Super-Jag

Well, I'm back to working on the axe again, it's starting to look better. I know it's been quite awhile, but since my truck is in the shop, and I'm being held up from moving (yet again) because of it, and I've got everything else done, I have nothing better to do than better my axes. I'll start with some answers... No offense taken. I understand it's rather hack quality compared to many on this site, and even compared to some of the newest stuff I've been working on. This guitar is really the beginning of a design that I've been working on since I was in the 8th grade, and much of the routing and so on was done back in high school, which was more than 5-7 years ago. I had first got a router when I started working on this, had no computer, no knowlege of parts/blueprint providers, or anything. It was all done by hand tracing, photographs, and lots of ridiculous amounts of learning to accept mistakes. Of course, I'd never sell any of the hackneyed guitars. My plans for the next one (Lynx v2.0) are to have it fully done in CAD on my computer. Funny you say that, that guitar was possibly the hugest rush job I ever did. It originally was assembled in 45 minutes time. The last few days I've been re-doing the neck to look better (as well as making my first attempt at scalloping the fretboard). The paint was just a bunch of black, gold, and blue paint I sprayed on till it was literally dripping off the edges of the body. I go to bed, come back to the shed the next morning, and find this AMAZING quazi crackle/burst thing going on. Of course, it'll never be a PRS, but the tone is amazing for what is made out of the same thing Lowes uses to make you a patio deck. The only reason for it ever existing in the first place was the fact that I had a TON of crappy spare parts laying around, and rather then throw them out, I decided to attempt to make a really crappy guitar for my "beater" axe, but then It's maiden voyage was at practice with a band I was working with at the time, and we took it to the studio, recorded a song with it, and when I heard the solo I played from that guitar, I could hardly believe my ears, it sounded incredible, all out of the 50 cent Harmony pickup in the neck. Sure I sound crazy, but that song actually got airplay on the local radio at one time. I might try and post it when I get time. As for the ground wire, that was added later because the faulty grounding in the practice area caused my lip to get zapped with +48 volts when I'd step up to the microphone, so I had most of my guitars at the time set up to have the ground wire removable so I'd quit jumping back from the microphone. Anyway, on with my work on the guitar. I will post pictures later as my digital camera went out on me, so I'll have to borrow one or get a new one. I've done alot of work. I tried to smooth out the middle position pickup rout a little on the pickguard, but I did slip up just a small bit so that's one more piece of trim I need to make. I just made a switch plate for the volume and tone controls, as well as the slider switches, and as I see, I'm probably going to need to go with Jaguar prefab units instead because I just don't have the tools presently to engineer such items (besides $8 apiece is not bad). I fitted the pickups (with the bridge pickup from the aforementioned "crackle-burst" gutiar in the neck), they fit nice and tight, however, I am getting rid of my "painted" trim rings from the silver guitar (which I have decided to strip because I'm moving "eventually"). It does not look too bad, though it does look rough in a few places (namely the mismatched trim rings and the chrome covered HBKR). All I really need is a Kalher bridge to make it functional as/is, but as they are going for huge someson E-bay, I may be putting this project on hiatus for awhile. I just wanted to post back that I have not given up or quit.

I'd rather play in bands on the indie and party a good bit till my mid-30's, then meet a great gal and settle down a bit and have kids and whatnot, still rock, just not as much.

(1994) My fist was a 81' Yamaha G245-SII Classical with Brazilian Rosewood back sides, My mom had it for awhile before I was born and after sneaking it out at night while she was at work she finally let me learn to play the thing. I still have that thing, and it's quite shocking the tone and loudness of that thing. My guitar teacher at the time wanted to buy it off of me a few times. (1995) 1985 Kramer Focus 3000, started off a $250.00 restored job, I tore that thing up a bunch over the years. The Floyd Rose has now been replaced by a flatmount Kahler, the pickups are 2 EMG selects and a Fender Custom Shop Humbucker, it's got loads of switches on it so I got just about every pickup combination possible as well as a few Fender Jaguar type traits. Eventually I intend to restore it most of the way back to original (all but the switching system which I love), but I want to get the Lynx out of the way first. (1999) B.C. Rich Ironbird NJ bass, bought on a whim at a store in the valley. It just stood out amongst all the P-Basses and J-Basses, that's why I liked it. My friend's Ex-Fiancee keeps trying to buy this one off of me. (1999) My first current "Big Name" electric, 1996 Fender Jag-Stang, which I only bought because it had EMG's, it's currently my favorite guitar in my entire setup, I don't know why but I have a thing for surf/grunge guitars done up for Hard Rock.

As I have a Jag-Stang, I think I can help you on the bridge issue. The Mustang/Jag-Stang bridges have some good and bad points. General concensus says they don't stay in tune very well unless you secure the bridge posts and lock the rear tailpiece from moving using washers and stuff (ah, the ol' "Kurt Cobain" modification). While this may make sense on a factory made Mustang, on a custom Mustang you built yourself, it makes no logical sense as all you are really doing is creating a Fender version of a "Tune-O-Matic w/ Stop Tailpiece", but as I see you want a tremelo, I have 2 viewpoints on it. First off, you CAN get a Mustang bridge as a tremelo to stay in tune. But for the best stability that would be with Locking Tuners, a Graphite lubed nut, and for best results you need to crank the bridge posts as tight as they go into the rear bar of the tailpiece (which will give you about 2" of travel for the bar to go down, it looks a little weird at first glance, but I've been using my Jag-Stang like this for 3 years for Floyd type whammy excursions). It works well, keeps the original vintage look, though it might not be for many people (most floyd users could not stand having their Whammy bar 2" off the pickguard like I do), but it does offer an advantage in pitch control. However, the easiest way of doing this would be just to get a Kahler tremelo, if you are going for a Mustang sized body, a Floyd Rose will not fit properly as the body is too thin. This was also the reason my Super-Jag project (which I have taken some time off from for a few weeks to work out some budgeting for other things) uses a Kahler as the Teisco body was too thin for a Floyd or other tremelo that works like a Strat trem. Anyway, good luck with the project. (edit) Oh, and the sustain properties with the Dynamic are about as good as that of a Floyd Rose if you ask me. I think the floyd rose is a little better, but a Mustang bridge can come close using the same mod I have.

I don't think it could be one of those, I remember the Rogue Aluminators all being hardtail, maybe someone took the idea and enhanced it a bit?

A new update...... Yep litch, you were right, there are polishing compounds at Wal-Mart, I just did not look hard enough. Finally got the body painted and polished, it looks stunning to say the least, i'm still trying to get over the fact that I have a metallic green Fender Jaguar copy hanging on my wall at this point (given it's hard enough to find a REAL one), should be soon ready to start work on the neck. Polishing was done using 3M buffing compound and finalized using Kit Scratch-Out (which I've had for awhile, it did wonders bringing my Truck's hood back to a shine, therefore it would be suitable for guitar polishing), it did it all by hand after testing it out on a Strat body that I'm going to refinish (had a crappy Krylon paint job with many surface imperfections, however, it still looks really nice even with them). Here's a few pics of the work in progress. Other stuff I have yet to do are clean up the routs a little, add sheilding paint, and clean up the pickguard trimming (got to Jaguar-ize the middle pickup rout), as well as get some control plates and repaint them black. I'm pacing myself pretty well, even if it's hard to do till it comes to time though.

I like that, especially the Stratocaster Jack, I always thought the Flying Vee body style would suit itself well to a 7-string guitar design.

Got some more work done this morning. Most of today's work has been to get the surface imperfections out, among the worst being the area between the stratocaster input jack rout and the Lead tone control plate rout (until now the areas where I filled in the area in with excess wood and wood filler looked worse the the pictures show, now it's invisible). I had to take a nasty finger smudge off the bass side near the arm contour, and had to take care of a few very light runs on the edges. and some grain showthrough on the back. It should not be too long before I get to clearcoat this monster. This is kind of a real stretch as my best paint job so far and the coolest so far have been 2 different things....which I'll show below for comparison.....and mind you this is very early work of mine, so yeah, it probably sucks from professional standards, but then, that's not the real point to the guitars I build, I built them to be played for the most part.... First off is a HEAVILY MODIFIED Harmony beginners Electric Guitar, for my best paint job thus far, it was painted in some cheap "textured Hammered Metal" rattle can paint. The Neck was done in fake stone colored paint. It looks kind of like the inside of the Walk-In Cooler where I currently work.... Next off is a remarkably great sounding guitar that I built out of junk leftovers from another Harmony beginners electric and the Teisco Del Ray, with an Ibanez Humbucker in the bridge. The body is also odd in that it's 3 pieces of pressure treated pine that was originally intended for a "sliding door" for a home project for mom that did not work out, so I cut it in 3 pieces, NAILED and glued a construction grade plywood top on it, and cut it out simiar to the Lynx I'm working on. It used to have lots of stickers and a WORSE paint job on it. However, the cool part is that I overloaded the paint on the pickguard and the top (using some GM blue paint, some black paint, clearcoat, and 24K gold paint mixed together), and despite the back looking terrible, the front, all surface imperfections aside, looks awesome. I even mixed in some color change paint from Wal-Mart, so at some angles the black looks purple or midnight blue, these pictures do not do it justice. And yes, that is the ground wire running out the top (used to deal with badly grounded studio equiptment where I had to remove the ground wire to keep my lip for being zapped). Jeeze I'm wordy. So, looking at the above, I'm looking to make this finish look MUCH better than either one of these two.

You don't necessarily have to use glass, I tried this once on a headstock of a friend's custom Warlock copy (which I am soon to be re-building as he wrecked the aforementioned neck on it). I found a sheet of reflective backed plexiglass (basically plexiglass mirror material), we cut it into the shape of the headstock but about half a cm smaller, covered the back in duc-tape, and hit it with a hammer, and it did not crush like the Ibanez guy above said the glass did. I cut out a rout in the headstock, used Liquid nails in small dobs to hold them in, then used a little stick or so to "spatula" small amounts into the cracks between the plexiglass, then painted them black with Testors model paint after using a hobby knife to carefully clear the excess off the edges. There were NO sharp edges leftover when we were done. As for me...hmmm...I might give it a shot for a body AND headstock after the Super Jag is finished, I got a pile of guitar bodies that I made over the last few years that I could do this to.

Darren, it was actually for a cheapie clone of a Kahler (which I bought with the trashed Teisco), but I kept it within limits that the Kahler could cover it over. I had both a Kahler and a crappy cheap clone (which is now a custom tremelo on my Explorer guitar, and a proto-type for a trem Idea I had back in high school after the floyd caved in on my Kramer Focus, but more on that later) and traced them both over the top of the guitar and made the route to fit them, not to mention the New Kahler tremelos are a little bigger than the older ones. The Tremelo should be able to pull pitch up approxamatley a 5th (like the claims for the Steve Vai guitars, and my Kramer Focus that runs a Kahler). As for the routs. Part of the sloppiness is because I just left the regular Tesico routs in there, so some of the incredibly large empty spots (particularly around the pickups, are the routs for the original Teisco pickups that are larger than the normal Humbuckers. As for the pickguard, I kinda went overkill with it and used a regular router (not the Dremel as I usually do). The Pickguard was cut for hums because it was overstock from another project with a pine body that went awry (one of my earliest works), and also it facilitates another feature that I plan to implement, and that's using molex connectors to hook the pickups up with, I read somewhere Earnie ball used them in one of their guitar models. Because of the connectors, I'm planning to make pickup swaps much faster by allowing the trim rings to fasten to the pickguard and be removable, so all one has to do is wire the pickup wires into another connector, put the pickups back in and the strings back on, and boom, done. I plan to use some special screws to fasten the trim rings to the pickguard (thin coarse thread machine screws, I have a ton of them laying around). As for an update, tonight I have done the base primer coats on the back to fix some grain "show through" that was showing up in back, so far so good, it looks nice and smooth. All I have left is to sand out one fingermark in the top and one run and one light smudge on the back and then it'll be ready for some more coats of Caymen Green, then it'll be time to add the clearcoat. Then I'll need to locate some kind of automotive buffing/polishing compound to get a showroom shine going (I'm going to have to try an auto parts store apparently, Wal-Mart has all the sandpaper and paint tools I need, but no Automotive polish). If worse comes to worse, I can always wait awhile and buy from Stew Mac like I used to.

Allright, here's some specs and some more pictures (I've been working more on this finish today so I should have more pictures soon)..... Neck Mahogany 2 piece with angled reverse "banana" headstock, schaller tuners, Floyd Rose Locking Nut w/ Single Bar String Guide. custom 24" scale 24 fret fingerboard with rock jumbo fretwire, and an interesting experiement, a flat radius like a classical guitar. Body Modified Teisco Del Ray bass guitar body, re-trimmed with contours, about 2/3 as thick as a normal Fender Jaguar Pickups Seymour Duncan SH-8 Invaders (Neck and Bridge), Seymour Duncan Vintage Jaguar (Middle) ControlsSeparate Rhythm and Lead Circuits (with pickups switchable on both circuits), master volume and pickup selector controls, and Lead Circuit with 3 tone controls appended to the pickups, and 2 coil splits for the neck and bridge humbuckers. BridgeSecond hand black plated Kahler Locking Tremelo TrimControl plates are black plexiglass with self fabricated holders for the rhythm circuit pots. Pickguard is an Allparts 62' Jaguar pickguard modified to fit 2 humbuckers and a SD Vintage Jaguar in the middle position. All the control plates are painted gloss black and beveled to fit along with pickguard. ColorFord Cayman Green Metallic (sort of a metallic Teal color) In this picture we can see the routing modifications made, as well as some small paint errors I need to fix (taking my time, I want this one to look really good). I had to trim away about 5-10% of the original wood, and so far it looks almost dead on with a normal jaguar. Right here is the original Teisco neck I disassembled fully (and am currently working on finding a headstock blank of mahogany for). I used my Jag-Stang's neck as a guide to how I wanted this neck to be. You can also see the pickguard and the master volume knob, mind you this is a rough setup right now currently being worked on. In back, we see my own version of an "All Access Neck Joint". I wanted to do it and still have enough stability to hold the neck in place. The back and front are being painted separatley, and I'm slowly blending the front and back paint jobs together to finish the whole guitar using an old Computer case as a "Lazy Suzan" to do the job. The final photo here is just to give a perspective on the whole thing, the only thing I did not show was an early mistake on my part (COUGHplywoodheadstockCOUGH), I want to change that to a normal tonewood eventually, but I'm not going to rush it. I have been toying with making a new neck out of maple as well, just depends on funds and where I decide to go. I have 3 necks already in the works in the shed that I might could use, just depends on what I feel like doing.

Sorry about the typo in my above message, files average 10-100 MB in size, I was thinking of the directory of files I was looking at (around 315 MB for all my current WAV files of music), however, the file sizes are large because there is no data compression. Mp3's cut out most of the signals un-audible to the human ear, and streaming is even less. The size is dependant on bit rate and sampling rate. If you have a 44.1 KHz sampling rate at 24 bits, thats CD quality audio in a WAV file, and thus a 3:40 second song is around 30-60 MB. As for the question about my effect. I use the headphone output jack (the ME-6 has a nice sound through there). The Headphone output jack is in stereo (just like the line in on my Turtle Beach Montego II sound card), and I just patch it with a small stereo cable, which is nice because the ME-6 (as with most digital effects processors) have some nifty stereo effects. Most of my patches have an Equilizer setting setup on them for the tone I want, and then I just sweitch between them. As far as cost, unless you don't already have an Electric guitar, it's only the cost of the pedalboard. I usually run other effects before the pedalboard, but I don't use them regularly (eg. My Danelectro food pedals (Chili Dog Octave and Tuna Melt Tremelo), my DOD Super American Metal, and a DOD Compressor (which is kind of moot as the Multi-Effects unit already HAS a compressor and a distortion pedal effect). A good effects unit can run from $25.00 for something really well used and beat up to around $1000 if you want to run a rack rig like Steve Vai or Edward. I just stick with midrange digital effects processors, they are more than adequate from my experience. The software for Quartz Audiomaster is free, unless you want one of their more advanced packages (which have more audio channels, but if you are going to create standard WAV or MP3 audio files, it makes more sense to get the free package). They have another program that works more like a 4 track tascam machine but I have had no luck in getting it to work. The link for Quartz Audiomaster Free is down here. Digital Sound Planet (home of Quartz Audiomaster Freeware)

This project started life around 5 years ago when I went into a local music store and saw a large cardboard box sitting on the floor behind the workbench, and in that box was a Teisco Del Ray bass from the 60's, all battered, chiped, and beaten to heck, looked like somebody had thrown it across the room a couple thousand times. For $50.00 I bought it and decided to use it as the basis for a "Heavy Metal Jaguar" project as the body was close to that of a Fender Jaguar, and use the hardware for parts. What I was going for, and still am, is in the picture I drew below. Anyway, I started on it soon thereafter but never got anywhere being a near broke teenager at the time. Now that I have a job (though my funds are limited by the prospect of moving to another state as well), I think it's time to get this project up and running. As for the moving, that's just another motive, I have tons of stuff I started on and never finsihed since high school. Anyway I'll put up some pics of my current progress tonight, as I have more done than mentioned. The body is already cut to size and had the custom routs added for the extra electronics, the elongated "Teisco" control panel rout has been augmented and filled , so half makes up the main lead circuit volume/tone control plate rout, the other half is where the strat style jack is. I pulled this off using Wood filler and leftover pieces of Mahogany from when I trimmed the body down from an almost Bass VI shape (which was badly torn up) to a Jaguar shape with some "Kramer" like twists added (the longer waist on the bass side being one of them). I'm probably going to learn very much more about painting on this project (as it has been my weakness, been doing the EVH type aresol can paint thing for too long, and unfortunatley, I'd prefer to get a standard high gloss finish). So far so good, but I'll let that wait till I get to my current progress later on. I got to go grab me some primer, I got to do some work on the back side.

My rig for recording is pretty weird to say the least I run my guitar through a BOSS ME-6 Multi Effects processor, which is run into my main computer (500 MHz Celeron w/ 15 GB HDD), and use Quartz Audiomaster Free (it can only record 4 tracks of audio unless you use a little trick) to record all my tracks. I just use different patches for different tones and EQ's for all the different instruments. For drums I use a Pentium Pro 200 MHz with 64MB of RAM to run the PDrums program for Windows (though I have used a 486 with the DOS version, which is suprisingly much more stable and usable, and I get to pick a cheap computer keyboard that has better action for my "drumming"). Anyway, the ME-6 goes into the Celerons line-input, and then I just swap instruments through the input on the ME-6, allowing me to add effects and keep full EQ control without having to rely on the computer. As long as I don't overdrive the sound card with my effects unit, I can get CD quality audio, and I usually store them in Wav files that come out around 100-500 MB in size, so for this rig, a large hard drive is quite necessary.

Hi all I've been building guitars of more or less obscure design out of spare parts and the occasional scratch built guitar body since high school (would be about 7 years ago me think's, my minds gettin' mite' rusty), and after a 3 year hiatus from it from fooling around in local bands that don't last too long and starting a second education in computer technology, I finally decided to whip out my old "near-destroyed Teisco Del Ray" turned Super-Jaguar project out, and man I forgot what I've been missing, amazing what a few years can do...