Leaderboard

Build documentation follows! 25.5" scale, ash body, maple neck, ebony board. Sintoms bell bronze frets, graphtech nut, Schaller DaVinci tuners, Scaheller bridge, copper hardware from Aliexpress(!). Emg pickups, jack and switch. Shopping list: Einhell bandsaw for rough cuts (pretty terrible saw but works well enough for this) Japanese shinto rasp (perfect for neck contouring, belly cuts) Lots of clamps and sandpaper (240, 320, 600, 1000, 1500, 2000 grits) Random orbital sander from aliexpress (Deko brand, very good quality and cost 25 euros https://www.aliexpress

Oh yeah the teaser of #002

First ever build done, call it "The Locomotive". Inspired by the german locomotives DB10 "Black Swan", tried to make it look sort of industrial dirty steam machinery looking, without making it into steampunk. I've worked as a welder/mechanic in coal power plants for over a decade so that helped, both in getting it done and as inspiration. I've worked from home for the last year so I thought I'd put together a small workshop for building my own guitars finally. Got the router templates from guitarsandwoods. Neck shape: baseball bat, D-ish. Copied my ESP Horizon neck but kept it chunky.

While the strings are off (and on then off then on then off...) it's interesting to see how flat the radius on the fretboard actually is. This is a 16" radius caul from the fret press, and even in the middle there might still be a little bit of a gap, which suggests it's flatter still: Tuning machines can finally be attached permanently. I had them unscrewed for the majority of the setup so I could see what things were doing under string tension and still be able to quickly take the strings off again to tweak things. I've just applied a little paste wax to the shafts near the mounti

I'm quite a fan of wenge! So, decided to just make a simple truss rod cover. The original idea ended up looking out of character with the build, this looks much cleaner. And then I got a start on the carve. Since the horn/cutaway is the most involved part that's where I started. Here's a picture of the test piece along with the real deal. You can see an area where I departed significantly from the test carve. I decided to keep the point tall to match the style of the mandola rather than the more 'Carl Thompson' look of the test. It ends up changing the look of the