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Hello. New to the site....No laughing please


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Hello. I just stumbled on the site and thought i'd stop and say hello as it looks a useful resource for a complete novice (in every sense!).

My little one wanted an electric guitar but every part of learning to play blows his mind. I thought we could have a bit of fun together and knock up a tea chest esque soundbox twanger stick type affair. It ended up going a little off topic and we knocked up this little baby monster out of an old oak table leg and a slab of counter top. Not having a workbench made it a challenge as building a guitar on a stone doorstep is not without its pitfalls but we cracked on with it anyway and ended up with this gnome sized 3 string 26" long fretless pocket sized metal guitar thing.  He loves it and is starting to find his fingers, I now find myself thinking about making a sensible full sized guitar and hopefully picking up a few shreds of knowledge  to get this and the next one sounding a bit better! 

If you can bear with me I'm sure mk2 will be a bit more in keeping with some of the other starter guitars here.

Ta

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I too am dabbling into the CGB guitar and slide steel world after making standard guitars. It is surprising how fun they can be. Other than 3 or 4 strings there are no real rules as  to hardware, tunings and shape.

CGB type guitars are really coming into there own now and I think it's great.

More important is, you are having some quality time with your Son.

Keep up the the good work.

mk

 

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3 hours ago, ScottR said:

I think that is pretty dang cool, and a great project for a father and young son. My son was only a a bit shy of thirty when I build him his first guitar.:D Was finding a three string bridge tricky?

And welcome to the forum.

SR

 

 

Strangely enough I clicked onto evilbay and the bridge was the first rear loading one I saw. The 3string concept came from there! As it happens the bridge could comfortably fit four strings, as there is a big gap between each piece. Finding a 3 string pickup was the tricky bit.

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2 hours ago, MiKro said:

I too am dabbling into the CGB guitar and slide steel world after making standard guitars. It is surprising how fun they can be. Other than 3 or 4 strings there are no real rules as  to hardware, tunings and shape.

CGB type guitars are really coming into there own now and I think it's great.

More important is, you are having some quality time with your Son.

Keep up the the good work.

mk

 

Im glad there are no rules as I made it up as I went along without doing any reading first.  It’s stumpy little neck does mean it needs fairly heavy strings which need to be tuned to A. With normal tuning it sounds like a bass!

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  • 2 weeks later...

So I lopped half the head off and created a more shapely one in order to fit a fourth string. The old one looked pretty shit too so pleased how it has come out. Setting it up a bit differently using super slinky's in D, G, B & E. I had read that thicker gauge strings were best for something this small, in reality it sounded muffled and fairly pants, these sound so much better now. 

Next job is to scratch out a new nut, this one was made with a bit of african blackwood which was the best thing I had in the shed at the time. I have been rummaging and have found this piece of fossilised bone that I found on the Beach at Robin hoods bay some years ago, It seems a fitting use for it. I have an old lapidary wheel which I'm going to use to crudely shape it as its a bit hard for my files.

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Robin Hood's Bay? As a kid I spent a lot of time there, Filey, Flamborough, Goathland, etc. and I remember cool things like Mallyan Spout. Wow, cool.

African Blackwood is fantastic stuff, so I would imagine your shed being pretty well stocked! haha

Bone can be really variable in density and hardness. It's the same thing here for reindeer antler and moose bone. I guess that fossilised is mostly integrated mineral in content rather than the original bone?

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I would imagine it's possible to make a nut out of any fine-grained stone if you had the patience to cut and polish it. There are a lot of exotic looking stones in the world e.g. marble comes in a wide variety of colours and can certainly be carved (as it has been for millennia)

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Agreed. The way I see nuts is that they should ring the same as fretted notes, hence my psychotic insistence on using zero frets for every damn thing. That does free up the choice of material for the nut since then it only needs to guide the strings by preventing them moving side to side. Materials that might normally fracture with downpressure from the strings are much more usable in that context.

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I've got several pieces of mammoth tusk I've been saving for nuts. We were at some museum somewhere and there was a small marketplace with all kinds of OldStuff(tm) for sale. I dug through every piece just to find a few big enough for nuts. (well, for my big nuts 🤔)

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  • 3 weeks later...

So I bought a fretting saw and started scratching out some cuts. After marking out the scale I fannyed about with a few bits of timber to make a cutting jig but in the end decided to just cut it by hand. With the exception of the last 2 frets (which were cut at 2.30 in the morning after a few to many drinkies) I was quite happy how it ended up. 

In true Dan style I chopped up a bit of broomstick and used a sqeezy clamp as a fret press. The  fretboard is flat on this but when I first sanded it I put a gentle radius on the edges. Now there is  four strings they run a bit close to the edges so I had to curl the frets around the edges in a mildly quirky manner. I couldn’t find a hammer so tapped them round with the metal handle of my trusty Gilbow tin snips! Frets went in nice and clean, just need to buzz the edges off and clean them up, fingers crossed the whole thing is going to really come to life now.

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Bending the fret ends over is something I would do personally, however if it doesn't affect the crown across the board's radius and general seating it should be fine. Slotting by hand is a bit of a task to get things straight and now wallered out. Have the slots cut the right width?

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The slots are all perfect apart from the aforementioned last fret which is not 100% solid and a bit wonky. I’ll run a drop of thin super glue into it and it will be fine. I was a bit nervous about fitting frets but I really quite enjoyed it, On such  a small fingerboard it was fairly easy but I can imagine the extra width of a  full sized one would be a challenge without a good cutting guide. Just smoothing off the craggy ends now and we are going to bolt her together and crank her up!

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Well it sounds 100x better now with twice the sustain. Above maybe the 8th fret it sounded a bit woolly before but it rings very nicely now. I was wondering if I would need a fret levelling tool, as it stands my broomstick press worked a treat, they all seem flat to me with no buzz or dead notes anywhere. I’m really rather pleased. I should really get that bone/tusk nut finished and get a wooden tone knob made now. 

To think a child’s toy has become such a long winded project!

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