My kit arrived last week.
Upgrades:
- Tonemaster pickups
- Wilkinson trem
- bone nut
- pearloid pick guard
- locking tuners
Latest thinking on colour is a pastel. Maybe blue, mint or something similar.
Question: some of the frets are not properly seated. they are sitting around 0.3mm off the fret board. I can push them in, but they don't stay pushed in. How can I fix this?
I have assembled the guitar, without finish and made sure the bridge is drilled in the right place. All good so far.
I made a couple of annoying mistakes - did not drill the holes for the 2 bridge pivots properly. One hole was too small and it put a fine split in the timber. The other hole was not deep enough and when I forced the insert into the hole until it was flush, it damaged the wood in the back of the guitar where the springs are. Annoying mistakes from not being careful enough. All fixed though.
The other mistake was that I broke off a piece of the neck when removing the nut. Also fixed.
I am painting at the moment. Battling the grain holes in the ash body. I tried Feast Watson Sanding Sealer, but only a few coats. It looked fine, until I sprayed primer filler, then all the holes showed up! The latest trial is to spray on primer filler then use and old ID card to smear it into the grain. Tried the same with the Sanding Sealer (I used a brush first time). I will give it a few days to dry and see whether the grain holes re-appear.
I am painting the face of the headstock. No issues with grain filling because it is maple. I have painted colour and one coat of clear. Waiting for decal paper to arrive so I can apply a decal before finishing the clear coats. Then it is on to applying Organoil to the fret board and neck.
Sanding sealer is fine for wood with smaller grain holes to fill, but for the larger grain patterns in ash, then a proper grain filler is easiest. Otherwise you'd need to apply many coats of sanding sealer to do the same job.
It's never easy knowing what size holes to drill for posts. You don't want to make them too large so the posts re loose, yet too small and you run into the problems you've encountered. A hole about 0.5mm smaller than the splines seem to work for me, at least with 12mm diameter posts. If there's a section of the post at the bottom with no splines on it that's a smaller diameter than the splines, then that should be the ideal hole size.
But good news that you've managed to fix the splits and other small accidents. I'm hoping that one day I'll have learnt enough from my mistakes to build at least one guitar without any mishaps and with everything going as it should. I'm not holding my breath!
Bit of a problem with the inkjet decal. I sprayed one coat of clear (auto acrylic) after I printed it so it would not run when I soaked it in water. Then I soaked it in water and applied it. Everything was fine at this stage. When I sprayed 3 coats of clear, the decal wrinkled up.
Should have been long enough to dry, though with a layer of acrylic already on the top of the decal, it may have remained slightly wet and not fully stuck. It is the decal itself that’s wrinkled, and not just the layers of acrylic on the top?
These days I use Decalsol (model kit stuff) to help stick my decals down and I’ll normally wait a full 24 hours for small decals and at least 48 for bigger ones. I use nitro sprays, and with a couple of coats of that over the decal before it’s applied, I know it could take a while for all the moisture to dry out from underneath it and I don’t want to trap it i n when I then spray more clear over the top.
I haven’t used acrylic over decals, so can’t really suggest anything you could try to rescue the situation.
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