Corvus Guitar Works - builds, paint, mods/servicing, Cambs

Corvus

Cheers @Supportact , it should be habitable fairly soon, pop over.

@BillDL those styrene curls and wotsits are annoyng! Not reusable and fly around stick to things with the static. 'orrible things.

The planes are nice, cute, I agree. Well made and satisfying shape. Some tools are just nice in form and function.
I'm gradually culling not-so-nice or semi-knackered things, with nice things. Carving knives do it for me as well, another sort-out going on with a couple becoming 'general abuse' knives as others I like better come in.

Dewalt tools, that's the polar opposite end of it - decent they are but look far too Bob the Builder for my liking

webrthomson

Brillant to see it all come together @Corvus, I’ll be in touch later in the summer (July or August)

Corvus

  cheers Ross, looking forward to it!

webrthomson

Corvus said:

  cheers Ross, looking forward to it!

Me too Bill

Corvus

An long-overdue update: I'm basically back up running but without spray facility as yet. There's been works & projects going on and things have been busy without announcing it, kind of thing.
Also Keith in town is crocked so some of his folks have been coming here.

Also trying to sort out the house which is 9 months of long days in,. No carpets, half without lights, living on a mattress and two wooden chairs. It's much nicer being in my workshop : )

More stuff to come but here's some pics...

Corvus

This is an EX style build for Ross, the outline taken from a Ken Lawrence. Which seems to be basically MX250 in outline.

Starting with a pair of giant limba slabs, being planed ready for glueing:                

Not interesting but I always just love hand planing a good join (not that this is glued) - offset the halves to hint where it is -

Corvus

Flattening one side ready for the next steps

Template check: Some width was trimmed before this pic, it's a very wide set - but length is just enough...

Glued up, (very) rough-cut and machined to a bit over final thickness, to allow for any slight movement:

Corvus

The neck is ovangkol, which is very pretty, nice straight grained chunk. It's horrible to work the quartered face... it arrived with the worst planed face I've ever seen, just looked like someone'd been at it with a pickaxe. Hand plane sorted it out.

The headstock angle bandsawn and planed.
A couple of nice trusty bargainaceous planes here, a '60s No.3 and a WS pre-1953.

Squared up with plane and drum sander:

Corvus

Some more excellent custom templates from @simo / routertemplates.co.uk. Highly recommended. It's great to be able to do the drawings and send them off, no doubt to be cleaned up, and get these nice super clear templates back

Corvus

Truss rod channel routing with "the dalek", overhead router:

T/r channel done and carbon fibre ready for the ends to be shaped before glueing them in:

Corvus

I generally pass acoustic stuff on, I just don't like them.. to play by & large, and working on them. Done a few of these though - young girl's first guitar. Within a few mins of arrival at home it was beheaded.. Being not an expensive guitar it only warranted a low-budget fix without full cosmetics, and was missing some wood, but came out OK 

TheMarlin

That’s a budget fix? I can’t see the join. Fabulous work. 

Corvus

A no-paint,,do 5 mins here & there thing. Looks more obvious in meatworld than my crap pics but it's OK.

Corvus

Most of this was assembled by the customer but did a few bits on this Strat inspired by deep sea diving welder gimp mask dudes Ghost - machined the neck to convert to an FR nut. Added luminlay dots. Misc other bits.
Drilling Fender lacquer is chancey, it delaminates very easily even with a fresh brad bit, to give a pale halo. My neck drilling jig helped get the dots nicely in line

webrthomson

Loving the EX stuff above very exciting to see it getting there!

That neck repair is seamless too

digitalkettle

Always great work, Bill!

Corvus

Cheers chaps!

Corvus

Don't know this is very interesting, but our last house was 300 yrs old. There was a rough lump of wood serving as a mantelpiece (over a nice 70s gas fire and back boiler..). Saved the chunk when we had to redo that lot.

It might be as old as the house, no way to know, but it had some hand-made nails in which seem to be of that age. Or 200+ years if I remember right. It has the same blackened areas as roof and wall timbers in the house - bits were re-used, possibly off other or earlier versions of the house, or barns, etc.

Decided to see if it could become guitar tops. Yew is cheap but it's the sentimental thing of it.

As found-


Blackened square nail hole - there were a few like this with nails quite deeply in. These got fished out, until magnets couldn't find any more -


It's rough, not even close to flat on the "good" side (not shown yet). So make a spare plane blade into a scrub iron; a vicious weapon for taking off lots of wood fast-


Next chop into two lengths.
Then flattening the main face and square up one edge, so it can be fed to the bandsaw-


Tiny sad ghostly face-


And we get these ready to slice. It's not the wildest yew and one chunk is boring. But there's a few tops in there so something better might be lurking. It'd be nice to make use of it though:

digitalkettle

Corvus said:

...
Tiny sad ghostly face-

...

Fkn 'ell, Bill!

Corvus

David