Full Build - Orbital Guitars - Custom T-Type Build and The Curse of Being a Maker

hello this is Dan with orbital guitars and welcome to this T-Type guitar build uh different from my usual form of commentary over videos I'm just winging this one because uh now this video has been sitting in the backlog for a long time waiting for me to finally get around to it and I wasn't really looking forward to it and we'll find out why later anyway I'm beginning by working on the neck this is a three-piece one gay neck yeah it's left over from the Headless guitar I did the year before it was titled Bob 1.5 [Music] as you saw I started by routing and chiseling the truss rod Channel now cutting away some of the excess material [Music] [Music] moving on to working on the headstock shape [Music] and of course with this being a fender style headstock there's no brake angle so I just have to remove some material from the front and then drill four truss rod access once you're using my miter saw and the Fret slotting saw blade to cut all the Fret slots and of course cutting away the excess material from the sides of the fretboard [Music] I really like this piece of Kingwood that I use just because of that one bit of sap wood going right up the middle oh that looked really nice and just some more shaping of the neck taper and the headstock so at this point I'm ready to glue on the fretboard now both the neck and the fretboard are a little bit oversized so that I can remove some more material once they're glued together and have the edges be perfectly flush let's put in some locating pins set on the fretboard and clamp everything down and then you're just using a bit of a just a straight edge template to route down the edges of the neck to be the exact taper that I want foreign [Music] ER to refine the shape of the headstock [Music] and then also using the spindle sander to make the curve at the bottom of the headstock transitioning into the fretboard [Music] and of course I need to make a little channel for the nut so I'm just using my Dremel with the Precision router base and a little router bit in it too grind away the material in between the two slots that I cut while I was using the jig here for the inlay I'm just using a leftover scrap of bog Oak it's not the uh really dark brown the black wood was going to look nice on the more reddish purple of the Kingwood I do tend to prefer using bits of wood as in as fretboard inlays over something like mother of pearl even though I think mother of pearl looks really nice just the fact that you can use wood glue to put in other bits of wood and uh not just the fact that it's a lot easier to work with bits of wood and the dust is still toxic but not as toxic as what you would get from other Pearl remember it's just routing away the material that I need to do to get the inlay pieces in and gluing them in place and sanding it flush [Music] at this point I decided that just the 12th fret inlay didn't look quite right on what would be essentially a Telecaster which normally has you know the usual dot inlays so I decided to add those as well [Music] foreign a little amusing watching this part back you can see sort of the uh Shadow sort of being cast behind the inlay when I spray on the the accelerator for the super glue and of course sanding the rest of them flush and then it's time to sand in the radius read on this one I put in a 12 inch radius I sand this up through I started at 80 grit then uh 120 and 220. uh all with the all of the radius block just to get the fretboard nice and smooth and then putting in the white side knots and then just shaping the end of the fretboard because having it cut off just straight in just in a straight line doesn't seem um I'm not sure what the word I'm looking for is I like the look of it better this way it looks like a I'm going to cut it off straight it just looks like well this is the best idea I had so I went with it I guess in here putting in some gold fret wire because I was going to match all the rest of the hardware for this guitar which is going to be gold there's also a bit harder than regular nickel silver so that's also a benefit while not being as annoying or difficult to work with a stainless steel and checking the neck for straightness and checking the Frets for if they're level of course they almost never are so they went and level the parts [Music] and here I've got both a z file from sumac and a traditional threat crowning file so I like to do the initial passes with the Z file because that gets most of the work done and any little touch-ups I can do with a regular crowning file if I need to I'm going in with some 220 grit sandpaper to just smooth out any little scratches that were left behind by the files then I'll follow that up with some 320 grit paper and then I'll move on to some polishing rubbers and then some Polishing Compound after that and once I'm done with all that it'll be very smooth foreign [Music] steel wool and then there's the buffing compound [Music] and once you're done with the buffing compound you have to go in and clean it all off with a bit of water and you can see they really start to shine so here there are some little gaps at the end of each fret slot where I had removed the excess bit of Tang so I'm going in with some dust and super glue to fill those in and this bit of super glue will also help to keep the fried ends in place [Music] and then of course drilling for the tuners and something I've started doing a lot more recently is rounding over the edges of the fretboard for improvements to player comfort and now it's time to carve the neck and you're just using a saw rasp and the faceting method to do the do the whole carve I don't have any particular neck profile that I try to carve to I mostly just go with the facets and then adjust it by feel until I'm happy with it after that and of course once I'm closer to being done I switch from the saw rasp to a much finer rasp and I'll also use that the half round side of that to carve the glute or just the transition to the headstock in this case and also the transition to the heel and now it's time to move on to the body so this was a big slab of extremely figured Redwood I had originally bought this slab of Redwood for another build which oh get that video out eventually um but it was thicker than I needed it to be so what I ended up doing was just maxing out the capacity on my bandsaw and resawing off the top roughly quarter inch so that I could use it for the top on this build and then here I've got some pieces of Alder that I'll be using for the body [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'll say for anyone who's just looking to get into Guitar Building Alder is a very nice wood to work with maybe not this piece particularly because this piece had a lot of knots in it but generally speaking the load is pretty easy to work and it gets nice results it's also fairly lightweight there once I've glued the pieces together and got them sanded smooth I'm going to go ahead and cut out the shape of the body [Music] and then cut out the shape of the top and some of the tricky things with this particular piece of Redwood is that it developed a lot of cracks and it also wanted to warp so I had to uh do a lot to try and counteract that here I'm just putting in a couple of locating pins on the body and then gluing on the top and you can kind of see there I I knew good places to put those locating pins because I already had the layout for where a pickup was going to be and also the other one went into where a neck pocket is going to be so there's no good nine of those once the guitar is done and then once the glue is dry I take it over to my rotor table and finalize the shape I hear there's a really rough knot right in this corner so I ended up not doing that part on the router table I did it with my spindle sander instead because I was really concerned that the router was going to tear huge chunks out of it and here I'm drilling for the pickup and control cavities and also for the neck pocket [Music] [Music] and of course finishing the cavities and the neck pocket with the handholder [Music] and putting a bit of a comfort carve on the back side of the body you can see I did most of the work with an angle grinder then following it up with a half round rasp but not a much finer rasp to get the shape nice and then sand it smooth foreign [Music] you don't want to forget to drill a path for the wires at least don't forget to do it and before the neck has been glued in I did that once it's not a good time [Music] so here was a little bit awkward that the uh the hole for the Jack had to go in right next to that knot so it was fairly tough Drilling otherwise I also like to recess my jack plates a little bit because I if it's just me but I don't like to see them sticking out from the side of the guitar [Music] and you're just giving a gentle round over all the way around here that was a quarter inch round over bit [Music] all right so here's where the first issue with the build occurred now these four holes uh were just supposed to be for the screws that attach the bridge to the body but for whatever reason I thought I was drilling for the strings to go through so a couple of those holes in the body went all the way through I'll address that later and here I was thinking the Redwood looked a little bit paler than I liked so I got some a stain and it's not a very dark stain it's actually fairly pale but it really made that figuring pop out all right so there you can see I tried to just plug the two holes in the back that were there but the repair stood out a little bit too much and just looked too much like a repair so what I decided to do was put in big decorative patch on the back of the guitar that covers this whole area and again I used a piece of bog Oak for that I'm actually fairly happy with how this turned out and uh if anybody asks you can just say it's a tone patch you know since the strings go through that it makes them sound better at this point I was ready to glue in the neck so for this build I wasn't really trying to be like a really traditional Telecaster hence the Comfort carve on the back which Tellies don't normally have and also this set neck with a fully carved transition from the body and personally I really like doing this sort of carve to go from the neck to the body because I feel like it makes the guitar a lot more comfortable to play so there are lots of carving an angle grinder with rasps and then a sander make it nice and smooth and here I was trying to put a decorative plate on the front of the headstock and you can see I tried a few different ways to try and get it not to crack and split yeah mostly I just tried using water to soften it up and that mostly worked had to get a little bit creative with the clamping but it mostly worked and then here I had found out the second issue with the build that the headstock wasn't quite thick enough so I also put a decorative plate on the back of it then here's where the third issue with the build occurred so I was building this in 2022 and for whatever reason the stores that I have available to me locally were still claiming that due to supply shortages from the pandemic there was a shortage of lacquer so I tried to use some stuff that I could find and it did not work well so I ended up totally stripping off that finish and switching to a polyurethane and what happened after I did that was as you can see along the bottom of the body there was a weird reaction with the wood that only showed up after the new finish was applied so it looks like a real mess there I'm not sure why this occurred or why it didn't show up on the original finish but as soon as I put on the poly that that showed up and really unfortunately because I was building this late in the year I didn't have enough time to put on a different finish or to strip this finish off again and try to do it again because it was just getting too cold you know because I work out of a garage and there's no heat in that garage there's no insulation when the weather gets cold I have to stop working for the year and I was about at that point when I noticed these issues with the finish on this guitar and yes I could have stopped the build there put it on hold until the following summer and then just stripped off the finish and finished it again but there is also something to be said for moving on from a build you know there had already been multiple issues with this build and you know you get to a certain point where you completely lose the motivation to work on it and you know yes it could turn out better if you kept going but at the same time if your heart's not in it anymore and you keep going you're just going to keep making more mistakes so I ended up leaving it the way it was and that's pretty much how the finish is going to be unless I don't know I find the motivation later or if somebody truly wants this guitar and wants to do it themselves and I guess they're welcome to do that at the same time the front and the back the neck all of that I'm really happy with it's mostly just that weird looking finish that I don't know it just kind of kills this guitar for me finish on the front I don't know if it really comes through on camera has like you can see the texture of the wood through it you can see some of the little cracks in the Redwood which earlier I had tried to fill the super glue and all kinds of things to try and get this nice like super smooth glossy finish but that really just wasn't working out with this wood it didn't it didn't want to do that but I ended up really liking how it looked actually because it's got the sort of Old Violin kind of look to it which I think is really nice you see they're putting in a set of bare knuckle pickups these are the brown sugar set some really nice pickups reverse all gold Hardware yeah I guess going back to talking about the finishing things I guess the real takeaway is here is that you need to know when to step away from something that isn't going the way you want it to because I'm not really sure how to phrase what I want to say but um it's also somewhat the curse of being a creator that whenever I look at this guitar I can only ever see its flaws because I know every single one of them and where to look for them and that's true of every guitar I make I mean there have been a couple that came out really really well in my the flaws that I can see in them are so minor that I know nobody else would notice them or care because I I barely even notice them but it's very true that everything you make there's going to be something that goes wrong with it and at least for me I can never not see the flaws yeah that's also the takeaway here is if if you're doing something like this mistakes are going to happen and sometimes like the patch on the back of the guitar you can get creative and do something with it that looks intentional and actually kind of looks better than if the issue hadn't occurred then there are other ones that can happen like what happened with the finish on this one that no they just eat at you anyway in my ramblings a whole lot more work has happened in the video and the uh the nut is just about done I file the slots into it and now I'm sanding it to round over the corners make it nice and comfortable so that if the player's hand bumps into it they don't hit a sharp edge and then polishing it up with some Scotch Brite pads and then here I felt like putting in a string tree it probably wasn't entirely necessary but I thought it was just going to benefit the guitar overall if it was there so I decided to do it anyway this is a nice one with rollers so then just some finishing touches getting the slots in the nut down to the appropriate depth I always do this after the guitar has been strung up so that I can actually feel what the the action of the strings are and how they're sitting in the nut if necessary I can take the strings back off and file down the top of the nut if the uh the slots are a little deeper than they should be and I mean deeper from the top not too deep to where the strings are buzzing and then here just putting in the strap locks and then after this we'll go on to a playing demo [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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Channel: Orbital Guitars

Views: 4,738

Keywords: Orbital Guitars, luthier, luthiery, woodworking, electric guitar, handmade, crafting, instrument, insane designs, woodworking tools, custom, hand tools, guitar making, boutique guitars, custom guitar, guitar, guitar building, luthier guitar making, hand made, bespoke, hand carving wood, wenge guitar neck, Curly redwood, curly redwood guitar top

Id: iCjZGD8WGmk

Length: 39min 46sec (2386 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023