Recent content by BillK

I do this quite often with wood dust or spirit-based stains sometimes. Wood dust gives an opaque solid look, with stains it's translucent. At least depending on thickness of fill, amount of tint and darkness of colour I suppose. Just don't add too much stain vs the epoxy amount, it shrinks a bit...

I have one, very useful to me (make guitars) and wouldn't be without one. Biggish blanks or sub-2mm plates, good with figured wood. Extraction is very effective, virtually nothing escapes (half-round section hood, quite close-fitting). Mine is manual push, didn't bother with power feed and...

I use a solid carbide stub-type bit for exactly this. You only need to go in a few mm anyway, 3-4 is plenty, but my bit has about 15-20mm flute on it. Side dots have been punched from celluloid sheet back in the day, so very shallow, there's no real advantage to going more than a few mil. I...

The inlet filters will probably stop wood dust or most of it, but they're not super-fine filters. Paint overspray can make it's way in and eventually clog the reed valves. When this happens the comp builds very slowly and probably doesn't reach cutout pressure, so runs & runs. This happened to...

I've used a sled or baseboard to put small pieces through p/t or drum sander, also a mini self-contained router sled: make a base, add side rails screwed to the outer ends under the base. Pic below with luck.. D/s tape or hot glue the pieces to a flat surface and skim them with the router. I've...

The hoops structure is amazing Scotty. Everything I do is small, or small and fiddly both. Love to see that kind of thing, as well as everything that gets made around here. My good mate badgered me to get an overhead and so glad I did. I've seen some in the premises of well-known makers, they're...

That Wadkin looks great. I have an Elu overhead router, it had a MOF11 in with too much runout. Luckily found a Dewalt for it (627). I look out for them to have one for backup but they're rare as an honest politician. I use the pin with some fixtures but I do most of my template routing on it...

Superior as in the Liberon one? It's very clear is the main thing, not yellow/brown - keeps the wood colour well:

Dunno if that was particularly meant re my post but doesn't matter, sometimes you don't know what you got till you tried it. Sometimes you have to buy what you can afford instead of best of breed. Nowadays there's usually forum posts & feedback on everything under the sun so it's easier to get...

I had an Evo saw, while not top drawer quality it did a fair bit of work, but died recently. Wasn't super accurate but I didn't need that really. Felt like there was a small amount of play or maybe some flex. The back fence wasn't anything near straight but a fat rubber mallet sorted that out...

@Sideways I did chop the beams on an Evo sliding mitre saw, which has since died. It was very handy for years but beyond me to figure out what was wrong with it. The cuts were never that clean in ally though but was a pretty cheap saw I guess, some deflection or slop in it. Bandsaw on the blocks...

A bandsaw chops ally easily, I got an M42 blade but also a standard blade worked fine - it was wearing out anyway so didn't worry about damage or ally smearing on it's teeth. Only thing was it wasn't so good tracking straight through the thicker bar parts (15, 25, 30mm) - just going slow and a...

I used pear for a guitar body once, with central laminations. Titebond original, all was good, no visible lines. The pear looked pretty boring dry but showed patches of flame & more character when wetted, also seemed to bruise very easily, like any slight dink showed dark under a finish.

Fender use all common coatings i.e. cellulose and 2k and/or polyester. Both gloss and satin. Same goes for bodies; back in the 50s it was all nitro. Then later some type of sealer and often a mix of 1k and celly on the same body, for colour & clear. But copies are almost certainly 2k or...

Citric acid is good stuff, quick if used with hot water. Safe as anything to use & dispose (can eat it, take a bath in it - bath bombs made of it). Long time since I used a liner kit but it came with an acid (hydrochloric maybe?) meant to etch, before using the resin. I did shake it with nuts &...