Blackdog

Pure genius ! The focus was more meant to be on inferring how I originally found out how not to orient it in glueup ;-) I learn. I know ! Isn't that the way we all learn ?

One final installment before the holidays… Sides were sanded clean of all routing marks. And the roundover was done on all the edges. For this I used a 3/16" (4.75mm) radius roundover bit, because by the time you finish the sanding you end up with something closer to 6mm anyway. If you start with a 6mm the rounding may become too pronounced in the end. Now I'll be gone for some days, have fun and make a lot of sawdust in the meantime !

Pure genius !

Hi Scott ! No, I try to stay away from epoxy as much as possible, we don't get along well... I just degreased the gluing surface thoroughly with naphtha and used good old Titebond. After all is a completely stress free lamination. I haven't had any problems so far with cocobolo. I like the stuff very much for fretboards, it feels more like Brazilian RW than IRW does. The neck of my number four (see link in footer) had also a cocobolo fretboard and faceplate, glued to the limba neck in the same fashion. And that neck was knocked around the shop for five years before I picked up the build again and finished it, and the joint was as solid as the first day. For gluing the fretboard to the neck I will use (after degreasing thoroughly, of course) hot hide glue.

A few more pictures, let's remove some more wood: Pickup cavities. Like I said before, there's a little departure here from accepted Vintage-Correctness… The originals were routed on a pin router, hence the cavities are squared to the top. For this build I opted for template-driven cavities, as on Les Pauls, angled to the same 3* of the neck plane. This leaves a bit more wood on the tenon. The cavities are as shallow as possible, as they were on the originals. Like on Les Pauls, I did it in two passes: first the humbucker legs, then the humbucker body, using separate templates. And the depth of the cavities in each case is the same, relative to the fretboard/template plane, for the neck and bridge position. As the plane is angling upwards, the rear cavity naturally ends up shallower on the top. The pickup separation on the V is slightly wider than on the LP, but I didn't want to make new templates for this. So I just re-used the LP templates, aligning the cavities as required. Hello wiring channel ! As you can see I also drilled the wiring channel for the bridge pickup. A side view of the angled cavities

Let me post a few more pics of the V before I go on holiday… This might be actually interesting to other people. This is how I glue the faceplate to the headstock. First I had to thin down the cocobolo piece I had from 7mm to less than 2mm. I tried slicing it on the bandsaw, but the piece was fairly wide, and being it pretty hard the saw just couldn't cope. So there was no other option than planning down on the router sled and blow 5mm of it in cocobolo dust ! There are no pictures of this reddish dust massacre, but believe me, not a beautiful sight to see…. The job itself was about 1/2H setup and 1/2H actual routing. The cleaning afterwards was pretty much the rest of the afternoon. With the piece already thinned down I simply chose the grain orientation I liked and made a rough cut. I then used the headstock template as a pressing caul. I mounted the faceplate to the underside of the template with a bit of a rather stiff plastic foam in between. Applied the glue to the headstock and attached the template to it using screws and nuts through the tuner pilot holes. Once you tighten everything up, the foam compresses squeezing the excess glue out and and ensures that the edges are conveniently pressed to avoid any glue lines. Once dried, the headplate was trimmed to the headstock itself using a table router jig. For the opening of the TR nut I re-used a template I have for the Les Paul headstocks, after all the opening is the same. It's a rather thick template, because the routing depth has to be pretty shallow. I simply aligned the template properly and used a 3/8" template router bit to route away just the faceplate material, exposing the opening beneath. You may have also noticed that I softened the corners of the headstock. After looking at several more pictures of original Vs, I noticed they were not that sharp. I adjusted the template accordingly and re-run the headstock shaping process. Starting to look interesting...

Nonetheless, I have found that building something trying to replicate the best I can the original building techniques and methods is very educational. Having to make something in a way different of what you would normally do, simply because that's how it's suppose to be done, immediately forces you out of your comfort zone. You learn new skills and might actually find a thing or two worth including permanently in your bag of tricks.

Well, you're right. There's vintage correct and VINTAGE CORRECT... I mean, it depends on the customer. Some people will get silly over details like the right kind of plastic used for the pickup rings. I mean, those plastics were used because they were cheap, not better. And plastics don't sound ! These were factory products, not works of art. And specs varied all the time according to manufacturing efficiency needs. I'm with you in that vintage correct should be about the details that actually make a difference in sound or playability. Even if these quirks could be easily improved upon, keeping them as they were makes for the "personality" of a given instrument of a given era. But some customers won't consider a replica that doesn't say Gibson on the headstock, or the fake serial number is not stamped using the right font or ink... That's why it's clear I don't have a future in the replica business. And I'm fine with that !

Yeah, well… Sorry about that... That last statement of mine cam out completely wrong, didn't it... Maybe that was correct in the 50s… It was either a Gibson or some cheap pieces of wood bolted together by a technician in California... But then the 60s happened to Gibson… And then the 70s, even some Japanese factories were doing a better job at making the same thing !! AND THE 80s !!! And Henry…. Matter of fact, the likes of PRS had a chance because Gibson had dropped the ball in a big way... So, what a gaff !!! I don't think I can blame that one on the auto-correct, can I ?

Oh, come on ! Before the arrival of the likes of PRS, Gibsons were among the finest electrics money could buy !

Ok, Now I see what you mean. Designing a jig, yes, I do enjoy. Even building a jig I find enjoyable as it involves a creative process. I always enjoy that. Now, making templates..... I don't enjoy. The topographic templates for the top carving of the Blackdog design involves 9 different templates. Designing these was fun, as it took many hours of computer drawing to achieve what I wanted. But printing the plans, gluing to the plywood, cutting and adjusting 9 templates is no fun at all. I have a hollow Blackdog build in the back burner, just waiting because I have to make the topo templates for the inner carving... 7 templates... And I can't bring myself to actually do it ! And BTW... Are you sure we've actually been to the moon....

That's a very valid point, I believe my case is similar in that I design a jig that will work for the way I want to do the task. Other people might find that other solutions suit them better. What makes it a success is the tool AND the operator. I could publish plans for all my jigs, but that might not be too useful for someone else. Jigs don't work on their own (that's CNC! ). Each one of them requires that you know what you're doing and what the jig can and can't do. Some ideas are simple enough to just adopt. Like the neck profile jig. I saw that one used by Gil Yaron to make Les Paul necks, and it is great at what it does: achieving a consistent neck depth profile. But those are more the exception than the rule, most jigs are only obvious to use because YOU designed them. The process is the means to achieve the end product, how can it possibly be less important ?

Time to do some moree damage to the body. Control cavities. These are pretty much the vintage correct shape and depth. Nothing new here, a simple template and appropriate router bits do the job. The jack cavity is just the result of a 1" diameter forstner, as it was on the originals. Now about the wiring channels. The original ones had a single channel drilled with a very long 1/4" bit from the mortise, through the control cavity and all the way to the jack cavity. Not completely horizontal, but slightly tilted downwards. I do not have such a long drill bit. I do have one in 6mm but it's shorter, so I decided to do it in two steps (close enough to vintage correctness anyway). The initial one goes in the traditional way. In the originals it was barely visible on the floor of the neck pickup cavity, and obvioulsy as it went out of the cavity at the back. So it had to be carefully measured where exactly to start drilling in the mortise wall and the angle required to get to the cavity at the proper place. Limba is pretty soft and there's not much drill bit drifting, so it went really well. The second channel was a bit trickier. Entering from the control cavity leaves a bit less space for the hand drill chuck (the body gets in the way), so the downwards angle had to be a bit steeper than I wanted, but still plenty safe. I had to deepen the jack cavity a bit to have a clean opening, but the floor of that cavity is still almost 1/4" thick.

Want to see more ? With the fretboard I'm following the sequence I used for the other Gibson builds: I'm tapering and fretting the board before gluing to the neck. WIth bound Gibson boards that's a necessity, because the binding is applied over the fret-ends it all has to be done with the loose fretboard. On this one I could have just as easily tapered the board against the neck, but I ended up doing it the Gibby way. Fretboard tapered and cut to lenght: If you're curious about how I taper the board the process is the following: I scribe with a sharp cutter on the back of the board the desired outside lines (full width if unbound, or adjusted if binding will be applied. Then I attach with a thin double sided tape a ssteel straight edge following the scribed line, and run the board through a table router with a template bit following the straight edge.

No, not really tempted. I don't think an artistic inlay goes well with this type of guitar. There wasn't anything "artistic" about them to begin with. Lots of plastics and screws, way too "factory product". Elaborate inlays belong more in "luthier-grade" guitars: like fancy woods, elegant carves, wooden pickup rings, that sort of stuff. You think my work looks clean ? That's because I take the pictures AFTER I cleaned the mess up ! Now seriously, you put me in a difficult position, I believe it's all about being methodic. I am an engineer in real life, so I'm used to the mental process of imagining ways to solve specific problems. I do not have any big tools, just a mid-sized band-saw, a small-ish drill press and a couple of routers (with dozens of router bits !). The rest is just a bit of ingenuity for building jigs, many times with a lot of inspiration from forums like this one. I have found that the router is the tool that works most consistently and in the cleanest way for me, so I tend to develop jigs for using a router for different things. These days I do not take many pictures of the processes themselves, I tend to document mostly the transformation of the pieces, for my own record. But if there is any specific jig anybody might be interested in seeing just ask ! In any case I believe that the most important tool available in any shop is patience. As soon as you rush a job yo make a mistake. And it's not like I don't have my good share of those anyway ! Then you have to put the second most important tool to use: think of a way to fix it, and if fixing will not be at the desired quality standard, then start over, don't compromise.

Thanks, they fall consistently between strings, i.e. they follow the string path.

For slotting I use another jig that I believe I have already shown here. The fret spacing pattern is the (in-)correct rule of 18 based on a 24.75" scale. Markers on the originals were simple 1/4" perloid dots. I decided to keep the simplicity but use the Blackdog dot arrangement. In a Blackdog design I would use offset dots and inlay the feather design as a 12th fret marker, like this: For this one I chose to move the feathers to the headstock that would otherwise look too empty, and do the double-dot for the 12th fret.

Time make a fretboard for this baby. fretboards on these were pretty simple, no binding and simple dots for markers. They were also on the thin side, typically around 5mm (or a bit less) at the center. I had a nice, wide piece of 7mm thick cocobolo, nicely striped on one half and swirly on the other, that was more than long enough. Cut a blank of 60mm width from the stripey half for the fretboard and kept the swirly half for the headstock faceplate. The fretboard blank had to be thicknessed down to the vintage correct(ish) 5.5mm. For this I use the same jig I made for radiusing, but with a flat router attachment. For all thicknessing operations I have two mortise router bits, of 25 and 35mm diameter. Then the radiusing takes place, the coarse wood removal with the jig And the finer radiusing with the good old wooden blocks and different sandpaper grits. A bit of fine sanding for the picture….

The tenon was already cut, with the angled underside as required. So it was time to make the mortise for it. First step is to square what are going to be the shoulders of the mortise. These are perpendicular to the top, as the mortise is flat. And a 10mm thick lip is left on the back of the body, that will act as a heel cap. The very first prototypes of 1957 did not have this feature, the heel was stepped, but on the following Vs the extended body-heelcap was the norm as seen here: I route the mortises using a template, made to match the actual tenon to ensure a tight fit. The mortise had to be routed to a specific depth so that the neck's fretboard plane is flush with the body top at the point where the fretboard is going to end. The top of the tenon from this point towards the bridge, obviously raises up. And for the small segment between the end of the fretboard and the shoulders of the mortise, it sinks below the body top. I planed the tenon extension to the top level just using two wooden rails of equal thickness on the sides and the plounge router cutting flush with the top. Then a bit of sandpaper action to even things out. For the short shoulders, the quickest solution was to use a hand plane.

Well, it's certainly going to be 100% vintage correct. As long as vintage correction still makes sense... Angled tenon, straight mortise seems to be the consensus apparently. It doesn't really work otherwise. The neck angle was indeed pretty inconsistent. Apparently going from 2* to 2.5*. I opted for 3* because it's the figure that, according to my plan, works well with the fretboard thickness I chose and the thickness of my pick guard material. Like you said, in this case vintage correct is just a guideline. The no-neck-angle was a thing of the late 60s, early 70s. Many SGs were built in that way. Pretty half-a$$ed and awful looking, IMO. BTW, I can't see picture you attached. The site tells me I do not have permission. Any idea what could be happening ?

Now about that headstock... Obviously it is not wide enough to begin with. And it’s pretty long, gets pretty narrow towards the tip and the angle is a steep 17*. Lots of short grain ! It needs reinforcement. So instead of adding wings parallel to the centreline, as usual (which would have left the narrower half of the headstock not reinforced), Gibson opted for this solution: So here we go… Ir really looks pretty silly ! Adding the wings (BTW, the neck has been already tapered in the meantime). And, using the headstock template:

These are pretty thin guitars. According to the gospels of Gibson literature the thickness of the body is 1.5” (38.1mm). Other accounts report 1 5/8” (41.3mm). I opted for a healthy compromise of 40mm. The blank was originally 45mm (1.3/4” or 44.5mm which is a very usual thickness for many uses, but too thick for this. So as soon as I had a rough cut I thicknessed it down. And only then I adjusted the outline against the template, with the robosander first and the router finally. Such a thin body poses some interesting challenges for the mortise and tenon implementation of the neck angle. In the originals the tenon is surprisingly long extending half way between the pickups, which in principle would seem as a necessity for adding gluing surface considering the neck to body joint is at the 20-21st fret. But if the tenon is made straight with the neck and the mortise is angled (like it is done on the Les Paul and the ES335), when the pickup cavity is routed (even keeping it to a reasonably tight depth) the tenon gets pretty thin under the pickup, rendering the extra-length pretty much useless. So the solution adopted for these was to cut the neck angle on the tenon and keep the mortise flat with the body. This and the angled pickup cavities leave the most wood under the cavity. I opted to do the pickup cavities angled (same as neck angle), like on the Les Paul, even though on the original Vs they were straight (the cavities were made on a pin router). So the first step of the tenon preparation was to cut it down to the required depth and at the required 3* angle. Then I cut the shoulders, also at the proper 3* angle, and thinned it down to the usual 1.5” width.

Ahhh, the headstock.... That's a thing in itself. I'll get to that soon.

Hmm, don't remember. But let's see, I got them here: www.theyardstore.com $27 sounds about right... I also bought the 7/8" and 1" ones. Those can be handy for jack holes, either straight or angled. As a matter of fact I toyed with the idea of a hidden jack on the back of the fin for this V. Using this type of jack (I have one made by Switchcraft that should be of decent quality), with angled counterbored holes into the control cavity. But the angle has to be pretty shallow for it to work and the drill chuck hits the wood way before you can drill deep enough. In the end I went back to the traditional jack-on-a-plate of the originals.

Now I was set about using this body blank as-is. The grain of the Limba on the original 50s Vs was running parallel to the fins. But when Gibson re-issued the model in ’83, they just used the blanks with the grain running in the direction of the neck. But there’s a lot of waste anyway, so I though “If I’m going to do it why not doing it properly ?”. And I cut and re-joined the blank for the correct grain orientation. There ! Much better !