tirapop

I think branding is cool. I like the idea of branding the back of a maple neck... looking sort of like a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. You could play around with some variation of their "powerized" logo and "player" signatures.

I'd guess it's either water beads on a waxed surface or... ray skin (from the fish).

Stewmac has an article on replacing a nut.

I was wondering how you make a water slide decal with an inkjet... whose ink usually runs when it gets wet. The bonder spray fixes the water soluble ink.

You can use insulating foam board and bondo for a buck. I know of a couple guys who are making car bodies, using masonite and sheet rock compound for the buck. Meerkat La Bala

Reverend uses extra metal for sustain, too.

How about using a rotary switch and put the pectoral fin on it? If you don't play sitting down, the volume and tone pots could be on the bottom of the body, shafts pointed down, tucked behind the other fin. BTW, I prefer the fin shaped headstock.

What kind of tools do you have access to? A bandsaw would be ideal. You could do bindings on a tablesaw if you make sure you have enough material to keep the binding from getting mangled in the blade or putting your fingers at risk. You can do that by using double-sided tape to stick on a piece of wood to the edge of what will be the binding. You want to cut the binding along the grain so that it won't crack along short grain when you bend it.

Canadian? Ooh, go bilingual! Eh? - <French Canadian equivalent to eh?>

No particular order... Django Reinhardt Richard Thompson Mark Knopfler James Honeyman-Scott David Gilmour Dick Dale Stevie Ray Vaughn Eric Clapton Johnny Marr Robert Johnson also B.B. King Scotty Moore Bo Diddley

I found a link for the pallet guitar (or one of them). This is a flat top from Taylor. I stumbled across this link for a formica bodied guitar. This isn't just a formica surfaced guitar. The formica is structural and it's built like an acoustic with heat bent sides and kerfing to glue the sides to the top. I'd think something like this would be fragile, but, the builder (Bill Machrone from PC Magazine) says it was built to take a lot of abuse and wipes clean with a damp cloth. He thinks it has better sustain than most Strats.

smoking - non-smoking

Why do you need a template? Do you have a router? If you had to, you could do the pickup holes, the control cavities, and the neck pocket with a drill, a couple forstner bits, a drill guide (if you can't get to a drill press), and a chisel. If you really want to build a guitar, just go for it.

Anyone know which model of Harmony ABMOA bought? It looks very cool. I like the shallow cutaway look. In a world full of Strats (clones/evolutions), that little variation makes those guitars look so unique... so '60s. A couple other guitars with that shallow cutaway: the Gibson Kalamazoo KG-1 and the Fender Musicmaster/Duosonic.

Nice sketch! Interesting idea for a bass... why is it that when I look at it I expect the bass to turn towards me and sing "Take Me To The River"? That would be a unique feature to integrate into your instrument.

Until you explained it, I thought it was a geeky Star Trek thing.

Dolly Parton does a good cover of "Shine"... really. She does it in a country/bluegrass style, so, two amps aren't required.

The top of the bindings aren't masked when he sprays the color. After the laquer is dry, he scrapes the color off the binding with a razor blade.

Have you seen this tutorial?

Yes, you can route the cavity for the control from the back and then link them to the p'up cavities by drilling. In Hiscock's book, he makes a Tele with a pair of humbuckers, rear routed, no pickguard. So, you cut both the top and back to their Tele profile and then glued them together? It's more common to glue the board together unshaped. If one part is shaped, it can be the template for routing out the other part. Glue is going to get squeezed out, whatever you do. If you want to keep things lined up while you're gluing, you can drill alignment holes, in both parts, and use pins to keep things from shifting.

I figure the finishing forum is a good place for this. I surfed into the Girl Brand Guitars website. All the guitars seem to be Tele profile, hardtails, with a pair of single coils, and a Les Paul style switch. The unique thing, the cool thing is the way the guitars are finished and ornamented. They're art works. Check out the site. Each guitar is built on a theme and it's reflected in the paint, inlays, and added details. The first one I saw was Henry Kaiser's SushiGirl, with the plate of plastic sushi in the window. Instead of "rhythm"-"treble" on the switch, like a regular Les Paul switch, it says "sho-yu" (soy sauce) - "wasabi". They play around with the choices. There's also famous-obscure, time-space, heaven-hell, fuel-spark, etc. What can you come up with? I like sacred-profane.

If you're building the neck, there's nothing wrong with making the headstock slotted. They've been used on steel string guitars before... National Resonators, for instance. Grafting on a classical headstock might be a little challenging. Classical guitars have a much wider fingerboard and nut. Whittling it down to 1-5/8" might look awkward and it might not leave enough wood for a durable headstock. As for the armrest, you could do it with a hand plane, a band saw (if you support the body properly), or even a router, if you have one of those duplicarver or thicknessing jigs. Oh yeah and sandpaper to clean it up. The important thing is that the surface you make is single curvature... you should be able to drape a sheet of paper over it and have it lay flat on the surface without any gaps, especially at the edges. If a piece of paper won't conform to the surface, without wrinkling, you won't be able to coax a piece of wood to.

FRETS.COM has an article about installing an under bridge piezo. Some acoustics use internally mounted microphones. Others use contact pickups that are stuck to a vibrating part of the guitar. Some guitars use combinations of sources and blend them to get the desired sound.

This is on the Warmoth site.

This thread got me curious about Danelectros. Scouring the net, I finally found this pic of the guts of a Dano. IS THAT REALLY ALL THERE IS? On the site the pic's from, Fatdog's Subway Guitars, they mention making custom Danelectros... peeling off the masonite and replacing it with thicker piece of figured maple. There's an idea.