avengers63

I wasn't referencing the HEADSTOCK angle, but the NECK angle. With a Gibson-style tune-o-matic bridge, an archtop, or an acoustic, the neck isn't parallel to the face of the guitar. It's at a bit of an angle. This lets the strings still be relatively close to the body/pickups while compensating for the bridge height. Of you examine a Gibson, specifically a Les Paul since you're making a carved top, you'll see not only the neck angle but that the carve isn't even, resulting in the top of the carve not being on the same plane as the rest of the body. As you're making a carved Strat, this isn't nearly as important for you at this point. Still, I'd greatly encourage you to research the topic. The more knowledge you have, the more informed a decision you can make on how you are to proceed.

1. I think Bizman has that one covered. 2. I've never heard of them. What I've experienced - It's OK to be frugal, but don't be cheap. Make sure they're using quality parts. Take some time investigating what the different magnet types sound like. Don't be afraid to buy used pickups on eBay, but be aware that there's a possibility they might be damaged. YouTube is your friend, especially for sound comparisons. 3. 45mm is about right for a Strat-like body thickness, so you're off to a good start. The carve depends on the neck angle and type of bridge. Staying with a Strat style hard tail and no neck angle, I wouldn't go more than 5-10mm. The more exaggerated the carve, the worse it looks, at least in my eyes.

This seems to have become me "what's going on" thread as well as a build thread. Worse things have happened. It's been too cold to do anything outside. Next week it's supposed to start warming up. I'm not coming home from work and then working in a 35 degree garage. I got those 2 DiMarzios installed. The X2N is exactly what it's supposed to be - an insanely hot bridge pickup. I mainly use an Orang Tiny Terror. It doesn't clean up well, but I can coax a nice clean sound with the gain <25%. With the X2N, it hits the tube so hard it will not play clean... period. The amp wants to overdrive anyway, but it's just crazy that it can't play clean with he pup. I'm insanely happy with the D-Activator-X neck. The bass..... dude! It chugs like an absolute monster. After playing them, I'm more excited about the DAX than the X2N. Lastly, I bought myself some veneer The 1st close up is the laurel, the next is the madrone. As you can see from the invoice, I'll be able to get 3 tops from the laurel, 4 from the madrone, and 6 from the quilted maple. Now, the odds of me actually making another 13 guitars is relatively low. But still... The laurel was selected for two reasons. 1: LOOK AT IT! Holy crap, will you just LOOK at it? 2: I'm planning on making a guitar from the Rickenbacker 4000 bass shape. It's monstrously wide for a guitar. The laurel is wide & long enough to be a top, along with enough cutoff to cover the headstock & cavity cover. The madrone was just plain too cheap to pass up. If you're interested, this is the site I used: https://www.veneersupplies.com/

BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.......... Make another body. Cut a hole clean through the body for the pickups & control cavity. Mount the controls on the face, but rig up a way to hold the pups in place. You won't even need a backplate as this is JUST to test the pups. Doing it all from the back will make the swaps a hellofalot easier. You won't have to remove the strings or pickguard. Easier access is one of the keys to what you're trying to accomplish here.

My thought as well. Without close inspection, you're not going to see it if you don't already know it's there. There's nothing like one of the "standards". We monkey around with all the other shape, pickup, and hardware variations till doomsday. It's fun and interesting. I prolly only have 2 that aren't an offshoot somehow. But at the end of the day, there's nothing else like a Strat, Tele, and LP to really cut through all of our nonsense. Back to basics, as it were.

NO! We must obsess over the minutia of every piece of inconsequential, trivial, guitar oddity. You silly, silly man - get with the program.

I was questioning that also. It's a bar - universal spacing. Maybe they just got tired of all the questions of "Is it F-spaced" from those who don't know and it's just easier to put the sticker on it.

Nothing really to report. I'm finalizing the shape of the headstock and getting ready to rough-cut the back of the neck & headstock. In other news.... I finally got one of the pickups I've always wanted. It's going into the bridge of a Jackson V I got several months ago as an upgrade project. Next week I'll be getting a D-Activator X for the neck. I'll post some before & after of the whole thing when it's all done.

What a fine way to spend a 59 degree Saturday afternoon: milling, rough radiusing, and slotting fretboards. L-R is bubinga, bloodwood, mahogany, maybe cherry, cherry, guyana rosewood, chechen, flamed maple, walnut, chechen I bet y'all have never seen a mahogany fretboard. We all know I pick a fretboard based on aesthetics alone. I've used white oak before. I was tempted to make one from poplar. I don't have any ash sixed right or that would absolutely have been in the mix today. FWIW - 3 of these will see relatively immediate use. This is what I landed on for the Aelita f/b. It's 4th from the left. I'm honestly not positive what it is. I THINK it's cherry. Whatever it is, it's dead perfect quartersawn and a pleasantly light color. It will contrast well with the black body and tortoise p/g. The markers will be dots of an undetermined material. Leftover recon stone is a distinct possibility.

routed to the template With this being a top-routed swimming pool route that's getting a side jack, basic rounded edges, and prolly a forearm contour & belly cut, this will be a VERY easy body for a change. The beck is gonna be a white limba reverse banana that's about 1/4 done already. I haven't decided on the fretboard yet, but it certainly won't be anything extravagant. Most likely cherry, chechen, walnut, or something else simple I have lying around. Ya know.... I've never seen anyone do an ash fretboard.

I've been sorely tempted to make a neck from ebony. I'm drawn to the absolute decadence of it. But there's no way I can justify $200-$300 USD for the lumber. for ONE lousy neck.

Mine isn't crippling either. Mostly annoying. In most cases, my "suffering" is limited to her "bugging the hell out of". I have to count stairs when I go up & down them, but I don't have to go back and do them again if I mis-count. If there's a pattern on the floor or sidewalk, I have to walk so that my feet will hit the cracks/blocks/pattern in an even rhythm from left foot to right. If my right arm brushes against a door frame, I have to brush my left arm against something to even it out. If volume is measured numerically, I have to set it by 5s. There are dozens of others I don't even thing about. These irregularly cut lines put in all kinds of crooked are one of those things. I attempted to do a type of half & half dot several years ago. I wasn't able to cut them with the division line dead center, so I gave up on it. Even were I able to cut them right, there's likely no way I could get them in perfectly. Abalone doesn't bother me at all. It's supposed to be mottled and irregular, so that's OK. The irregularity is a sign that it's a naturally occurring substance. Nature, while ordered, is also somewhat chaotic. It's just like a wall display my sister had at one time. She had metal leaves dispersed among the pictures and shelves. The leaves had to be wopperjawed because a leaf doesn't fall on a level plane. There doesn't seem to be any logic to it, but in my twisted perceptions, it's so plainly obvious that I can't understand anyone else not seeing it. OCD makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to anyone who doesn't have it. But to us..... it's better to just let us satisfy what's wrong in out heads. We can get twitchy if we don't.

I did indeed notice that the dots aren't consistent. The whole thing is triggering the hell out of my OCD. In most cases, I require order, symmetry, and balance. I mentally twitch when it's intentionally not there. the last one, Normally I can keep my mouth shut if I don't care for someone's build tasted, but this one is just too offputting for me. Sorry!

OMFG I HATE THIS SO MUCH!!!!!!!! All the lines going in so many different directions is just so damn WRONG. This would drive me absolutely insane. But ya can't please everyone. Folks tend to hate the Corvus, which I have an unreasoning love for. what are ya gonna do, right? With that being said, the craftsmanship is, as always, top notch. I like the curved point at the bottom of the f/b. So anyway, I don't feel like looking back through the build. Is the neck maple with walnut & cherry, then a black palm fretboard and dots made from the cutoff of the back of the neck?

I planed the body blank down to 1 3.4" (if I remember right!). Then the ears of the bass horn and trebel side of the lower bout are being glued on. It's just a little too wide at full width to go through my planer. The oddly shaped and slightly offset body jives with me somehow. I bought a quart of water-based poly and had it tinted black. The plan is to lay down the black poly and sand between every coat. With the finish being tinted, I won[t have to worry about any sand-through. The hope is that it'll end up transparent black with some of the grain showing through. If it ends up opaque, that's fine too.

Closing the box. I'm not even a little bit nervous. I'm POSITIVE I've screwed this up somewhere, and that it'll need tome epoxy filler in the top joint just like the top did. Also, off to the right, a lady from church wanted me to restoration on her childhood ukulele. I strongly advised her against it as it was only worth about $150 in great condition. But she's emotionally invested in it and that over-rides logic.

I have a Gretsch brass-bodied resonator. I bought a flat humbucker from CB Getty last year. I'm just now finally getting around to putting it onto the body. All I'm gonna do is drill for the 4 screws and the hole to run the wire through, the 2 for the volume & tone pots on the lower bout, and one for the input jack on the side of the body. I'm not going to worry one bit about shielding because the whole body is brass. As I was starting to lay out everything, it hit me..... Where in the hell am I supposed to ground this thing? There's no metal bridge!!!!!!!! We ground the strings to the circut via the wire going from the metal bridge to the common ground, but there ain't no metal bridge! So what am I supposed to do? The strings ARE connected to the body through the metal trapeze tailpiece. Strings to t/p which is all metal and screwed to the body. My thought is to have a common ground attached directly to the body, as it's all metal and connected to the tailpiece. But I'm the inlay guru, not the electronics guru. please help!

In my eyes, they reflect some of the 60's & 70's Japanese pickups. See, I'm a sucker for non-traditional pickups. They have a vibe that your "normal" s/c & hb can never have. Some of the surface mounts have a rubber magnet and are wound to about 5.5 or lower. We have some boutique builders reproducing them, but they're using A5 magnets, so they aren't going to sound anything like the originals. The sad thing is that the boutique pups cost more than the originals but don't sound like them.

Right!?!? I've listened to some demos of this on youtube. They're similar to a regular s/c, but with their own vibe. I'm just hoping that the wiring isn't too screwed up. Thinking just a bit... this thing is clearly an oddball. In that thought, I should use a strange fretboard. I have a black palm that I'm unlikely to use on anything else....

Sometime last year, I bought an oddball pickguard assembly. Pickups, switches, pots... the whole thing allegedly untouched and probably working. As it turns out, it's from a Russian guitar from the 70's/80's called Aelita. IIRC, the assembly cost me around $100. It turns out you can find the whole guitar on Reverb for $200-$300. I'm not entirely positive I made the right move in the long run. Oh well... we're here now, so let's go. The blank is supposed to be African mahogany. That's how it was labeled at Rockler. BUT... when I was cutting & planning it, it let off a somewhat acrid medicinal odor. I don't remember African mahogany smelling like this, but it's also been quite some time since I've worked with it. I'm planning on dyeing the body black. I might or might not go with an actual finish. Linseed oil is a distinct possibility. I have absolutely no idea what I'll be doing for the neck other than it'll prolly be a reverse banana. There are plenty of available options sitting on my shelf: hickory, cherry, walnut, paduk, purpleheart, ash, anigre, and a few others. When the time comes, I'll be taking the whole thing to a shop to do the wiring. I have -zero- confidence that all 3 pickups, 6 push button switches, and 4 pots are all free of issues. Finding and fixing them is well above my pay grade.

4 months later, it's warm enough for several consecutive day to allow me to get several things done. Among them, I put a mild carve onto the body of this thing. Later, I'll take the curved scraper to it and scrape the recurve into it. But for now, this knocks out the majority of the hard work.

Plenty of time spent in the workshop today. Mostly, it was looking, thinking, comparing, sizing, and all over again from the start. Y'all know how it is. But that doesn't mean NOTHING got done. I sanded down the inlays on the rosewood neck more-or-less flush. There's still work to be done with the radius block, but the vast majority of the heavy lifting is done.

All I can personally testify to is that I've never had any sort of safety issue with it, not have I felt unsafe in any reasonable way. The drill press doesn't spin fast enough for it to grab the piece pit of my hands. Per the instructions, I take tine bites, like maybe 1mm at a time. Any more than that and it gets jerky, but again not enough to yank it out of my hands. Like any other spinny cutty blade of flesh mutilation, I keep my fingers well away from the tool. FWIW: I've prolly had this thing for 15 years. I've used it less than 10 times, including the two times I've used it on this build. The blades are still sharp. This is because it's not intended for regular use. This is one of those things that you whip out when all the stars align, just like any other specialty tool. It is of limited use and should be kept on the shelf accordingly. RE: lateral force/bearing/wear. To me, this falls under the same idea as using a family sedan to haul a trailer loaded with 2 tons of material. Is the vehicle & engine intended for that type of torque? No. Can it be done once in a while? Yes. Will the engine fail? Not if it's only occasionally, but if it's abused like this daily it will fail much sooner.

58 degrees outside this afternoon! I was so dang happy to get outside and FINALLY get some stuff done in the workshop!!! So first up, I needed to trim the top flush with the body Next, I've been waiting for months to be able to take down the block inlays on the rosewood neck. Work smart, kids, not hard. Screw cutting or sanding them down when you have a Wagner Safe-T-Planer If I got 'em down any closer, I'd dig into the fretboard. Which is exactly what happened once! I was able to use the belt sander to take off most of the extra epoxy from the headstock inlays. The palm unit got the rest. It's so pretty wetted down with mineral spirits! It's really gonna pop under the lacquer. I had left myself a note so that I wouldn't get ahead of myself. I've screwed up too often in the past. Know your weaknesses and work within them! So I cut the tenon and routed the fretboard to the template. This was soooooo satisfying. I'm excited to be able to get out there again tomorrow.

Also, all this stone inlay has really opened my eyes to other possibilities. It would be a simple matter to use various grades of crushed stone to make fretboard inlays. The tricky part would be to accurately rout out the shape, but that's just a thorough prep job and a lot of patience. And the actual process of inlaying the stone is so easy. I might need to invest in some fine detail chisels and gouges. I hope Scott R. is watching this thread, cuz I could sure use some recommendations.