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Thoughts?


Thistle

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I'm in the design stage for my second guitar. Don't want to make a clone of any kind so I spent a few hours tonight drawing up something. It's ended up a bit Yamaha sg unintentionally but after a while it's easy to convince myself something looks good.

It'll be a thruneck with maple top. Just need some honest opinions before I start making templates etc. What do you think?

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The concept is good but the body just looks a bit small by about 20%. Of course that just my opinion. I will say that the point in the bottom is real trouble when it comes to sanding and finishing. You might make it a bit wider to give yourself a fighting chance. I did a similar thing, but larger, and it was more work for sure.

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A Les Paul is often considered to have perfect proportions. I like to start with that and then start modifying. I just keep comparing ratios: distance from the waist to the bottom vs from there to the top; width of lower bout compared to width of upper bout compared to width of the waist and so on. You can change the shape drastically, but if you keep the proportions similar to those of an LP, odds are it will look visually balanced.

SR

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This may or may not be helpful but I use Photoshop to design by placing a half-transparency existing guitar(of similar type) on top of my design and tweaking where necessary. Just make sure the necks and frets line up. I have a design for a LP style that looks a little goofy in scale but when compared to a real LP it's dead on. I did that same thing with my first design and an Ibanez RG. I had to do some major tweaking to the drawing I started with and scanned.

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Also, for Mac users there's a, I'm not even kidding, 100% free beta of Rhino CAD OSX on their site. Works great. I have Rhino purchased and have it on a parallels install, but still use the OSX version for convenience. Only issue I've ever encountered is some failed trims commands.

Chris

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Thanks for all the input guys. Been reading lots of guitar design stuff over the last few days. I'm not on a computer all that often so cad or photoshop designing would take an age for me. @psiko, I prefer drawing at 1:1 scale. My drawing board is a sheet of plywood and my canvas is a roll of lining paper so I'm about as low tech as possible in the design stage.

It has now morphed into a chambered thruneck with f holes. Still working on it tho. Better??

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I think it looks great, Thistle. The only comment I have right now (sorry if this has already been made) is that the neck joint has a lot of potential weakness if this is not a neck-through. SG-itis. It reminds me of the Ibanez Artist, or even the Roland G303 which IIRC Ibanez built for them. The Roland has more meat around the neck joint and was neck-though. The last one I laid my hands on was an absolute beast. If it were a 12-string it would have destroyed planets with love.

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Yeah it is a neckthru Prostheta, one piece this time round from a nice bit Brazil mahogany. Found it as 100 year old stock in a little woodshop up north and got a bargain, got enough for four neckthru blanks and wings. Already started..

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I'll do a build thread once I'm a bit further in.

One question... How thick do I need to leave the back and sides? I'd like to get as much volume im the sound cavities as possible.

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Whilst it is maybe not what you should do, but the physical limit is somewhere in the region of a few mm. Think about how thick the back and sides of an acoustic are! I'd not make it much thinner than 4mm myself, purely because I feel there is little advantage in it. It's more dependant on what it practical to you, and what your tools/skills will allow. Just don't take unnecessary risks, especially with such a nice piece of old stock!

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SwedishLuthier would be a good person to chime in on this. I think 4mm is a good minimum for structural purposes. Anything less and you might as well laminate a thin back onto a hollow shell. Of course, anything thicker is going to be easier to achieve and much stronger also. As for "loudness", I think that is much of a muchness.

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When I did a hollowed out guitar a while ago I left the back a bit thicker, I think I was in the 6-7 mm range, possibly a tad more. However I had the top "de-coupled" from the center stock. In that sense the guitar was a "true" arch top as the top was carved and braced and could vibrate freely. If I would have had the top glued to the centre stock I would have taken the back down a bit further, towards the 4-5 mm mark. the top was about 3 mm thick

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Decoupling is another layer of difficulty, certainly. Realistically speaking, how much do you think the thickness remaining on the back of a chambered affects the end product? I would suspect, "very little" unless you end up in archtop/acoustic sorts of territory....

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No science at all here, but I have the feeling that if you run your fingers across the surface (smooth sliding motion here, no knocking) and you are starting to hear that "acoustic" vibrating quality (however that might be quantified) the wood will start to act as a part of the "acoustic system" in a much more serious way than if the surface have a much more "dead" sound (compare to a solid body guitar). I actually did exactly that with my MorningStar right now out of curiosity and the back has almost the same response as the top. I actually tried to measure more precisely the thickness of the back and it is pretty close to 5 mm. So at that thickness (if my theory is right) the back or top will already start playing a bigger part of the sound the instrument will have in the end

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Well this is part of what I've been arguing all these years, especially with the "electric guitars aren't affected by the wood" crowd. If this were not the case, archtops and thinlines would sound no different to a Les Paul or a Tele. Simple weight relief through to chambering and finally decoupled tops, etc. is a spectrum of effects on the instrument as a system. The kinetic energy of vibrating strings is transferred around the system (to a degree dissipated as heat and light, but not measurably!) including back to the strings. A rubber guitar would sound different to a concrete one.

Going out into the back garden and bolting a bridge and machines to your patio does not make an earth-sized guitar though.

Looks like a good hollowbody design, Thistle. There's possibly a lot more material that could be removed from the centre. So much so, you could leave a few mm either side of the pickup screws or reduce them to posts. The same applies to the bridge and stoptail. Have you figured out how you're going to deal with a cover plate, or are the electronics going to be "fished in" through an f-hole?

As it stands, it's an easily-manageable build. Looking forward to seeing her develop :-)

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