Maxxas

[RGGR]

When stopping over at the local wood supply the other day, I noticed some nice big Mahogany body blank. These blanks must have been 2-3" high and big enough for complete body - a nice one piece blank so to say.

Now I'm no expert on mahogany - and I haven't browsed the search function yet....cause I know there are different types of mahogany and not all are used when building bodies.

My question now.....if I wanted to go about building a Maxxas type body. Meaning....building body in clam-shelve fashion. Hollowing out top and bottom - except neck/pup/bridge area.......what would be best way to create the two halves like that.

I have to rip the body blank in half....length wise.

Normally I have dealt with two piece body blank......side to side.....this would be two piece body blank top to bottom.

I'm thinking finding giant a bandsaw.........or is there a more cleaver solution????

[jnewman]

When stopping over at the local wood supply the other day, I noticed some nice big Mahogany body blank. These blanks must have been 2-3" high and big enough for complete body - a nice one piece blank so to say.

Now I'm no expert on mahogany - and I haven't browsed the search function yet....cause I know there are different types of mahogany and not all are used when building bodies.

My question now.....if I wanted to go about building a Maxxas type body. Meaning....building body in clam-shelve fashion. Hollowing out top and bottom - except neck/pup/bridge area.......what would be best way to create the two halves like that.

I have to rip the body blank in half....length wise.

Normally I have dealt with two piece body blank......side to side.....this would be two piece body blank top to bottom.

I'm thinking finding giant a bandsaw.........or is there a more cleaver solution????

←

That's exactly the way to do it - if you go to a really big wood shop (the place you went may have one), they'll have what's called a "resaw bandsaw" which has about a 1" wide blade whose open cutting area is horizonal above a raisable/lowerable conveyor belt. It's for ripping stock into thinner pieces. I recently had this done on a limba blank I'm going to make a hollowbody out of.

One note: go ahead and get the wood surfaced, or the roughsawn side will absorb/release moisture much more quickly than the already surfaced side and the wood will warp quickly and pretty badly.

[frank falbo]

That's all good advice. I've got a Maxxas and I think it's one of the finest examples of guitar design -EVER-. Other guitars that are champions of design often ignored classic functionality of acoustic sound, like the Steinberger, or the old Brian Moore graphites. The Maxxas had every element focused on tone AND beauty AND function. So I hesitate to say that you could just as easily use a couple 1" pieces of Mahogany that were very similar, or take a 1" piece that is over 3 1/2' long, and rip it down the center and just flip it. My Maxxas is so lively and percussive, and it's possible that some of the magic is from the fact that it's the same piece of Mahogany all the way around. But IMO, once you insert a glue joint between the two pieces, it's less important that they be the "same cut" of wood.

The only more clever solution I can come up with is a gang of highly trained termites that will eat away the inside in the exact fashion you want. Then again, if you had that, I'd say let them do the whole guitar.

Edited October 11, 2005 by frank falbo

[RGGR]

I'm still on the look out for nice MX-3 to add to my collection. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't love to give this way of building a try myself.

This is what Rich Lasner said on Ibanezregister.com on the Maxxas.

I am bad with dates, so please excuse that I’m not precisely sure when I did many of these guitars. The Maxxas was one of my very first original designs at Ibanez though. I noticed that all the US guitar makers were trying very hard to copy Jackson and Charvel ideas- pointy headstocks, square-edged bodies. I thought of developing a guitar with a completely different design direction of rounded shapes. The other important features were carefully hollowed out internal cavities to give it a huge tone at medium volume, All Access Neck joint (which I designed by taking a 24 fret neck and cutting off the fingerboard past the 22nd fret) and locking tuners which were rare then.

We had a lot of trouble mass-producing the hollowed out version, which is why there is the first solidbody one. You have to make the body in an upper and lower “clamshell” half, hollow it out on the CNC mill, then glue the halves together and continue to cut out the shape and contours. To figure out how much wood I could leave out, I simply had a flat drawing of the body outline and drew chambers that left wood for the neck pocket, pickups and bridge to mount into.

To make the AANJ for the Maxxas, a standard-length 24 fret neck blank was used with a 22 fret fingerboard, This left the “tongue” sticking out beyond the 22nd fret to attach the mounting inserts to. Hoshino and Fuji Gen didn’t want to invest in getting unusual-length neck blanks for the project, so I designed it that way using existing 24 blanks on a 22 fret neck. Hoshino felt that maybe the AANJ was too unusual at first, as the wisdom at the time was that you had to have a neck pocket to match a Strat neck, in case the player wanted to replace your neck with a Fender or Mighty Mite neck. It sounds strange today, but back then Japanese guitar companies had an inferiority complex that their guitars weren’t really that good.

was the first Maxxas prototype much different from the production model?

It has a standard Strat tremolo painted the same blue as the body, three pushbuttons with blue caps for pickup selection, blue Sperzel locking tuners and maybe even the pickups and rings sprayed blue. We wanted to see if a monochromatic color scheme as was popular on cars then would work on guitars. The effect looked good, but would have been expensive as the colored parts would need to be custom made.

The guitar lasted only about three years in both solid and semi-hollow versions. There may even be a few strange prototypes of a Maxxas with an extended range neck and one pickup out there somewhere. Other models grew quickly in popularity, so the slow-selling Maxxas was dropped.

I would love to re-build one of these strange prototypes.

[frank falbo]

I'm not much for extended fretboards, the Washburns are the only ones I covet. The Maxxas has such an awesome neck pickup tone. The only thing I did to mine was install a 4-pole switch. At one time I had two push/pulls, but the 4-pole gave me all the combos I wanted.

I wanted to build one using a copy carver. I figured you could perfectly hollow out the back just by making a mold of the outside, then using an oversized stylus and resetting the depth. Of course you'd have to put a "log" down the middle of the template to create your center block. I never was brave enough to use my own Maxxas as the template-maker. I have mixed feelings about doing a set-neck version, too. On one hand it would really make everything drive as one unit, but on the other hand, the early AANJ with the "tee nuts" is a really strong joint, and because it's not glued I think it adds to the snappiness of it. But an ebony board and an oil finish neck might be just what the doctor ordered.

It would look good in a monochrome styling. And nowadays annodizing and powdercoating are more accessible, as are colored pickups.

Edited October 11, 2005 by frank falbo

[RGGR]

I'm not much for extended fretboards, the Washburns are the only ones I covet. The Maxxas has such an awesome neck pickup tone.

When building one, this is of course the thing to accomplish. That little lip under the neck pick-up.

To me building a Maxxas inspired guitar (copy is strong word in relation to this) would be a very challenging project. The hollow camshelf body, the strong contour, the AANJ, the extended neck with little lip.

I never was brave enough to use my own Maxxas as the template-maker.

I can imagine.

I have mixed feelings about doing a set-neck version, too. On one hand it would really make everything drive as one unit, but on the other hand, the early AANJ with the "tee nuts" is a really strong joint, and because it's not glued I think it adds to the snappiness of it.

With set-neck, you would mean a LP type glued in neck, I suppose. Personally I would never do this on a Maxxas. Part of the Voodoo of the guitar is this special lip with "tee nuts" (I didn't even know they were called like that).

The only thing I would different would be the headstock. I think original duck shape Ibanez headstock will look cooler. And if only the Ibanez gooks would have been little bit more brave back in the days, I think the Cirrus/Maxxas would have had one like that to begin with.

It's really a guitar I would love owning.

Building one would be fun. Just because it has so many challenges.