2 steps forward, 1 step back.....

Did you ever just have one of those days? Today I had one. I got up in the shop to work some more on the SJ and after inspecting the finish, I just wasn't happy. I had some pores that didn't fill right, and they collected the white sanding dust from leveling. I had gotten the back pretty good with the finish sanded down to the pores so it looked good. The sides however didn't. They had a lot more of those little divots with white spots in them. I decided to go ahead and try to re-level sand to try and remove them. I did this on the back and it worked pretty well and I didn't sand through so I figured I could do the same on the sides. I was wrong. I started to re-sand and just when I thought I had gotten them all leveled out, I saw that dreaded dull spot that is a telltale sign of a sandthrough spot. I had sanded through just above the waist on the upper bout a spot about the size of a quarter. So now I had a decision to make. I could just brush the sides with lacquer to fix it or I could rough sand the entire body and spray the entire thing again. Since I was already spraying the other two guitars today, I decided to just go ahead and re-spray it. I had a few small orange peal spots on the top that I didn't like, and I still had a few spots in the back center strip that the pores were showing anyways so I figured that I could most likely get them to fill now with new coats of lacquer. I sanded the entire body down to 400 grit (ouch that hurts after getting it shiny as a mirror!) and leveled out the top spots as well as the few grain spots in the back. I then shot 4 more coats over the body and it is now drying. It does seem to look pretty good. From what I can see, it looks like I got all the pores filled so it should polish up a lot easier now.

While I was in-between spray coats, I decided to try and level out the neck where some pores were also showing through. Yep, you guessed it, I sanded through into the stain! GRRRRR! So after a bunch of stain touchup to try and make it match the rest of the neck I re-shot the neck to fix that spot as well. So, the SJ is basically back to where it was 8 weeks ago. I did get the tuner holes expanded for the tuners, and the peghead is polished and looks great. I didn't re-spray that.

Yesterday I decided to try my hand at making a K-sled to make kerfed linings. I did a rough draft of the machine using stuff I had in my shop and gave it a try. It works pretty well. It holds the strip of wood perpendicular to my bandsaw, limits the depth of the cut, and automatically advances the strip a pre-determined distance for the next cut. All I have to do is put the wood in and slide it back and forth into the saw blade. Now that I know how it works and what kind of adjustments I need to make, I will most likely get some Lexan and make a more finished version of it.

This was the SJ body just before I decided to re-sand the sides. You can see the reflection in the back. It looked pretty good, not perfect but very nice. Hopefully it will look good again!

Here is the neck after sanding with micromesh. I decided to try and get rid of some of the pore spots and ended up sanding through the neck in one spot. This also has been re-sprayed.

This is the prototype of the Ksled I made. I got the plans off of the OLF and the original design was made by Frank Ford I believe.

Here is a scrap piece of mahogany that I tested the Ksled on. You can see different widths between the kerfs. I have an adjustment on the sled that does this.

So here we are, the two twin guitars in the background, and the SJ in the foreground.