tirapop

It's a Faustian bargain!

Silvertone was the brand sold at Sears. For a while Danelectro supplied guitars, as did Teisco, Kay, Harmony, and National.

Try surfing around www.fetishguitars.com for a match.

Jehle had used these guys.

The June 2005 issue of Fine Woodworking magazine has a review of hand planes from $30 to $300.

This is sort of a companion to the Reverend, another laminate top guitar, the Formicaster. Girl Brand Guitars uses construction similar to Reverend. Girl Brand has really cool top designs that border on fine art. For non-traditional materials, I've noticed ads for stores carrying bamboo flooring (durable, sustainable - save trees for something better than floors). The bamboo fingerboards anyone?

That site says the wild cherry top is laminated, so, the cherry probably isn't much more than a veneer.

A few months back Hyunsu built a pine guitar that looked nice. He said he picks all his wood by tapping it. If the tap sounds good, it's suitable for a guitar. He's made lots of guitars, so, I'd be inclined to take his advice.

Take it to the next level.

Hey, the link for hydroforming is back up, if anyone wants to check it out.

The Scary Sharp method uses sandpaper to sharpen blades. Somewhere, I've got an old Fine Woodworking, where 3 woodworkers sharpened blades with 3 different methods. I think they did oilstones, waterstones, and sandpaper. I think everyone came away impressed with the speed and economy of sandpaper.

LK, I wasn't making the case for replacing bending notes at the strings with doing it on a pitch wheel. I was just trying to correct Pr3Va1L's misconceptions about keyboards. The point I was trying to make is that it would make more sense on a MIDI only guitar to play with sustain digitally, rather than putting in all the hardware for a sustainer. I'd guess if you ran real feedback through a MIDI pickup, the complex overtones would make it harder for the MIDI converter to follow the pitch. Whatever comes out (which I assume is monophonic for each string) still has to go through a tone generator. I wouldn't expect it to be as satisfying as the real thing.

Yesterday morning, on public radio, one of their commentators was shilling his new book. His old acoustic got destroyed by baggage handlers. His wife let him pull the trigger on getting a custom acoustic for his birthday. Having the guitar built got him into researching the history of the guitar in America. Oh, what about cherry? The sides and back of his guitar are cherry. WILD figure. You can listen to the story and check out the pics of the guitar here.

You haven't looked at too many keyboards, have you? Yes, you can bend notes on a keyboard. They have a thing called a pitch wheel. MIDI is Musical Instrument Digitial Interface. A MIDI guitar (or a guitar run through a MIDI converter) just sends out a string of commands like "turn this note on", "turn this note off", "do this programmed command", etc. Any MIDI device: a guitar, a flute, a keyboard can drive the same MIDI device (a synthesizer, a sequencer, etc). That's kind of the whole point.

Buy these fret pullers or modify an existing set of nippers to do the same thing. Carefully pull the frets. Fill the kerfs with epoxy, strips of wood/plastic, or decorative pieces of metal or stone. Scrape or sand what's there flush. I think that's it.

Make one from clear plastic and paint the underside, so you don't have to worry about wearing through the paint.

Is a sustainer really necessary with MIDI? You're using the guitar as a trigger for a tone generator. It seems like you could get more control and options if the sustain was all digital. Maybe put a little joystick on the front of the guitar to control "feedback" effects.

For folks with broadband, a video interview with Steve Evans of Beltona describing how he makes the blue ukulele. http://www.ukuleledisco.com/beltonainterview

I used to have a great link for what oldnslow was describing, but, the Eurospares web site seems to have disappeared. What you're doing in metal is essentially what you do with those mylar balloons: you have two flat sheets of material, joined at the edges in a shape, and you inflate it. You can play around with a couple sheets of tissue paper and glue to get an idea of what the inflated shapes would look like. There are limitations to the technique. If the contours change dramatically or if you want a lot of depth, you can get creases along the seam (like on those circular mylar balloons).

Here's a lost foam tutorial... for a motorcycle gas tank. Also Robert Q. Riley's tut. Somebody mentioned composite bicycles, so, there should be a link to Damon Rinard's pages.

Ding ding ding! That's it! Retire the Viagracaster and move on.

Try this.

I think the lower horn, with that deep cutaway, just looks out of scale. When I first saw it, I thought about an Explorer with the trimmed upper horn to balance it out the long horn. You did that with your yellow guitar... it helps, but, not enough. I think it's an aspect ratio thing, the cutaway shouldn't be more than half the distance from the tip of the horn to the beginning of the radius for the waist. To that end, start with the reverse Strat. Put the standard cutout on the neck where you want for fret access, sliding the body in the direction of the bridge if necessary. Compress the lower bout (kind of like on the Gibson SG) to keep the body length reasonable. You can reduce the cutout on the short horn side, if you want to keep enough wood for the neck p/u. The balance might be a bit off... you can ballast it with batteries and electronics for a sustainer

Good start. I like the right side. I think the waist on the left side needs to be a bit higher, centered on the bottom edge of the neck p/u route.

So is that a good thing then? ← Heck, yeah! People spend good money on delirium inducing substances. Like I said, it's very Seussical... a good thing. So, from the sketch, are you going to do an ash overlay with a lattice thing going on?