Lahav - Unusual Build

[brian d]

This is the story of the Lahav:

I started building her about three years ago. That was my first foray into guitar building, and originally was going to be my only build. Well, we all know how that goes.

The original plan was for a "frame guitar" style - minimal body with a guitar shaped frame around it like Yamaha's silent guitars. After I got the shape for the centre part, I fell in love with it and didn't want to add the outer shape.

Lahav is a Hebrew word meaning "flame". I chose the name for the shape which resembles a flame and the flame maple veneer on the top. I actually finished building it last June, then thought I could improve on it, so I took it apart and slowly redid parts. The headstock took me longer than the rest of the guitar put together. Serves me right for buying a neck off e-bay and trying to make it my own. I now know that it would have been quicker, easier and better to build the neck myself. This was very much a learning project for me, and if we learn from our mistakes, I must have learned a lot!

It took so long because after I started it I started a luthiery course where I started another electric, had a fourth child, moved countries, and moved house a couple of times and did a classical guitar building course. I've finally got my workshop set up at home (with many thanks to Oztradie Stu). I should have it ready to play in about a week.

Here is the start:

Don't worry, the sander isn't on. That's my number 2 child who wanted to help dad.

The body wood is padouk with some sap wood on the bass side of the body. I chose that piece so I could mould the tone of the bass to be more warm from the softer sap wood while retaining the bite for the treble in the heartwood. The sap wood has some organic micro tone chambers (aka worm holes) to get a"bass reflex" effect. (What I lack in skill I make up for in marketing BS)

Following sanding, I laminated some flame maple to the top. I sometimes think that was a mistake, as the padouk is such a gorgeous wood, but I had a vision in mind that I wanted to follow. The maple veneer was actually the first guitar building purchase I made - from Brian our host through e-bay. If not for that purchase I don't know if I would have found this forum! Serendipity.

I made a template for the body, and neck pocket. I routed the pickup pocket freehand. The body shape was cut out with a jigsaw, and then a router with a pattern following bit. Then came the edge sanding.

That's me when I was young and handsome At that stage the guys at the workshop called it "the fish".

You may see a bit of the original headstock there - it was basically a fender stlyle headstock - the neck is a 25.5" AXL neck. It is surprisingly good especially for the price.

For those who saw my classical, you may recognise the recurring theme of the teardrop/paisley shape.

That's it for now. More later.

Brian.

[oblaty]

Very interesting guitar. I´d like to hear it playing

[brian d]

Next installment...

Here are some photos:

The next stage was rounding over the edge of the top. I was going for a sort of "faux binding" or contrasting edge. I'm really pleased with the result. Then I routed for the GK unit at the back and then drilling a hole to connect the GK pickup to it. Of course this hole left a great big entry hole at the top of the guitar which had to be covered up. I made a padouk cover in a complimentary shape. I routed a cavity to inlay it into leaving space for the cable to go through.

The electronics are very simple - 1 humbucker with a pull/push coil tap and volume control. This is connected directly to the "guitar in" of the GK. The knob was carved in a similar style to the other shapes. I have since changed the inlay in the knob. Originally I hadn't planned to have an inlay in the knob, but I drilled the hole with a hand drill and went a bit far. I will post a photo (as yet not taken) of the new inlay in the knob later.

After routing the electronics cavity, I found a piece of padouk with very similar grain. I was lucky to get a good match. The bridge holes were drilled, and the holes for the ferrules. Stuffed them up a bit - now I have a drill press so I can avoid that problem. To (partly) hide the mistake I counter sunk the ferrules and then filled over them with a mix of titebond and wood dust. (photo coming soon).

The pickup is a GFS Fat PAF. I mounted it from behind, so the pickup adjustment screws are at the back of the guitar. I then covered the ear routes with more padouk inlays.

Somewhere amongst all of that I made a matching string-winder (which was the first project at the guitar building class I did) and plectrum. The string winder is finished in french polish, the plectrum in CA glue.

The next installment will be the saga of the neck and headstock.....stay tuned.

Brian.

[oz tradie]

Nice Brian.

You've got some different,outside of the square kind of ideas, and your own style which compliments what you're

achieving. Nice padauk there, too.

It's good to see your two builds moving along.

How's that work shop of yours. Is it getting much use? I should bloody well hope so !!!

cheers, Stu

[brian d]

Thanks Stu,

Although I don't think I'll get into the workshop as much as I'd like to until the kids move out and I retire, I've been quite busy. I've been working on the Lahav as well as starting to sand the edges of the Goncalo guitar. I've also built a large drill press table and I'm getting to the end of a jig for sanding compound radii on the small belt sander.

It goes without saying that I've made a 20" long, 12" radius sanding block. The hardest part of that was finding a spanner that fit in the space available to adjust the table angle! After that, it was 5 minutes to set up a fence, a few passes with the Safe-T-Planer and I had it. I lined it up with my radius guages from Gilet, and it is spot on. I just need to sand it a bit now.

Back to the current build:

Here's the knob up close and personal.

I prepared the concentric shape of the inlay with a dremel and exacto kife. I cheated a bit with the inlay itself. I made it from temporary dental crown material which is polymethyl methacrylate (a type of plastic). I just poured it into the preparation and let it set, then trimmed it back and polished it. Voila, no gaps as it is actually cast into inlay route. Although the indicated use of the material is temporary, I think that as long as I'm not chewing on the knob it can be considered permanent.

Now, the headstock....

The headstock has been the hardest part of the build! I wanted the neck and headstock to match the vibe of the guitar, so I had to do some fairly major changes to the headstock. Unfortunately I didn't take photos of the whole process. I added to the bass edge at the end to get the point of the curve that I wanted, and then trimmed the shape.

I dyed the neck black, as the maple of the neck was much lighter than the flame maple. I used water based aniline dye.

I laminated the face of the headstock with flame maple and painted an edge of black around it to frame it.

Apart from the edge looking messy, I didn't like the look. I redesigned the face of the headstock with a paisley shape. I routed a channel around it and filled it with temporary crown material again. I was very happy with the design concept, but it was terribly messy looking in execution. Part of that was due to using incorrect tools and jigs to route the channel, part from the translucency of the material picking up different colours from around. I rerouted the channel, lined the edges of it with maple veneer and redid it...still not right. After routing the channel again, it was way too thick.

I sanded the face down to start again. The next attempt was to paint the paisley shape over the edge of the white material figuring I could control how much of it would show. It wasn't too bad, and that's how I had the guitar finished last June. I wasn't completely happy with it, and it was one of the reasons I took the guitar apart to redo bits.

It occured to me that binding material was the best thing for the outline of the paisley shape.

I ended up sanding off the whole face of the headstock and filling in the channel with wood filler. By the time I had done this to my satisfaction, the headstock was too thin so at a later stage I laminated some goncalo alves which I had to the back of the headstock. I did this with a bit of an angle so I actually don't need string trees now. That's a mistake which became an opportunity.

I was out of any decent pieces of the padouk. I took what I had and cut some slices which I stuck together and cut out the paisley shape for the headstock. With what I had, it ended up as end grain, which while not ideal is at least not a structural problem. I bent the ivoroid binding on the stainless steel handle of a pot of water boiling, and bound the padouk shape using binding left in acetone as glue. I routed the shape into the headstock and inlayed the new piece in after carving a curve into it.

This is how it looks now excuse the dust, serves me right for photographing in the workshop. You can see how the end grain picks up the finish differently than the grain on the body and gives a slightly different colour. Not ideal, but I'm ecstatic about how the headstock came out.

I removed the original plastic nut on Tuesday, and made a new bone nut. I slotted the nut with "Norman nut files" from e-bay. Although, I don't have anything to compare too, they worked really well. Today I trimmed the excess height off the nut and polished it.

I learned some valuable lessons in the workshop. Along the lines of "learn from your mistakes". You can learn from those mistakes of mine in the next installment....

[brian d]

Last weekend I put the whole thing together, only to find that the action was way too high. Funny thing was that when it was all together previously (albeit over a year ago) the action was spot on. Eager to fix the problem I spent a few seconds on my trusty belt sander to adjust the angle of the heel. Of course this would mean refinishing the heel, but that's not too much of an issue with dye and tru- oil.

Retried the neck on, only to find the action was too low!! I'd only changed the angle by a degree (measured and then marked on the sides of the heel to avoid overdoing it). I then realised that the problem was that I had loosened the screw holes by attaching and removing the neck multiple times over a few years, and the string tension had pulled the neck up a touch. So I reflattened the heel and checked..byewdiful.

Went to refinish the heel. I had run out of the dye I originally used (from OS) and got some local dye. However the black was black green, and was definitely a different black than the rest of the neck. The original black looked purple when diluted, but jet black on the wood. With no access to it, I masked the fretboard and shot a couple of coats of rattlecan black. I was surprised how well it turned out.

Now I'm in the process of re-oiling the neck. Should have it back together this weekend. (I hope). It's father's day on Sunday....maybe I'll get a few hours in the workshop instead of breakfast in bed.

Edited August 30, 2007 by brian d

[brian d]

Drum roll please:

Did some final coats of Tru-Oil this morning, then had to do the obligitary Father's day stuff. Polished with Meguiar's #7 and put her together. Strung her up with a set of 12-52 flat-wounds, set up with a nice low action, intonation is spot on according to my electronic tuner. The whole guitar reverberates with every string you pluck. You feel it through your body. I'm very pleased. I played a little through my micro-cube and the sound is what I was going for - round and mellow - almost semi-acoustic-ish. (That was the purpose of the flatwounds). I can't find my GK cords, so I can't test the sound through the VG-88 or the MIDI tracking. I'll do that later this week and get some sound clips going.

I'd love to hear some feedback with your opinions, questions, comments, suggestions....whatever.

Finsish off with another pic of the body (couldn't get a good one of the headstock yet....I'll wait for some sunlight for more pics).

Edited September 11, 2007 by brian d

[brian d]

After reading one of the other posts on fret levelling, I decided to try the method on this guitar. As the neck was bought, and the fret job was OK, I hadn't touched the frets. Here was my chance to make it more mine.

I bought some L-cross sectioned aluminium and cut it long enough to file the whole length of the fretboard at once. Of course it was not dead flat, so I spent some time planing a long block of pine from an old bed, double sticking some 80 grit paper to it and slowly but surely flattening one side of the aluminium. I taped off the fretboard and the body past the pickup and marked the tops of the fretboard with black marker. I made a high nut from an offcut of padouk to hold the strings high enough for clearance of the new levelling file while the strings were brought up to pitch/tension.

Here you can see the flattened side of the angle iron with 80 grit paper stuck on with double sided tape. it also gives a better look at the temporary nut.

I levelled all the frets under one string at a time, with a bit of overlap to the next string each time. The bottom of the "L" gets hooked under the string while the other part is used as a handle to move the tool along the frets. I filed under each string until no frets had black marks on top. Turned out there was quite a bit to do. After that I removed the strings and marked the tops again for crowning. I started with a crowning file which was fine for most of the frets, but was useless on the ones that had needed more levelling. I rounded a corner of a 3 corner file and used that for those frets. I then polished the frets with 00 and 0000 steel wool. Good thing I had the tape over the pickup, the remains of the steel wool all settled there.

Next step was to string it up again and review the nut and intonation. I went to my local guitar shop only to find that they were out of 12-52 flatwound strings. They should have more by Friday. I had snipped the old strings (they were pretty dinged up anyway from the fret levelling) so now it's time to be patient. Hard to to as I'm really anxious now to see what the levelling job has done for the playability.

Brian.

Edited September 7, 2007 by brian d

[brian d]

I've been PM'd to extrapolate about the crowning process. FWIW, here's what I did (which is nothing special really).

Levelling takes away all the markings from the top of the frets - that way you know all the frets have been touched, and should be level to each other. Now that you've gone to all that work to get the frets level, you want to make sure that you don't change the height of any fret at all - you just want to change the shape.

The levelled frets are flat at the top which means they won't intonate properly, and could potentially ruin the strings. I marked all these flat fret tops with a marker. The idea now is to file the fret crown so that you leave a thin line of marker right at the top. The fret crowning file will start to take away from the wider edges of the crown before it gets to the top. Keep watching while you crown the frets and stop when you see that you're left with just a thin line of marker. In some areas I found I had more control with a 3 corner file - I could watch the line while working from either side of the crown.

After that I polished the crowns with 00 steel wool to remove the scratches, and 0000 to polish them.

I'm still pretty inexperienced at this, so there may be better or more efficient ways. After I re-setup the guitar I'll know how well this worked for me.

Cheers,

Brian.

[Mickguard]

The idea now is to file the fret crown so that you leave a thin line of marker right at the top.

This is the info I've been missing all the while...it's going to help me rescue a neck, so thanks!

[brian d]

Your welcome Mick. I hope it works out well for you.

I strung up the Lahav today. I needed to set the curve of the neck....couldn't get into the truss rod nut! Spent an hour or so cleaning out crud from the truss rod access and inside the nut. finally got it going. yay!

Then I went to plug her in and did a really stupid thing....I rested the guitar neck against a desk....just for a second....just to get a cable. Murphy's law, the guitar fell and cracked the headstock. Went into the workshop to get some titebond and masking tape and the bloody #*!! roll-a-door on the workshop came off its rails and came crashing down. We were planning on knocking it down in a couple of months to do a renovation at home (complete with a new space for my workshop), but it was so frustrating. I got the door back on to its rails, but it doesn't open and close easily.

The only compensation is that for a brief couple of hours, the guitar played smoothly and buzz free all along the fretboard.

Now I'm going back for the repair, then I'll have to wait a couple of days, then refinish the area, etc. etc. etc.

Brian.

[oz tradie]

That's truly a string of bad luck there, Brian. A real kick in the guts.

I'm happy to see each of those projects you showed me all done and dusted...............nearly.

I've noticed you on PG heaps lately, so maybe maintenance took a backseat for a bit.

No damage to your workshop gear from the roller door hopefully.

And what changes are you due to make to your workshop area? Obviously bigger !!!!

Oh yeah...........if it's not too painful to re-live, how about showing your repair method ?

cheers, Stu

[brian d]

Yep, had me quite distraught.

The crack was at the back of the headstock where I had laminated some Goncalo Alves after thinning the maple face too often.

I hear that a titebond joint is stronger than the wood itself, but the crack was awfully close to the joint. I think that having a stronger joint actually causes a stress concentration near it, compared with a homogenous material. I couldn't see any maple in the crack, so it was a crack in the Goncalo, not at the joint.

After masking on either side of the crack (minimise glue cleanup), I used a skewer to push titebond into the crack, and flexed the headstock backwards and forwards to pump the titebond into the crack. As the crack was in a position that I didn't have parallel sides to clamp against, and I don't have any friendly plastic, I used cauls to direct the pressure of the clamp in the right direction.

I'm going to leave the clamps on until tomorrow and then not touch it until Tuesday....just to be on the safe side.

Just to make things more "perfect" I found that our dog has chewed through the GK cables that I haven't used since December. No-one in Melbourne has them in stock, and I'll have to special order one, so I'm going to have to wait for that to really put her through her paces anyway.

No damage to the workshop gear, although some pencils and spare exacto blades got knocked off a shelf. The roll of the door ended up just resting on the bandsaw. Moved it away very quickly.

Cheers,

Brian.

[jmrentis]

Ouch, dang, man that hurts. Well, if anything you can now claim a stronger neck/headstock joint! You just have to say you cracked it on purpose in order to strengthen it ; ) jk What a week! I've had those weeks and they are tough, but once you get through, you've learned a ton. LOL I'm trying to find some positive stuff to say here and it isn't coming to me, sorry LOL. Anyway, I'm sure it will come out just fine.

My favorite part of guitar building is the idea that you can fix or change most anything you come across and can end up with something that almost looks flawless. I often run through all the fix-it threads at Frets.com, just to learn and see what can be overcome and I am always amazed, even though I've read each one a dozen times. He has a ton on headstock breaks, delaminations, and general headstock issues. Glad to see you have taken care of the problem and keep us posted on how it comes out on Tuesday. And have a better week next week! J

[brian d]

Thanks jm. If it's true that you learn from your mistakes, I've learned a library full on this build.

I took the clamps off this morning. There's a bit of excess glue, but otherwise it looks like a tight joint.

I've since done some sanding with 120, 240 grit paper and 00 and 0000 steelwool, and put a couple of coats of paint. I think the repair will be invisible - just see the telegraph lines (is that what they're called?) of the laminations which were there before the break.

Cheers,

Brian.

[brian d]

A bit more progress with the repair today. I sanded the paint level, went through to maple in a couple of spots, so did another couple of coats of paint. I used the same paint as the rest of the neck. I sprayed the paint into a plastic cup and painted it on with a brush. This paint allows 1-2 hours between coats, but at least 24 hours before sanding. It may be a while before I get back to it.

Here's how it is now.

Couldn't do much else with the guitar today, so I continued with my other build. It was a very productive day for it.

Brian.

[brian d]

It's been a while since I posted on this one....

I sanded the repair and refinished the area with tru-oil, and I've been playing the guitar for about a month. I'm really happy with how it turned out, with a few eternal reminders of what I've learned from the experience. After having the it at full string tension for a month with heavyish strings (12-52 flatwounds) without the headstock repair opening up, I'm finally feel the confidence to say it's done!

I've put it in for November GOTM and more photos of the final result and links to audio clips are posted there.

Some things I would do differently on future iterations of this design:

1) Build the neck from scratch. Having built a couple of necks since this one, I know that it's easier to build it from scratch than to piss-fart around with a ready made neck and make it how I want it. The neck I got was actually a really good buy - well made, nice straight grain in the fretboard, the only real problem with it as a standard Strat replacement was the cheap plastic nut. But it was a Strat neck, not a Lahav neck, and it took a lot of effort to turn it from one to the other.

2) I wouldn't use a neck plate again. I would go for neck ferrules and an AANJ type heel.

3) I would get the Roland internal GK kit rather than try to internalise the GK2A. I'm also toying with the idea of not having a magnetic pickup at all, to show off the body wood more. Of course that limits the player to using VG units.

4) carve the top of the guitar with a smooth rounded shape, make it like a teardrop.

5) redesign the headstock so the tuners would be on the right hand side. - I think the look of this headstock works beautifully, but I'd prefer to have less "dead string" on the treble strings so bends can be made with less deflection.

6) Possibly bring the neck further into the body (and of course move the bridge accordingly). Access to the upper frets is incredibly easy anyway. I'd have to draw the new setup out and see how I like it.

7) I prefer not to paint or dye the wood. I did it in this case as the maple of the neck didn't match the flame maple of the top or the sapwood of the padouk. Dying/painting was a way to make the neck colour fit with the rest of the guitar via the hardware, and it worked well - but next time (going back to point 1) I would choose neck wood that works well with the body from the start.

That about wraps it up. I'd love to get feedback about it from you guys and girls.

Cheers,

Brian.

[Drak]

If that were in the GOTM, I'd vote for it without a second glance.

:D I love it!

[brian d]

Thanks for the compliments Drak. I have entered it in the GOTM, so now I should get at least 1 vote.

Cheers,

Brian.

[TheIRS]

Make that two votes! Excellent work Brian! I've always wanted to make a guitar with a small body like that. I hope you make another Lahav, I really like this one.