What are you working on currently?

magicbastarder

just finishing up a slab of elm for a coffee table, going to be a present for my mother. was planning on making life easy for myself and probably just using hairpin legs; they stock them in screwfix. anyone know of anywhere else which would stock them, just in case there's more variety available?

https://www.screwfix.ie/p/rothley-2-pin-hairpin-worktop-leg-matt-black-350mm/821pr

glynf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120597239#Comment_120597239

Very nice. I picked a few sets of these off amazon.de before:

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B08XLY177P/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Decent quality, but the screws they came with were rubbish-very soft metal-so I would recommend using your own.

glynf

Finally got back doing a bit of woodwork-a nice change of pace from doing a lot of DIY lately. Got a load of oak countertop that I got from a skip and made some adironback chairs. Got the design online and sketched out the templates on 6mm plywood. This was nearly the slowest part as all dimensions were in inches... cut with a jigsaw and fine tuned with a shinto rasp and pots of sanding. rounded over all edges with a 1/4" router. I used stainless screws and finished with two coats of osmo UV protection finish.

https://i.imgur.com/ROw52Afl.jpg[/img]

https://i.imgur.com/iUwiOPWl.jpg[/img]

https://i.imgur.com/dx78zlIl.jpg[/img]

https://i.imgur.com/07hFiB7l.jpg[/img]

https://i.imgur.com/lSWzbWdl.jpg[/img]

magicbastarder

working on making an electric guitar at the moment; currently doing the neck. the place i ordered the non-wooden bits from (thomann) don't stock fretboard sanding blocks. was curious about making my own. but they're not simple - but are deceptively simple looking. they look like this:

the key point is the concave side has a curve of a set radius - in my case i want a curve of radius 9.5", which is standard on telecaster style guitars. but making a block with a consistent curve like that is not particularly easy - the most common method i see on youtube is to build a pendulum jig for a router so there's 9.5" between the pivot and the bottom of the router bit, so you swing the router back and forth as you slowly feed the block underneath. i may just have to buy one instead...

-=al=-

Yea they're tricky enough to make and not really worth it, especially when they're available for a few quid on ebay.

G&W have decent quality ones that aren't too expensive - https://tinyurl.com/radius-blocks

The aluminium ones are pretty good and the medium/long ones are a bit better for a new radius, but you can get a wooden set for a few quid that do the job. The smaller ones are even better in some cases for doing certain repair jobs or localised radius-ing

You can plane most of the fingerboard away then finish with the radius blocks for a 9.5 radius since you'd be sanding for a bit otherwise, If it's rosewood or something I'd go up to 8k sanding and get it super shiny but it's not totally necessary.

The last couple of frets I usually sand ever so slightly more so the smaller blocks are good for that. The last side dot can be compensated about .10/.25 of a mil lower to be in the middle of the fingerboard for this

magicbastarder

i actually started making a jig this evening. minimum ten days seemingly to wait for delivery of a sanding block, i figured i'd know within a couple of day if a jig works.

magicbastarder

first go (i knew the first pass would be muck, i was just ensuring nothing was fouling on anything else - and you can see i hadn't added the 45 degree braces to the cradle the jig is sitting in, so the base was going to flex anyway). followed by a reasonably successful result - two changes i made; one was realising that some of the inconsistency was in a knot sitting just a shade proud on the track i was pushing the piece along, and the second and more fundamental one was realising that there was still a little too much play to swing the router back and forth and back and forth over the piece as i incremented it to - so i tightened up the swing of the pendulum, to make it stiff, held it there, and advanced the entire piece through in one pass. then incremented the pendulum slightly and repeat... meant there was a single swing of the pendulum for the final full pass.

magicbastarder

the guitar mentioned above is finished. slightly amazed that it works.

-=al=-

Looks pretty cool! nice off centre inlays and wooden knobs! well done, how does it sound?

magicbastarder

here's the funny thing - i'm not a guitarist! well, i know a few chords etc., but to my ears it sounds good. i decided i wasn't going to go to all that trouble and throw in dirt cheap pickups, so got fender tex mex pickups for it, and it sounds good to my ears.

the inlays in the face of the fretboard actually came from a plastic lollipop stick. getting a drill bit the right size to mount the wooden knobs onto the pots was not too straightfoward, but i managed to get 5.8mm bits from a place up north.

magicbastarder

worth mentioning that the guts of the body came from a london plane tree that was felled in merrion square. it's a lovely wood to work with.

-=al=-

Pretty cool good to have a story for the timber, looks good together. Those pickups are pretty decent for the cash and prob make the biggest difference to the sound. What pots did you use for it and what value capacitor?

magicbastarder

sorry, only saw this question now - not sure what the pots were, a friend who had some spare ones and said they were decent, gave them to me. 0.02uFk capacitor i think. the tone response is not very linear as you roll it off.

magicbastarder

so i bought a (secondhand) lathe weighing over a quarter of a ton. what was i making with it today? eggcups.

Listendernow

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121929226#Comment_121929226

That looks great, love it!