G-Axe

Depends on what you mean by Nato. Mora (specifically Mora excelsa and Mora gonggrijpii) from South/Central America gets called Nato, but the South East Asian Nyatoh (Palaquium and Payena) also get called Nato from time to time. [voodoo] I have a guitar with a maple topped solid Nyatoh body and a 3-ply Nyatoh neck, and the sound I get is like a "too clean" Les Paul. It doesn't quite have the same "bite" in the upper registers, or a whole lot of "growl", but it has a very thick bottom end and sustain. I chalk it up to a lack of resonance - I have a fake all-mahogany set-neck SG doubleneck that really vibrates when you strum it. I mean, it shakes and rumbles in your hands, all the way down one neck and back up the other. My nyatoh on the other hand has a fairly sedate vibe on the neck that you can barely feel through the body, (partly due to the top) and doesn't quite have the "edge" of a Mahogany guitar. It's still a good warm sound, and it's my main gig guitar - I just don't think you'd get that noisy, raw SG sound if that's what you're after. Still, it'll get you a lot closer to a big thick Mahogany sound than most woods. [/voodoo] However, sound voodoo aside, I can tell you from experience that Nyatoh is solid and stiff enough for a neck, as a body wood it's pretty bloody heavy. My Nyatoh guitar is pretty bloody thick too - it's SG shaped, so not overly large, just over 2" toward the middle, and carved down to about 1.75" at the edges - but manages to weigh almost as much as my mahogany double-neck, which is admittedly much thinner at 1.5", but with a considerably larger body, twice the hardware and twice the necks. Of course, all that's pointless if you're talking about the other type of Nato.

Eastwood Guitars make a bunch of replica guitars of some more unusual vintage shapes. Nothing truly outlandish, unless you're likely to get offended by guitar with a 5-way switch, 3 volume pots, 3 tone pots and a master volume pot.

Congrats on the high praise from the customer, and cheers for the info on the paint. I really like the finish so I'm going to have to shamelessly imitate at some point. Not everything has to be gloss.

Now there's a cigar box that's pure rock. Love the matte finish, and that looks like a noisy little pickup. I want one.

I can't believe (but nor can I disbelieve) that Maynard was the falsetto doing the "not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin" bit in that Green Jelly song. Or that Danny Carey drummed for them. Or that Opiate was recorded in the Green Jelly loft. Let the scheduled program continue...

I'd love to see that finished in a nice pastel pink, with Hello Kitty decals all over it. Not that I tend that way myself, but I can't help but feel you can only be so metal before you're beginning to seriously overcompensate for something. Seriously though, that's shaping up to be something pretty special. That inlay work is amazing.

Aren't Epiphones made of chipboard anyway? Well, I managed to at least get clean and dirty matched up, but I thought the chipboard sounded best and hence pegged it as the LP, thought the Les sounded average like an Explorer, and thought the Explorer sounded like a bit of chipboard. Great little experiment, and a humbling experience for those of us with a hard on for tone.

First of all, let me say I haven't so much as laid hands on a guitar making tool, so everything I say is purely academic. If someone says something that contradicts my advice, they're probably right. Anyway. It shouldn't make a huge difference between most of the standard scale lengths, but if you're going with a H-S-H pickup configuration, a long fretboard is going to leave you very little room to squeeze all of your pups in. For instance, if you go with a 25.5" scale, you're going to have just 5" between the end of your fretboard and your bridge saddles. A longer scale will buy you a tiny bit more room, however you'd have to extend out to a ridiculous scale length like 30" to even get 6" between. If you want to play around with scale length calculations, Stewmac have this handy Fret Calculator tool. Not that I have any particular experience in this department, but what I'd do would be to draw/mock up the three pups and work out what the minimum amount of room you need for them is, and then work out your minimum scale length from there. Just as a bit of reference, here's a good front on shot of a 27-fret with a Floyd. Not sure what scale length it is, but you can see how cramped an extra bucker would be. Of course, all of your complications would disappear if you opted to use minibuckers or stacked coils. I've heard it's a good idea to try and get them under a strong harmonic point. The "standard" is to have the neck pickup about where the 24th fret would be - with around the same distance from the bridge to the neck pup as the fifth fret is from the nut. It works out somewhere around 6 inches on most of my axes. For the bridge pickup, about the same distance you get from the nut to the harmonic just under the second fret. That one works out at about 1.75" on average. But there is no "right" answer as to where you locate your pups. You'll get different sounds from where ever you put them, it all depends on exactly what sort of sound you want. I find in this respect it's best to imitate a guitar you already like the sound of, unless you're trying to achieve something drastic. Grab Melvyn Hiscock's Make Your Own Electric Guitar. It talks you through the process of designing a guitar, what considerations must be taken, and has a few example builds that it steps you through.

Wauchope would have to be a good place to source timber from, no? I haven't had any experience when it comes to actually working with any Aussie timbers as tonewoods, but I've been doing my own research. Jarrah is a dense, hard wood, not dissimilar to ebony. It's tough as nails, and the irregular grain makes working with it difficult. There are a few acoustic guitar and mandolin makers out there who have put it to use as soundboards, and I've heard of people using it in neck laminates, but it sounds like prime fretboard material to me. Coachwood I haven't really found any mention of in terms of guitars, but on paper it looks as though it has characteristics close to walnut or lacewood (silky oak) which seem to stack up pretty favourably as neck timbers. The maple (Queensland?) would work well as a body top, neck laminate, or even the whole body, and seems to be a pretty reliable wood for guitars. I know Maton use it pretty heavily. But most of that data is just bits and pieces I've picked up here and there. I found this link pretty helpful when I was asking similar questions not too long ago. Anyway, hope that helps you a bit. Look forward to seeing what kind of metal monster you can put together up in timber town.

I've always wanted to build a Strat-shaped glass bubble, fill it with cuts of beef and bolt a neck to it. I envision the ultimate in gutless radio-friendly rock sound since the beef would kill any resonance you get from the glass. But, since that's a pipe dream (for now) I've instead decided to invest $30 in a brand new strat copy off eBay. Not only will it give me that spineless kind of sound, it gives me something to hone my woodworking skills with. (read: butcher with a router) Anyhow, carry on. Nothing to see here.

That sounds about right, since Sumner is the surname of that other guy with the goofy pseudonym.

I'm wanting to do something fairly different for a guitar I'm in the process of designing. Primarily I'm wanting a mirror top, and will likely use an acrylic mirror to keep weight down, and have something more durable than glass. However, a plain mirror top is likely to wind up looking a little boring, so I want to spice it up. One thing that sprang to mind while watching a random German movie from the sixties about vampire-lesbians (true story apparently ) was the idea of a mirror finish streaked with blood (or something that looks close enough). My immediate thoughts on how to achieve this would be by creating a laminate where a transparent layer sandwiches the "blood" against the mirror, not unlike a microscope slide (but not spread so thin). Obviously, I'd like to avoid glass, but I'm worried about the flexibility of acrylics leading to an uneven contact between the two surfaces. The other concern I have is with gluing. Since the contact will be completely visible, I'm assuming I'd have to go with a perfectly even layer of glue across the entire surface to keep it invisible. Also, my experience with gluing plastic is that the glue itself reacts with the surface - would epoxy react only with itself and not damage the transparency, or would I need something else entirely? Alternately, is there a way I can avoid the whole laminating idea, and maybe just spray a clear finish over the bloody mirror?

I can't really comment with authority on any of those, being a newbie myself, but much of what I've read points to Rosewood being resonant, but muting the high end quite a bit in favour of a thick bottom end. Of course, when it comes to this sort of thing, I'm more or less reading as many opinions as I can and taking the most prevalent to be closest to truth.

One of my guitars uses a translucent print over the top of figured maple, so you get a detailed image (in my case a semi-naked woman that looks like it should be airbrushed on the side of a panel van) but you also have the figure of the grain showing through which gives almost a cat's eye effect. It's impossible to actually show what I'm talking about with a photo, but if you imagine the two guitars pictured here hybridized to be all part of the same finish, then that's basically what you've got. I'm not sure as to the difficulty of the process, but it opens up a lot of possibilities for finishing a non-carved top if you go that route. Leopard print on birdseye maple could give you a pretty original sort of finish.

That's a really nice piece of instrument - great shape, great use of woods and a natural look - I dig the wooden knobs and covers. How's it play?