Scratch Pine Toronado: Sanding for Black Dye

With all the woodworking finally completed on the Toronado scratch build, it was time to start on the final finishing. That meant sanding - a lot of sanding. With the end grain in particular sporting some vicious machining marks, I started at 180 grit and worked them all out. A few dings needed filling with Timbermate along the way but I took these in my stride. It was my first attempt at routing a body after all. Sanding out my own machining marks made me realise that I haven't been sanding nearly enough on my previous kit builds. I now know what those light white patches on the end grain actually are - machining marks (or sanding scratches) filled with saw dust!!

After the 180 grit I moved up to 240 grit, and gave the body another good going over. I again concentrated on the end grain, and the results were smooth and clean. After the 240 grit sanding it was time to apply the first coat of black dye. The aim of this dye pass was to act as a trace - to get into the grain and highlight it. I'll be sanding the top layer back off when it's dry, and hopefully the dye will stay in the grain and accentuate it nicely.

It took a little while to saturate the wood with dye, but I used quite a dark mix and it's looking really nice. What I would like to achieve is a nice dark finish, but with wood grain still showing through as even darker black. I think I'm definitely movingin that direction. Here's what the first pass looked like after I finished applying:

The dye has blotched just a touch, as pine is want to do, but I think all-up it's looking pretty awesome. My other option for a black body, if all else fails, is to spray the body with a solid acrylic paint - but I want to avoid this if at all possible. From the looks of the first dye pass, I have made the right decision going with the dye. From here on out it can only look better and better!

You can see that the wood grain is already standing out in the background, giving a nice "trans-black" effect. After a few more passes, taking the top coat off with 360 grit sandpaper,  the grain should be highlighted nicely and the overall colour will be dark enough to start the clear coats. The plan at the moment is to then apply a 3 or 4 coats of Tru-Oil to soak into the grain and enhance it further before spraying with Acrylic clear.

Yesterday I ordered a sheet of pearloid red pickguard material to go with the black, so I can't wait to see what the two look like together. If the red is no good, I also have white perloid and tortoiseshell as options also. I'm hoping for a real shoe-gazer look similar to (but even better than) this:

Awesome huh? :)

Scratch Pine Toronado: Neck, Bridge & String Ferrules

Well, I finally got the woodworking completed on my very first scratch body today - it's all ready to start the final finishing! To get it there, I had to do all the tiresome drilling tasks - you know, the ones where you have to be accurate and have a steady hand. Not my forte, naturally.

The first task was to get the neck bolts drilled and installed. With a nice tight neck joint this was a no-brainer. The holes were drilled, (after checking the drill bit diameter in a scrap of pine) and the neck was screwed in-place through the plate. I used a few drops of boiled liseed oil to lubricate the neck bolts as they went in.

After the neck was attached and tightened down, the next step was to position the bridge to get correct string travel down the neck. With the two E strings threaded through the bridge and clamped at the headstock, it was just a matter of moving the bridge from side to side until the strings aligned correctly up the neck and the desired distance from the edge of the neck was achieved for each string.

With the bridge holes marked, drilled and screwed home, the string-through positions could be marked and drilled. After marking with a punch, I tried to drill the holes with my el-cheapo drill press. I quickly realised that the drill press doesn't have the clearance to drill in the centre of the guitar body :(. And so it was back to the hand drill to finish the holes.

The first set of small string-size holes were OK, if a little uneven. I tried my best to keep the drill upright in both dimensions but unfortunately one or two of the holes were slightly off by the time they travelled 45mm to the back of the body.

With the string holes drilled, the wider ferrule-size holes needed to be drilled from the back. When doing these I tried my best to get them all lined up again. I was partially successful. The ferrules will be almost in line (not bad for a hand drill) but not perfect. Damn my el-cheapo tools! I was also amazed at the amount of tear-out I got drilling these ferrule holes. Despite the fact that I used a Brad-Point drill bit, the soft pine just didn't want to cooperate.

Hopefully the lip of the chrome ferrules will hide the majority of the tear-out, but I'm sure that some (for example the 3rd from the left) will still be visible. All in all I'd have to say that this experiment in string-ferruling has been a bit of a fucking disaster :(. I will definitely need to fill the tear out with Timbermate before even thinking about staining. The uneven lineup I can't do anything about. Just chalk it up to experience I guess and try do better on the next build!

Anyway, the body is now ready for a thorough sanding before staining or painting (I haven't decided which yet). On the end-grain especially, there are some major machining marks which will need to come out. I'm hoping that I can handle most of these with the random orbital sander, so it wont be long before I'm ready for some colour! Stay tuned folks...

Scratch Pine Toronado: Pickguard Mockup

Only a little progress on the Scratch build this weekend. I'm waiting on a couple of router bits to allow me to route the control cavity deep enough, and to round over the edges of the body. Until these come, there isn't much to be going on with. Despite this, I was able to decide on pickup placement and get my pickguard mock-up completed.

I'm really happy with the way it's looking. I really do think the Toronado is such a great body shape - no idea why Fender discontinued it. I could have built a Telecaster for my first scratch project but I'm so glad I went this way instead.

I've ordered some tortoiseshell material to create the final pickguard. I'm thinking of going with a black dye body finish, so hopefully these colours will go well together. With a little luck, I'm going to have a real shoe-gazer at the end of all this!

Scratch Pine Toronado: Routing the Neck Pocket

A knock on my door at 9:00am heralded the arrival of my latest Stewmac loot - two router bits, extra bearings and a slew of routing templates. Joy!

So after a nominal amount of wage earning, I snuck into the workshop to get humming on my scratch Toronado body.

Now I wont say that everything went exactly to plan. I made a couple of epic errors in the few hours I spent shaping and routing the body, but in the end it all came together.

First step, I traced the body shape on to my pine blank and endeavoured to cut the shape out with my el-cheapo band saw. When the blade snapped (yes snapped) I realised that I really didn't know what I was doing. Apparently you can't use a band saw like a jigsaw?? Who knew! And so I fell back to said jigsaw to try and finish cutting out the body. Turns out the jigsaw blade is 1mm too short for the 45mm body blank. But, with a bit of brute force I managed to get the body roughly cut out.

Second step saw me finishing off the body cut using my body template and the router, using the 1/2" template following bit from Stewmac. All went well until the router reached it's maximum depth just over half way down the body.

Time to flip the body over! This is when I discovered my second error - way too much double sided tape on the template. Christ! It took me 15 minutes and a whole lot of swearing to extract the template from the body. With this done, I got the template *almost* identically placed on the back and then routed the rest of the body. Awesome!

Third step was to take the mostly shaped body and use the desk sander and the slap wheels to even out the sides of the guitar where the template didn't quite line up. No problems here. In no time the sides of the blank looked very straight indeed!

Fourth step was to route the neck pocket!! Finally the moment of truth. Firstly I stuck my bespoke neck pocket template to the body (this time using only 2 small pieces of tape!!).

To make sure the template didn't move, I also made sure one of the clamps held it in place in addition to the tape. Looking at my previous Telecaster builds, I calculated that the fretboard should clear the body by approximately 9mm. For my neck, this left a pocket of depth 17.5mm. And so, out came the 1/2" router bit again and the pocket depth was achieved in 3 passes.

All looked perfect! But did the neck fit? Like a dream baby! I'm so happy with how the pocket came out - the neck fits nice and snug. Should sound fantastic when it's all bolted together!

 

Here's how she's looking so far. I'm really happy with how this build is coming together - especially since at least 3 times today I thought that the project had died in the arse due to a) very poor tool choice or b) operator error.

Now all I need to do to finish this phase of the project is to a) route out the pickup and control cavities, b) rasp out an arm bevel and then c) get the edges rounded over. To be honest I'm not sure I have a deep enough router bit for part a) so I may need to spend a few more bucks on tools before I'm done. Stay tuned!