RGGR

I might steal that idea.

First was thinking of this:

The darkness of the wenge looks great in contrast to the dark grain of the zebrano (they almost looks like they flow together) and the maple.

Zebrano/Wenge/Maple, he?

Any pics?

Yesterday made pittstop at my local woodsupply store. The guys/girls there were complaning I was stopping by there way to often lately. I told them, if you enjoy doing something, it's hard to stop. So I was forced to pick up some more body blanks for future projects. (More about that later, first wanna finish current projects).

While sieving through the wood supply, I picked up some maple, and some thin Wenge laminates, for future neck purposes.

For my 8 string neck I picked up a nice Ebony fretboard, and I saw this nice thin blanks of Zebrano, that would be perfect for Maple/ Zebrano/Maple neck laminate.

I think this would look nice in a 5 piece neck, having this small laminates of Zebrano in between the maple. Question now is ......Wenge would be perfect laminate candidate, as Wenge is very hard and stable. I never heard of Zebrano as neck blank material, and wonder how well it would perform as a neck laminate.

Any ideas, suggestions, opinions. I got this quote of the net:

Zebra Wood is a quite dense & strong wood, similar to Hard Maple or Purpleheart.

Another option would be two Ebony laminates in the neck.......and although I think it will look awesome.....with the Zebrano is would more bring the neck and body together as one.

If you're dealing with just a tid/tad/tiny bit of difference....I would say Epoxy. It's so much less cumbersome then the plug/redrill option.

Swiss cheese, anyone?

How would you go about replacing fretboard on binded neck. Meaning, current neck has binding, and I would like to replace the fretboard. With tutorial on this site, I'm pretty confident I could pull off a standard fretboard removal. But with the binding....I guess you have to remove and re-apply that too, right?

Comments are welcome.

Did some rough sanding on neck this afternoon.

Front

Bottom

There are no neck Autocad files out there. You have to roll your own.

Regarding using a Floyd Rose for your first guitar I would not recommend it. The trouble of installing one has kept me from doing one and I have been building guitars for 15 years.

First the choice of wood. For guitar you're after (with EMG pup combo) Alder or Mahogany makes perfect sense. Read up on both woods do search on Alder Tonewood on this site and you will find tons of information about this wood. Tone is perceptive and it's like explaining the color red to a blind man. So read up, and make a pick.

The Alder body would be tid bit lighter, and maybe bit easier on your tools.

You have the drawing of the guitar you want to make. You need to copy that to MFD template and use that as routing template.

For neck wood: Maple would be a good choice. It's nice to work with, and can be finished super smooth.

Fretboard: order pre-radiussed and preslotted from LMII.com. Saves you sh*tload of headache.

For Floydrose.......you need to be good with Autocad and should be able to create good templates.

Look [url=http://www.floydrose.com/instructions.html]here

Ask Dave at fretsonthenet.com

kahler finally made it easy to get a trem from them...and at over $100 less and with such an easier rout,i would havehad to be crazy to not switch over.

Saw that the Kahler trem came without the toplock nut, what are you gonna do concerning the top nut???

With this lighting, I kinda like the body.......the neck on the other hand is total no-no.

Control cavity done.

this is a really cool build... i like the headstock idea too, though i hope you don't put the ibanez logo on it lol, thatd be cheesy since you built it

Instead of the tele bridge I would use regular strat bridge, even a hipshot if you have the cash to throw away! Nicely stripped and sand blasted I think that the brass base on a hipshot would look preety good!

With Tele bridge I can make front of bridge follow angular line of frets, like the Conklin design. Have probable access to powdercoat unit so thinking of golden saddles on black (powdered) modified base plate.

On basis of Warmoth PDF, I will start drawing somethings up in Autocad. Will see what looks best.

E.T.S make the best sh*t out full stop! they take their time but are total professionals

They haven't answered my emails yet. And yes, their single string bridge looks very nice, but unfortunately I think it's too wide.

Would love it if they make a 10mm wide version of it.

Going the fanned frets route means I have to c*ck up my own bridge (or modify an existing bridge)....which makes things more complicated. Definately not as simple as ordering one off the selve.

This Black Machine design is also starting to grow on me. I think when some more guitars are finished I'm gonna do one of these. Thin body, strange headstock, nice simple white binding on black guitar.

Yep, that's wny I have to take another route......

http://www.novaxguitars.com/parts-accessories/bridges.html

the ABM system is better i think...no string thru body...IF the strings will fit

String thru body is not a problem. I kinda like that concept. What I don't like is that this design is way to wide (15mm), and yields a spring spread that is too wide for what I'm after.

The ETS ones look very good,

but will yield same problem in width area, I think. I set them a email asking for dimensions. Haven't heard back yet.

Conklin has interesting design that looks like copy-able by cutting up two of these Tele style bridges

This guy know his stuff, the last bike he painted won the Biker Build off in Daytona in 2006.

Seriously not impressed with number of options in the single guitar string bridge department.

Should be back from the painters any day now......

Just talked to the guy......JS-7 currently has its candy apple color, and is working on the flames .....Hopefully full guitar is done first week of March.

That's the trouble with these guys.......they deliver excellent work, so lots of people bring their projects, with result that work piles up, and up and up.

Then again, I'm not in a hurry. No customer waiting for this puppy. The customer is me, and the customer wants it done right, instead of quick and dirty.

So we will play the waiting game again. Tons of other guitar projects keeping me busy.

Also, I don't really buy Black Machine's comments about removing the unused fingerboard behind the nut. This can be done regardless of the fan.

Yep, is the way to go IMHO, only trouble is that with this kinda set-up it's impossible to have angle headstock.

RGGR, I've never played an 8-string guitar, but I'd be a little careful of placing the parallel fret so close to the nut. I have a fanned fret bass (34"-37") where the parallel fret is about the 7th. In that arrangement the slant at the higher frets is pretty noticeable, and it's easy to get lost above the 12th fret.

So putting straight fret at 5th fret makes good sense to me. This is what the guy from Black Machine wrote on his website.

The fingerboard is slanted differently to others you might have seen. This departure is to allow chording at the first fret without the player's finger hitting or being over the nut. Also I wanted to remove the piece of unused fingerboard behind the nut usually found on fanned fret instruments. At the bridge end the angle is more radical, similar to the position of the pick hand, which is oddly natural.

I'm buying that.

On a bass, that's a good compromise because I rarely play above there, but on a guitar I would be looking to place the parallel fret around the 10th fret. The fan is more pronounced on wider fretboards, and I would think that your 8-string's fretboard would be about as wide as the one on my bass.

Yeah, I noticed that too.

Personally, I love the fanned fret idea. I've been wanting to try one out to see if I would make one.

That's part of the motivation to build this guitar to begin with. The whole 8 stringer idea is so darn intriging.

And last few days I have been reading up on the issue concerning 8 stringers.......and the more I read about it (sevenstring.org, jemsite, here, etc) the more it all starts to come alive. And there are so many opinion and ideas of the "right path" it's almost like a religion. Lot's of opinions on fanned frets. Some aggressively against the whole idea.

Sucking it all in, chewing on the different opinions, experiences, and ideas.......the fanned frets idea has won me over. I think it makes absolute perfect sense. Only real downside is that I can't order preslotted fretboards from somewhere, and I can't use a standard 8 stringer bridge. Something that will make the build more of a challenge.

Looking at what's out there, this 884 from Black Machine seems to be the route I want to take.

884

Looking at the specs:

Fanned frets: 25.5"-28" (workable compromise)

Nut width: 51mm nut (manageable, so far manageble goes with 8 stringers)

Staight fret positioned at the 5th fret (clever!!)

24 frets (personally I will use 29 or 30 to eliminate the need for a neck pup)

Strings 9-11-16-26-36-46-60-84

Not overly enthousiastic about the thin body and the headstock.

So with that settled it's time to look at the headstock. Ibanez on their RG-8 has this obese looking fat headstock, not my cup of tea. While some people made some better looking mock-ups.

Together with FretFind programm a first mock-up should look something like this.

I need to do some more fine tuning and start hunting down some single string bridge suppliers. Width of those suckers will determine the bridge spacing.

That Jigsaw bass is fantastic. How do you suppose he did it?

Probably water-jet or laser cut. The black can be dyed black epoxy, at least that's my guess.......