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Movie Review: Fairy Tale Killer/追凶

Friday, May 25, 2012 10:20AM / Standard Entry

I’ll tell you a fairy tale.

Once upon a time, the Pang Brothers made Bangkok Dangerous, a really great film.

That was a long time ago.

Danny Pang should be locked in a tower until his hair is long enough that some China investor can climb up to rescue him.

His underarm hair.

Until then, please take away his camera.

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New Guitar Project: Les Paul Junior Build – Part Six

Saturday, May 5, 2012 10:22AM / Standard Entry

We’re into the home stretch.

I drilled for the bridge posts and drilled a small hole from the lower post hole into the control cavity for the ground wire.

I routed for the pickup, making the cavity deeper than normal. That’s because I used a ‘dummy coil’ under the pickup (a regular P-90 pickup with the magnets and polepieces removed) to reduce noise that single coil pickups (like p90s) have. I used a ‘push-pull’ pot as a way to switch the dummy coil in and out of the circuit.

Originally I was going to put the dummy coil in the control cavity on the back (which is why it is bigger than a normal Junior cavity).

I drilled the hole for the input jack on the side of the guitar.

Okay, now we have photos. Of the finished guitar.

I cut out the pickguard, though it’s not an exact copy. I always wondered why the Junior pickguard looks like it does, but now that I built one I see why. The pickguard goes under the strings to the butt of the neck so that it covers the place where the mortise ends because the fretboard doesn’t go all the way to the end of the mortise.

I painted the guitar yellow because Gibson used a color that has come to be called TV Yellow. Back in the 50s, when TV was black and white, white guitars played havoc with cameras, so Gibson came up with a color that looked white on TV and didn’t make the cameras go haywire.

I’m sure it’s a lousy color match, but for HK$30 it was close enough. I didn’t grain fill the wood because I wanted the grain to show. I sprayed very little paint, and this one will probably wear through quickly. Which is fine, since that’s what I want.

I put mahogany veneer on the cavity cover so it would match the rest of the guitar.

Here you can see the neck heel, the maple laminates in the neck and the roundover in the heel area. The roundover that’s perpedicular to the neck is the one I had to do before milling the mortise. The parallel roundover was done after the neck was glued in and the excess was trimmed away.

The neck joint area came out really well, probably since I did it the right way for a change. I decided to get a little funny with the paint line:

As you can see the body’s not very smooth. The real Juniors were budget guitars that were made quickly and cheaply. I tend to see guitars as tools more than works of art, so I don’t get too carried away trying to make pristine finishes. Besides, I don’t have the equipment for that kind of thing.

The headstock came out pretty well, though it needs more lacquer. The patina is really nice because of the angle-cut quartersawn wood.

The headstock design is different from Gibson’s; Les Pauls are notorious for tuning instability because the strings come off the nut at a horizontal angle. My headstock tries to straighten the string path as much as I can.

I need to do a better job with drilling the tuner holes. On this build, I forgot to do it before I glued the neck to the body, so it was awkward. It still works, but the holes are out of alignment.

The truss rod cover is missing too. Not just from the picture, I mean I can’t find it!

I wanted to do some sort of inlay, and I wanted to do a simple Chinese character. Given my personality, and the expectation that people will ask if it’s a Gibson, I chose NO:

The bad part about those pretty maple laminates is that they make it easy to see how wrong the tuner placements are!

Speaking of wrong, I mixed up the tuner buttons because I wanted white buttons but only had 4. I have 6 brown buttons, but I like the white ones better. Hopefully soon I can get some more.

Below you can see the end of the laminate I glued on with the ‘wings’ of the headstock. It makes a nice detail.

You can also see the volute, which I think could be refined, and it may be.

Tuner button update: I ordered replacement buttons from a eBay seller in Taiwan (so it got here quickly).

They’re bigger than the old ones, but they fit, I like the color, and they’re actually more comfortable than the small ones.

The guitar sounds really good, and plays well. I need to work on the frets a little, and tweak the setup some, but it’s just what I was hoping for.

All I need now is for Rick Richards to sign it!

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New Guitar Project: Les Paul Junior Build – Part Five

Tuesday, May 1, 2012 10:20AM / Standard Entry

We’re working on the neck.

Down at the heel end, I needed to figure out how thick the neck needed to be. On a Les Paul, where the neck joins the body, the fretboard should be right at the top. Like this:

Since the mortise was already cut, I just needed to see how deep it was, then measure that same distance from the top of the neck without the fretboard.

That way I could mark out the neck and cut off the excess on the back of the neck with the table saw.

I also used the table saw to rip the neck blank to just over 2 1/4″ wide. I leave it ‘plump’ so that I can work it slowly down to where it fits very snugly into the mortise. Ideally, you should be able to pick up the body by holding the neck.

That was before I rounded the corners of the neck. Once I did, it fit up against the end of the mortise.

I used a template I made (after the HKGSEC neck template problem) so that I could rout the final dimensions in the top of the neck; 2 1/4″ where it joins the body and 1 3/4″ at the nut.

I cut away the excess on back of the neck and started shaping it. Rather than using the router, I tried a different approach.

In my internet research over the years, I had seen reference to a Japanese Saw Rasp, and during one of my trips to Japan I was lucky to find one in a hardware store. It’s a great tool for luthiers (and me), and it makes shaping the neck easy and almost fun.

I started by rounding the neck at each end to provide reference points:

Then I shaped the whole neck between those two points.

It is at this point in our narrative that the photos run out.

Once I got the neck shaped, I shaped the heel and the volute (photos later). This neck doesn’t need a volute, but the wood was there and I wanted to experiment with something I hadn’t done yet.

I glued the fretboard onto the guitar, put in fret markers on the face and sides, and fretted it. Then I glued the neck to the body.

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Movie Review: Marrying Mr.Perfect/嫁個一百分男人

Sunday, Apr 29, 2012 12:54PM / Standard Entry

90 minutes of my life I’ll never have back.

I watch every Wong Jing film, and sometimes my penance for that dedication is the watching itself.

I even went to the Grand at Elements to watch this turd. Because it was barely playing here.

How f@#$ing broke can Gigi Leung be? She took her career to China and it got disappeared faster than a dissident.

———————————————————-

You know what? F@#$ this.

It used to be fun to watch movies I knew were garbage. It’s not fun any more. I’m tired of being insulted by movies.

I know many of you were looking forward to a review of Nightfall, the new movie from the arrogant halfwits that brought us Murderer. I’m sorry, I couldn’t bring myself to waste the time and money to see Nightfall and the time to write the review.

From now on I’m not going to watch many movies, and I’m going to review even fewer. I’m bitter and cynical enough in my life without knowingly amplifying it. It got so bad I became afraid of myself.

The movies are what they have become, and they are entitled to it. If I find them so annoying, I have no choice but to walk away.

I sincerely apologize for stopping, but I quite simply don’t have the heart for it any more. I really don’t need to be reminded that the major reason for my moving to Hong Kong is now a horrifically bad joke.

So long, and thank you for laughing. It made it much easier and I am sincerely flattered and grateful.

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New Guitar Project: Les Paul Junior Build – Part Four

Wednesday, Apr 25, 2012 9:50AM / Standard Entry

It’s time to make a neck for this guitar. But there are a few things to take into consideration.

Les Paul necks were notorious for being weak at the point where the headstock meets the neck, because there isn’t much wood (thanks to the truss rod adjustment cavity) and because often the grain is horizontal instead of vertical.

In wood terms, it’s flatsawn or plain sawn instead of quartersawn.

The closer to quartersawn the wood is, the stronger that area is. If you had a flatsawn neck, it was a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Nowadays, people build these kinds of necks using quartersawn lumber, since it is stronger.

Because Les Paul necks are glued into the body, they need to be made from much thicker pieces of wood than Fender-style necks. I didn’t have any thick quartersawn mahogany stock.

But I did have some leftover wood from building my bed, and I also had a bunch of maple veneer that had been sitting around for a while too. So I decided to make a quartersawn neck blank. I took three pieces of mahogany and put maple veneer between them simply for aesthetics:

I glued it up and let it dry overnight.

The maple in the photos is overhanging; I trimmed it off and we’ll see the result later.

Once I had the blank cleaned up, I needed to cut the headstock angle. I have a jig for this using a miter saw, though to be honest I need to make a better jig.

I cut the blank at a 14 degree angle:

This gives me the face of the headstock. Then I needed to cut the excess off the back of the headstock. Mahogany is pretty easy to cut, so I used this extra-large coping saw:

I used it to cut away the excess wood on the back of the headstock:

To clean up the back of the headstock, I used the router jig I showed you above. I put the neck face down, and clamped it so that the headstock face was dead flat on the bench. Then I used the router to get the back of the headstock flat and parallel to the face. Here’s a very simple drawing to illustrate:

The headstock wasn’t wide enough at this time. It’s very common, actually. There’s no sense using up a lot of extra lumber along the entire length of the neck when you only need two little pieces around 5/8″ thick on the sides of the headstock. Gibson has done it that way for years:

I needed to make some wings. I’m going to finish the headstock in clear lacquer, so I need to try and match the wood as best I can. The best thing would be to use the same wood.

Like, for instance, the piece I cut off when I did the headstock angle. I cut it in half, not worrying about the cut because it would get machined away: