Hardware

All the hardware is in. Just keep to solder all the wires now and its finished

Polyurethane

The Poly is all on. 3 coats. Its looks more or less like a real guitar now that you might buy at the store, all shiny and smooth.. minus the hardware of course.. And you don't often see batman guitars kicking around, but you get the idea. All that's left to do is install the hardware, solder it up and rock!

Side Fret Markers

The black paint is finally all dry. I added the fret markers up the side. Next step is polyurethane. 3 or so coats of that...

Also, thanks to Ryan and Michelle for the huge fan. Saved me a few days in paint drying I wager.

Paint 5

Not much of an update today. I'm in a holding pattern waiting for the oil paint to dry in the humid weather here. I did find a little brush and touched up where I "over masked" with the tape as well as filled in the pickup and bridge holes.

Paint 4

We've been having some hot and humid weather here which is making drying oil based paint rather time consuming. Anyway, two and a half days later I was able to paint the burst on the top.

It turned out better than expected.. Since I sort of expected to ruin it doing this part.

Paint 3

I put a second coat of black on. It's been 24 hours and still quite tacky. I took the masking off before the black hardened all the way.  

Next step is to paint the burst pattern on the top. I'll wait for the black to be nice and hard before I do that since it will have to lay flat on the back to do it. I'll also paint the bridge and pickup holes in black too, they won't really be visible but no point leaving the little bit that is visible wood colored. I'll paint those with a little brush. 

Paint 2

The sanding sealer went pretty well. I put 3 coats and sanded it a little rough with 400 grit to get ready for the paint. I applied the first coat of black to the sides and back and it's looking pretty sharp.


I brought my old template out of retirement and used it to mask off the top.

The black paint is matt finish so that the clear coat will stick better. I think that makes sense.

Update:
A few more pictures by special request. I will post some more after the next coat of black.

Paint

I finally took the strings off again along with all the hardware. I found some wood dye at Lee Valley as well as a small can of Sanding Sealer. I've applied both.


This is the general idea of how the dye reacts with the curly maple.  this will be sanded with 1000 grit paper and re dyed.  The sanding lightens the light stripes and re dying darkens the dark.

The dye came in power form.

And mixed into a real oily soup.

I rigged up this paint shop in the garage using plastic table clothes from the dollar store and some wire. The fret board is masked off with tape.

I borrowed this paint gun from my brother who does a little auto painting.  My 6 gallon compressor struggled to keep it going.  The sanding sealer went on very smooth. Thanks Rob.

Play Test

I got the tuners on  and strung it up for real this time. I tuned it which took forever and wasn't really that in tune by the time I stopped. I played a few chords though. Take a look.

I discovered that some of my frets need to be pushed in a little more. And its about as comfortable to hold as it looks. But otherwise completely awesome. :)

Fret Board Final

I think the fret board is actually finished.


I filled the gaps will a wood filler from Home Depot

Then scrapped away the excess after it dried.

After that I colored the wood filler with a dark brown sharpie.. I wonder if Gibson does that too..

I made a caveman style fret bender with the wood blocks I made to sand the curve in the fret board. It worked surprisingly well.

Attaching the frets was a very time consuming process. They fit in quiet snug. 

Surface Preparation

The fret board is glued in place and final sanding is just about finished. I just need to put the inlays and frets on the fret board and I think its about ready to paint. And poke some holes for the . I probably forgot something....


The fret board was one of the more simple glue jobs of this project. I left the nut on to mark where the board should start.

I sanded the maple top to 400 grit.The rest was sanded only to 220. Since everything but the top will be painted with a solid color, I'll be able to put a coat or two of grain filler on first. Sanding this beast was quite tedious. If I ever make another guitar it's going to be a rectangle..

Fret Boarding

I finished cutting out the inlays today and curved out the fret board. It has a 10" radius curve at the nut up to the 9th fret and transitions to a 16" radius up to the 13th fret. Its 16" the rest of the way.

I strung the guitar before putting the curve in the fret board to make sure I didn't sand it down too thin. I put in the picks up too to make sure they fit in properly under the stings. Everything came together pretty great. Looks pretty cool too :)

I made this two sided block to sand out the proper size curves. I wrapped it in 60 grit sandpaper. After the curve was there I hand sanded it up to 220 grit. 

Inlays 3

I spent the past two weeks in Nova Scotia visiting family. I didn't get any work done on the guitar but I did borrow two tools while I was there. A rotary tool from my Dad and an air powered paint gun from my brother. Thanks !

I put the rotary tool to use today and carved out the first of 11 bat inlays. It went fairly well. I cut out a little more then needed as expected, but I'm sure there is some sort of wood filler I can fill in the gaps and stain later.

The rotary tool had a pen-like attachment that worked very well. I started off using a router style base but it was too clunky for this job and decided to free hand it instead.

Here is the 3rd fret inlay in place. You can see there are a few gaps. It looks worse in the picture because the reflection of the flash. The fret board is pretty dark normally and its hard to see the empty space. After I carve out the curve in the fret board I'll come back and put the inlays in permanently and fill the gaps.

Pretty smooth. Looks pretty cool I think.

Inlays 2

I changed gears on the inlay production. Before buying the pearl I tried to find a synthetic version that would be perfectly flat, cheap and easy to cut. Plastic or something like that. I couldn't find any.

After attempting to use real pearl and it going rather badly I had a new idea. I decided to try to use a pick guard with a pearl finish. I found a strat pick guard on kijiji for 20 bucks. What fun I had cutting it into tiny bats.  After cutting them out I got them traced onto the fret board.

Nice new pick guard, about to be cut to pieces.

All the little bats cut and glued to the neck.  Some of these are real pearl, you can't really tell the difference unless you look really close. I did end up skipping the 24th fret. Its just too small to squeeze in two little bats. It's the last fret, I'm sure I'll remember where it is.

I traced around the bats as best I could. It's going to be a little tricky trying to carve these holes out later.

Here are the outlines after picking off the bats. This is what I will need to carve out somehow. Maybe not the best way to do this. Did I mention I'm making all this up as I go along?

Inlays 1

I want to make bat shaped inlays for the fretboard. And I want them to be all different, and made of mother of pearl. That's hard it turns out. mother of pearl is expensive and really fragile to cut. I need 12 inlays in total to do a 24 fret neck. I can get away with 10 if I skip the 24th fret.

I found some mother of pearl (pieces of polished oyster shells) on ebay and it came in about a week and a half.  There weren't very flat and there weren't very white.

I traced the fret board and drew out the inlays.

I cut the paper inlays out and glued them to the backs of the mother of pearl.

After a miserable attempt to cut them with the scroll saw I switched to this set up. That's the pearl clamped between two pieces of wood and a manual coping saw. It's slow going and they crack easily in the vice. It's the least worst way I've come up with to cut them so far. They're way too small to hold onto while cutting them anyway. 

I got 4 cut out that are usable so far. I ruined 4 in the process. When this is finished I'll need to carve holes in the fret board to match these exactly. I think that'll be even harder. This might have been an ambitious design....

Cut Away

My original design had a cut away that kept part of the lower right wing but still allowed access to the higher frets. After actually cutting it out and doing a little testing it turns out that its not a big enough space if you're hitting the high strings. I cut it out a little more and I think its much better. The curved style fits in better too I think.

Here you can see the original design and the pencil line for the new cut. 

Now there is lots of room..

Finger Board

I started into the fingerboard today. I planed it down and cut the fret slots. I needed to make a couple of jigs to do that. I also tapered it down to fit the neck.

The measurements of the frets were pretty fussy. They are identified right down to the 1000th of a millimeter.

The first jig i made was to clamp the finger board against a square surface to cut the slots.

The second one was a depth stop camped onto my fret saw. I will need to do this one again after sanding the curve into the fingerboard.

 Here is all cut out from the nut.

....and from the bridge.

Here it is trimmed to match the mahogany portion of the neck