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Hey

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Everything posted by Hey

  1. Boy, I haven't posted in a while. The main thing that was giving me trouble was the truss rod channel. I was planning on using an edge guide to route it, but then I learned that my router doesn't work with an edge guide. So, my next plan was to route freehand, and clean it up with sandpaper. That's how I started, and I think it theoretically would work if that's what you had to do. However, I started using a mill, and it works much, much better. It fits the truss rod just about perfectly in terms of width... However, it needs to be made just slightly deeper: I also got a pickup coil wound in the meantime.
  2. What I was planning was similar but a little different (especially since the top is glued and can't be removed any more). I was planning on first having the top up, and use a pattern bit with the follower bearing on top. I would use that to shape as much of the bottom as possible. After that, I planned on flipping it over, and using a pattern bit with the follower bearing on the bottom, and using the part of the bottom that had been shaped as a template.
  3. I hollowed out the mahogany bottom... And glued the two halves together! I'm not sure how well this will work, but my plan is to use the top half as a template to route the bottom half to shape.
  4. I'm not surprised there's confusion. I have access to three drill presses, and they're all different as far as depth stops go. The one I chose to use for hogging out my cavities was, not coincidentally, the one I thought had the easiest to use depth stop. That one had some big bolts / washers on a threaded cylinder. I put some wood as deep as I was drilling (I was leaving 1/4" behind, so I used 1/4" plywood) under the bit, then set the washers to that position. They would hit a stop when I lowered the press, so the press could absolutely go no lower. I realize that sounds confusing. I looked through my photos to see if I took a picture, and unfortunately it looks like I didn't. Another one had a depth stop on the side that could be set with a set screw. Unfortunately, if you pulled hard enough, you could go deeper than you set it. When I Google Image Search "drill press depth stop", the first few that come up look like this one. That drill press had an table with an adjustable height, and if I was forced to use it, I probably would have needed to set the table height to get the depth set. Obviously not ideal, or as accurate (when you would tighten the table down, the height would change slightly), and since you'd have to lower the drill as far as it possibly could go, it would even take longer. The third one was a really small one. It had a threaded cylinder with a small bolt, kind of like a depth stop that some routers have. I suppose it's similar in principle to the first one, but it looks quite different.
  5. Thanks for the comments. I think I might agree, the sound hole might look a little better if it was a little longer and a little more tapered. However, there is a reason it is what it is. I originally used a 1/2" diameter bit, and it wouldn't fit very far into the soundhole template at all, and it didn't look very good. Then I got a 3/8" bit, so that's what the taper is now. At the very least, it looks a lot better than it did with the 1/2" bit. I'm not even sure how I'd change it now. I have a 1/8" bit that I could try to use freehand, but I'm sure I'd screw it up like that.
  6. When I looked at that picture, I noticed that the waist on the bass side had an unnatural straight part, and the sound hole didn't look quite right, either. I tried to make them a little more curvy. Hopefully, I'll be able to start on the bottom tomorrow.
  7. I already learned one lesson from experience. I am making a semi-hollow, and I made this template for the chambers. Now, what's the point of a template? You push the router against it, and it cuts the wood to the shape of the template. But what do you think happens when you push against that thin strip of wood on the bass side? Yeah, it's so thin that it deforms. Not to mention, where the heck is the router supposed to sit when routing around that edge? How is it supposed to reach the middle of the chambers? What I should have done was, make two completely different templates for the outer body (thankfully, I still had my template for that) and the chambers. The chamber template should have been in a larger rectangle for support and room for the router. And I could have also considered having some extra wood on the bass side to hold the router when routing out that large chamber, and then a second template for getting rid of those extra bits of wood later. It was quite easy to route the smallest chamber, and to some degree the middle sized one, because there was plenty of support for the router (I solved part of the problem by putting wood outside of the template). Finally, make sure the template is thick enough. For the outside of the body, it doesn't really matter, but for a chamber template, you need to make sure you have room for the router bit to fit inside without going too deep while the bearing rides against the template.
  8. I finished the chambers in the top, rough cut it, and routed it to shape with the template. I'll have my work cut out for me cleaning up the top.
  9. I got the bandsaw blade changed. It did have literally no teeth left at all. One thing different about it compared to what some people are used to here is that it's used for cutting metal a lot. Still, I asked a machinist what could have caused it to wear so badly. He said that some people try to use it to cut way too fast. So, I'll try not to make that mistake. I got the chambers in the top cut out with a Forstner bit. And the soundhole, too, but I'm not completely happy with how it was routed, so I'll sand it a little by hand after making that chamber a little deeper (so the wood will be thinner)
  10. No, killemall8's intuition was right. Its scorch marks. I thought it might have been because I was cutting through so much wood, and at a weird angle, but it's really just because our bandsaw sucks. Anyway, I made some progress, but I greatly underestimated how much time this would all take if I thought I could have finished up the body before this week. On the plus side, I got a new camera for better pictures! My jig for planing wood: Part way through planing the mahogany bottom. I think it turned out nice: The planed maple top: It's obvious that it's three pieces, because of the grain and color change. Maybe when it's stained it won't look so blatant. But I think I did a decent job with the glue lines. In fact, this is a close of the right glue line. My fingernail is exactly on the join: The color change, where you might guess the join is, is a little to the right of the join! I try to plan ahead, but I'm always surprised by somethings. I did not take into account that the drill press would not be able to reach the center line for drilling the dowel holes. I ended up cutting notches and got that part done. It might have seemed an obvious thing to do, but I wanted to keep as much wood as possible to give the router a place to sit when I route the chambers. The notch at the bottom that you can see (and that's black) was cut with the bandsaw. The other one I cut with the jigsaw. The jigsaw actually worked better (and didn't scorch the wood). I don't know what I'll do when it's time to rough cut the body shape.
  11. Honestly, I don't know. Not only am I new to this, it is not my personal bandsaw, and it's quite likely they don't equip it with high quality blades. But I didn't worry about it too much since the entire rough, black surface was removed.
  12. Finished the chamber template: So, I have an electronics cavity, and two acoustic chambers, which will be joined by another route which I'll make a separate template for. Then I'll need to make the sound hole template. And that's it! With that, I should be able to get the body routed and glued together. I hope to get that done before next week. Here's a possible sketch for a sound hole. Just a simple "swoosh" like I've seen on some Rickenbackers:
  13. Well, when I started drawing the body, I started with a drawing of a Stratocaster, and with each new draft, widened the horns and made the bottom rounder. So, I think if I tightened everything above the waist, that would just get me back to being more like a Stratocaster. Anyway, I spent a lot of time playing with pickups, and while I'm not even done with that, I at least know enough about them to plan where they'll fit. So, that let me design the chambers. I made a working template out of my master template, drew the chambers on them, and started hollowing it out: I will use that template for both the top and bottom halves, so I'll probably need to use wooden dowels to help line them up for gluing.
  14. Well, yeah, that's what I meant. When the neck is still square, glue the fretboard on, cut the slots, then shape the neck and the fretboard at the same time.
  15. It seems like everyone recommends cutting the slots in a fretboard while the board is still loose, then gluing it to the neck. Why not just glue it to the neck and then cut the slots? I can think of a few advantages of doing it that way -- for example, the slots could easily be cut perpendicular to the path of the strings, and then that would be that. Whereas the other way, you have to make sure you carefully align the fretboard when you glue it on, and fix it so it doesn't slip, to keep the existing slots oriented as well as they were when they were cut. And off the top of my head I can't think of any disadvantages. But I'm thinking there must be some, or else people would already do it that way. So, what am I overlooking?
  16. My original idea for this build was to have one pickup, where each string had its own individual pairs of humbucking coils. I still like that idea, but knowing that I have to make FOURTEEN of those things (and the last few I tried had coil breaks) made me start to get frustrated. I think I will continue with that idea, but so I have at least SOME pickup I'll always be able to use until that project is done, I decided to add another pickup. This one will have a coil for all the strings. I am a ways in: The base is plywood. I figured that would be easier to shape and use than normal flatwork material. I've finished some of the coils for the other pickup projects, so I know a couple of things. First, yes, you can solder a pickup that's made of plywood without the plywood catching fire. You can pot it, too. The thick top of that pickup is just there to hold the coil in place as I wrap it. It's only attached to the tops of the magnets with Elmer's glue, and since the glue doesn't bond so well to the magnets, it's easy to remove. I'll remove it around the time I pot it. That will lock the coils in place, even without the top. I think to make this pickup humbucking, I might just wrap the second coil around wooden dowels instead of magnets, so it'll buck hum but still have more of a single coil sound. Since that pickup might not be the most attractive thing in the world, I'll probably put it under a wooden pickup cover, maybe something like this:
  17. I've been working on my first build. I'm much more of a player than anyone who aspirations to build a lot of guitars; I thought that building one would deepen my relationship with the instrument. I have access to some power tools, like a bandsaw and a drill press, but since I'll only build one for now, I didn't want to go crazy with too many tools. I don't really have any prior woodworking experience, and I'm sure that many people here would say that I shouldn't jump into a project like this, but I've recently seen some other people in real life jump into even more complicated projects, and it's encouraging. I don't know if I'm really "jumping in", anyway. I might not be starting by making wooden furniture, but I have read three books on guitar building and try to carefully think over every step. I've also been inspired by some of the posts at this board on topics like router sleds to come up with my own solutions for things as they came up. I decided to try a 7 string, semi-hollow. That would be make my first homemade guitar unique for me. To come up with the body, I just doodled around for a while, until I came up with something acceptable. I drew it 1/4 scale: It's big, but I wanted to have a lot of volume for the chambers for a good acoustic sound. I also noticed when I was drawing that that most guitars (eg., Stratocasters) get really tapered at the top, at the horns, and I thought maybe it'd look good to not have it get quite so "pinched". Then I scanned it into the computer, blew it up to the required size, printed it out on six sheets of paper, taped it together, and traced it out onto a larger piece of paper. I used that to make a template with 1/4" plywood. I don't have a picture of the finished template yet; I'll try to get one later. I decided to sand the thing to shape by hand. And that experience taught me that I don't want to sand something like that to shape by hand again. I was stuck with sanding the concave parts by hand, but I eventually cheated and sanded the convex parts (the bottom, the tops of the horns) with a belt sander. After that, I bought a cylinder for sanding with a drill press (I don't remember its exact name). Just like the body will be big, it will be thick, too. I bought the wood for the bottom half of the guitar (mahogany). I decided to try to make the blank for the top half. Instead of just having it be a thing top, the top is nominally 1" thick. I'll extend the chambers into the top, again for maximum acoustic volume. In order to make the neck playable at the high frets, I'm planning on have the body recessed around the neck join. Here's my goofy (but effective!) jig for planning the side edges of wood: It occurs to me that I could have had the router run alongside the edge of the wood rather than over it, and use some sort of edge guide or fence to keep it straight. Oh, well. As it was, the critical thing was getting the four legs exactly equal in length and having the tops and bottoms perfectly parallel. I glued some MDF together into a block, used a mill to chop of the tops and bottoms perfectly flat, and cut it into four pieces. After that, I could get my body wood glued up: I had been working on some homemade pickup prototypes, and I had some progress there, but nothing fully completely. Lately, I've been working on the neck, and the scarf join offered another chance at improvisation. I marked the neck: and bandsawed it. To get the surface plane, I decided to use my prior jig again! At the base of the wood, where I clamped it, I used two offcuts, one from the neck one, and one from a practice run on scrap, to get the face of the wood for the join parallel to the rails. Then I ran the router over it to get a good surface: I cut the wood closer to size for the neck, and glued the headstock on. I used some advice from the forum to use an offcut to keep the clamps perpendicular to the join. I decided not to, however, use the advice to use a screw to keep the headstock in place and prevent it from slipping. I figured if the headstock piece was large enough, even if it slipped a little, I'd still have plenty of room left for the head. I then removed most of the excess wood, again using a router sled, but this time one with rails just above the base, with no legs. I still could remove a little more, and get the top surface really plane, but I'm just about ready to route the channels for the truss rod.
  18. It seems there's a lot of doubt about the possibility of cutting a fretboard using scale positions measured by hand. Of the three guitar books I've read (Siminoff, Hiscock, Koch), none said it was impossible to do that job by hand (though one, Hiscock, did say you should forget winding a pickup by hand). Hiscock just said the job would have to be done to the "highest degree of accuracy possible," without specifying what that would be. Koch says you need to be within 1/64". Here are my calculations, for a 25.5" scale guitar: At the first fret, an error of 1/32" would result in the note being off by 2.2 cents. 100 cents is the difference between two semitones, while the just noticeable difference for pitch is 6 cents. So, that's well within the just-noticeable limit. At the 24th fret, an error of 1/32" would result in the note being off by 8.46 cents. So, that's outside the the just-noticeable limit, but not by much. An error of 1/64" would put it back in that limit.
  19. Thanks for the advice. I figured it was straightforward, but I wanted to be sure. On that subject, and I hope I'm not asking too stupid things here, I have one more question. About ten centimeters from the non-adjusting end, on the bottom side, is a little rectangle that pops up. I'd estimate it pops up by maybe half a millimeter. Here's a picture (sorry, taken with a bad web camera): and if you can't see what I'm talking about, I circled it here: Is that normal? I imagine I'm supposed to get the rod to sit totally flat in the channel when I glue it in, so I'd have to clamp down the rod over that bump. It's big enough to raise the rod a little.
  20. I got this truss rod on advice from this thread but I haven't seen a lot of information on it. Of the three books I've read, the only one that mentions rods that like was Martin Koch's, where he says that the opening of the u-channel should face the bottom of the neck. However, that's in a description of a one-way truss rod with a u-channel, so I wasn't sure if the same applied. So, how do you mount it? Do you directly epoxy the channel to the slot in the wood? Do you epoxy all sides of it (bottom and sides, and top when you put on the fretboard)? You don't need to put it in a tube like some truss rods, right? The bottom of mine has some sort of tape covering the inner workings. A corner has come off. Can I just put normal tape over that? Nothing in the wood needs to hold it in place, right (eg., how a normal truss rod has a slot for the nut and a hole for an anchor in the heal)? You just make a slot and press it in. Anything else? Thanks.
  21. Sorry, I don't think I explained what's going on very well. I'm planning on making a pickup with individual humbucking coils for each string. This will take a while to do, so I wanted to test it as I went. I especially wanted to test them since the pickups are hand-wound. Most humbuckers are machine wound so the two coils would be identical. I do count the winds, so at least those are equal, and the resistances are basically equal, but of course I'm not gonna get perfectly tight, sequential winds like you could get with a machine. So, I wasn't sure how well it would humbuck under those circumstances. After I made the first coil, I verified (by simply holding it up to another guitar) that it worked. Once I made two, I figured I could test if it was humbucking. I first wired it up to not be humbucking (they were wound the same way, so the end of one coil went to the start of the next). And there was noise. Then I wired it to be humbucking. (this was just a prototype circuit, so I did that just by switching some alligator clips around). And it still made noise. And I couldn't tell if there was more or less hum one way or the other. It took too much time to change the connections for me to remember exactly how much hum there was the other way. So, I came up with a new test. There is another way of switching the humbucking properties of a pair of coils, other than how you wind them or the order you connect them. You can flip one of them upside down relative to the other. A counterclockwise wind, for example, looks clockwise if you look at it from the other side, which is why this works. It was easy for me to flip one upside down, because I just had them in a prototype circuit outside of a guitar. So, that's what I'm doing in that sound file there. There's always noise either way, but there is another low frequency noise that comes and goes as I flip one of the coils back and forth. This verifies that SOME of the hum is canceled. So, my question was, is the remaining noise always gonna be there, maybe because having hand-wound pickups makes it unlikely to be able to fully cancel hum, particularly the high frequency component? Or would I be able to expect that all to go away once everything is fully shielded and soldered? Because if I couldn't get rid of that noise, it would obviously save me a lot of time to just go with single coils.
  22. Okay. It's a flat bridge that just uses screws, not a tune-o-matic with posts, but I guess it works the same. I think maybe I could have the hole come in from the pickup route rather than the control cavity. It seems like then I could have the hole go in as a straight shot, so it'd be easier to line up.
  23. Thanks. It'll be a while before I get a finished (non-prototype) pickup made, which is why I wanted to know if I was at least on the right track. And, yeah, the thing wasn't connected to a guitar; the cords were just kind of hanging in space. As for grounding the bridge, that's another question I have. I've seen floyd rose bridges grounded, and it looks pretty easy, since it's easy to have a ground wire go to the routed area in the back. But for this guitar I'm planning, I have a fixed bridge, with strings through body, through the bridge. I'm not sure -- is there a standard way of hooking a ground wire to that?
  24. I'm working on making a home-made pickup. I think I'd prefer for it to be humbucking. Anyway, I already got a prototype made! And it does indeed work! (It sends sound to the amplifier. Doesn't sound too bad, either!) The question is with humbucking. I've verified that it does cancel some hum, but there's always quite a lot of electrical noise. This is what it sounds like. To explain what's going on there, I'm flipping the two pickups back and forth, so it goes back and forth between being hum-canceling and not hum-canceling. When it's hum-canceling, you still hear a fuzzy noise, but when they're not hum-canceling, there's an extra low pitched hum on top of that. (There's also a couple of bumps when I knocked something, unrelated to electrical noise). Right now, when I made that recording, the circuit was just made with alligator clips. Does the extra noise sound like it's something that could be fixed with a permanent soldered circuit, and maybe some shielding? Or is it a sign that my homemade pickups just won't ever buck hum correctly?
  25. I love this idea. Has anyone tried this: How about using magnets in the cover, and just iron in the guitar itself? If the grip is still strong enough, it seems like it might have some improvements. No worry about the polarities matching. And if you have trouble getting the covers off, you could use maybe lift it them off by using magnets on the outside.
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