My first build: DTL-1

[McCreed]

There's those freakin' tiles again!

But that's a beautiful old desk you have there.
Oh, and nice looking guitar too!

[gpjt]

Thanks! The desk is one of my favourite things, and hopefully the guitar will be too soon :-)

Brief pause over the last week or so for work and for the first two coats on the neck to dry so that I can put on the decals. Did a test run of the decals on my heavily-used headstock offcut today to see how it looks -- pretty solid so far:



Need to confirm that a coat of clear on top adheres properly before going ahead with the real thing, though.

As the neck and the body are currently dry, I thought I'd try a test dry-fit with the tuners installed. I was thinking that with the nice grain on the body it might actually look good without a pickguard, but because the neck pickup position was factory-routed to humbucker size that probably wouldn't look nice. OTOH I'm not entirely sure of a light-coloured instrument with a white pickguard, so I picked up a decent five-screw black one on Amazon and I think it will look pretty good, once I've filed a bit of material away around the heel of the neck, where it doesn't fit right now. Here's a photo with it roughly in position:

[Simon Barden]

The 22 fret neck with the overhang means that you need to take the neck off, in order to take the pickguard off, in order to adjust the height of the neck pickup. So from a practical point of view you might want to drill a couple of holes in the pickguard so you can top-mount the pickup rather than body-mount it. Less vintage looking, but more practical.

Otherwise, best to leave the pickguard off when settting up the guitar and then tuning the pickup heights, so you only need to slacken the strings and remove the neck once, to finally fit the pickguard.

[gpjt]

That's a great point, Simon. I'm planning to top-mount it -- as you say, less vintage but more convenient. I'll use the white pickguard that came with the kit as a jig.

I tried putting the clear coat on top of the decal; I wanted to see what the effect of brushing it on would be, so I used the brush on the "Made" of "Made in London" to see, while I dabbed the clear on vertically with the same brush on the rest of the decal. The reason why you need to dab the clear on is pretty obvious:



For a second coat, I brushed normally over the now-messed-up "Made" and also over the "in", and then dabbed vertically on the "London" -- you can see that the first coat was sufficient protection, and the brushed "in" looks fine, and the "Made" is no more messed up than it was after the first coat:



So, the next step was to put the decals onto the headstock properly, with the tuners loosely attached so that I could check how it looked:





I'll leave them a couple of days and then carefully dab on a coat (or maybe two) of clear.

[gpjt]

Well, it's been a while! Hope everyone's been keeping well.

Over the last few weeks I've been putting on more and more coats of clear on the neck, and it finally reached the state I wanted it in. Although the Wudtone finish isn't meant to be used for a high gloss, the last few coats actually made it quite close to that, which wasn't quite what I wanted. Luckily, a bit of buffing with steel wool left it with a nice satin finish that actually feels smoother to the touch than it was when glossy. My hand slides along it in a way that feels pretty much right.

So here's where we are:



Time for some fretwork. First thing was to make sure that the neck was straight using the notched straight edge -- it was a tiny bit concave, so fixed that. Next I masked the fretboard with tape; this took way longer than I expected and was very dull:



Used a black felt tip to colour the frets:



Masking tape also on the inside of the 12" radiused sanding block, superglue on the tape...



...then 400 grit paper on top of that:

[gpjt]

The first couple of strokes with the block made me realise that the ink gets everywhere, including on the unmasked bit of the first fret, but luckily it wiped off easily with a tissue. More masking tape on:



It rapidly became clear that the frets were actually pretty level, but not just in the sense that they were all pretty much at the same height -- they didn't seem to be radiused at all, and the paper was only really touching at the sides:



After a number of passes, ink started coming off in the middle too, while the sides were looking pretty flattened; this photo was from when it was almost there:



Once that was done, the masking tape came off:



And it was time to go at it with the crowning file. This took an hour or so, probably because the sides needed so much reshaping, but I'm pretty happy with the results:



Will check that it all looks OK in daylight tomorrow, and then use the fret polishing rubbers I got from Crimson Guitars to finish up if so.

[Simon Barden]

Nice work. But unless you've got one of those stainless steel fret protectors, you'll want to mask the fretboard again when using the fret polishing runners. They will mark the fretboard.

I finnd this stuff very useful for masking the fretboard and binding:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The different sizes means that it makes it so muck quicker to do as you don't need to cut the taps to fit the gap. Two pieces will do for all the fret positions. It's also nice and low-tack.

I haven't used the polishing rubbers so don't know how rough they go, but I find that most of the fret polishing effort after crowning is with P240 to remove all the cross-wise scratches on the frets. Get a bit of 0.010" E string and hold it between your fingers with a couple of inches poking out and rub it up each fret. If you can feel it catching then it needs more sanding. Only progress to finer grits or polishing rubbers once its no longer 'grabby'. I'd do each fret with the same number of strokes of paper (or polishing erasers in each case) so that you remove (as close as you can) the same amount of material (and so the height) from each fret.

[gpjt]

Thanks, Simon! I did have a metal fret protector, so got to work...



...but after a few minutes it got annoying holding the protector in place with one hand while using the rubber with the other, so I re-taped the fretboard (faster this time) and did it that way:



The results look pretty decent, though of course it remains to be seen how it will play:

[gpjt]

My plan was to get the nut down to a sensible height next; here's where it is right now:



The trick I had seen on a Crimson Guitars video was to use a pencil, split in half, held against the bottom two frets to draw a line that is at the same height as the two of them (if you see what I mean) and to use that as a guide to the lowest that the slots can go. I was planning to use a mechanical pencil lead to get the same effect, then to sand the bottom of the nut to lower it appropriately. Unfortunately there was one small problem with that plan:



Too short to reach the nut when lying across the two frets. Some re-thinking required there; I'll also dig through these forums to see what I can see.

[gpjt]

Anyway, onwards! Time to fit the tuners. I attached them reasonably tightly -- enough that they could still pivot with a little effort -- and then used a straight-edge to get them, um, straight:



They're staggered, so a quick sanity check to make sure that I put them in the right places:



The screws to hold them in place are a smidge over 2mm (so probably actually 2mm and the thread was just getting in the way):



So a 1.5mm drill bit to give the thread something to hold on to:



Then used the pin vice to drill each hole, putting in the screw after each one (with lots of beeswax) and double-checking alignment after each one. Pretty pleased with the result: