]

Then it came time for the logo. Although my build is based on a specific branded guitar (am I allowed to say their name here?) I'm not trying to pass it off as one. At first I designed a logo using my surname in their typestyle, but aesthetically it didn't work; it literally didn't fit. So since this is inspired by the Halcyon Les Paul, I just went with Halcyon.

Using a rotary tool with 1/32" bits, a jeweller's saw, various files, X-Acto blades, a few hours and Dog Day Afternoon on in the background (I have no idea why I remember that), I ended up with this

[trv]

Routed the logo shape into the overlay


Rough cut the overlay to size

[trv]

At this point I revised the shape of the headstock again, making it slightly curvier at the top and pointier at the base. Pay no mind to the stained sections, I had been experimenting on the veneer earlier before staining the top of the body


Because I didn't want to make the headstock any thicker I had to plane 2.5mm off the face before I could add the overlay. To do this I made a ridiculous jig out of scrap wood and held it together with painter's tape. I then ran that atrocity over a router in a router table to remove the 2.5mm. It probably shouldn't have, but somehow it actually worked