Making and using templates for items on your CBG build's is quick and easy! Thanks to Brian Romero (Bairfoot Cajun) for this tip...
Use light weight cardboard from the case of a soda carton (I use Canada Dry - mixes well with scotch; Brian uses Moun
A good source for good vinyl is your local sign shop. I have a friend who owns one and can get scrap rolls in just about any color, thickness and selectivity.
I bought from fleabay some very cheap leather punches in the 7 - 8 mil size and honed the
I am going to try making milk paint with natural pigments for adding some color to the Dulcimer I'm working on.
It has survived since ancient Egypt, and was also used by the pioneers on Colonial furniture.
It has the effect of adding soft color while
We just had a great thread about the (not) use of Gorilla Glue (not going there) which lead to how to secure a fretboard and some methods to keep the fretboard from shifting while gluing. Here are some suggestions/techniques that I gleaned from the o
I built my dulcimer almost 30 years ago at a fair that was part a museum project on the mountain dulcimer. I paid $20 for the kit and the project leader helped the people me included build our dulcimers.
our frets are actually baling wire (from old
Here is a simple Fret Scale ruler I made that I use constantly. It saves me the time of having to print out fret scales on paper, cut them and transfer them to a neck or fret board. For this particular rule, I used a piece of extra copper flat stock
Making and Installing Position Markers for Your Guitar - by Brian Johnson edited by Dragon
Here's a simple and economical way to make fret position markers with little chance of destroying you work. I am sure that someone else has probably done this
Here is a simple fret depth checking gauge for those who use standard guitar frets...I decided to make this a separate discussion from the fret jig thread for obvious reasons.
Very simply, take a 3 to 4 inch long piece of standard fret wire and bend
How to make a custom logo in one-million, well, 5 easy steps
By Bill Jehle, edited by Dragon
What you'll need:
Printable Transparency film (Available from Office Depot. The kind used for making overhead projections for presentations)
A computer wit
On the neck near where the top of the fret board is going to be....on the right hand side near the edge ....drive in one of those tiny skinny nails or brads or whatever they call them ...but only about 1/2 way....down at the bottom of where the fret
I have a bunch of signatures on my CBG. Johnny Winter, Jimmy Vaughn, Mac Arnold, George Thorogood, pAt mAcdonald, Bob Margolin,etc and all of them are written in Sharpie marker. Sharpies are great in that they are thick enough and can be applied to a
So making a radius is not easy for the... tool challenged. That is, if you don't have the right tools and we all don't at one time or another. So I devised a clever tool to sand down a fretboard to the radius I wanted.
Damn, I love this group. And the greatest thing is when we solve common problems with everyday solutions. Mind you, there are better [read: more costly commercial] solutions out there but if you really want to make your instrument in the hand made fa
Just get a good quality Vinyl Sticker (Bumper sticker) and pass it through a 3 hole punch. You can make as many as you need, in any color you prefer. They hold up nice. You can always get these quality stickers for free from your local radio statio
Read more…
OK, I got a wild hair and wound my first pickup last night. It works...not real loud, since the smallest wire I had on hand was 34 gauge, but still not bad. It is a short fat little guy and I like the tone...it tames the highs quite well in compari
Bangin' around can make your day go really bad. Take today for instance. I'm putting a good coat of oil on the fretboard/neck which happens to be in my wood vise when the whole thing slips out! SH17! Frig!
I have used the stain called Aquafortis on maple and walnut before. What it is is (degreased) steel wool dissolved in Nitric acid. You paint it on and let it dry completely. The acid dissolves the iron out of the steel wool and carries it down deep i