Build #3 - Sy6 Superstrat

[curtisa]

Now that I'm starting to find my feet with builds I think I'm ready to begin journal-ising the construction process. This one is going to be a 30th birthday gift, a 6-string companion to my SY7 (see GOTM submission elsewhere). The birthday isn't until December, so I have plenty of time to screw it up!

Target specs:

Body - Queensland maple with Tasmanian blackwood carved top

Neck - Queensland maple with West Australian sheoak fingerboard

Scale length - 25.5"

Radius - 16"

Trussrod - Allparts

Tuners - Sperzel Trim-lok

Nut - Graphtech black Tusq

Frets - Jumbo nickel silver

Pickups - Seymmour Duncan '59 neck, JB bridge

Bridge - Wilkinson VS100 trem

Electronics - 1x vol, 1 x 3-way toggle

The story so far. The borer hole in the blackwood top sits just outside the edge of the body template, so no need to fill it. Flame pattern in the sheoak is interesting, almost looks like camouflage stripes:

Gluing up the body and top blanks:

Body and top roughed out:

[curtisa]

Routing to the body template. The 4 fixing screw holes are located in convenient locations such that they get buried under the blackwood top:

Thicknessing the body and top. The jig is just a variation on designs I've seen floating around on PG and elsewhere. Nylon rollers and alumininium rails/angles are the go here. The planing bit is a monster. I run the router at around 80% speed so that I don't exceed the max RPM of the bit and take the barest nibble in each pass. To prevent the massive kickback I'd get starting such a large bit in my router I ramp the speed up using a variac:

[curtisa]

Control cavity routed. Not easy to see in this shot but I've covered the pickup cable channels with clear sticky tape to prevent glue filling up the channels when the top is fitted:

Aligning the top to the body. Two nails prevent the two halves sliding around while gluing up. The forward one sits where the neck pocket route and the rear one is in the tremolo route. Once the glue is dry the nails are removed and the two nail holes are "erased" when routes are done.

Clamped:

[curtisa]

Neck action. The scarfe jig is cut to give me a 13 degree headstock angle. I just make the initial cut by hand with a tennon saw, clamp each piece in the jig and run the router over the cut faces to square up the scarfe. Then clamp time:

Everything glued and out of the clamps:

[curtisa]

Routing the neck pocket and pickup cavities. The neck pocket template I'm using has a matching "sister" neck profile template, so having the neck cut to shape at this stage isn't so critical. Maybe I'm tempting fate a bit here, but I'm willing to give it a shot, and the practice run I did on scrap gave me a good square fit. Pickup route template looks oversized, but I'm using the pattern ring in my router with a 1/4" bit, so the resultant route is smaller than the plexiglass template. I've made a little sub-template that allows me to sink the pickup legs deeper into the body than the rest of the pickup route. It just sits inside the template and limits the router's movement to the pickup leg sections only:

Pretty good fit:

All done for now:

PS, sorry about some of these image sizes. Photobucket is completely screwing up my pic sizes for some reason when I'm uploading.

[Muzz]

Fantastic, what type of bridge is it getting?

[curtisa]

Thanks Muzz. Wilkinson/Gotoh VS100 two-point trem, as per 1st post.

[idmicheal]

That fretboard wood is awesome! With figure like that you wouldn't even need position markers

[curtisa]

Yeah, I was really surprised when I unwrapped it. The original photo of it from the seller didn't do the figuring justice. Only side dots going on this one, don't want to put any visual distractions over the fretboard.

Not so much progess this weekend. I printed off the headstock drawing at work to make up a template from it, and foolishly didn't check the nut width before I got home. At least I didn't route the headstock with a dud template!

Neck taper roughed out and then trimmed:

Used the downtime to make up a couple of jigs. This is the Tunerhole-omatic getting a test run. You position the top edge of the headstock against the rear fence and drill the first hole. Then insert the indexing pin in the base of the jig, slot the previously-drilled hole over the pin and drill the next hole. Rinse and repeat. It'll do as many inline holes as you can fit on the base, left or right handed. Hole spacing can be adjusted by rotating the drill table closer or further away from the centre of the drill bit. The next trick will be working out how I can incorporate drilling the hole for the little anti-rotating pin in the back of the Sperzels into the jig:

[curtisa]

Baby steps this weekend. Had to put on my Bob the Builder helmet and recast a new concrete step on the garden path to replace a busted one.

Fitting the blackwood headplate. Just used an offcut from the blackwood body top and thinned it down on the router sled to 3mm. Doesn't look pretty at the moment but it'll get sliced and diced further down the track. Also had to glue a couple of wings on the headstock so that I didn't run out of wood at the extremities of the headstock pattern:

Finally got the headstock drawing sized properly and printed off, and made up some templates from some 10mm plexiglass. The big one does the overall shape and the smaller one is used to get the "step-down" on the blackwood headplate:

And the sheoak has been thinned down to 6mm and slotted:

[Osorio]

Nice! Very nice!

Tihs thread give some great tools ideas!

Tks Curtisa

[curtisa]

Thanks Osorio. My jig ideas are available for stealing at your leisure.

[curtisa]

First hiccup. I failed to take into account that the extra depth of the headplate would shift the nut line forward once it was planed to the same height as the neck face, so I had to remove the blackwood headplate and cut a new one. I'll attach it after I have the fretboard in place so that I can plan the headstock thickness properly. That'll teach me for trying to squeeze a sneaky hour of workshop time in after the day job. Still, I managed to get the overall headstock shape done:

[curtisa]

Clamps! The fretboard is tacked in place with some 1.25mm brads - two in the nut and one in the 24th fret slot. I clamp the fretboard to the neck beforehand, align everything and then pre-drill the nail locations with a 1.2mm bit. The brads then get driven into the fretboard before applying glue to both faces. With the brads locking the wood in position I can clamp away willy-nilly without having to worry about the two pieces sliding all over the place under clamping pressure:

[Wretched]

NICE headstock shape!

[curtisa]

Thanks Wretched. I have a thing for headstocks that have slightly softened corners, gives them an angular look without being too "pointy".

Neck out of the clamps and fretboard trimmed to shape. While running the router over the fretboard with the trimming bit it revealed a bit of a knotty void on the treble side just behind the 2nd fret slot. Not very deep, should fill and sand back OK with a bit of sawdust and clear epoxy:

Gratuitous dry-fit shot. Starting to look like a banjo. Note to self - might need to paint the shed door soon...

[Muzz]

That is shaping up to be a weapon , I like the way you left some wood between the neck pocket and the pickup cavity to position the neck.

And, you have my workbench

[curtisa]

I like the way you left some wood between the neck pocket and the pickup cavity to position the neck.

Looks can be decieving. The neck pocket is right up against the neck pickup route, but the pocket is routed about 3mm deeper than the pickup cavity, giving a stepped lip between the two.

And, you have my workbench

Ha!. I've rebuilt that thing about 3 times. New tops made out of old floorboards, new nuts and bolts, reinforced threaded cranks. I really should invest in a proper workbench.

More progress. Trem cavity done:

Fretboard being radiused on the Radius-o-tron. The router sits on a tray that has curved rails underneath, which in turn sits on another tray that sildes up and down on rails parallel to the neck. The curved rails on the top tray give me an exact 16" radius provided I route to a depth of 20mm below the level of the top tray. The finished radius then only needs a light sand with 180 grit to get the tooling marks out. About 45 seconds to rough-radius a neck:

[curtisa]

Side dots in, neck thickness started and new blackwood headplate attached/shaped:

Planning the neck carve. Drawn in some guide lines to work up to:

Happiness is a pile of wood shavings:

Carve done and sanded to 180 grit. Will probably give it another quick adjustment just behind the volute, there's a flat spot centred behind the nut that could be softened a little:

[curtisa]

Belly cut and heel shaping done:

Trem inserts, ummm...inserted:

Using the big bastard pedestal drill at work to do the jack socket. The "clamp" is just offcuts of timber glued/screwed together to make a giant set of jaws that can hold the body at the correct angle while the drill goes down. First pass is with a 20mm forstner bit to a depth of 25mm or so. Leave the body clamped where it is and switch to a 12mm twist bit for the remainder. The result is a nicely aligned counterbored angled jack socket:

[curtisa]

Had a change of mind with the tuners. The Sperzels I bought didn't match the photo by the seller (wanted small schaller-style buttons, came with larger 3x3 buttons), and Sperzel were being unhelpful in regards to selling me a set of new buttons, so I've shelved the Sperzels for a future build and splashed out on a nice new set of Hipshot Griplocks.

Time to give the Tunerhole-o-matic a run. Drill the first hole with an 8mm brad point to get things going:

Then the indexing pin goes into the baseplate and start leap-frogging until no. 6 is drilled:

Do another pass with a 10mm bit to counterbore the holes for the tuning machine shaft (you can see the indexing pin poking up into the adjacent hole):

All done:

[curtisa]

Disaster! Lament! Arse! The body took a dive off the workbench and landed on the lower horn, digging a dirty big chunk off the tip. The chunk that came off was pretty mangled up and wasn't going to go back squarely in the cavity without resorting to filler, and reshaping the lower horn around the gouge isn't on the cards, so I had to cut out the damaged section and fashion a patch out of some scrap left over from the body blank. Oh well, guess this kind of thing will happen to all of us at some point:

Finished sanding it back down to match the shape of the body this afternoon. There's still a slight seam visible around the edges, but it's nowhere near as bad as the jagged gaping hole. I can probably blend the edges of the seam with some creative staining to disguise it further when I get closer to the finishing stage:

[Fagerholm]

guess this kind of thing will happen to all of us at some point

My otherwise perfect kelly shared the same experience. Made me sad, I guess I have to hide it under black burst.

That Radius-o-tron turns me green with... happiness for your part. Does it work on inlayed boards?

[curtisa]

My otherwise perfect kelly shared the same experience. Made me sad, I guess I have to hide it under black burst.

I've had reasonably good luck hiding glue seams by carefully brushing on a matching stain-and-varnish-in-one finish using a tiny paintbrush, drying the bristles on paper towel before applying it to the area ("dry brushing"). Kinda feathers the painted edges without flooding the area with too much colour which makes it look obvious, occasionally put heavier strokes on to the blend grain lines etc. I'm hoping I can pull off the same trick here.

That Radius-o-tron turns me green with... happiness for your part. Does it work on inlayed boards?

Don't know, only tried it on one un-inlaid boards so far (this one!). Depending on what you inlaid with it may not work. I imagine it would make a mess of pearl or abalone (too brittle), but acrylic plastic or wood would probably be fine. In those cases it would probably be better to radius before inlaying, or use a more gentle method to radius ("traditional" sanding blocks).

[Wretched]

Nice save on the horn!