Soloist in green PRS-style Laguna Dragon Breath finish

Thanks!
I have the matching buttons, truss rod cover, and control back plate but completely forgot about the tremolo cover... Even though I'm not sure I'll install it I'll try building one and stain it before sending everything for finishing, hopefully it'll be easier to build than the control plate.
 
Had a busy week-end learning how to plane a very rough piece of wood with just a router because feeding curly maple to a planer didn't work so well (got to learn the hard way)...

From there I built a tremolo cover, and another set of truss-rod+control plate.

Everything went fine except at the last stage when routing the control back plate from the wrong side.
2nd pic: that moment when you realize you just made a left-handed cover...

I salvaged it by routing out the bump and gluing another piece of wood on the other side, maybe that's better that way for rigidity anyways.
It removed a little bit too much material though, the cover is slightly thinner than the plastic one Warmoth includes.

The truss rod cover was a bit of an experiment, done entirely with a dremel cutting wheel...
It was much faster to do than it sounds.
A single piece was way too flexible, but laminating and gluing two thiner pieces made it incredibly rigid. Wonder how the stain will react at the glue joint though.

I'll build another set of control backplate and tremolo cover tonight, there's a piece of wood that seems to have even more iridescence and could look even better on this build.

Also got the Gotoh 510 yesterday and installed the stained wood buttons on it (last pic)!
 

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Everything looks amazing, but it’s those tuner buttons that are just knocking my socks off. Freaking fantastic.
 
I bought a few sets of curly buttons from Charis Acoustic last December.
Really high build quality (note the indentations on some, that's my mistake as I should have used the iron steam method to remove those prior to staining/finishing).
 
The body/neck/plates are on their way to get finished !

Last week-end I ended up making another set of backplates, as well as one truss-rod cover (1st pic). One set is finished in blue/turquoise, the other is the same fade color scheme as the body.

And Saturday I decided for some reason to make as many trussrod covers I could with the piece of curly maple I had left. I just didn't want to throw it away and there wasn't much else I could do with it.
It's amazing what you can do with a chisel and sand paper, ... and time ... :toothy12:

I stained couple of them for this build and sent them for finishing as well, I like to have spares ;-)
 

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No update since last time.

But since my last post was about making (way too many) truss rod covers I thought I'd show the ebony one I made for a recently acquired Taylor this week-end.

Using a chisel wasn't an option here given the concave shape of the Taylor and how easily ebony can crack.
Instead I used a Dremel with rotary sander. That was a lot of sanding dust, but not as time consuming as it sounds.
 

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The dragon arrived, in pieces. Now the fun part begins.

The color shifted quite a bit compared to what I had in mind initially but looks pretty good still ;-)
I think it's due to how I overlapped the colors, plus doing a 2nd pass of stains + blending probably has something to do with it too.
 

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The mounting holes of those Gotoh 510 tuners just look wrong on a Vortex  :sad1:
Guess I'm going to have to buy a set of 301 ones series for this build.

Anyone interested in a new set of 510s ? Or maybe I should keep them in case I do build with a Warmoth or Hombre headstock in the future...
 

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I ordered 301 series... Those 510 with those mounting holes just look goofy to me on this headstock shape.
There were 510 with vertical/bottom mounting holes but larger buttons and I couldn't predict for sure whether they'd work with mine (most likely the screw or shaft would have been too long).
 
docteurseb said:
The mounting holes of those Gotoh 510 tuners just look wrong on a Vortex  :sad1:
Guess I'm going to have to buy a set of 301 ones series for this build.

Anyone interested in a new set of 510s ? Or maybe I should keep them in case I do build with a Warmoth or Hombre headstock in the future...
I'm with RoboNarples, I think they look fine too, but hey, your build, your choice. And I also hope they look good on a Warmoth style headstock, 'cause that's what's being installed on mine!
 
I can see why you might want to change them. Of course, not everyone will notice or find it distracting but look forward to seeing it with the new tuners.
 
Just got them and I think they look much better on a Vortex headstock than the 510:
 

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