tirapop

You could sell it and buy a couple Grizzly LP kits. Then you could try both finish ideas... swap out pickups for better, play around with less at stake if it doesn't turn out well, while you're getting experience.

It's as hard or as easy as you want to make it. Hardware-wise keep it simple: a bolt-on 25.5" neck, no angle on the neck pocket, a toploading hardtail bridge. You can buy a neck, buy just a slotted fingerboard, or make the whole thing. You can buy templates for routing a Fender neck pocket. Pickups? You could canibalize a prewired pickguard or buy a bunch of parts and wire just what you want, just how you want it. You can find wiring diagrams for just about anything on the web. For the body, simplest would be a big rectangle like the Gretsch Bo Diddley. Obviously a flat body is easier than a carved top. You can always go back and carve/contour the body, later. If your guitar isn't a direct copy of another guitar you get a lot of latitude on the proportions. Think about how you're going to cut and sand the body as you're drawing the outline of the body. That scoop in the tail of the guitar you sketched is probably more trouble than it's worth. Go nuts. Part of why you're doing this is for the learning experience. You'll probably get more out of it by designing and building your own body than you would copying an existing body or buying templates.

I'll admit that I don't know much about lap steels, but, since you aren't fretting strings (stretching them down to the fingerboard), just holding the slide on the strings, what intonation purposes are you going to angle the bridge for? That standard check of intonation is to strike the harmonic on an open string and then play the 12th fret and check if it's sharp or flat. On a lap steel, when you strike the open harmonic and then put the slide on the midpoint of the string is it usually off?

Sounds feasible. I think a cap is still preferable. You want to have a good sized glue line to keep those wings from snapping off if you drop the guitar. That will limit how thin you will make the top/back compared to a cap. The Bocaster's straight sides make it easy to set the depth of the channel, you're going to hog out. For a guitar with contours, like a LP, it's going to be more difficult. It's likely that, to maintain a margin for error, less material is going to be taken out than would be for a cap. Finally, there's the router depth of cut issue. Either you're stuck with a couple inches of chambering or you're drilling a bunch of holes. If you want the chambered guitar to be the same species of wood, make the cap alder, too. You can hide the glueline under a binding. If you want it to look like it's out of the same slab of wood, take it to a shop that has resaw capability and have them slice off the cap. You can glue it back on after you've chambered the body.

A drafting trick that uses an engineers scale (like unclej mentioned) and a triangle: Draw a line down the center of the neck. With a triangle, make a line perpendicular to the centerline at the nut. Place the scale so that the tick mark at zero is where the centerline crosses the bridge. Keeping that mark there, pivot the scale so the tick mark at 24 crosses the perpendicular from the nut. Take a pencil and draw a line along the edge of the scale. Extend the line so that it's the length of the guitar. Draw lines from body features (like the red lines in your pic) perpendicular to the neck centerline and long enough to intersect that diagonal scale line. If you put the scale back on the diagonal line you can read the true dimensions for those features where they intersect the diagonal. For the blue lines, make lines parallel to the neck centerline. Draw a second diagonal line perpendicular to the first diagonal scale line. You can use the scale to read the true dimensions where those blue lines intersect the second diagonal.

There's a tutorial at Frets.com. You can buy truss rods for acoustics from Stewmac and LMII.

Surf over to Guitarnuts.com and check out their wiring section. They show the standard Strat wiring and some mods you can do.

Go to a big hardware store or industrial supply store and pick up an O-ring. The diameter should be small enough to grip the part. Pick one that's thick enough to create friction, to keep the arm from swinging, but not so thick that the arm pops out.

Just google "fret calculator" and take your pick.

Extreme Tech had a feature on a digital audio workstation.

Check out Frets.com. He has a few articles about repairing top cracks.

How about trimming down a Carvin thru neck to make a set neck?

I had a part time job, back in the mid '80s, assembling SMDs. It was kind of interesting. They used ceramic substrates and then screen printed the conductive traces, the resistors, and the non-conductive masks. My job was to look glue on capacitors and ICs. The caps used conductive epoxies and the ICs used dielectric epoxies. The ICs were harder to install than the caps. They were easier to damage, had a specific orientation and location they had to be in. We used a slender vacuum stylus to pick the IC out of it's tray and then put it on the drop of epoxy. Automated machines would ultrasonically weld gold wires from the IC to the board it was on. The machine would identify landmarks on the IC and landmarks on the board. It was able to correct for small misalignments and took less than a second for each wire. There was another machine that used a laser to trim a slot in the printed resistor to precisely set it's resistance value.

Check out frets.com. They have a lot of info on repairs.

Found this with Google. And this. And this.

Off the top of my head, these are the obstacles... The bolt-on neck - I think the archtop would have traditional construction for the neck, a dovetail or maybe even a slipperfoot. There might not be enough wood there to make a strong joint. I looked at pics of archtops on my PC and all the ones I looked at had the neck join the body at the 14th fret. Strat's join at the 16th fret. How do the scale lengths compare? How much room for adjustment do you think there is with the bridge?

There's an analogy that's used for fluid flow and dynamics, "it's easier to drink soda through a straw than a garden hose." It's easier to propagate a pressure wave through a narrow column than a much wider cavity. The acoustic energy is directed along the length of the column. In a large cavity, the pressure wave travels out in all directions, from the source. More of the energy is being dissipated by moving air in directions that aren't toward the intended receiver. That's the reason that horns (bugles, trumpets, trombones, etc) are shaped the way they are. Back in the early days of recording, before amplification, special instruments were built that were loud enough to recorded. Guitars, violins, ukuleles had bridges mounted on little diaphragms that drove big Victorola shaped horns, that were pointed at the acoustic microphone and it's stylus cut the record. I'm just talking about a chambered solid body, where the bridge isn't directly driving the entire top, like it would with an acoustic. For the folded horn to work, the bridge would have to be driving a small surface that would radiate into the column.

I wonder if anyone's tried making a folded horn, like in the Bose Wave Radio. It would be one long labyrinthine chamber, snaking through the body and emerging at a sound port. And, no, I don't know what the point of doing that would be. Does everything have to have a purpose?

Search through the archives for other fabric refinishes. You can get clear plastic pickguards and glue the fabric to the underside. Fender Paisley Telecasters use clear pickguards and then spray on fade color on the backside of the pickguard to cover the pickup route.

Primer is the first coat of solid color paint. It provides a smooth opaque base for the layers of paint to come. The color coats don't usually match the color of the primer.

No, it's been done. It shows up more on archtop guitars. It's sort of like a monitor, directing sound to the player to hear what they're doing. a Harrison a Buscarino Linda Manzer put in a sliding door on the side port. Someone also does a hinged door that forms a speaker horn that projects sound right at your head.

I prefer the middle one. You've got a Tele bridge, Tele pickups, and Tele controls/switch/coverplate. The pickguard ought to say Tele, too. When you do your Thinline Bocaster, and the p/u's and controls are less characteristically Tele, then do something more rectilinear.

idch, I forgot about Eastwood. That was the first obscure guitar site I ran across. Hitone, I like your taste... your Surfer and Fatboy rock. So whose semi-hollow is the inspiration for your current project? ripsrv, I don't think xebryus was being hypocritical. He praised PerryL's design, something totally PerryL's design but with recognizable Jag influence. As far as we know, PerryL didn't ask people for guitars that looked like they were Jaguar influenced... he just synthesized it himself. I think the point was instead of trying to adapt someone else's interpretation of a design, that you skip the middleman and figure out what design elements you like, be inspired, and make something that's all yours. There's a great book, Electric Guitars: The Illustrated Encyclopedia by Tony Bacon. All the guitars you know and many you've never seen or dreamed of. I have to admit that I don't really understand where you're coming from. I've no shortage of ideas for guitars. I've got dozens upon dozens of scraps of paper with sketches of different guitars I fancy. When something different and choice floats into my field of view... the Girl Brand guitars, the Pagellis, vintage euro-freaks, the Bocaster (a single cutaway Bo Diddley, brilliant!)... I'm inspired. But, I don't ever want "that" guitar. I always want a variation, an evolution, sometimes something that only has a tiny kernel of that other guitar. You sound kind of young and that you might be trying to knock one out of the park with your first guitar. It's good to stretch yourself. But, look at the guys making guitars. One guitar begets another and another... Your first guitar doesn't need to be THE NEW CLASSIC. You like the Jagstang and want a guitar with a 25.5" scale. Go ahead and make that guitar. Live with it and squint at pics of other guitars. Start mutating with guitar #2... and then #3

Bill, Smells like a new project... the Jellysonic II!

PerryL, sweet guitar! Me like. ripsrv, I think you got a lot of negativity because the way you made your observation about the types of guitars you've seen on this board. It sounded more like a criticism of those styles of guitars. Yes, there are a lot of pics and sketches of pointy guitars. I've called PG the cult of quilted maple. There are lots of Jems and a few thru-neck with contrasting laminations. You don't need to be a fan of every style to appreciate the creativity and craftsmanship that goes into the guitars. I was never into metal, so, a lot of the metal oriented guitars don't do it for me. My taste tends to run towards vintage and oddball. Tradition is such a strong element in Blues... Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, Gibson semi-hollows, Gretsch. You really can't stray too far from convention. That kind of constrains innovation and uniqueness. But, there's a tradition of blues players making do with cheap instruments. Makers of cheap guitars have made a delirious array of oddly proportioned knock-offs and strange takes. There's a really cool site of Euro guitars (Ekos, Hagstroms, Vox, etc), www.fetishguitars.com. If you haven't, you really need to check out Girl Brand Guitars to see what cool variations you can do with the humble Telecaster. You mentioned the Jagstang. Tym Guitars does a take on the Jagstang that's recognizable, but, clearly different: the Vibratone. For fresh, but, vintage flavored, check out Koll Glides, Reverend Guitars, and the Pagelli Beatmaster and Rockability. A guitar I really, really like is S.B. MacDonald's resolectric. I like the way it looks like it's been hacked out of another guitar. I know you weren't looking for a resonator, but, it would make a cool blues guitar. A bridge p/u could be mounted on the coverplate. Also think of an anonymous looking single cutaway (clearly not a Les Paul) along the lines of a Gretsch Duo Jet, a National Resolectric, or a Danelectro U-2. Get weird with the pickguard to make it completely unique.