Mosstone Thinline Baritone Strat Project

[tobijohn]

...But there's a bit of wiggle room top to bottom. The pickguard will really determine how close the pickup gets, but I think it'll be good. And if I have to sand down the end of the extension a little bit, I'm good with that too.

You could also just remove a little material (1/8"-1/4") underneath the top of the fretboard at the end there leaving a slight overhang so that the pickguard edge slides under it a little. That way, with the pickup opening so close to the edge of the pickguard it will have a little more structural integrity. I have a few like that...

[Mossman]

...But there's a bit of wiggle room top to bottom. The pickguard will really determine how close the pickup gets, but I think it'll be good. And if I have to sand down the end of the extension a little bit, I'm good with that too.

You could also just remove a little material (1/8"-1/4") underneath the top of the fretboard at the end there leaving a slight overhang so that the pickguard edge slides under it a little. That way, with the pickup opening so close to the edge of the pickguard it will have a little more structural integrity. I have a few like that...

Yes, there have been times when I thought I might have to do that with a an extended fretboard, but it always managed to clear a plastic PG. A wooden pickguard might be thicker, though. I'm not really a fan of the extended fretboard, personally, because it makes it so you have to remove the neck if you need to take the pickguard off to work on the electronics... and I've never missed that extra fret.

[tobijohn]

Yes, there have been times when I thought I might have to do that with a an extended fretboard, but it always managed to clear a plastic PG. A wooden pickguard might be thicker, though. I'm not really a fan of the extended fretboard, personally, because it makes it so you have to remove the neck if you need to take the pickguard off to work on the electronics... and I've never missed that extra fret.

FWIW, the ones that I have like that do not require the neck to be removed, the pickguard just slides right up under the lip of the fretboard...

[Mossman]

Ok, now that the "Sun King" Strat is finished, I've turned my attention back to the baritone, and after weeks of debate and hand-wringing, I think I've settled on doing a natural Tru-Oil finish, with a dark wood (hopefully mahogany) pickguard. Kinda like this Suhr:





I decided on this course of action because there's a lot of broad grain on the lower bout:

...and running all up the side of the body, really:

While sanding the body last night, it occurred to me that if I do the "black-and-sand-back" procedure to darken the grain before applying color, then all that grain will drink in the black dye, making the upper half (bass side) of the body look too dark. And all that black dye will interact with whatever color I apply over it, and make it look muddy. But if I apply a Tru-oil finish, then the grain will take on a golden/tan-ish hue.

I found a guy on ebay who makes custom pickguards out of wood. They're spendy ($65), but that's about what I paid for a custom (plastic) Pickguardian PG, and that was a few years ago. I'd prefer mahogany, but that wasn't among their list of species options. However, they did say in the description that they may have other types of woods available, and to send them a message if you want something that's not listed. So I did... I reckon I''ll hear back from them by tomorrow.

If they don't have Mahogany, there's Wenge:



Shedua:



Sapele:



Bubinga:



Padauk



And Patagonian Rosewood:




They also have Maple, Black Limba, Purpleheart, Iroko, and Zebrawood.

[Mossman]

Just heard back from the seller. He said he has problems sourcing mahogany in big enough pieces to make a PG out of, but he recommended Sapele, as it's almost identical to the grain and color of Mahogany.

[Mossman]

Well I sanded the body to 800 grit... Yes, 800. Because Tru-Oil is notorious for magnifying scratches. Actually, the Chinese sandpaper I used felt more like 600, which is how I high I usually go when using Tru-Oil.

I debated a little more about whether I wanted to do a dye finish, but after doing some more experimentation on a scrap piece of Ash, I decided to go natural.

This is what it looks like after one coat... I think I made the right decision.

Since Birchwood Casey Tru-Oil has been deemed contraband by the People's Republic of California for a few years now, I had to make my own. It's three equal parts boiled linseed oil, polyurethane, and mineral spirits.

[tobijohn]

Since Birchwood Casey Tru-Oil has been deemed contraband by the People's Republic of California for a few years now, I had to make my own. It's three equal parts boiled linseed oil, polyurethane and mineral spirits.

Is the polyurethane you used the common wipe-on variety? Does that mean it could be tinted as well?

[Mossman]

Since Birchwood Casey Tru-Oil has been deemed contraband by the People's Republic of California for a few years now, I had to make my own. It's three equal parts boiled linseed oil, polyurethane and mineral spirits.

Is the polyurethane you used the common wipe-on variety? Does that mean it could be tinted as well?

Yes. I used this...



...and yes, it can be tinted. I usually tint Tru-Oil with Yellow Ochre artist's oil paint when I finish necks with it. Though Tru-Oil does impart a yellowish tint on its own when applied in multiple coats. I wanted this body to look more "woody" than yellow, so I skipped the tint. I'm probably going to put 20-30 coats on this, so it will yellow up a little more, but I didn't want it to look like an aged lacquer patina.

[edit]

I should also mention to make sure you use oil-based polyurethane (which is also illegal in California now ). If you use water-based poly, it won't mix with the linseed oil.

[tobijohn]

...and yes, it can be tinted. I usually tint Tru-Oil with Yellow Ochre artist's oil paint when I finish necks with it. Though Tru-Oil does impart a yellowish tint on its own when applied in multiple coats. I wanted this body to look more "woody" than yellow, so I skipped the tint. I'm probably going to put 20-30 coats on this, so it will yellow up a little more, but I didn't want it to look like an aged lacquer patina.

[edit]

I should also mention to make sure you use oil-based polyurethane (which is also illegal in California now ). If you use water-based poly, it won't mix with the linseed oil.

Thanks for the info. So hypothetically, could you get any color you wanted by tinting it with artists oil paint? Or does the linseed oil give it a yellowish overtone regardless of the primary tinting color?

[Mossman]

...and yes, it can be tinted. I usually tint Tru-Oil with Yellow Ochre artist's oil paint when I finish necks with it. Though Tru-Oil does impart a yellowish tint on its own when applied in multiple coats. I wanted this body to look more "woody" than yellow, so I skipped the tint. I'm probably going to put 20-30 coats on this, so it will yellow up a little more, but I didn't want it to look like an aged lacquer patina.

[edit]

I should also mention to make sure you use oil-based polyurethane (which is also illegal in California now ). If you use water-based poly, it won't mix with the linseed oil.

Thanks for the info. So hypothetically, could you could get any color you wanted by tinting it with artists oil paint? Or does the linseed oil give it a yellowish overtone regardless of the primary tinting color?

The yellow of the linseed oil will not over-power whatever color you add to it, but the color will be kinda weak, since 1/3 of the mixture is solvent. After I read your message I did a test to see how well tinting the Tru-Oil would work. I don't have any other colors of oil paint, so I used red dye instead (should be good enough to test the principle). First, I added just a drop, which made the mixture look pretty red, but on the wood, you could barely see it (far left in the pic). I kept adding dye until there was more dye in the mixture than Tru-Oil, and the results were still pretty weak (far right). I think the mineral spirits just thins out the color too much.

Using oil paint might yield slightly better results, because it has more solids than the dye, but that is also part of the problem. When adding oil paint to True-Oil, you have to break down the solids (pigment) as much as possible. You can't just squeeze a dollop of paint into the Tru-Oil and mix it up with a stick and call it good (I tried that the first time I did it... didn't work out so well ). I don't go so far as to run it through filters, or anything, but I do mix the paint with mineral spirits until it has a very thin, watery consistency (but is still pretty opaque), and then mix that into the Tru-Oil.

[Mossman]

For what it's worth, I also tested my Tru-Oil mixture against straight polyurethane before starting the finish (TO on the left, poly on the right).

[tobijohn]

Thank you for taking the time to check that out, I really appreciate it. When the time comes, I think I'll just coattail your earlier project when you did the burst with dyes. However, do you think the color will deepen as more coats are applied?

[Mossman]

Thank you for taking the time to check that out, I really appreciate it. When the time comes, I think I'll just coattail your earlier project when you did the burst with dyes. However, do you think the color will deepen as more coats are applied?

No problem... I was curious too. I think the color might get a little darker with additional coats, but not nearly enough. Also, it will get yellower with each additional coat too, so you'll probably end up with a color that looks pretty hideous, and still not dark enough.

[Mossman]

Man, I had forgotten how nice it is working with Tru-Oil! Or at least my home-made version of it. It goes on a lot easier than wipe-on poly, and it's much more forgiving. If you get a run, or a drop, you just rub it into the rest of the finish. With poly, you have to wait a couple of days for it to dry, sand it down, then re-spray, or wipe on another coat. Tru-Oil also self-levels perfectly. It's not nearly as viscous as the water-based, wipe-on poly that I used on the Eclipse, so you never get any streaks or "brush marks". The only reason I can think of to go back to poly would be for finishing a painted guitar (I don't think Tru-Oil will bond with a painted surface).

It has darkened the wood a little more than I expected, but I still dig it.

Here is what I started with:





One coat of Tru-Oil:

Several coats of Tru-Oil:

Even a natural finish looks different under different light sources. Here is the body under diffuse sunlight. I think this one is probably the most accurate:

It looks very... woody. And I think I'm getting addicted to the satin finish. It just feels and looks so nice on a guitar that has a trans or natural finish, where you want to show off the wood.

However, the big drawback with Tru-Oil is that it absolutely emphasizes scratches in the surface. I cannot stress enough the importance of sanding thoroughly, up to a fine grit before applying the Tru-Oil. I spent a whole evening, meticulously sanding this body up to 800 grit. I was thorough, and methodical. The body felt as smooth as an android's bottom, and I could neither see, nor feel any scratch marks, but still... there were a few light rough spots visible in various parts of the body after the oil went down. I didn't really notice them until I had applied about 4 or 5 coats, and I thought I would have to sand it all back to bare wood and start over again. But then I remembered a technique that I had never used before. It's meant as a method of grain filling, but I reasoned that if it would seal the grain, it'll probably fill light scratch marks too.

Basically, you just wet-sand the surface, but instead of using water, you use Tru-Oil. The sanding creates a slurry of material that builds up in the grain, and apparently obscures scratches too, because after the first time doing it, a lot of the scratch marks disappeared. Bear in mind that these were very faint, almost invisible scratches that you could only see when it was angled in the light just right (and impossible to photograph).

There were also a couple of spots around the perimeter of the body where the radius bit of the router took some "nibbles" out of the wood.

They're very small, but too deep to sand out without flattening, or changing the radius, so I just had to hope that the Tru-Oil would fill them in. The sanding slurry helped a lot.

I also starting finishing the neck too.

I debated for a while whether I wanted to tint the neck, but decided against it. I mated the neck to the body to see how the light wood looked against the natural finish, and I thought it would look odd if the neck were yellow. I want everything on this guitar to look woody and natural, not stained. I knew the Tru-Oil would darken the wood anyway, but more in the direction of tan than yellow. The neck will darken up a bit more than this with subsequent coats too.

I also ordered the Sapele pickguard and trem cover that I mentioned earlier. I looked into getting some wooden P90 covers too, but yikes! They're expensive! I'm not about to spend more money on pickup covers than I'm comfortable spending on pickups! If anybody knows where I can get some wooden covers that don't cost a small fortune let me know!

[tobijohn]

It looks great! With the body, neck and pickguard all woody, grainy and earth tones, I'll bet chrome P90 covers would not look overly blingy and would maybe also accentuate the naturalness of the rest of the guitar., I've got a set on an old dark mahogany SX Calisto Junior style and I think they look pretty good. Mine are metal and came with the pickups but the plastic ones are relatively inexpensive...


I'm going to probably eventually replace the crème pickguard and knobs in favor of black :

[Mossman]

It looks great! With the body, neck and pickguard all woody, grainy and earth tones, I'll bet chrome P90 covers would not look overly blingy and would maybe also accentuate the naturalness of the rest of the guitar., I've got a set on an old dark mahogany SX Calisto Junior style and I think they look pretty good. Mine are metal and came with the pickups but the plastic ones are relatively inexpensive...


I'm going to probably eventually replace the crème pickguard and knobs in favor of black :

I have considered that. I have nickel/chrome covers on my Furrian, and they look pretty sharp.

But I already have a bunch of cream plastic P90 covers lying around here, and I think those will look good too. I haven't decided yet. I'm still hoping to find some wooden ones that don't cost $75 apiece, but that will probably mean buying from China, which is something I'm seriously trying to avoid these days.

And I agree... I think a black PG and knobs on that Calisto would be a better choice.

[tobijohn]

Crème would work too, just make sure you have the correct pole spacing. I've gotten jammed up in the past on projects involving switching P90 covers because there seems to be no standard, some sets are both 50mm and some are 50mm neck (or 49mm if Gibson and some Epis) and 52mm bridge...

[Mossman]

Crème would work too, just make sure you have the correct pole spacing. I've gotten jammed up in the past on projects involving switching P90 covers because there seems to be no standard, some sets are both 50mm and some are 50mm neck (or 49mm if Gibson and some Epis) and 52mm bridge...

I haven't come across a set of P90s that have different spacing for the neck and bridge yet, but I am mindful of the spacing. What's weird is; all the wooden covers I've come across so far have 50mm spacing, which won't fit USA spec P90s. I'm going to be using SX pickups (with alnico magnets), so that's fine for me, but for the prices they're charging, you'd think the 1-15/16" spacing would be more prevalent. I can't imagine many people would want to spend $150 on a set of covers for pickups that cost half as much... At least based on the apparently dominant philosophy that you should spend as little money as possible on upgrades for a cheap guitar... You know... the people who won't spend $100 on a good set of import pickups because the guitar it's going into isn't "worth it", so they buy a set of generic, Chinese pickups off ebay for $30, and then complain about them.

[Mossman]

I found a set of P90s on Amazon for $35 that come with Maple covers:


https://www.amazon.com/gazechimp-Alnico ... ts&sr=1-49


For that price, I could buy the set and throw the pickups away, and still come out way ahead.

[tobijohn]

I found a set of P90s on Amazon for $35 that come with Maple covers:


https://www.amazon.com/gazechimp-Alnico ... ts&sr=1-49


For that price, I could buy the set and throw the pickups away, and still come out way ahead.

Well there ya go, problem solved! Even the box they come in looks pretty swank...

[Mossman]

I could go with Rosewood, too... The neck I'm using has a really dark Rosewood fretboard, so these would match that:



But I'm not sure if Maple would look better... More decisions!

[Mossman]

I found a set of P90s on Amazon for $35 that come with Maple covers:


https://www.amazon.com/gazechimp-Alnico ... ts&sr=1-49


For that price, I could buy the set and throw the pickups away, and still come out way ahead.

Well there ya go, problem solved! Even the box they come in looks pretty swank...

Yeah... I don't know how I missed these the last time I looked.

[tobijohn]

Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of a similarly themed @TVvoodoo Well Hung strap...

[Mossman]

Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of a similarly themed @TVvoodoo Well Hung strap...

Well I don't know what that means, but I ordered the pickups with the Rosewood covers, because I remembered that I have a set of Rosewood knobs, and I liked the continuity of having the same wood type reflected from the fretboard to the pickups, to the knobs. I think the Maple covers would have stood out too much, and I didn't like the idea of Maple knobs, either. But I won't have them for about 3 weeks, because they're coming from China.

I also ordered this Wilkinson vibrato from the Stratosphere:



It's the same type that I put on the Sun King Strat, but this has slightly wider string spacing (54mm vs 52.5mm). I thought it would be better for the heavier gauge strings I'll be using. I also like that it has stainless steel block saddles, a pop-in arm, and it's got more mass than a standard-style Fender trem.

[Mossman]

Update:

The Sapele pickguard and trem cover came in on Monday. It's a nice piece of wood. Laser-cut. I like it. It doesn't have beveled edges (oh well), but the screw-holes are counter-sunk. Here's what it looks like on the guitar, unfinished:

and the trem cover:

The pickguard is a perfect fit (and that also shows how close this body is to Fender spec). Except I will have to take a Dremel to the pickup cavities a little:

These routs were intended for humbuckers, after all. Not P90s. The SX covers fit in the cavities, and I thought that would be good enough, but SX P90 covers are a bit thinner than standard (that's why I had to use metal covers on the P90 Pros in my Furrian. The plastic Epiphone covers wouldn't fit in the routs), and I imagine the wooden covers would be at least the same dimensions as an Epiphone/Gibson P90, so there was really no way I was going to dodge this.

I had plenty of that oil finish I mixed up left over from finishing the body, but after seeing how much it darkened the Ash, I wanted to test it first on the Sapele (on the back of the trem cover) to see how dark the oil would make it. The top swipe is just straight wipe-on poly. The bottom one is my mixture (I've taken to calling it "Moss-Oil", because it's not exactly like Tru-Oil ).

I liked the color of the Moss-Oil swatch, but that's more the color I want to end up with, not start out with. I'm going to be applying about 20-30 coats, and it's only going to get darker from here. Like Mahogany, Sapele has a lot of "iridescence" (there's a word for it, but I can't recall it off the top of my head), and I didn't want to lose that, so I decided to reformulate. I assumed that it was the Linseed oil that was causing the darkening, so I took some of the original mixture (about one fluid oz), and added more polyurethane at about a 1:1 ratio. That did result in less darkening of the wood. I could have swore I took a picture of it after just one coat, but here it is with about a half dozen coats. It's darker than when I started, but I don't think it will get a whole lot darker than this:

I also started work on the headstock. I decided to dub this guitar the "Titan-90". It was a name that was suggested by another AGF'er (sorry, I can't remember who it was off the top of my head, but I think it was one of the "dogs" ), for another project that's been on hiatus for a while (a Tele with a P90 in the neck position), but I think a baritone guitar with 2 P90s deserves this title more.

First, I put down a few coats of the original "Moss-Oil" mixture to darken the wood. On Maple, this finish behaves quite differently. Being a closed-pore wood, it doesn't drink up the oil the way Ash does. It just kinda lays on the surface, and when it's dry, there's still an oily residue remaining. I wasn't planing on completely finishing the front of the headstock with this stuff. I just wanted it to darken the wood and provide a smooth surface for the decal to adhere to. I'm now spraying gloss polyurethane to bury the decal, and I'll finish with a coat of satin poly to match the rest of the guitar.