Number 13 - EIR\Sitka Drednought -Finished

[johnnparchem]

I have been slowly preparing this guitar for finishing. My main concern right now is keeping the maple clean while preparing the rosewood. I have scraped the entire the back and sides and sealed the binding, purfling, back center strip with shellac. I rounded the bindings edges and re applied the shellac. I plan pore fill with z-poxy. To seal the rosewood before I really get going I plan to carefully pad on alcohol thinned Z-poxy. I should be able to create a thin enough coat that I can follow with normal pore filling coats without the need to sand off the seal coat. It might be a nutty idea, but it mimics what I do when I French Polish with shellac and I want to avoid spreading rosewood stained shellac all over.





I also made and installed two version of my hawk in moon logo. The first I made with mother of pearl and ebony. I thought that I had installed OK but, when I had it installed there was a hair line crack in the pearl going straight up from the hawks head. Also I wanted to try a black African rosewood hawk instead of the ebony to look better with the Brazilian Rosewood.







Logo one with ebony would have been Ok except for the crack. It is too small to see in the picture.



Logo two with a Black African Rosewood hawk. Still is very dark under finish but a nice match with the headstock veneer.

[Kevin Sjostrand]

That rosewood is beautiful, and you sure are getting good at inlaying that logo.
Great work John

Kevin

[johnnparchem]

Kevin if I keep having to do two logos per guitars I will get really good.

I have the guitar in the finish room now waiting for the second coat of epoxy to cure.



To finish off the fret board I inlayed diamond shaped pearl. Like I normally do I just glue down the pearl with a dab of white glue. With in 10 minutes it is secure enough to trace. My normal method is to just trace with a .5 mm pencil. This time I traced with my scalpel and filled in the cut with chalk This worked well enough and I started routing out the diamonds. I was switching back and forth between end mills, fine for the outline and corners and a larger one to route out the bulk. Sure I could be efficient do either all of the bulk routing first followed by the fine routing or visa versa. Instead about half through the process I looked at the nice clean cuts I made with my scalpel, deepened them a bit more and used a chisel to clear the waste. I was much happier with the fit. Also it was nearly as fast.

[RnB]

Really nice work John & guitar as well. Someone's going to be very pleased w/ this one. I've been out of touch for a bit, but it always great to see your projects & detailed process on your builder's blog. I'm envious of the tools you have available at hand. Keep up the great work...!

[johnnparchem]

Thanks!

She is all pore filled and prepped ready for spraying

[songman101]

hello John
I just spent all my early morning enjoying coffee (2cups) reading this mini course on guitar building. I really appreciated the detail and documentation that you lay out (like John H. said) in each process, amazing work and quality. The tooling was efficient as well, nice shop. I want one very similar when I'm ready. John you mentioned spraying(could it deaden the sound) verses French polishing (century's of proven sound) is there any particular reason for this finish on this guitar. I think it is a great looking instrument ,one that I would enjoy playing. I wanted to also mention that the whole picture theme was terrific and well illustrated .Again great job and looking forward to the next one. I just started ( this last yr.) taking in all the info and technique that is possible to begin my first guitar, good lesson for a newbie. Thanks

The new newbie Stephen Colby

[johnnparchem]

... John you mentioned spraying(could it deaden the sound) verses French polishing (century's of proven sound) is there any particular reason for this finish on this guitar. ... The new newbie Stephen Colby

Stephen thanks for the kind comments, I French Polish my classical guitars and spray my steel string guitars. I guess more than anything I am meeting the expectations of the market. I keep the finish on the tops relatively thin spraying only half of the number of coats that I spray on the back and sides. The top does not take as much abuse. If there is a deadening, I am not finding that it really matters as I am trying to sound like a lacquered guitar. There is so much sound to be had from a dred that is made to be flat picked, that I think the difference in a FP vs. a lacquered guitar would be in the noise.

The strings played with finger nails on a classical do not have has much energy and the traditional sound of a classical is made with a FP top. Although I have heard great sounding lacquered classical guitars.

[Darryl Young]

It looks great John!

[johnnparchem]

Thanks Darryl!

I have the body sprayed. I still have another day with the neck. After the first day of spraying, I found a small but noticeable area that somehow I had left without zpoxy, a sand through, so it was lighter than it should be. I scraped all of the finish off and have been re-spraying it. Looks good now.

16 coats (leveling at 4, leveling and drop filling at 8 and 12 finished with 4 coats. All sprayed as close to 3-4 mills wet as I could spray.)

The top is 10 coats total (leveling at 4, leveling and drop filling at 8 finished with 2 coats.)

[johnnparchem]

I find waiting for the finish to cure the hardest time during a project. I need to wait until Wednesday before I can start to buff out the body and Thursday before I can buff out the neck. Luckily I was able to buff out the head stock veneer as it has been sitting a week.

While waiting I also bolted on the neck to verify that the neck angle was still good. I set the bridge and pick guard on top so I can have a preview.

With Flash


No Flash


The real look is somewhere in between.