Weeks 4&5 Neck to Body, Color mixing and matching, Ovation repairs

Its been a very busy couple of weeks! So busy I didn't have time or energy to post last week! We have been busy at home training the new mascot/shop dog/ kiddo! Meet Spring.. She is proficient in chewing things and aerial acrobatics.

The other big news outside the shop is that I am now engaged to be married! Its been a long road and worth every minute and i cant wait to call Tanja Niemi my wife! She has been so supportive of me through this process and I couldn't ask for a better partner.

Now back to the business at hand! In the shop these past few weeks the electric guitar has been taking shape quite quickly. Only a few more steps to go and she'll be readt for a paint job and final assembly.
last week saw the fingerboard get glued to the neck, the position markers and frets were installed, the head stock was shaped and brought to thickness and the neck pocket was routed into the body and recieved the neck!

Fender-ish Head stock rough shaped before gluing the fingerboard on to the maple neck stock.

Finger board all glued up and clamped on tight! let sit for 2 hours and then flush trimmed the excess neck wood off on the router table.

Installed vintage style clay dot markers and medium tall frets into the gorgeous Cocobolo fingerboard. trimmed fret ends, filed them, beveled them and dressed them to remove sharp edges. The neck will be left alone now till final shaping and tuner installation. 

 A neck pocket template was made from the neck itself to ensure a perfect fit for the neck to the body.
The pocket angle was calculated and the template was shimmed up to produce the correct angle for the cut out. The pocket was routed out and the neck was bolted tightly to the body. Its really looking like something now!!!

 A Schaller Locking Roller Tune-o-matic Bridge was installed in precisely the correct position for scale length and intonation. The bridge has rolling saddles to provide smooth action for the Bigsby Tremolo system that will be installed.

 Ahh and there she will hang with her cousins till next week when the control and pick up cavities are routed

and the body contours and neck shape are put into place.

Finishing class has been a fun time for me these past few weeks also. Finally finishing a few project boards and receiving good marks on them has boosted my confidence that my skills are improving on par with the course. We spent more time with our color theory and started mixing some custom colors, as well as matching paint colors.

 Fun with color! Finished my color wheel showing the Primary, Secondary, And a few Tertiary colors.
Then experimented with warming and cooling color hues starting with yellow and adding red on the warm side then adding blue on the cool side. This project is finished now as well with the cool side reaching a blue tone and the center circles moving from red to violet. i forgot to snap a pic before turning them in!

 Tried my hand at custom color matching adding drops of paint at a time trying to match the Sherwin Williams Cooled Blue paint chip in the top photo. Got it close but still a bit dark. We are using tempera paints and matching the hues and sheens exactly is almost impossible.
Then I turned to mixing custom dye colors for dyeing woods before clear coats. I call the three colors. Iguana, Aqua, and Fire..

Some of the finished project boards in high gloss and satin pore filled finishes on mahogany. The high gloss will still need sanding and buffing to make a perfect mirror shine. The satin board is done and tuned in, the white maple board was primed white then painted with what my instructor is calling his take on sea foam green. ( i think it need more green and white. looks more like a sonic blue to me) Then it got 8 coats of gloss lacquer. 

 This is my first attempt at a hand applied tobacco sunburst! its a nice look. Still need some tweaking to remove the hard lines between the colors but this was a super fun job and I am so exited to learn this technique.

Repairs class was spent giving my vintage 78' Ovation Celebrity some much needed attention. The guitar is a family heirloom that I have had since I was a teenager and it has been through hell with me before i really knew how to care for it properly. The guitar has developed some problems over the years such as severe buzzing and low action due to top movement and poor set up. I spent some time leveling the frets, rounding and smoothing the sharp corners of the original nut, and making a new taller compensated bone saddle to raise the action and correct the intonation.

The fingerboard was taped off to protect the wood. Then the frets were leveled re crowned and dressed.to give a new perfectly flat playing surface.

 The frets were then polished to a high shine and the corners of the original nut were taken down and rounded over for comfort. The corners were originally left sharp from the factory.

This is the new bone saddle i made for the guitar to raise the string action to a normal comfortable range, and compensated the landings for each string for perfect intonation, Its so nice to play this treasured instrument now that it sounds and feels as it did 17 years ago when i first received it.
Thanks again for following my progress here. I cant wait to have this rewarding feeling each day when I find myself being paid to do work that i truly love so much.