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Round 2: Etna And Flying V


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from which I learned that I need to dial in some neck angle into the neck pocket, the action is stupidly high with the saddles all the way down at the moment.

I ran into abit of that myself. On mine the height adjustment screws extended through the bottom of the bridge a bit when the saddles are at their lowest. I filed those flush and lowered the action a little. Also the saddles are fairly thick, so there is room to slot them with a nut file and lower the action another couple of mm, should you see the need at final setup.

SR

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well its gonna be a mini-humbucker actually so kind of in the middle :) but thanks!

@Scott good to know about the screws. I'll take another look when I have a chance, I think I'll anyway try to put a little angle in the neck pocket. For now the Hannes is on another guitar now since I'm preparing to do the bridge comparison I was mentioning earlier.

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I added 2 degrees to my gibson style V and had to recess the bridge pretty far. Recessing has the potential to ruin the break angle on the strings at the bridge. Especially if you are doing string through the body. The stop tailpiece may need to be recessed as well if you don't get it right.

Moving forward I went back to 4 degrees when using Gibson hardware (TOM) realizing that Gibson did 4 for a reason.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'll come back to this issue when I give the neck its "few days with strings on". Its basically ready for that, I need to get the body up to speed. I carved the back of the neck, first roughed in the nut and heel area with a sanding drum in a drill press:

1606389_10202246780803429_484470070_o.jp

then followed up with a spokeshave and sandpaper, arriving at this:

1048401_10202246779683401_1670820495_o.j

I'm experimenting with the neck profile a bit, I need to actually play it to fine-tune it so I'll leave it for now. The one thing I want to still do now is to add some veneer to the back of the headstock, so that's up next.

The V is at the stage of bevel cutting, I thought I'd run around it with a chamfer bit but then I realized that they are not constant around the perimeter of the guitar so I have to take a different approach. In the end I decided to mark the lines that I'm going for and then do multiple passes with the router, with increasing depth - taking care to not cross the pencil line.

1602133_10202240291521201_699919515_o.jp

I've managed to straighten out the outer straight bevels nicely with a handplane, the back part where they're curving is still to come.

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  • 2 weeks later...

and now for something completely different:

1797009_10202320456845284_523077236_o.jp

just a snap of a 3/4 I'm building for my daughter. my first try at a bound fretboard and natural binding. And set-neck - it was supposed to be bolt on but the heel ended up so thin that I decided I don't want to risk it - the neck is being glued as I type this.

But back to the V:

I did manage to clean up the bevels ok, the cleanup of the cleanup will be when I'll be finish sanding the guitar. The top is still not perfectly level anyway so I'll leave it at that for now. At the moment I'm preparing a set of templates for the floyd route, the friend of mine that I'm building this one for CNC'ed the shape for me so this is the starting point:

1025506_10202300875835771_10989401_o.jpg

here's the first template starting to take shape, along with an electronics test-fit (i routed the cavity, drilled the holes etc)

1009242_10202321264985487_378355696_o.jp

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I am happy to report that after some time spent planning out and making templates I am now able to produce a working rout for the lo pro schaller tremolo in scrap wood

1836939_10202378307251508_1843714420_o.j

on to the real thing..

edit: yes, there saddles are out in the photo, I did check with them that everything is ok :)

Edited by pan_kara
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Thanks!

Dremel (in the stewmac base) + fence indeed. I made a strat pickguard mdf template some time ago, I use it to lay out the 5-way slots. It has 4 holes drilled - two bigger ones for the screws and two smaller ones that mark the ends of the channel. I copy them to the body and then connect the smaller holes with the dremel, aligning the fence at both ends by sticking the dremel bit into the holes. The only problem is that the bit is smaller than the channel that I need to I have to do 2-3 passes, adding something thin between the fence and the base.

But that's just me being stupid.. I probably even have a bit that would work on one pass somewhere...

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hah! from a blue hater this means even more ;) thanks!

concerning the order - this is an exception, not a rule for me. The thing is that this guitar is a bunch of first-s for me. To name just the relevant ones - its the first time I'm trying a set-neck and the first time I'm trying to do a faux-binding finish.

The way I wanted to do the binding was to spray the back and sides with shellac, finish sand the top (also removing any possible shellac overspray/runs) and then stain the top. I wasn't confident I could do all this with the neck already in place, so I decided to shuffle the order a little bit - do all of that (and everything else that I could) with the neck off the body, then after staining seal the top with a couple coats of shellac and do the remaining parts: glue the neck, route the (neck) pickup, align the bridge and drill the mounting holes..

So far its working ok - the neck pickup route is in place and the bridge is mounted. The only problem I got is that the shellac seemed to dissolve the colortone stain I used and washed a bit of the color off.. And I got little blue runs on the sides after painting the top, but these sanded out easily.

I'm now about to solder the electronics, test that everything works and then finish everything off - carve the heel, finish sand the neck etc. - and then its the real finishing, I'm planning to put rustins plastic coat over the whole guitar.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I hear you Scott. I fell in love with the "vintage copper" thing Schaller does from the moment I got the stuff in my mail. I'm with you on the V's too - I never really felt any attraction towards V's or explorers, but not that I'm building one I'm liking it more and more

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks Sancho! Love how your wenge-top turned out BTW!

yea, I'm really enjoying this build. (Etna, the other one is a bit on hold at the moment, I'll come back to it when I'm done with the V and a few others). I wonder if I will suddenly begin to like explorers if I end up building one at some point... :P

I'm slowly doing some work shaping the neck and heel, and starting to sand the body (I still have to do the cavity cover recess and the cover itself but the perspective of having to route more mdf templates keeps holding me back...)

I acquired a stationary belt sander recently, just in time to shape the heel:

1614585_10202613201123708_1127209146_o.j

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  • 2 weeks later...

Getting there.. here is the V with strings on, I wanted to play a bit and tweak the neck profile

10003671_10202691511481418_992843312_o.j

Carving the neck left me with a problem since the neck went into a backbow .. I tried correcting it with the truss rod but after turning the thing a bit it gets stuck, I don't know why, whether its the thread or simply the force from the wood, but I'm afraid to push it further by force (I already used quite a bit of force).

I clamped the guitar into a forward bow for a few days and at the moment I'm at a situation where the neck is basically perfectly straight under string tension. I'll probably be able to get away with this when I level the frets with strings off, but the fact that the truss rod is already at its adjustment limit is making me a bit uneasy..

But this didn't stop me from finish sanding the neck, and now I'm putting on the first coats of truoil

1980475_10202691511521419_75131315_o.jpg

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Carving the neck left me with a problem since the neck went into a backbow .. I tried correcting it with the truss rod but after turning the thing a bit it gets stuck, I don't know why, whether its the thread or simply the force from the wood, but I'm afraid to push it further by force (I already used quite a bit of force).

I think it's better if you let the neck to stabilize a couple of weeks after carving the back... for me, it means that the fretboard radius has to be done after that, so I can check if it needs some extra levelling before giving radius and installing the frets... at the end, it almost will not need any trussrod adjustment (just a little bit)...

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I held off with fretting and leveling the fretboard as long as I could, which was to the moment just before carving the neck, but after the initial thicknessing. I prefer to press the frets in while the back is still flat. Then I always left the neck a long time to adjust when I was removing wood from the back, once the frets were in.

I'm suspecting maybe my fret saw makes slots that are too narrow for the fretwire that I'm using.. and the less wood I have in the neck the more the frets manage to push it into backbow.

Well, at the moment the strings are off and the neck is still pretty much straight. I'll probably be levelling the frets when all the other work is done, so something like 3 weeks from now. We'll see.

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Glad you have the problem controlled... I think I didn't understand, still not sure about the direction of the bending, but if the fret slots are too narrow, you should get a kind of convex neck, right?... or I'm missing something.

Installing the frets in a carved neck is not a problem, maybe it helps to you in the future. ;)

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maybe I got some terminology wrong or something.. I am getting convex fingerboard i.e. a bump in the middle - something that string pull would straighten if it was stronger. Since the truss rod is double action, I'm trying to counter it with the truss rod.

Edited by pan_kara
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  • 4 weeks later...

Small update on Etna. While the V is getting tru-oiled I finally liberated the Hannes bridge from the body I'm using for the harmonic sustain measurements in the other thread so I could move to the step I had planned next, which is mounting the neck, attaching the strings, letting the neck adjust to string tension (so that I can do a fret level) and playing on the guitar a little to get a feel of whether I need to tweak the neck profile further.

Here's the front with a set of baritone 12-68's

1622322_10202880612768832_50472936857576

and here's the back. The neck profile is some weird rounded-off half-trapezoidal (i.e. a flatt-ish spot at the top and then gradually falling of over the bottom 2/3rds of the profile) and feels really good. So I think I'll give her a few more days under tension and then take the neck off to finish sand it and finish with tru oil.

964346_10202880613008838_403931383683723

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Thanks Sancho! The neck should be ok, she's without strings now and mostly straight. I'll see for sure when I get to leveling the frets, but so far looks like it should be fine.

The Etna headstock is not _exactly_ what I wanted, also I think it would look better reversed. I have another iteration of the design for the next V that is currently in the planning stages (and accumulating the wood). That one should be killer.

But meanwhile we have the current one.

I had to drill the output hole with a hand drill, couldnt fit the guitar under the drill press

10010102_10202885539812005_8792221272128

The cavity cover. I learned my lesson from earlier attempts of gluing together 0.6mm veneer (and HDF) with Titebond to create pickguards and cavity covers... and having the stuff warp on me terribly. This time I used two layers of 1.5mm veneer and glued them with epoxy. Much better.

But since I suck so bad I managed to cut it inverted, i.e. with the walnut side facing downwards. Didn't want to start from scratch so I glued another layer of walnut to the other side and routed off most of the "wrong" layer so that it would wit "inside" the ledge that's in the cavity. (might need to make room for the 5-way now).

So this is it, magnets being glued in place now:

906865_10202885539932008_545241152563921

And here its in place, the back getting the first tru-oil coat:

10296053_10202885851899807_6342405317418

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