tirapop

The Bigsby Merle Travis guitar predated the Les Paul (and the Strat). It may have been awkward to try and sue Gretsch, back in the day, when Les Paul looked kinda derivative of the Bigsby. 40 years later when they went after PRS, Gretsch had already been pumping out Jets for decades.

I don't know if it's an age thing, but, lyrics seem to register with me less and less. Crappier hearing? Not enough time? Songs click whether I know what they're singing about or not. Lately I've been listening a lot to My Morning Jacket. I got tired of mumbling along and found the lyrics to a couple songs I really like. The lyrics were on the verge of being incomprehensible nonsense. No longer mumbling, I still don't know what the songs are about, but, I still love them.

Hitone, I've been really impressed by guitars you've built. I love the retro style and name is perfect. So, does the Classic have an end to end center block? Or are you doing something else like a Gretsch or a Danelectro? Got any more build pics of the Classic or the Fatboy?

Bundle it with "Control Freak"... give me an excuse to buy it!

http://www.hitoneguitars.com/hitone_classic.htm

Not turquoise... too blue, not turquoise enough. It's in the description, "lapis purfling".

Planes are probably the sexiest hand tools (no snickering) on the planet. I found this on the Fine Woodworking magazine website: See that wild wood grain pattern on the sides of the plane? Damascus steel. Two different flavors of steel fused together, then repeatedly folded to make layer upon layer, and then twisted to form those cool patterns. The wood in-fill is ebony. The maker? A hobbyist. I don't know if there's a Project Plane website. On those Holtey smoothing planes, they've got their sides dovetailed to the soles. Taunton Press has a good book called "Bench Tools". It's a collection of articles from FW magazine. One of the articles is a tutorial on building a panel plane, which uses that dovetail construction. The brass plates a cut to rough shape with at bandsaw. After that, it's all done with a file, by hand. The author used a hot plate to preheat the brass and then soldered it together with a propane torch. Cool, huh?

2"?... I can't estimate dimensions when I'm tired. What you want to reinforce is the glue line between the bolt-on and the tenon. You could put a screw up through the tenon into the neck. Putting screws through the heel, all the way into the neck would be stronger still. Is that something that needs to be hidden? As far as sinking the neck into the body, sure it helps. Does it help enough? I don't know. You'd still want to reinforce the tenon. Your original design featured the tall neck and I think you can keep that with a reinforced tenon.

Idch, just stringing up the neck isn't going to be the real test. The neck has to carry that load for years, plus the vibration of the strings, you handling the guitar as you play, and the odd knocks, when it bumps into things. Let me say this again: there are well designed glue joints and there are poorly designed glue joints. Think about this... wouldn't it be easier to make a tilt-back head with a butt joint instead of a scarf? If you wanted a 7° tilt, just crank the table saw blade over 3½° and trim the ends of the neck blank and the headstock. I've got a saw blade that will leave a cut surface smooth as glass, for a perfect gap-less fit. People keep repeating the glue is stronger than the wood. This should work shouldn't it? But, when have you ever seen a guitar with that kind of head joint? You haven't because it doesn't work. Good glue joints put the glue line in shear. The glue line is much weaker when the forces are trying to peel it apart. A headstock butt joint is mostly in compression, but, the string tension is trying to straighten out the headstock and puts a prying load on the glueline. The glue might be strong enough to allow it to be strung up and played. But time under load and a stray bump would be all it takes to fail that glue line. A scarf joint also has that prying load, but, it's spread out over a larger area to reduce it's intensity. The tapered thickness make it more flexible, transmitting less load to the very edge of the glue line. A quick google finds that the string tension for a 25.5" scale guitar is 122 lb. The height from the strings to the glue line between your bolt-on and the tenon is what? 2" maybe? So, your glue line has a prying load of 244 in-lb. That's why I suggested you put screws into the neck. The glue line at the headstock end of the surface is in tension. I'm an aerospace structural engineer. I work with carbon fiber and much of it is put together in bonded joints. I don't know the specific strength of the glue you're using or the wood for that matter, so, I can't guarantee that your neck joint is going to fail. I can only tell you that after all that work you've put in, a couple screws are cheap insurance.

Idch, Are you planning on doing any more reinforcement on your neck joint? Maybe it's just that pic, but, it looks like very little of the old bolt-on neck is glued into the body. It looks like the bolt-on is held to the guitar by the glue joint to that heel extension you used to make your tenon. If that's the case, you've essentially just glued the neck to the face of the guitar. With a set neck, the strength of the glue joint is on the sides of the tenon, not the bottom. Glue joints are strongest in shear. They don't work well when the forces are pulling or peeling the glueline apart. Imagine a neck-thru guitar routed for a trem and a pickup. There's no bottom to that "tenon". All the neck bending forces have to go through the gluelines on the sides of the center block, into the sides, as the loads go around the p/u and trem routes. The loads go back across the gluelines on the side to go back into the center block to the bridge. Seriously consider putting a couple screws from the body up into the neck.

Shimmy, Try this for $2.50.

http://www.rahul.net/gaa/Uke/ http://makeaukulele.tripod.com/ http://homepage.mac.com/d_limiter/PhotoAlbum5.html http://www.geocities.com/tpe123/folkurban/uke/uke.html http://www.hanalima.com/

And they probably all smoke, too.

I kinda like it. I skew retro, so, the absence of pointy bits and the pickguards appeal to me. Ditto comments about the headstock and the lower horn. Keeping with retro, maybe go 3X3 with something along the lines of the Danelectro coke bottle or a National Resolectric... symmetric, maybe a little bland, but different. Trim the horn back, to somewhere between Strat and Les Paul. String through is cool, but, to my eyes the V pattern only works on the old Flying V's that had that V-shaped bridge plate. The toggle looks way too high. Since I'm stuck in the way-back-machine, I'd stick with metal covers on the HBs and go with traditional bursts or solid colors.

Calculus for tangent? How does that work? I've been out of college as long as some of you guys have been alive. With tangents, I use simple trig relationships and Pythagorus' theorem. That's about all I can remember.

Is that a coin or medallion on the headstock?

Duchossoir's Strat book says that the contours were marked with a template, bandsawed to the line- freehand, and then cleaned up with a belt sander. I guess they used the same technique to get the overall body profile. Anybody got Duchossoir's Tele book?

If it was anything like the Strats, they traced a template onto a blank. Bandsaw close to the line and cleaned up on a belt sander.

Sure it isn't supposed to be something like castor oil?

In this pic?

It doesn't look any worse, balancewise, than a Daisy Rock guitar. Build it and find out.

I've used Dri-Cote, a spray on bit lubricant. It works. Blades and bits pick up less pitch, stay cooler, and burn less.

Okay, lets just dispence with the wah and kick it up a notch... a guitar with a built in talking box: a little self powered speaker, a plastic tube, and a microphone. My mouth can say "wah" better than my foot can.

Pretty original. Meat Purveyors are great. They do a medley of a bunch of Madonna songs done bluegrass... never been a fan of the material girl, but, take away her voice and all the production, those are pretty good songs.

I have trouble getting my hands and feet to work together. I thought it would be cool to have a built-in wah that operated by tilting the guitar... maybe a pendulum on the rheostat. Guitar held normally sounds normal. Tilt the head to the ceiling and WAAAAHHHH.