Lutherie (building and repairing stringed instruments)

[charanguista]

Anyone else into this as much as me?

[V M]

Hi Charanguista

Actually there are quite a few folks into Lutherie here, have you taken a peak at the Guitar anyone? Electric or accoustic topic?

[Jill F]

F*** me, yet another one?  Are we all MTF luthiers here?   I mean, wow.  Nobody does this, but there are like a dozen luthiers here.  I'm like really creeped out now. LOL.

I was a professional luthier for years and used to regularly collect blank checks from rock stars.  Even today I did a fret dressing, two restrings, and three detailed setups along with a few truss rod tweaks for summer.  I handled about 25 guitars in all today while reorganizing my closets.

What the hell?

[charanguista]

Glad to hear there's a few of us on here!

I'd love to see some of all of your work. Here are some of my recent builds:

[V M]

Very nice and rather unique    Would be interesting to hear them played

[Jill F]

Well, off to the buffing wheel I go with my pink 1987 Strat Plus body. 

Anyone here ever use Micro-Mesh on frets for polishing?  When you get to the 12000 grit it's almost mirror-perfect, but I like to finish them off with a quick pass of jeweler's rouge on the mini-buffing wheel of my Dremel.  (Do it quckly so you don't heat them up and risk unseating them...)

[Jill F]

Well, the pink Strat has been restored to near mint condition.  It too bad that the idiot who crowned the frets last put some serious gouges and  veritcal scratches in the fingerboard.  I was able to get 90-95% of them out, but there are a couple of deep ones that won't go away unless the board gets planed.  If I'd gone any deeper to mitigate them, it would probably start to look like a very light scallop job. *cue Smoke on the Water*

[Jill F]

This morning I finally got around to fixing an Aria acoustic parlor guitar that was a factory reject/second.  There was significant wood swelling at the neck joint that caused an "S" shaped fingerboard profile and it wouldn't stay in tune.  The fingerboard defect was too pronounced to just take the difference off of the tops of the frets, so I carefully pulled frets 12-21 with my ground down mini-nippers after heating them with a soldering iron, as to not damage them, planed the fingerboard with a 12" radius sanding block, cut the slots deeper with a .022" bit on my Dremel on a router base and reinstalled the frets (sorry, trade secret on that one!) with a bit of glue to hold them in.  I leveled and polished them and re-cut the nut slots wider and lubed them with graphite (pencil lead!) so they didn't bind.

Now this guitar seriously kicks some butt and I only paid $75 for it.  It's great for open "D" and Delta blues.