Replica Les Paul rebuild

LastMantra

I'm more from a horticultural background than guitar building to be fair. 

Ddigger

LastMantra said:

I'm more from a horticultural background than guitar building to be fair. 

Is that a euphanism for being a Telecaster player?

WezV

Now done.

Its a soft semi-gloss with some lacquer checking and a bit of grain sinkage, not as aged as I normally do.  A lot of the red is now gone, ive tried to show it in different lights below.  Fret bard is nicely dark, but still shows its grain.  The fix in the top disappears from some angles and is more visible from others, but the eye does pass over it so I'm happy.

I am an idiot, and forgot about the narrow wiring channels in this till i came to put it back together. I had the perfect opportunity to increase them safely when the neck was off.   I decided to break out the 10x400mm auger bit and drill all the way from jack socket to switch (this is how Gibson did the solid mahogany customs).  This was a squeaky bum moment knowing the hole in the top came from an attempt to redrill the channels.   Anyway, it worked fine and the guitar has been re-wired with braided wire now it actually fits.

Phil and I agreed it should have his last name on the top of the headstock, since its had at least 3 guitar builders input at this point.  My name has replaced the les paul script

normula1

That looks superb. Love the logo.

PhilKing

It's really looking great Wez.

Dan

I honestly love posts like these. Great work Wez

Roland

Outstanding work Wez

davros

Wow, I thought it looked alright to start with, but looking back to page 1 now, that's a massive improvement! Stunning 

sawyer

Awesome work,as always! Love it

RickLucas

Beauty.

mudslide73

Stellar work as always Wez. 

grappagreen

That is amazing... you are a very talented man...

PeteC

Fabulous work yet again @WezV     Phil is a lucky guy ! 

Supportact

Just seen this. Amazing work. Outstanding. 

PeteC

Wez, I just went back to start of this thread to re-read through it.  Could you explain a bit more about how you went about removing the glued in neck ?  I want to redo one of the early carved top guitars i built to increase the neck angle by another degree or so to improve the action and wondered how best to do the neck removal   I realise its probably a case of drilling some fine holes and injecting water but could you elaborate  on how you’d do it?   Hmmm…. Maybe this should be on a seperate thread to keep this one “clean”?  

WezV

I took the fretboard off first for this since it needed to come off the neck anyway.   Iron and a seam seperation knife to do that.  That meant i had full view of the tenon

Then i drilled 3 narrow holes into either side of the tenon so i could inject boiling water.  I kept injecting and removing it to clean out the dissolved glue.  You can also add heat to the tenon to help it along.   The aim is to gradually dissolve and clean out the glue , not rush it.

You can also steam if you have a way to get the steam through a tiny needle.   If you can do that, you can do the whole proceedure with fretboard on by getting to the tenon at a fret slot, under an inlay or from the neck pickup pocket

PeteC

Thanks Wez.   Much appreciated 

normula1

Have a look at some of this guys videos.