Set Neck Jazzmaster

[Geoff St. Germaine]

Here's a guitar I'm working on with a friend. He's on a course from me and across the country from home for 6 months. He'd mentioned he was looking at getting a new electric guitar and was over and had a look at a guitar I'd built previously. "You build guitars?" and "That looks awesome" turned into a new project. I'm trying to get him to do most of the work with my supervision. He has very limited woodworking experience, so sometimes I take over for the critical parts. Anyway, here's the guitar he looked at:

And here's what we're working on:

Set neck Jazzmaster

Flamed maple neck with macassar ebony fretboard, 22 frets

Cherry body with bubinga top and ebony centre strip

Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder Jazzmaster pickups

Vol/Tone controls with 3 position switch (neck/both/bridge)

Gotoh tuners

LMII hardtail bridge

Here are some progress pictures:

And this is where it sits now:

Next up is fretting the neck and routing the pickup cavities before the neck is glued into the body.

I have two 6 string basses and a headless guitar on the go right now as well. I'll try to get something up on those.

[ScottR]

Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder Jazzmaster pickups look like P-90s. What's the difference between the two?

This is a good looking build so far, love the fretboard.

SR

[RestorationAD]

Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder Jazzmaster pickups look like P-90s. What's the difference between the two?

This is a good looking build so far, love the fretboard.

SR

Quarter pounders should have .25 pole pieces (instead of modern .185" or vintage .197")

Jazzmaster bobbins are even more squashed than a P90 making the coil wider. In general the shape of a coil plays a part in shaping the EQ of the sound. In general the taller a coil the brighter the output.

[ScottR]

So these should have a fat or warm sound? (If thin is a bad term, is fat likewise a bod term?) I'm gonna have to find me some audio samples of those.

SR

Edited July 26, 2012 by ScottR

[RestorationAD]

Fat and Warm but they are easy to mess up... personally I think they are too flat and hard to make sound good (when building my own) however I am sure that seymour has done them right. Nothing like having a lot of resources to throw at experimentation.

[Geoff St. Germaine]

I'm really not sure what the pickups sound like. I'm primarily a bass player and have neither played nor knowingly heard a Jazzmaster. It'll be a new one for me.

The pickup cavities are routed now.

[Levi79]

Man that's nice.

[Geoff St. Germaine]

Thanks Levi. I really like how it's turning out.

[Geoff St. Germaine]

I got this one finished. It'll be going to it's owner in a couple of weeks. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. The main area for improvement for this is finishing. It turned out well in the end, but it was a lot more work than it should have been.

[Levi79]

Came out incredible dude!

[Geoff St. Germaine]

Thanks a lot, Levi!

[Levi79]

I like the inlay at the neck joint, just saw that!

[ScottR]

Yeah,me too. I just have to ask; is that covering something up or were you just purely being creative......or both.

Because even if you weren't, that would be a great way to cover up a mishap.

SR

[Geoff St. Germaine]

The inlay is absolutely covering a mishap, good pickup. What happened was the neck tenon is like an LP neck, so it has the tongue under the fretboard that isn't the full size of the fretboard. Shaping the neck joint I carved too deep into the body and exposed the bottom of the neck tenon in a small area. While this did nothing structurally to compromise the joint, the nice straight neck joint now had an area where the maple ran into the cherry and looked rather ugly. My solution was to do this inlay. There's a matching pearl inlay on the back of the headstock, but I didn't get any pictures up of that.