Violacaster

[Pleshy]

Hello project guitar. I'm a new here, just starting my first guitar build. I played guitar in my youth, but never had any previous intentions of building a guitar. I am professional woodworker. A few colleagues of mine are hobby luthiers and I was eventually convinced to design a guitar.

The design started with a telecaster template. However leaving my mind to its own devices the design very quickly deviated from a tele. Heavily  inspired by the fender custom shop "violinmaster" relic build, but with some obvious modifications. Think thinline telecaster but it's a violin.

I mirrored the two left bouts of the telecaster template across the centerline to achieve the viola outline. Then hand carved the "points" onto a new template that was then replicated to make my final template. The neck template was also slightly modified to accommodate an exaggerated scroll headstock. A custom template was also created for the internal clambering.

In telecaster fashion white American Ash was chosen as principle material for the core. Thats about as far as the telecaster goes in this build. Thin laminations of Nogal and Padauk are sandwiched between the bookmatched flame maple top and back. The top and back will eventually be carved once the neck pocket and pickup cavity are cut and internal work has been completed. The body is obnoxiously thick. Just shy of 2 1/2" uncarved. The body was chambered to an exterior wall thickness of 1/2". I always enjoyed playing thick heavy guitars. That's the only reason I chose to leave some thickness in the body.

I'm thinking of angling the neckpocket a degree or so to compensate for some of the thickness. Any thoughts, suggestions or advice about neck pocket angles would be appreciated. This is where my technical guitar knowledge drops off. There will be a floating bridge that should give me some play in regards to string height and geometry.

 

The neck is laminated with bookmarked curly maple with thin nogal and padauk detail down the centerline. A scroll was handcrarved into the headstock.

 

I will begin preparing a Gabon Ebony fingerboard blank for fretwork in the coming days. A block of African blackwood will be shaped into an acoustic style bridge plate, mounted with a floating tuneomatic bridge. As well as a carved blackwood tailpiece. I am also toying with the idea of making my own laminated purfling binding, probably with nogal and paduak in keeping with the same detail asthetique elsewhere on the build.

The guitar will be finished with a french polish shellac to complete the traditional violin look with all gold hardware; frets, tuners, strap buttons, etc for a traditional look.

I think in going to go with simple electronics. A single TV jones Supertron in the neck position. Simple wiring 500k volume and a 500k tone pot with a .022uF cap. Simple.

 

That's where I am now in the build process, and where I'm going in concept. Just wanted to share. Let me know your thoughts. Hope you enjoyed reading. I will keep you posted.

[Pleshy]

Another picture

[Pleshy]

[nakedzen]

Very nice. The missing piece behind the bridge makes me worried but I guess the top and back can take any strain from that.

[Bizman62]

Hi and welcome!

I've seen some violin shaped electric guitars before and I must tell that yours has a beautiful shape!

I won't try to help you with the neck break angle as there's people here who are way more experienced with those. It's no rocket science, though.

[henrim]

3 hours ago, Pleshy said:

Any thoughts, suggestions or advice about neck pocket angles would be appreciated.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject but I have done it a few times. My preferred method is to draw a side view of the instrument in full scale. I do it in Illustrator but can be done by hand on paper. In your drawing you set the  bridge you are going to use in its lowest height and draw a straight line towards the nut so that the line is just above the frets. There’s the lowest string position and your neck angle. Illustrator gives me the angle in degrees. On paper you need to measure it yourself.

Now of course you don’t ever want to have action so slow that the strings would touch the frets. So you may want to draw the lowest position touch over the frets. And take the nut height in account. But as long as the bridge has a height adjustment you should be good with this method.

Obviously some basic trigonometry can give you the angle too but personally I draw the instrument anyway.

[nakedzen]

TOM bridge usually needs around 3-4 degrees tilted neck. You can do either, tilt the heel or the pocket.

If you have the bridge already, you can measure the angle with a long ruler or string. I find it best to have everything ready, the neck, the bridge, so you can build with the real components  and check the actual action you'll have when it's all in place. If you tilt the pocket bottom only, leave some overhang on the fretboard to hide the gap.

I usually first route a shallow flat neck pocket. Then tilt the template to desired degree, and route the bottom with a pattern bit along the edges. I guess you can do it all in one go, I just prefer to do it in steps to avoid making it too deep.

[Pleshy]

On 11/13/2022 at 12:35 PM, nakedzen said:

Very nice. The missing piece behind the bridge makes me worried but I guess the top and back can take any strain from that.

I’m not too worried that the center block doesn't extend all the way to the bottom of the body, Plenty of gibson semi-hollows have been made with partial blocks. By no means conventional in a thinline tele, but I don’t think it will be detrimental to the build.  I discussed these considerations with my colleagues before the chambering was done. Ultimately we decided that if a thin soundboard on an acoustic can hold string tension without issue, then the partial block on my build should more than suffice. I reckon the bigger impact of chambering is feedback. But I think I have enough meat in the body to mitigate any uncontrollable feedback.

[Pleshy]

On 11/13/2022 at 2:37 PM, henrim said:

I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject but I have done it a few times. My preferred method is to draw a side view of the instrument in full scale. I do it in Illustrator but can be done by hand on paper. In your drawing you set the  bridge you are going to use in its lowest height and draw a straight line towards the nut so that the line is just above the frets. There’s the lowest string position and your neck angle. Illustrator gives me the angle in degrees. On paper you need to measure it yourself.

Now of course you don’t ever want to have action so slow that the strings would touch the frets. So you may want to draw the lowest position touch over the frets. And take the nut height in account. But as long as the bridge has a height adjustment you should be good with this method.

Obviously some basic trigonometry can give you the angle too but personally I draw the instrument anyway.

Because I am adding a bridge-plate I will have a bit of play when it comes to either the neck break angle and/or bridge height. I think I will dig the pocket at 3 degrees and test fit all the pieces, making  micro-adjustments as necessary. The plan was to leave the bridge plate over-size and slowly plane down to ideal height. I also speculate that I will need to router a small recess and inset the bridge a millimeter or 2 into the bridge plate. The bridge plate is more for aesthetic reasons than anything. I may reconsider if I find I’m having too many issues with the geometry, but I’m not giving up on the idea yet. I’m determined to at least try and realize my vision. I just need to spend some time at the drawing board working the problem. Thanks for the advice.

 

[Pleshy]

14 hours ago, nakedzen said:

TOM bridge usually needs around 3-4 degrees tilted neck. You can do either, tilt the heel or the pocket.

If you have the bridge already, you can measure the angle with a long ruler or string. I find it best to have everything ready, the neck, the bridge, so you can build with the real components  and check the actual action you'll have when it's all in place. If you tilt the pocket bottom only, leave some overhang on the fretboard to hide the gap.

I usually first route a shallow flat neck pocket. Then tilt the template to desired degree, and route the bottom with a pattern bit along the edges. I guess you can do it all in one go, I just prefer to do it in steps to avoid making it too deep.

Personally I would not adjust the template between routing passes for such a critical joint. I’d argue that even a nominal degree of precision would be lost with each adjustment. I would set the template at the correct angle from the start. I would still take multiple small passes adjusting cut height with each pass to achieve the depth in the mortice.

[woodfab]

Looks great so far, very interesting.

[henrim]

39 minutes ago, Pleshy said:

Because I am adding a bridge-plate I will have a bit of play when it comes to either the neck break angle and/or bridge height.

Right. Sounds like you have room to experiment there. On the black body in the attached picture I have about 3 degrees tilt. That one was designed for a different bridge than I ended up using so I made a ~3mm hardwood shim plate under the bridge to get the action right. On the one that has its neck wrapped (for refinishing) there is close to 5 degree angle. I can’t remember exactly but the point is that it’s a huge angle and I don’t really feel comfortable playing it. At the time I built it I still played a Les Paul and wanted to try how it felt if I had even more neck angle than my Gibson had. I realized I want to go to the other direction.

Edited November 14, 2022 by henrim

[nakedzen]

10 hours ago, Pleshy said:

Personally I would not adjust the template between routing passes for such a critical joint. I’d argue that even a nominal degree of precision would be lost with each adjustment. I would set the template at the correct angle from the start. I would still take multiple small passes adjusting cut height with each pass to achieve the depth in the mortice.

You don't lose any precision since you're not routing against the template with the angled cut, but against the edge of the neck pocket.

[Pleshy]

7 hours ago, nakedzen said:

You don't lose any precision since you're not routing against the template with the angled cut, but against the edge of the neck pocket.

Wouldn’t that open up a small wedge shaped void where the bottom of the neck meets the back edge of the pocket. If you set up the template and rout the mortice all on the same plane as the break angle,  the back wall of the mortice would be a plumb 90 degree in relation to the bottom of the pocket making for a zero clearance fit with the neck. I suppose the voids could be shimmed, but I still feel its's prudent to get as close to a Z-C fit as possible. The only way I could see this working without adding an open void in the neck joint would be to carve the top of the body where the neck meets to be on a parallel plane to the break angle (which I didn't intend on doing.) Same concept, your doing all the router work on the same plane as the break angle, just using a different reference for the angle. Or would you suggest that the top of the body where the neck meets be angled to the same plane as the bottom of the neck pocket? I figured the only downside would be visually where the fretboard and body meet together not being parallel.

[nakedzen]

There's a lot of finessing and multiple shallow routes doing it the "creeping towards" method. Which I prefer to do to avoid going too deep and having to use a shim. You can change the back of the pocket to the same angle as the bottom, by routing against the top edge of the pocket when you do the angled routing.

If you're sure about the angle and action much easier and quicker to do it with an angled template all at once.