MIMF

Great! I'll pick some up tomorrow at HD.

Barry Daniels wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 4:08 pm Yes, red label, Titebond ORIGINAL Wood Glue. Around here we call it Titebond 1. They carry it at Home Depot and Ace Hardware.

Ah. Thanks for clearing that up. I have had guitars with Floyd Rose and Bigsby tailpieces, and I wasn't clear on how this type differed. Keep in mind that this type of vibrato is really designed to work in only one direction. It can move forward to lower the tension of the strings. But there is no m...

Scale length is EXACTLY twice the distance of the 12th fret to the inside face of the nut. So your scale length is 25-3/4". But you need compensation added to get the guitar to play in tune, so you need to add about 0.15" to the scale length. Thank you! That's very useful, and something I...

Thank you again, Barry! It's bewildering to me how much that it seems some guitar people obsess over pick-up placement. I read page after page of debate over it (at times a bit rancorous) on Harmony Central and other fora, so I thought I should ask before presuming it was all nonsense along the line...

Thank you, Barry! That's good to know.
Left to my own devices, I tend to overthink (and over-build) everything.
Looking at their website, Titebond seems to have a bewildering variety of wood glues! You're recommending the one with the red label?
http://www.titebond.com/guide/completed/glues

Continuing the saga of the Kay "Vanguard II" I'm building-up: I am wondering about pick-up placement. I've read about nodes and anti-nodes until my head spins, and yet pick-up placement still somehow feels like it's one of the dark arts that I will never grasp. This seems especially true s...

As I have mentioned in my thread about the tailpiece, the body and neck of the solid-bodied Kay "Vanguard II" that I am working on were purchased from two different sellers. The neck is definitely a Kay of the same era, and originally of the same profile as the stock Vanguard II neck/heads...

Continuing with my 1960s solid-body Kay "Vanguard II" project: the stock tailpiece was a very crude vibrato unit (really just a steel rod crossing a sort-of soapdish), so I bought a new unit that was not intended for this body, and I have to figure out how to mount it. The new unit is not ...

Thank you, Barry

The size of dowel I could fit in the existing holes would only be about 1/8". If I were to go the "plug and screw" route would you recommend first drilling-out the holes to the maximum diameter of the screws (probably just shy of 1/4"), so that the threads that have already been ...

I recently bought a mid-1960s Kay solid-body guitar body and a similar-vintage Kay solid-body bolt-on neck which I got to build-up together. I first wrote both sellers to ask them to measure the widths of the neck pocket and the heel of the neck, and both measurements they reported were the same, so...

I have a WWII-era Deagan marimba that was missing the top 3 sharps when I got it. I had previously asked here about substituting some padauk tonebars from a cheap xylophone, and I fitted them, but never liked their tone (or their appearance), compared to rest of the Honduras rosewood tonebars. Well,...

I'm starting on a project for making a music box that will be permanently mounted out-of-doors here in the San Francisco Bay Area, about a mile from the ocean (and consequently subjected to the corrosive atmospheric conditions that we get). I was thinking of machining the comb (or "harp", ...

Thank you, Nate! I appreciate the experienced advice. I used to make marimbas for zimbabwean-style marimba ensembles - I've made about 50 instruments of various sizes, mostly using paduak and mahogany for the keys. Bob is correct. The suspension points should be located at the primary nodes - theore...

...I would guess that the small size of the block contributes more to the bright tone than the actual materials used. Yes -- the size, and the fact that sounding blocks typically are solid, resting directly upon a podium. I would expect that even the most resonant tonewood like rosewood would still...

This probably counts as one of the odder projects ever posted on MIMF, but here goes: I'm a Freemason and we use gavels on sounding blocks to mark certain points in the procedures of our meetings. Typically, the three officers of a Lodge use solid wood sounding blocks more or less 6" in diamete...

I know that it's possible to fabricate new tonebars, and out of a variety of woods (not just the original Brazilian rosewood). If I wanted to go that direction right now, I'd be grateful for the advice that you folks could give. But as I said in the OP, I only want to make the xylophone playable as ...

"It can't be that hard"? Really ? I would need a source for Brazilian rosewood -- a wood that's very difficult to find and basically illegal to buy or sell, probably have to pay more for that lumber than I paid for the xylophone, would then have to find some way to mill it to the correct t...

I have an old Deagan xylophone that happens to be missing the top 3 accidentals. I'd like to make it playable so I can practice with it but have had no luck finding suitable replacements for the original rosewood bars. I also have a cheapo student's tabletop xylophone (no resonators) that has padauk...

So, I have a student-grade glockenspiel and the keyboard from an old reed organ and naturally, I want to find a way to force them into some kind of unholy relationship. My first thought was to make a keyboard glockenspiel, using solenoids to strike the tonebars, triggered by contact switches attache...