Balancing A Guitar A Build Stage

[ByronBlack]

Hi Guy's, i'm a newb to this forum, and i'm planning on building my first guitar soon, however I have a question that i've yet to find already answered on here. Are there methods or techniques that can be applied to help make the guitar balanced when creating the body and neck?

I plan to build a Ken Lawrence style Hetfield Explorer replica. I've owned cheap explorers in the past and all have been excessively neck heavy. A Gibson Gothic Explorer was perfect, yet the body didn't seem to have any weights or body cavities to help balance it..

Any idea's on what I can do to ensure perfect balance? I don't want to use liquid lead placement, or other after-build adjustments if possible.

Regards

BB

[fryovanni]

I would start off by researching the model you found to be perfectly balanced. Creating a replica can be a good learning tool for someone who is starting out. When you get the hang of building you will start experimenting more and can try different combinations of wood, tuners, headstock configs, body shape, strap pin locations, routing cavities and so on. The other option would be to just wing it and learn from the school of hard knocks and trial and error, but that can be a bit frustrating and distract from the fundementals.

Peace, Rich

[ByronBlack]

Thanks for the input, i'll probably just go ahead and wing-it and see how it comes out, but I was intrigued to know if there were any techniques to it. Perhaps weighing the hardware, and calculating the wood densities to work out a balance point?

[Mattia]

Few things: use lighter woods for the neck (say, mahogany rather than maple), and use mini-sized tuning machines.

Strap button placement and body wood also have a lot to do with it, of course. Other than that, you can build 'mockups' out of plywood that are the right shape, strap them on, and add some weights: clamp on the headstock that weights roughly what a set of tuners weighs, clamp in the middle of the body equating to, say, 2/3 of the body weight (templates weight something) plus weight of hardware and pickups. That should get you ballpark figures, and I'm sure there are bits of cad/engineering software that should be able to work out balance (ie, give it mass/density of various components and go), but I don't know about those.

[ByronBlack]

I'll actually be using mahogany for the neck with a rosewood fingerboard - I did consider smaller tuners, but I like your idea of clamping weights to a template, that could definitly be a bit easier and hands-on than working out dense masses in CAD..

Thanks :-)