thanks for the tip on that website. somehow they never came up on any searches. LOTS of knobs. I only see one set of wooden ones, though. most seem to be plastic, but a few metal ones. looks like a REALLY good source for amp knobs, though. Iāve seen the odd used amp (or pedal, even) for sale with missing knobs so this is a good source to keep in the back pocket.
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The knobs did arrive first so I got to looking at them. Yeah, my dad had real problems with the central bore for the pot shafts. No different than my early attempts with the bit flexing and getting a cockeyed hole. One of them looks like it turned out well, amusingly enough.
I went ahead and filled those holes with epoxy so I can start over on those. I think Iāve figured out how to get those holes drilled centered and straight. I started working on a jig to hold the knobs in place. I need to spend some more time verifying that I have the position exactly centered on the drill press before I start making any holes. But at least right now, itās REALLY close.
When I get ready to drill, Iām going to kick the drill speed up much higher. My drill press is the type where youāve gotta move the belt to change the rpms of the bit. Iāve got a good brad tip bit thatās new and sharp and Iām just going to take it slow so I lessen any effects of the bit flexing as it gets into parts of wood (or resin) with variable density or grain direction or whatever.
The pot showed up later, so I can start working on replacing the volume pot in the guitar, too.
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Itās a big amp and pedal builder site. I try and check the sale stuff before looking other places and great for builders. Just make sure they are the correct type of knobs push on vs the ones with a set screw. I like the ones with a set scew for pedals, but not for guitars, also it depends on split shaft vs solid pot.
Good progress today. I swapped out that bad volume pot and tested it out. Volume control works smoothly as it should now. Thatās the last soldering I need to do so I can put away all those tools/supplies. Letting the soldering iron cool off for now.
Resin is still curing in the knobs so it will be a little bit still before I can drill them out again in an attempt to get them to install straight. I used the super thin penetrating flood coat epoxy so it would pour easily and settle into the little recess, so itās probably going to take a few days before itās ready to drill.
Iāll probably use the same stuff when I am ready to pour the knob tops with the turquoise chips. Iām going to do a slightly different method this time. On my last attempt, I mixed the stone chips with the resin before I poured it and I found it difficult to ensure I got enough stone chips. This time Iām going to pour the resin into place and then mix the stone chips into it. With the really thin resin, this should allow any bubbles I introduce this way to float out. It will also let me make sure I get plenty of stone packed in there.
The other stuff I used was on the thick side and while I think it would be fine for the process if I was working on a larger piece, I think the tight quarters make it a little tougher to work with. Mixing the stone chips after pouring, Iām pretty sure Iād have air bubbles in there that I could never get out.
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damn Iāve been wasting so much time trying to make these knobs. I was working this evening on trying to āfixā the knobs my dad turned. I got a little better results, but I was still unsatisfied.
I was doing some digging on the interwebs and very nearly dropped $72 + shipping on some walnut knobs from someone who does this. But then I read on an old forum post archived somewhere about someone using a plug cutter to make knobs. I didnāt know what a plug cutter was so I looked it up. When I did I realized that I have a better way. A hole saw. Because the hole saw uses a pilot bit, I could put my 1/4" brad tip bit in there and have a walnut guitar knob assembly line. I donāt have quite the size hole saw I need for this, but thatās easily remedied. I tried out the closest I did have (a bit small) and in short order I had a perfectly concentric knob that Iāve been struggling to make for months now.
On the one hand Iām glad I finally got to this point. But on the other hand Iām pissed that I didnāt get there sooner.
I also did a bunch of fret work and got the strings installed on the uke. I plan to get the strings on the guitar tomorrow and hopefully can get to work sanding the nuts down where they need to be. Both are too high. But at least the guitar nut is loose. The uke nut is glued down pretty firmly. tbh, I kinda wish the luthier who made it had put it in a baggie and taped it to the neck.
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Great āah hahā moment. Persistence paid off!
I might try making some wooden knobs with your technique. Are you drilling and tapping the knob for a set screw?
I am using a threaded brass insert (press in type) for a set screw.
I want to wind up with 3/4" diameter knobs so I am going to try for a 7/8" or maybe even 13/16" hole saw to give me room to sand.
This method puts that 1/4" hole all the way through the knob blank. so you need to make a cap to cover it. Iām doing the caps with resin, so I have that taken care of.
I was watching some vids and a couple of the luthiers mentioned that using stabilized wood is a good idea to keep things from cracking. I think Iām going to use CA glue for that purpose here. Iām already going to be using CA glue to make sure the threaded insert stays put, so itāll be easy enough to just use a lot and allow it to seep into the wood pores.
My wife did the finishing on my StewMac S-type kit and did layers of epoxy. A hair dryer helped a lot in getting the bubbles out, so you could consider trying that. Or a heat gun but itās quite easy to overdo things with one of those.
the knob tops are too small, I think, for that technique to do much.
I have a heat gun and used it on the first batch (with thicker epoxy). If the bubbles are already on the very top surface, then it works okay. But if they are not at the surface on their own, itās not helpful. and yeah, too much heat gun and the epoxy starts to set faster at the surface (you get a film).
thatās a bit part of the reason why I plan to use a thinner resin formula this time around. hopefully it will allow the bubbles to rise on their own. the fact that Iām mixing tiny stone chips into it definitely complicates matters. I might try some gentle mixing with a tiny mixing stick if I have to.
My hole saw knobs also arenāt perfect. mostly owing to finding workarounds to the limited āthrowā of my benchtop drill press. But the concentricity is MUCH better than anything else and I think I can work with this. Going to mount the knobs in the drill press and do some prelim shaping to address a few things (namely making sure the top and bottom are square to the sides - I donāt have a good way to make perfectly square cross cuts).
Barlow guitars shared on their Facebook page recently that they mounted knobs in a router for some final shaping. Now, it looks like their knobs were already pretty perfectly shaped and they were just doing some polishing and roundover shaping.
Despite hours of googling, I couldnāt find anything except horror stories of people mounting things in routers that they shouldnāt have. One guy diving for cover while his router table behaved like a bucking bronco and shook itself to pieces before shorting out and tripping a circuit breaker. And another guy who didnāt get out of the way fast enough and got a hole punched in his cheek by shards of flying material. So even though Barlow does something that looks an awful lot like mounting knobs in a router, Iām going to stay far, far away from that idea.
My wife and I have a router and a table to mount it to, and have used it to good effect. Itās an amazingly powerful tool that can also be very dangerous, so your caution is well advised. I think many people get in trouble with a router trying to take too large of a cut in a single pass. The examples you found where probably misapplications of the tool. And sometimes stuff just happens: the guy we hired to make a custom fit oak bookcase for our house thankfully avoided injury when a router bit he was using on the project just exploded (the end result of his build is wonderful).
What you wrote about Barlow almost sounds like they were using a router as a substitute for a lathe, which seems like a much better tool for the job.
I have no idea what they used for the initial shaping of the knob, as that wasnāt part of the vid. they just showed some sanding. I sure wish I knew how they got such a perfect knob that they could spin it up like that.
Hereās the link to the vid on the book of face and youāll see what Iām referring to.
They probably had a speed controller to slow that router waaay down.
Agree that routers are dangerous. Spinning at 20K RPM puts a lot of stress on bits. I now pay up for name brand bits (regardless of all the great reviews on Amazon for cheap bits).
I was soooooooo close the other day to dropping $72 on plain walnut knobs (and thinking about mucking them up and doing the epoxy/turquoise caps)
grrr. a bit frustrating over the nut sanding. I have a decent nut sanding tool, but apparently the depth adjust screws arenāt level when they are both zeroed. I assumed they were and ended up sanding too much off of the high E side. so now Iām building thickness back with CA glue and sanded nut material. I finally have the angle how I want it but now I need to wait for the glue to dry again because I need to fill some little depressions that didnāt get enough the last time around.
Iām wishing pretty hard right now that I had bought some of the CA glue activator so I didnāt have to wait so long. gonna give it some light heat with the heat gun in hopes of moving it along.
whoa. this thing is FIRE.
Got the nut leveled out and then worked on pickup height and intonation and stuff. Installed the strap buttons and then plugged it in. I still need to do some truss rod adjustments, but I wanted to get a feel for the way it sounds.
holy sweet mother this guitar absolutely rips. Dial back the volume and the cleans are very nice. Dime that volume and all by isself, it becomes a different angry beast altogether. Ample growling grit. Little hints of feedback start to sing when you hold a note or a chord for awhile. Put on some mild/moderate OD and it dives easily into screaming feedback.
This guitar will definitely get some preference over my Les Paul for grittier sounds. The LP had āchimierā cleans which are nice, so itāll probably get preference for cleaner stuff. I might try out that treble bleed to see what it does. If it adds some sparkle at the top end, especially on clean stuff, but doesnāt take anything away from that growl/grit, then I might make it permanent.
Still need to get the knobs done and some truss rod adjustments to address some neck relief, but itās sooooo close to finished.
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Got the setups finished for both the guitar and the uke. They feel really nice to play now. Wife canāt wipe the grin off her face. I felt confident in the nut heights, so I went ahead and glued those down today.
Then turned my attention fully to the knobs. The hole saw āplugsā definitely werenāt perfect. But they were at least workable enough that I could sand them down to practically perfect. The fret leveling beams I bought came in handy here, too, since I could make certain I was sanding the sides straight and square. Iāve got them all down to exact dimensionsā¦at least to fractions of a mm.
Iām ready to pour the epoxy tops on them now.
I mentioned earlier I had to adjust the āprocessā to work around the shorter depth capacity of my little drill press. The depth capacity I have was just enough to work with the knobs, but the hole saw with the central bit inside is too tall and thatās where I had to get creative.
So here you can see that I started with square blocks cut from my walnut turning blank. I clamped it down and used a forstner bit to put the recess in. Then changed the forstner for the brad-tip 1/4" bit and drilled the central hole (all the way through the MDF base Iām working on). Hereās where it gets creative. When I remove the 1/4" bit, instead of pulling it out completely, I slide it down into the hole I just drilled. Now I can put the hole saw in the chuck, tighten that down, and slide the 1/4" bit up and into the arbor for the hole saw. Now that bit serves as a guide for the hole saw.
And then I can cut out the āplugā Iāll shape for the knobs.
Lots of sanding to take out the remaining irregularities and bring them down to size (3/4" diameter and about 0.65" tall).
Forgot to mention that in order to mount the knobs in the drill press on that allthread, I needed to install the inserts for the set screws. I guess I needed some metric drill bits here, because the insert really needed a hole in between two of my SAE bits. I had to go with the larger one just to get the insert in. But it wanted to slide around in there. I had to be careful about where it was when I put the CA glue on it to hold it in place.
There are my knobs. Those recesses arenāt perfect. But theyāre bit enough to rotate around the mounting nut for the pots, and you wonāt be able to see them when the knobs are installed. Iām fine with that. I wonāt say I ālikeā my hidden mistakes. But Iām glad that my worst mistakes are hidden.
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Wow dude, you are in the home streach. I super stoked for you. What a amazing and successful dual project.
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Heck yeah! I just got the resin and turquoise for the knob caps poured. Now to wait a few days for that to cure. Putting the turquoise into the āmoldsā first was the right choice. I got to control how much stone was in there before putting in any resin. And the resin Iām using is thin enough that it seeped down through the gaps in the stone no problem with minimal bubbles.
The āresin mold tapeā Iām using is maybe not all itās cracked up to be. The adhesive wasnāt really sufficient to seal up the pores in the walnut, so when I poured the resin in, it weeped down through the wood grain and the tape really fast. I just hope it doesnāt glue the set screws in place. That would be really frustrating. The knobs at least fit snug enough that I could get away without functional set screws. But still. Weāll see how that shakes out I guess.
I guess one way around that would be to use the resin on its own as a pore sealer on the knobs, let it cure, and then maybe the tape would seal better? A bit late for that now.
I finished with setup and final tuning now that the nuts are glued down. I maybe should have installed the uke bridge just a touch closer to the neck. To properly intonate it, Iām near the max adjustment point for the saddles. I got it though, so I donāt need to mess with it.
Also broke the B string on the guitar while doing final tuning. Sigh. I wasnāt even doing much. Just turning the tuning knob. At least I had another set of electric guitar strings laying around. I considered just stealing the B string from that pack. But theyāre different brands, the replacements are uncoated (whereas the one that broke was coated), and ever so slightly different gauges. I checked to see if I could get single strings locallyā¦and I couldā¦but again I probably couldnāt get the same gauge in a coated string. So I bit the bullet and replaced them all. Driving to one of the shops to buy a single string at less than $1 wasnāt worth it. It would cost me that much just to start my truck and get it out of the neighborhood.
Iāll just order more sets of electric guitar strings (and get a replacement set for the uke while Iām at it).
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Completion is imminent. As in, later today.
Iāve been working on these knobs. I figured some stuff out along the way. Using a set screw to affix them to a piece of allthread was fine for improving their roundness from the hole saw. But I found that it was inconsistent if I had to remove the knob. And thatās where the last image left off. It was fine for getting them ready to pour the resin caps. Shamefully, I didnāt take any pictures of that process. The short of it is that I also coated the walnut with epoxy (a happy accident). I also found that I STILL couldnāt manage to get all of the air bubbles out (especially along the sides of the mold tape). And I had a bit of edge crumbling off when I was milling the resin caps to thickness with my dremel. I think that primarily came from spots along the edge where chunks of resin sat directly against other chunks, without enough resin in-between to firmly keep them together. Itās okay, later shaping minimized a lot of that.
I managed to find some sort of 1/4" split shaft pin at the local Ace Hardware. It was just long enough that I could securely attach the knobs and clamp it in the drill chuck. That split shaft fit in the knobs tight enough that they held securely and consistently. Then as I sanded the outer diameter of the knobs (to get the epoxy sanded down smooth), I learned that they still werenāt totally round, but that the epoxy I put on there helped me see what I still needed to sand to get them perfectly round. These knobs are VERY highly round. Iām very pleased with that part.
Here you can sorta see that pin. It fit so snugly that I had to hammer it in. And to get the knob off, I needed to use a small rubber strap wrench sorta like this. This pin is just a tiny bit larger in diameter than the pots, fwiw.
Hereās all 4 knobs completed after the first coat of oil finish last night. Iāll get the last 2 coats on before lunchtime and will be able to mount them later on today. I sanded the walnut to 400 grit sandpaper (as opposed to about 1500 for the bodies) so thereās just a little bit of texture. The resin caps are polished to about 12,000 grit (wet sanded, actually). You can see some of the little bubbles. I made 1 early attempt to fill those with epoxy but didnāt really get very far with it. I contemplated then using a thicker CA glue after the rough shaping but before polishing. That would have done it I think, but you know, Iām good with those little imperfections. Itās another little indication that these are handmade.
Iām going to put little white marker dots on the tops so you can see the knob position (though the brass inserts and set screws will be a little tactile indication of knob position). Maybe should have done that before polishing last night. But honestly I was in such a groove that I didnāt think about it until after the first coat of oil. No matter. Iāll get them on. Itāll be one of the faster jobs once I get a jig set up so I can get the position exactly the same for all 4. Once I get them on, Iām going to use the dremel to recess the dots just a little bit. Another tactile indicator, though probably a little too subtle to be truly useful. But a detail nonetheless.
I havenāt told my wife yet, but Iām bringing her electric uke to the uke fest with our battery powered portable amp. Sheās taking a class or two where she could put the lessons directly into play on the electric.
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