I tried everything on a piece of plywood with maple laminate first, and in my experiments I discovered that every time I tried to cut a plug with my new Japanese saw (first time I've used one...handy!), I damaged the laminate somewhere on the body. So I taped off the area around the plug to minimize damage.
Once cut, I sanded to almost flush with 150 and then switched to 220 to sand the plugs flush.
One thing you can't see on the plugs is that I put a pencil line on the top of the plug to show me which way the grain went for gluing up. In my experiments I found that it was really easy to lose track of grain direction in the heat of glue-up, and hard to see with maple anyway. The line sanded off, of course.
So...the grain is going the right way, but clearly the color is a bit off. I used maple that looked light to me, and worked pretty well in my plywood experiments, but the actual body is considerably lighter in color than my maple plugs. Hopefully it won't be too bad when stained, but not sure what I can do about it in any case.
Next step will be to drill holes for the two point bridge. Still figuring out how I am going to do the tailpiece...
Reply With Quote