How feasible is this to DIY? I'm supposing not but if anyone has ideas.
I want to make a guitar out of resin - the same stuff you see fancy bog seats with embedded razor blades being made of. One piece body and neck hopefully.
It would be two resins, one opaque black, and one deep red with a glitter finish inside. The body wouldn't be solid but would be made of resin channels. A kind of skeleton type design. The design is not really completed in my head yet but that sort of idea.
How DIYable is that stuff, and if not at all, anyone know where you can get one off pieces done? Perhaps 2 off or 3 off if it needs prototyping or multiple drafts doing?
Making something that looked like a guitar would be pretty easy. Making something that sounded halfway decent is likely to be very, very hard and you may have to work by trial and (repeated) error.
You won't do a one-piece for your first, but casting a body and then attaching a cheap ready-made recycled neck would be a much easier route.
The resin is water-white embedding resin: polyester, but not just the usual fibreglass layup resin. Hopefully you'll be near somewhere like Glassplies in Southport who are good at this sort of thing and sell the whole bundle. This resin is easy to work with and will go on either clear or coloured, as needed.
You start with a mould. This is an MDF box, basically a thick slab board with sidewalls on top of it. It can be as crude as you like outside. It will save you some effort for multiple casts if you make it so that a few sides can be unscrewed. Fill and radius the inner corners with a smear of plasticine and a ball-bearing rubber to shape the minimum radius. Shellac the inside (with shellac (Screwfix)) and then wax it _very_ carefully with mould release wax (Glassplies)
Pour your resin in layers. No more than 1/4" in a pour, unless you're feeling brave and practiced. Follow the resin maker's advice.
Don't use old resin or especially catalyst. Buy fresh.
If you're embedding, pour a layer, places your things, pour more around them and cover them in one go. Vacuum degass. Don't pour only halfway up a thing, it's a recipe for trapped air bubbles. If you do have air bubbles, winkle them out with a wire (or vacuum). Things that aren't flat are best supported on a snippet of resin rod, that you cast earlier (it disappears).
Repeat the pours quickly (couple of hours, maker's advice), then leave it for a few days to harden fully (maker's advice). It's usually best to strip the mould relatively quickly. You need the resin "solid", but don't need it hard yet.
While you're about it, cast yourself some control knobs to go with it. Just dumping spare resin into plumbing wastepipe is OK if you have a lathe (split it out and turn it up later), otherwise cast over some ready-made knobs in a home-made mould. Use plasticine to stop the resin going where you don't want and to leave the lock grubscrews accessible.
I'd strongly suggest a vacuum pump, because vacuum degassing saves a whole bunch of problems with trapped wind. If you don't have one (eBay, fairly cheap) then at least use a Vac-U-vin coffee jar (car boot sale, they go down to 1/4atmosphere) to degass each batch pour of resin before pouring it.
Once you have a body blank, machine it into a guitar. Plenty of books on this, but it's largely an exercise in jig routing. Cast resin will machine OK, but watch for heat buildup (sharp cutters, adequate cut, control the speed to suit) as hot resin goes soft and sticky.
Polish the surface with successive grades of wet & dry, down to a couple of thousand (CSM Just Abrasives, believe me it's easier than polishing compound). Then use either Micromesh abrasives (best, not cheap) or polishing compounds and lots of elbow grease & water.
Remember that Lou Reed's celebrated album "Metal Machine Music" was recorded on a plastic resin-cast guitar...
First thing that comes to mind is some resins always have a nasty tacky feel to them. So picking the exact one might be difficult without expert advice.
Second an un-reinforced casting would bow as you tensioned the strings so you would end up with something you could use with arrows. So steel or aluminium rods would be needed.
The actual casting seems a lengthy but solvable problem with a bit of love and dedication.
It would certainly be worth some time *playing* with it. :)
Nearly all do - it's caused by curing whilst exposed to the air. There are two solutions:
Sand the tacky surface down and re-polish it. This is the usual solution, especially if you're machining it anyway and will need to do some polishing,
Cure it in a closed mould. The supplier will also sell Mylar (polyester) sheet that you can lay across the exposed surface
A third solution is to use a resin (or additive) that stops the tacky surface problem. Handy for the last layup coat when you can't do otherwise, but I wouldn't use it here.
That's why bridges aren't screwed to the surface of the body, but are attached through the back too. The idea is to have as much force as possible as a purely compressive force, rather than an asymmetric bending force. There will be _some_ bending, but that's how they work
OP - you have to be careful not to use a resin that doesn''t have an exothermic reaction when setting
You need to build up layers
Making it is one thing, finishing and polishing is another It's not quite as simple as you might think. You could easily create cracks milling out the internals
Really, wood is a much better material
Bernard - what you need is a rigid dense material for a good sustain - epoxy would more or less be up to the task, presuming that he's talking about a solid body axe
You need a truss rod to adjust the neck to take the optimum shape under string tension.
It needs an accurate fingerboard with a very slight bow under string tension.
You need a good bridge rigidly coupled to a fairly dense body, some decent pickups, and then you have an electric guitar.
In a typical Gibson solid body, there are almost no interactions between the string tones and the rest of the guitar. That was les pauls intention.
In a fender there are some. The tremolo bridge on a start plus the overall lighter bodies mean that there is a small amount of acoustic resonance, which is why a strat feeds back better on some notes than others., whereas a Les Paul is much more even in sustained feedback.
If you are using a loaded epoxy for the neck it will still need a truss rod. There is no other way to set the neck precisely correct.
I see no real reason not to use a resin cast body either and even cast it in one piece.
I wouldn't use a piezo pickup tho. Crap for a leccy. Use coils and magnets.
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