Cthulhu

[komodo]

5 hours ago, ScottR said:

Now I have....

Wonder if you saw the right one? A casual search did not turn it up.

If you check out Viks FB page, a coupla posts down. You’ll know it when you see the all black one that’s sexy AF. 

[ScottR]

Yeah, I went to the FB page. I presumed it was the Eidolon, a custom built concept guitar for Tosin Abasi?

SR

[komodo]

On 3/2/2020 at 4:28 PM, ScottR said:

Yeah, I went to the FB page. I presumed it was the Eidolon, a custom built concept guitar for Tosin Abasi?

SR

Yes sir. That thing has my attention until I come up with something else that might work. But, waow is that cool.

[ADFinlayson]

Lacquers barely dry on the other one and you're already looking around, tart. To be fair, I'd leave my current build for that walnut. 

[komodo]

Well, the Fishman pups came and I dug out my cocobolo neck that I had started. Much to my dismay, I forgot that at the time I decided to shift gears and make it a 6-string fanned fret. So, the neck is way too narrow and there is even a slotted fanned board to go with it! How could I have forgotten that?! So, I’ll start from scratch, but I’ve got another nice coco piece for that. I’ wondering if I should finish out the 6-string neck more and sell it? What kind of value would that have? It’s a Macassar 24 fret, 7th fret perpendicular board and a cocobolo neck with a compound scarf done. Scales are maybe 25.5-27? Just a guess.

 

[ADFinlayson]

On 3/5/2020 at 3:37 PM, komodo said:

Well, the Fishman pups came and I dug out my cocobolo neck that I had started. Much to my dismay, I forgot that at the time I decided to shift gears and make it a 6-string fanned fret. So, the neck is way too narrow and there is even a slotted fanned board to go with it! How could I have forgotten that?! So, I’ll start from scratch, but I’ve got another nice coco piece for that. I’ wondering if I should finish out the 6-string neck more and sell it? What kind of value would that have? It’s a Macassar 24 fret, 7th fret perpendicular board and a cocobolo neck with a compound scarf done. Scales are maybe 25.5-27? Just a guess.

 

Advertise it on Luthiers Club (fb), you never know - There are plenty of amateur builders buying necks and making bodies.

[komodo]

Pushing it down the road a bit. I worked on the potential inlay design today, there's really no reason not to start building other than the world is on fire, and I need to do final polish and bits on the last build. Maybe I'll just get the FB cut and start the inlay.

Scale(s) are 25.5 - 28". I think the perpendicular ended up being the 8th, but I bounced it around a bit to adjust the geometry at the ends. 

[Prostheta]

Absolutely in line with the theme and very functional. That's a big tick! Lots of fine detail though. Hand cut? I'd be tempted to have it laser or CNC cut myself. 

[komodo]

@Prostheta When I was at a stopping point, I stepped back and said "oh crap". It's like cutting a whole bunch of those really thin,  pointy planet edges. I've had this design for years now, so it must be done. CNC may be an option, we have labs on campus that are world class, but I'm not sure they are cutting ebony or pearl everyday. 

Robin (wife) said the body needs to show up more. So, it's not done, but close-ish. 

[Prostheta]

Well, here's the thing. Back in the way back when, I meddled with inlay in conjunction with Doug West who used a technique he called "laser scrimshaw". Maybe not the most accurate of names all in all, but a very nice method of working complex inlays. The caveats are that you need to be able to cut down a specific depth into your blank material and the fingerboard itself. This varies from piece to piece of course.

Essentially the entire design is cut in mirror say, 3mm down into 4mm material. That way the whole thing is held together by a thin layer forming a backing board. I guess you could laminate inlay material onto a more laser-resilient sheet as well, but hey. The pockets for the inlay are completely evacuated by laser, which it in itself quite a trick. In principle you should then be able to insert all or large sections of the inlay to the fingerboard at once. Perhaps not so easy to achieve with long thin fragile pieces as misalignment will leave you in the realms of damage (and pain), but still possible even if it's on a fret to fret basis.

Personally I think that with access to a CNC, the entire design could be assembled onto a strong backing board with (lets assume pearl) an arrangement of blanks epoxied into a large mat. @curtisa is acutely familiar with benchtop CNC and using alignment pins for workholding and accurate re-aligning between processes. It would be possible to have one machining step grave a rough arrangement outline into a baseboard, epoxy the material directly over that, then cut it with a second program in a known alignment. Bingo.

Doing it in silver would be quite the achievement, but so would be madness. The inexorable draw of insanity, inevitable with these great old ones.

Soapstone (Steatite) is very very Lovecraft. How about a stone fingerboard graven with the image of the unpronouncable cosmic horror? I'm thinking that the graven parts could be sized and gilded. Whitby Jet or other soft black stone would be too incomprehensibly cool for the naked human mind to withstand, leaving one gibbering in Arkham whilst the wall pulsate and chatter with entities from the beyond reaching out to claim your sweet sweet mortal light.

Apparently, anyway. What would I know? WWCD?

[ScottR]

2 hours ago, komodo said:

Robin (wife) said the body needs to show up more

Astute gal, that.

SR

[curtisa]

5 hours ago, Prostheta said:

Personally I think that with access to a CNC, the entire design could be assembled onto a strong backing board with (lets assume pearl) an arrangement of blanks epoxied into a large mat.

The tricky thing would be machining such fine details into an extremely fragile material, and keeping it all together in place while it was worked. The inlay channels would be a doddle. The inlays themselves more problemmatic.

You could do them as V-carve (see my current build thread) to get the really fine detail required, and the pieces to be inlaid would exist as a single substrate that just gets 'plugged' into the channels until such time as you need to flush-trim the excess off. The drawback would be is that the material to be inlaid would need to lend itself well to being machined as an embossed design on a large substrate. That'd discount shell.

Another catch would be that V-carving only works on flat surfaces unless you can machine the channels and inlay pieces to conform to the eventual radius of the fretboard, otherwise you'd end up with the middle (highest) point of the radius'ed fretboard having the inlays appear with the intended lineweight and the edges of the inlay gradually thinning out to nothing as the radius falls away at either side.

You'd also need to ensure that any subsequent sanding of the fretboard after the inlay is installed is kept to a minimum, as every bit of material you remove from the surface thins out the inlay lineweights due to the inlay being a V in profile - as more of the top of the V is removed the width gets narrower.

Doable, but challenging. Unless you've got access to some very talented and confident CNC operators, I'd stick with inlaying it using the techniques you're already comfortable with.

[komodo]

@Prostheta wins the day with the last 1/4 of his post. 

Read some Algernon Blackwood or Clark Ashton Smith if you haven’t, a couple of Lovecraft’s big influences.

[komodo]

More deep thinking. I think @Prostheta is right. The excavation needs to be CNC, though at any other time I could've made that happen, in our current state of the world I'm not sure it's possible. Any resource I had is closed and gone. I'm pretty sure I'll go with some kind of crushed stone inlay which will save A LOT of ridiculous pearl cutting. The biggest issue here is, My routes will need to be bang on perfect, as the cavity decides how good the inlay is. There would be no gap filling using the ebony trick. More deep thought.

[Bizman62]

On the late Crimson forum there was one guy who instead of birds made inlays of each plane type he had flown. Very impressive with windows and all. He had access to a communal workshop with a laser cutter big enough to fit a fretboard. Some trial and error to prevent burning the edges was required, IIRC covering the area with masking tape did the trick as a disposable layer to burn.

[Prostheta]

Lasers are finicky since the focal point needs to be long and hence more likely to be burnt, bellmouthy and inconsistent. Lots of test pieces will be required, and even then the process needs tuning once you change to the actual material itself

Build yourself a for-purpose pantograph and have the design laser cut in 4-5mm acrylic at 3-4x scale. Whilst the super fine details are still difficult to do with a pantograph, you can supplement this with hand finessing. An accurate spindle with low runout would be a must. Mine turns a 1mm cutter into a 1,5mm channel. Dremel suck.

Use your time man. You've got eternity. 

[komodo]

Well no, they tell is we only have weeks.

I’m in no race, I’ve still got the other build to finish and many things to work out still. Which crushed stone, I’m still finalizing the design, there may be some black pearl for the head area, blah blah blah. Not to mention I need to establish a perimeter, dig a well, place landmines, build a windmill, work on my MadMax car, build a forge, setup a canning area, plant a garden first (duh!), reload some shells, etc etc etc.

Stay safe everyone.

[komodo]

Refined the inlay some more, it's more inline with a Cthulhu vs an octopus. Similar to the one in my avatar. I need to scale it down a little I think, but it's getting close. There are still some rough bits where I was connecting the center design with the extended tentacles. ignore it for now. This certainly isn't getting any easier to pull off LMAO. I'm trying not to think about that part too much.

EDIT - even further tweaks, getting the tentacles to flow better

 

[JayT]

I just noticed the tentacles loop on the 3|5|7|9 (and so on) frets ... nice touch!

You did already mention it, but still -- I'm a bit slow

Edited March 25, 2020 by JayT

[ScottR]

1 hour ago, komodo said:

This certainly isn't getting any easier to pull off LMAO. I'm trying not to think about that part too much.

Now that thing LIVES! Nothing wrong with the first one but this is way better. You've got skills man, but give the wife a cudos for giving you a push.

Having said all that----I'm glad I'm not cutting it.

SR

[komodo]

Hmmm yes, there's that. Either I can excavate a bit looser, cut pearl tighter and fill the gaps. Or, I can excavate perfectly, fill with crushed stone and be done. The second certainly sounds better, but the perfect excavation is going to give me nightmares. I mean, one slip and boom. Actually, I could still kind of fill a gap using a teflon dam, but that gets into some uncharted territory. 

Or, I could steal a page from the graphic design manual and just do it. Then whatever happens, you come up with a bunch of explanations and rationalizations of why you did that and sell it to the client ("I was going for a distressed look here . . ."). Unfortunately, I am the client, and I know my game better than anyone except for my wife.

[ScottR]

1 hour ago, komodo said:

("I was going for a distressed look here . . .").

That's a special effect. You get to charge more for that.

When it's your own though, it falls into the category of never being able to unsee what just happened there.

That is a tapestry of curves though, and curves can always be manipulated to account for a slight unexpected change in direction.

You can pull it off.

SR

[komodo]

btw- I didnt draw the center bit, thats cthulhu art ripped from the web. Same as I used on the bottle caps of my Cask of Cthulhu imperial porter. After bringing it into Illustrator, I blended the previous version I’d done and that one together. Just showed the wife and got just a little bit more than “thats nice”, so, hit out of the park. wOOt

[Andyjr1515]

It is stunningly good inlay design, @komodo  

[komodo]

4 hours ago, norm barrows said:

Design your methodology for success.

Always sir. Every single process in this madness is considered that way. In RC airplanes, they call that "flying two mistakes high".

For me it won't exactly be uncharted territory, but it will absolutely be crazyville. And, since we are ALL already there . . .no problem!