Flying V build

MLten80

Foam & screws works well for soabbars/p90s.. the slightly denser foam in pickup packaging works particularly well ime 

Paint looking great again now!

greggreg66

Started the wet sand this evening. On the face of the headstock and one of the lower bouts / wings I hand rubbed some polishing compound (as opposed to a woolly mop on the rotex etc). It has a satisfying VOS style dull gloss to it, rather than full high gloss - which is of course a massive result as most of the gloss coats were a failure and the pin holes give a nice mini relic look lol! The main success is that the 45/45/10 mixture of nitro/thinner/retarder worked a dream on the headstock face* and was really quite flat, so for future builds I finally feel more confident with nitro out of the cupgun. Great.

* the previous "full fat" gloss coat went horribly, so I'm left with a mottled kinda look under the final coat. It's a learning curve.



You can clearly see where I went too hard scraping the first finish off around the near bridge post in this pic. Will see if I can tidy that up soon. The closer wing is hand-buffed while the rest is at 1000 grit. In the flesh the hand buffed is almost satisfyingly imperfect. 

MattNovak

Looking really nice Greg - reminds me of the Jeff Beck Oxblood LP

PeteC

I am really liking the oxblood - so much so that I ordered oxblood ink to try Andyjr1515's approach to staining. 
Love that colour - its rocky and classy at the same time - keep it going ! 

greggreg66

MattNovak said:

Looking really nice Greg - reminds me of the Jeff Beck Oxblood LP

PeteC said:

I am really liking the oxblood - so much so that I ordered oxblood ink to try Andyjr1515's approach to staining. 
Love that colour - its rocky and classy at the same time - keep it going ! 

Yeah I love that colour. I think it works so well, has a bit of a retro vibe too. Mine is on the burgundy end of it, but I love it all the same. I need to address the frets next. After then I'll be mostly there I think. Exciting! 

Look forward to seeing the Jnr get the oxblood finish Pete, that'll look wicked. 

greggreg66

Tantalisingly close now. Have strung it up after doing an average fret job (ends need more work), the nut slots need to be deepened, but it’s been great to be able to play it finally! And the neck or head didn’t snap or off and it sounds pretty resonant which is a mega result! Dead happy. The dusty end is full of dead spots, but I hope once I’ve sorted the nut slot heights I can then adjust the bridge and truss rod and hopefully sort it out. I’m then highly likely going to take it to a tech for a once over to make it better I reckon. 

Once its all wired I’ll post finished pics and maybe a little clip. 

MattNovak

That looks fantastic Greg! The hardware choices and colour scheme all hangs together really well. Nothing like stringing up a new build for the first time  

PeteC

Vey nice indeed - great to see it completed.   persevere with the fret levelling and polishing - my first attempts were very poor but I soon got the hang of it with the right tools and was amazed how well the juniors played after getting the frets sorted. 
The V looks great with the binding too.   
Looking forward to the clips when you get chance. 

greggreg66

MattNovak said:

That looks fantastic Greg! The hardware choices and colour scheme all hangs together really well. Nothing like stringing up a new build for the first time  

Thanks Matt! I've also the adde bonus that this is the first one I've built too, some I'm double chuffed. 

PeteC said:

Vey nice indeed - great to see it completed.   persevere with the fret levelling and polishing - my first attempts were very poor but I soon got the hang of it with the right tools and was amazed how well the juniors played after getting the frets sorted. 
The V looks great with the binding too.   
Looking forward to the clips when you get chance. 

Thanks Pete. Can't believe you're on build No.3 when we started our first builds more or less at the same time! I noticed when I was levelling the frets they were sanding/grinding/flattening much more at the edges (I used my 12" rad aluminium sanding beam), because the slots were a tad wide so I think I got a bit of spring back and ended up gluing them in. I got a great polish out of them, but they could just maybe do with a tad more detail on the very ends. Might need a finer file for that perhaps. I ended up playing it acoustically for about 3 hours last night, and that was with a high action, but I loved it. 

I bought a bottle of lemon oil but for the life of me I cannot find it. 

Explorer build has started. Hope to finish pre-Christmas. Life is busy!