Cms Puzzle Guitar

[pan_kara]

I just finished a small project of mine, not really a full build, more like a refinish with a fretboard swap, but I thought I'd share anyway. This forum and the site tutorials spawned some of the ideas I had for this thing.

I basically wanted to do a guitar themed after a .. particle detector at the Large Hardron Collider at CERN. Which is where I work. I've set up a blog to document the whole story at http://cmsguitar.blogspot.com, and I'm posting the highlights in this thread.

I wasn't confident enough to try to attempt a full build so I decided to buy a decent-but-cheap guitar and make the necessary changes. I wanted a fretted-fretless with the first 8 frets in (later decided to have only 5) to help with chord playing and no frets beyond that. So I knew I'd be swapping whatever fingerboard is on the guitar for a piece of ebony.

The second major thing is the artwork for the top - I wanted to use the photo of the CMS detector, aiming at something like this:

Then I thought that the way to have this one the guitar would be to have a jigsaw puzzle made with the photograph, glue it to the body and then drown in clearcoat. I never heard of anybody doing it this way so figured it probably makes no sense, but decided to go for it anyway and see if it worked.

Here is the puzzle itself, lined up on a guitar body (the body is a different project, but this was just to test):

For the real guitar I ended up getting a LAG (French guitar company) that I bumped into in a music store in Poland. It played and sounded surprisingly good for a guitar costing something like 150 EUR. Here it is, along with the pre-slotted ebony blank I bought for the fingerboard:

I steamed the fretboard off - something that I didn't know was possible until I found the tutorial on projectguitar.com

I wetsanded the top with P1500, filled the middle pickup hole and started gluing on the puzzle pieces with epoxy:

and ended up with something like this:

[pan_kara]

The next step is the fingerboard. As my workshop is my small apartment and in some cases my balcony, my sawing device of choice is the dremel saw attachment run against a fence made from an I-beam:

This is to get roughly the correct size, I then follow that with P100 sandpaper glued to something long and flat (the same I-beam for example).

The fret slots in the fretless part are to be filled with veneer, I did a test on one of the cut-off pieces to see what I like better - maple or padauk (I have those plus wenge lying around). I chose to go with the padauk:

superglued a bunch of strips in:

After cutting these off sanding flat I did a quick mock-up, took a photo of that and started on the inlay design. This is what I came up with editing the thing in GIMP:

The strings and the inlay lines are drawn on the computer. I wanted to have something representing particle (muon) tracks bent by the magnetic field of the CMS detector pictured on the photograph. So the idea is to cut long channels with the dremel and glue veneer strips in them. I did a series of more or less failed attempts on scrap wood and learned that there's no way to freehand that. So I made plywood templates to guide the dremel along:

This gave me restults that I was satisfied with. In the meantime I upgraded to the Stewmac attachment, a huge step up I have to say. Here is the first channel done in the ebony:

The channel is just wide enough for two veneer strips so I went with two-color maple-padauk lines. Here's how they turned out:

[ScottR]

Nice. The fretboard is especially sweet. It will be interesting to see how well the puzzle pieces hold up to forearm rub.

SR

[Workingman]

That is looking cool. Great idea and interesting work place.

[pan_kara]

Thanks! There's one more bit I did to the fretboard, I'm really proud of that. esp. given that its my first inlay attempt. I'll post that later today.

As for the arm rub... I'm wondering about that too. The final version is clearcoated so in theory they should be protected.. in practice - we'll see.

[pan_kara]

The final bit of inlay is a little "electromagnetic shower" at the 12th fret. These are short curved lines so there was no point in doing templates for these - decided to just do it very slowly with the dremel on the stewmac base. Ended up with this:

I glued in the maple strips and cut through them at the intersections to make room for the two final padauk strips. These had to be pre-bent to fit the tight curves. I have no previous experience with bending wood, but heard you use heat to do that, so I took my soldering station, set it to 200C which is the lowest I could and tried wrapping wet veneer over the tip. No idea if that was the "right" way to do it but it definitely worked better than I expected:

and this is the end result:

After getting this done I proceeded to glue the board to the neck. This didn't come out perfectly, I think I took too long putting the clamps on and there are tiny gaps between the neck and the fingerboard in a few places, but I decided to go with it.

The most complex power tool I used in this job is a sanding drum mounted to a drill in a drill stand with a jig designed to allow me to take material off the sides of the fretboard in a controlled way, producing reasonably straight lines:

The I-beam was then used to do the final straight fretboard egdes, and the sanding drum was used to shape the nut-end of the board:

You can also see here a small padauk veneer part I glued to the headstock to give it some life.

[Pestvic]

holy crap that fretboard is thick! or is this some type of illusion? haha

[pan_kara]

yea its around 7mm at the center. I guess thats the thickness of the blank I got - I admit I didn't really think about this, I figured its more or less right and didnt have anything to thickness it anyway. I did a little thicknessing of the part by the nut so that the fretted part is more or less level with the unfretted part. Used a robosander with a fence for that, but I didn't have it yet when I was doing the inlay.

I'm really just starting with this guitar buliding thing

[Workingman]

Did you sand a radius on it, or is it flat?

[Pestvic]

I think you could still get two fretboards out of that beast haha :-P but yeah its going to look good

[pan_kara]

Ok, so to finish up the fingerboard topic. I created the depression for the fretted part before gluing the fretboard on, running it between a straight block of wood (maple neck blank for some future project) and a robosander. This way I lowered the space under frets 1-5 by a little under 1mm (1mm being the fret height).

After the board was glued to the neck it was time to radius it. I did put a radius on, 17'. I wanted it to be pretty flat. This was done with a 20cm long wood block, following with the I-beam with sandpaper glued on to make sure everything is nice and level. It turned out I needed little of the I-beam, careful passes with the radius block created a pretty straight surface. I ended up with something like this:

you can see the depression in the spot where the frets will come.

And once again, the whole thing:

Next up was hammering in the frets, gluing them down by running superglue down the fret slots, making sure that they're level, polishing, dressing the ends...

[pan_kara]

Over to the guitar body. I got some 2K paint for use as a clearcoat for this project. That, and a spraygun - I tried spraying 2K with an airbrush powered by a pressurized air container in the past, with mixed results. But I figured out there's compressed air lines at CERN that I can plug into so I decided to try to switch to a proper gun. This was my first try spraying with a gun. I set up to do 3 bodies at the same time:

This is 2 or so coats on:

left to dry until another session on the following day:

Then I gave the guitar about a few days for the paint to settle. The result was good but not without problems. I had bubbles forming in the paint - which as I understand is a sign of painting in excessively humid conditions. And on top of that, the paint turned a bit "milky", I think I must have contaminated it somehow or thinned it too much (the instructions said don't add more than 20% thinner, I believe I didn't and I only did one coat thinned, oh well...). I didn't really have a way of undoing that so it stayed like it was. Which wasn't bad, in fact it looked pretty good nonetheless.

I put in the hardware and soldered in the electronics, ending up with something like this:

The sides and edges were polished, the top is basically the way I got the paint to flow out. Maybe just a little polishing.

[pan_kara]

With the neck and the body mostly ready I could finally do a test fit to check that everything is aligned properly:

Then I took her apart again to attempt adding a logo to the headstock. A "CMS" logo and a freshly created logo of my own. Here's the two decals on the headstock:

and then after a series of failures I ended up spraying over them with automotive acrylic clearcoat, arriving at this:

...and voila - done!

[Pestvic]

whoaaaaa that fretboard is awesome! Looks just crazy! No wonder it needed to be a bit thicker

Edited July 21, 2012 by Pestvic

[pan_kara]

Thanks Pestvic, as I said I'm really happy with the way the fretboard turned out - for a first attempt. After finishing the job I had 4-5 days to learn fretless playing before showing her to the world at the annual CERN Hardronic Festival

[Pestvic]

whaaatt!?!!? haha I want to seeee. Is there some videos around? im about to dig everywhere for some lol

[pan_kara]

It was webcast. The band playing before us was "Les Horribles Cernettes" - a band who's photo was the first ever photo posted to the WWW, it had its 20th anniversary and there's been a lot of media noise recently. So we got 150k hits at the webcast page at one point, hopefully some people stayed and saw my guitar creation

anyway, I have a multitrack recording and HD video from the webcast, its just a matter of time until I put something on youtube. Check the cmsguitar blog or facebook.com/traqq. I'll post here anyway.

[Pestvic]

sweet i cant wait

[pan_kara]

sweet i cant wait

Here you go:

http://youtu.be/P4NrS1Tq-YU

sorry for my crappy fretless playing (had 5 days to learn)

I managed to get this project officially acknowledged by the experiment, yay!

http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/when-music-and-physics-collide-cms-guitar

[bob123]

CERN! awesome! You may have met my older sister at some point haha.

Anyway, lots of great, unique ideas on this build, and appears to have come out great! Enjoyed the video haha.

[Pestvic]

so rad!

[pan_kara]

Thanks guys!

I did some work on her recently, changed both pickups, re-leveled the fretboard and fixed the nut slot, stripped the whole finish from the back of the neck and finished it with danish oil and changed the strings to flatwounds. I'll post some pics soon - right now I just have "in progress" shots from the pickup installation:

oh, and my small success with this project - it made it to Discovery News

http://news.discovery.com/space/cern-physicist-builds-cms-inspired-guitar-120904.html

[Prostheta]

You're my new hero, man. Combining some of my favourite things. My hat is off to you.

[ScottR]

oh, and my small success with this project - it made it to Discovery News

http://news.discover...tar-120904.html

Now that's pretty cool! Congrats.

SR