Farrakhan Telecaster
January 25th, 2011Comes With a Free Bean Pie
The Telecaster clone STILL isn’t finished.
I bought some bowtie router templates (for making bowtie-shaped inlays with matching cavities), and I was going to use bowtie inlays to “tie” the new wood around the neck pocket to the rest of the guitar.
Here’s a sloppy Photoshop illustrating the idea. Ignore the piece of mahogany lying on the guitar.
I went to a guitar forum and asked people for advice. They generally thought it was a bad idea. Their answer was to create a “burst” finish which starts dark and opaque at the borders and fades to clear in the center of the guitar. The dark stuff would cover the mismatched wood by the pocket.
I checked out some videos on creating burst finishes, and I played around with some pigment and scrap, and I found that I did really bad work. For me, finishing is much harder than woodworking. So I gave the burst idea up.
Problem: the smallest bowtie inlay I can make is way too big to do what I did in the Photoshop. If you look at the little inlays above the neck, they’re maybe half an inch long. I can’t make one smaller than an inch. Too big.
I tried to make a smaller template, but it turns out there is a limit to how small you can go with a 1/8″ bit, and I’m just about there.
I decided to try a new strategy: use my inlay kit to remove the top layer of mismatched wood, and replace it with something that should be nearly indistinguishable from the guitar top.
This meant creating a new template, and that meant using acrylic on the milling machine. What a nightmare. It’s like I always say: calculus is easy; addition and subtraction are hard. To create anything on a mill, you have to do a ton of addition and subtraction in order to determine where to move the cutter. And it’s not intuitive. It’s very easy to confuse positive with negative, which results in horrible mistakes. For example, you might need to move the cutter to -0.530″ on the DRO, but you screw up and move to +0.530″, and your workpiece is ruined.
It took me half an hour to come up with a list of milling directions to produce a simple template.
When I tried to make the template, of course, the cutter grabbed the acrylic and pulled it out of the vise and broke the template. So I had to start over, sawing out more acrylic on the table saw.
The second time I milled it, I applied WD40 to prevent the cutter from grabbing, and it worked. Thank God. Finally, I have something I can use.
I still want to put some bowties on the guitar. I want two on the front and three on the back, and I want a small one in the maple inlay at the head end, with the strap pin attached to it.
It turns out the Photoshop version is not workable, because I forgot to lay the hardware out on the guitar top. The inlay to the left would be under the bridge. I plan to move it farther left, so it shows through the little window in the Bigsby. And I think I’ll get rid of the little inlays under the knobs. On the back, I want one big bowtie in the middle and two smaller ones around it. They would be on the centerline, just like the ones on the front.
I like the way bowties pull stuff together visually. A long time ago, I saw a TV show about a guy who made tables from figured stump wood, and he stuck bowties in areas where there were big cracks, so it would look like they held the tables together. I like that.
I’ve noticed something else. Plain wooden guitars look bad. I’ve seen a bunch of photos of Telecasters made from clear-finished wood with no pigment, and they look unfinished. Even acoustic guitars have rosettes and binding. A guitar needs something beyond lacquer to make it work. Some people mix the woods, using inlays and so on. Others use burst finishes or dyed finishes. You can also jazz a guitar up with a pickguard. To make a guitar look nice, you need to do one of these things. But you usually shouldn’t do more than one of them, because it will look like the guitar was made by a committee.
People have complained that I’ll cover up some figuring, but that’s not really a concern. The left inlay will be in a plain spot, and the bridge pickup hole has already done more damage than ten inlays.
Maybe I’ll change my mind. I don’t know. I do know that I’m almost certain to ruin a burst finish, and it will add days or weeks to an already interminable job. I need to get this thing done and move on.
I think the next guitar will be a hollowbody with two F-holes, a Bigsby, a quilted maple back, curly maple sides, and a spruce top. A maple top would look better, but it’s my understanding that spruce and other softwoods are best for hollowbody tops. Another possibility: figured redwood. This stuff is incredible. But I’d have to come up with a suitable wood for the back and sides, since maple would not look right.
Basically, I want to make a Gibson Blueshawk with a Telecaster body. My Blueshawk is great, but the neck is garbage because of poor Gibson quality control. A Warmoth neck (or a homemade neck) would be a thousand times better.
Anyway, it’s taking shape.
January 25th, 2011 at 6:31 PM
Just from the pure design stand point, I would not mix those straight edge bow-ties with the very organic and dramatic burst that you have in the center of the guitar. I would say that the suggestion of a sunburst finnish is not bad at all, but it would take practice to do that, the opacity of the finishing would higher at the edges of the guitar but it should be completely clear in the center -albeit tinted with some color, so you can see the woodgrain through the clear varnish.
Anyway, you should take into account the golden hardware you have selected for your guitar while selecting a color treatment, I see it more in the warm color spectrum. On the other hand, there’s the principle of “honesty of the materials” which is more or less structuralist; if you didn’t use the bow-ties to actually hold the pieces together, and they hold themselves together without the bow-ties, then you do not need the bow-ties.
Maybe you do not need to do the sunburst treatment in the “traditional” way or sense. It could have more of a free-hand, free-spirited way to it, actually drawing the dark part by hand instead of spraying it, and thus being freer from that convention.
At the end, you should -must- do whatever you feel comfortable with, and whatever you like, artistically speaking. Remember, this is more than building yourself a guitar, it’s a spiritual exercise.
January 25th, 2011 at 6:56 PM
I was in love with the bowties this morning, but as I wrote this piece, I started to doubt.
I want to see how the new wood looks before I make a decision.
January 26th, 2011 at 3:49 AM
Charlie articulated it better than I could, but count another vote against the bow-tie inlays; I think your doubts are well founded. Those “unfinished” looking natural-finish guitars you didn’t like — did any of them have gold hardware & Bigsbys on them? Once all that stuff is on it, adding the bowties just seems too much — as you put it, “by committee,” but as I see it, just too busy.
To me, the bowties seem too much even without the pickups & bridge — they distract the eye from that nice walnut burl. And I especially don’t like the idea of them around the neck pocket: they tend to draw attention to the mismatched wood instead of integrating it into the rest of the design.
Frankly, the wood around the neck pocket doesn’t even bother me; probably won’t even be noticeable once the neck’s in place, especially if you get a 22-fret neck with a little overhang. (And all that gold + the burl will draw the eye away from that area anyway.)
January 26th, 2011 at 8:35 AM
“I’ve noticed something else. Plain wooden guitars look bad. You can also jazz a guitar up with a pickguard.”
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It’s amazing the realizations we can come to, all by ourselves, if we just think on things a while.
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What about some sort of edge binding? That would really bring out the shape. Like using bold inking on a drawing.
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I Like the wood around the neck. I forget what it is…Would it contrast more when finished?
January 26th, 2011 at 10:13 AM
I can’t entirely agree with you on unadorned guitars. Though I admit I mostly agree with you on that. Take a look at Paul Reed Smith Swamp Ash Special guitars with the “natural” finish – fantastic. But they’re fantastic because of the swoopy grain pattern of the swamp ash. But PRS also makes korina guitars in natural and they have a great look. I don’t think PRS has made many mahogany bodies in a natural finish but I’ve seen some lovely, lovely natural mahogany guitars.
As you can tell, I’m a big PRS fan yet my only non-PRS is a 60th Anniversary Tele. And it’s a great guitar.
January 26th, 2011 at 2:38 PM
The bow-ties just don’t look that good. Rounds, maybe?
January 27th, 2011 at 5:10 PM
While at Ga Tech back in the late 1970’s I worked in the maintenance department at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta. I was charged with finding replacement veneer to fix a bunch of the giant 4′ x 10′ conference room doors which had been scratched and otherwise damaged by the food service carts.
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In the process I found this old guy that traveled all over the world buying logs and stumps of exotic wood and who had them sawed into slabs and boards and veneer thickenss sheets. I just googled them up here:
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http://www.rarewoodsandveneers.com/pages/home.htm
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They are still in the same location just off the GT campus as they were in 1979 but I suspect Carlton is long gone.
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You would not believe the stuff they have in that little crappy building.
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Take a look for the materials for your next project.
January 27th, 2011 at 10:40 PM
…just to jump in, after a 4 (6?) year hiatus: is there some reason to do inlays with straight edges and sharp corners with a router? – Instead of a properly sharpened set of chisels?
February 3rd, 2011 at 11:06 AM
Chisels require a lot of skill.
February 5th, 2011 at 4:04 AM
Chalk it up to experience and burn it for heat.