Wow - looking good - are the scatch plate and truss rod cover wood ? - they look nice !

Shame that P90 looks a bit dog-eared - sorry couldn't resist!

Will there be a bridge pickup ?

Yep, plate, cover and knobs all wood. No bridge pick up though.

Coming along nicely

How many coats of oil do you put on?

Normally around 30, with the last 15 or so using Tru-Oil thinned with turps. Each coat is very thin, and with a light sanding every 4-5 coats, you don't end up with a thick finish.

About another 10 coats for the neck and bits, another 15 for the body, will take me up to 3000 grit. Then i guess a few more coats for luck and think about gluing it together.
Which will be the nerve-wracking bit...

That's the fun bit!

Looking good so far!

How do mass-produced natural-finish guitars get their surfaces done ? Even using illegal child slave labour, I can't imagine getting dozens of sandings and re-oilings done on a 300 dollar guitar. And that cabinet scraper thingy looks like it needs a lot of skill and practice.

Do they have something like a big electric wheel covered in sheepskin, and hold the wood against that ?

Normally a sprayed poly finish, sanded flat once then buffed to a shine on a buffing wheel. It's the finish that takes the most time on making a guitar, and contributes most to the price.

Satin finishes are a lot cheaper as the final sanding and buffing stages aren't required.

Wonks wrote:It's the finish that takes the most time on making a guitar, and contributes most to the price.

Probably true for mass produced instruments and custom electrics, but hand-made acoustics? Certainly lots of time spraying and sanding through the grades but probably not more than 50% of the build effort would you think?

It's definitely something most people underestimate.

I was thinking more about mass-produced electrics. I should have been broader in my scope.

I have to click on the image to view and it takes me to a page asking me to sign into Google accounts.

Andy

Grrr, One day I will get images working on this site. But plainly not today. Sorry about that.

blinddrew wrote:Grrr, One day I will get images working on this site. But plainly not today. Sorry about that.

Mostly visit this thread to lurk and watch your guitar take shape, but since I know you're an instagram user you can host pics there and link here. I've used this with other sites and tested as a "preview" post to verify that it works for SOS, but don't have anything even remotely topical to demonstrate the principle in a real post. It's a bit of a faff, but basic process is (from PC - no idea if/how possible from mobile/tablet):
Go to the "view post" option for the pic you want to link.
Use developer view (F12 key in most browsers I think).
That'll open a little area/window showing the code for the page. It should hopefully also open a little "find" box - use that to look for ".jpg" - basically takes you to the picture file components without having to read through the code for the entire page.
One or two of them will be stuff like your avatar, but the actual picture will be prefaced by some stuff with alt=" (text from your post)", followed by the hastags from the post, and then src=https://(some long address ending with the jpg extension you're looking for). This should be the link for the picture, so just copy that address. Can then paste into the address bar to verify it's the right image.
You can then just paste this into the img brackets from the SOS insert image thing.

After doing it once it'll make sense, and isn't as convoluted as it sounds

Edit: Apologies if the how-to is a bit patronising. Just occurred to me that the average SOS poster is probably significantly more IT literate than me, so doesn't need the same level of handholding as my colleagues at work

Nope, you were right first time, handholding is very much required.
But all other things being equal it might just be easier to sign up to imgur!
Just a bit frustrating as on the pitbull forum I have no (well, almost no) problems posting photos from the google account.
It wasn't a very exciting photo anyway.
Next weekend will be approaching gluing the neck time though!

Trying the Logarhythm method (pun intended), does this work:

It does for me.

Excellent. Told you it was a boring picture...

I've seen worse.