metalcarver

A couple of things to add. We should all be a little aware of the medium, i.e. internet/electronic. A serious beginner is going to be allowed the same space as a casual surfer who kind of dabbles in making things. Praise, sarcasm, and humor don't always translate from the spoken to the printed word. A question that is asked and then gets no answer is kind of self policing, kind of stands out like a fart in church.

Guitar, 6 -string, M1-A1 No wood at all. Manually machined billet aluminum body, Seymour Duncans, Moses graphite neck. Decorated for battle. For those who haven't seen ice feathers, they form when you have high humidity and very cold weather. Our lakes get a little stiff in the winter. Dave

It looks like a piece of brass that's been sitting around the shop for years. Make it out of brass and shine it up and everyone will ooh and ahh. Then a couple months of drool, beer, and sweat and you have one of them there patinas.

I get my ideas the old fashioned way... I steal them. Nice

If you take a look at the 22 fret bolt on necks, there is an over hang past the heel that holds the 22nd fret. That is, the fretboard overhangs the main part of the neck at the heel. Starting from scratch it'd be no problem but as a retrofit kinda sounds like a headache.

Guess I'm one of the few who can refer to you as being "south of the border"

Oh yes. Time. hm well I charged for 45 hours. But looking at the fuss over the neck, they were very long hours. I work metal so my shop reflects it. So when I have to work on some wood I have to clean everything wipe down etc. and then I get a beautiful piece of birdseye like on this one (they wink at you) and I feel like I'm transplanting a thumping bleeding heart into a new body. Add to that the fact that this was my first inlay job and the fact that I learned to cuss in an underground mine honed with years in the oil patch,... well there were some tense times...

Hey- Metallic Mathew- how cold there? Saskatoon is one of those chilly places I hear. Down south there in those little provinces that is... It's a balmy -25 C. here. Tongue got stuck to the gitar

Most of the pickups I[ve bought have several wiring diagrams or rather pictures of the individual pieces and which solder lugs the wires go to. The Stew Mac site has a bunch of stuff too. I think that guitar nuts had a picture page on howto. Anyway you don't need to understand it to make it work.

I think the Fender Mustang was 24" as well as others. The best info I've found on scale length is at : Novax Guitars technical article While your there check out his fanned frets...

All of the configuration details were requested by the customer. He plays strictly slide in an open G# tuning and he doesn't use the 6th string at all. He has several others set up the same way. He only finger frets the strings up to #15 so I suggested putting in markers for the high frets flush with the fingerboard. Gives a little more slapping room. The inlay is aluminum. Pretty easy to put in, but filing flat and polishing puts little specs of metal in the pores int rosewood and it oxidizes black so it was really hard to keep the wood clean. Probably work better with ebony or synthetic fingerboard. I'm about 60 air miles south of Anchorage = 180 miles through the mountains by road. Nikiski, Alaska about 1500 people scattered around the area. The onry ones are kind of hard to count though. After talking with MM a little I'm sure that if we were locked into a shop with plenty of tools and material some very strange things would come out = if we survived. He has an evil mind.

More pics at : Triestele

Would indentured servitude work with you?

At the bridge

A recently completed project for a client in Italy. Slightly different specs too. 5 String 24" scale neck two Jason Lollar pickups - the neck pickup is perpendicular to the strings 7lb. 4oz. - 3.2 kg 3 - way, volume, no tone control The owner was surprised by the acoustic volume and sustain. He said it rings clear on every fret. When I was setting it up I was really impressed with the Lollar pickups. I think I'm getting an idea of how a tone snob gets there. The design on the top was what happens when you leave a machinist at the end of the road in Alaska - unsupervised.

Pesky little decimal points anyway. I had visions of sledge hammers and sweating bodies, glow of flames, big guy with hood and whip... One thing to keep in mind about forming aluminum, is that it needs to be squeezed and not stretched. I guess that was the big trick in forming aluminum cans. The punch and die have to pressure the material into place without stretching. I've heard that about Kramers and Beans with the stage light stuff. I guess Les Paul made an aluminum guitar himself and couldn't keep it in tune on stage. My guess is that - especially in the neck- having wood and aluminum alongside each other makes it act like a thermostat. It'll curve toward the side with least expansion. It's probably going to take some extreme conditions to do that or they wouldn't have made them to begin with. A lot of people like the Beans. Veleno had a neck cast for him out of aluminum and people are willing to pay $10k for those now. But it was all aluminum. Yes the expansion is proportional to the material dimension. and in 3 dimensions. Just multiply the expansion rate X the dimension X degree change. So at 13 microinch/deg/inch you're not going to be able to measure a lot of change. But if that material is locked to something that doesn't change as much There'll be lots of pressure, more than enough to bend stuff. From looking around on the net there are lots of high end guitars using 3rd party necks. Have you made many? I run a machine shop so I really don't have the wood working end of things down pat. But I recognize quality when I see it. I'll pick on Warmoth because I have 3 of them. All three were within .003" (.076mm) on the heel dimensions - and that may have been due to finish. They ship them with a little bow in the neck so the wood won't take a set before the strings are on, but if you tighten the rod so that the frets are flat the ALL of the frets will touch my surface plate. The absolute best guitars out there have necks totally made by hand and you can't touch them for quality. They're stuff you dream about. But you really have to have your poop in a group if you are going to compete with computer carved necks on quality AND price.

By thin I meant the body cavity depth. Strength wise You could probably get away with a single flat plate 6mm thick I'm down to 3-1/2 mm (.140") and don't see any flex at all from string tension. Of course the rounded edge helps there. As far as necks - Warmoth, USA Custom, Stew-Mac, Moses and others will sell you all you can afford to buy. Fretted, finished, inlayed. The fret jobs on Warmoth necks are the standard by which others should be judged. They're basically plug and play. However, they've really got a case of Seattle attitude.

I forgot to mention... you can make these suckers too thin. Try finding low height behind the panel switches can be a pain. Even the mini's can get kind of close to the back after wiring.

I don' see any reason that you couldn't do a full bore mass production on something like that. The body shape could flex... Could be made by one of those outfits that press out aluminum briefcases. you could also get into all kinds of splash anodizing. The metal underground is growing... Dave

Excellent! Gonna get me some competition and some of those ideas sound great. I would still remain cautious about the wood/ aluminum interface. The thermal expansion of aluminum is 13 microinch/deg. per inch of material. Wood is around 1.7 to 2.5. If it stays at room temperature - no problem. If you leave it in the back seat of the car on a really hot day or really cold day there's going to be some stress on the fastening points. Something like contact cement or glue that doesn't harden would have a little give. The double back tape that they use for carpet installation might do just fine, I use it for milling really thin plates. I'd be hesitant to use epoxy on a wood/aluminum joint but homebuilt aircraft makers use epoxy to join spars and ribs (obviously a lot of faith there) but it's aluminum/aluminum. Blind rivets like on airplanes would work well and eliminate bumps. If you're thinking of forming (hammering) look for 3000 or 5000 series sheet. They're softer and would form better. Aluminum will work harden and if it's bent too much it'll start cracking. You need to do it in steps with annealing in between. To anneal aluminum, take an acetylene torch, set the mixture so it's puking black smoke and blacken the aluminum. Then clean up the flame and heat the aluminum until the black is burned off but no more. It'll be soft and you can work it some more. For cutouts for pickups you can use a router if you don't get too greedy and have everything clamped down. There's a whole lot of learning about to be done on this metal stuff. I still don't understand all I know. A lot of the rules for getting tone out of a wood guitar seem to be suspended with aluminum. All of the ones I've built sound good but the 7-1/2 pounder sounds better than the 13 pounder. My current theory is that the partial harmonics don't decay as fast in metal as in wood so you get more coloration in the sound... um, that's the theory for today anyway... Please post pictures. I get my ideas the old fashioned way.... I steal them. Dave

There's a downloadable program called FretCalc that will calculate any scale lenth and all the fret positions and there are severl online java calculators Ifergit where...

As far as patenting a metal front guitar you gotta be the first to patent it and lots of folks have been using metal to decorate for a long time. Zemaitis made (d. 2002) some spectacular ones. I googled this image : http://www5a.biglobe.ne.jp/~k-ma2/guitar/z_meta.html And it appears that Zero Guitars welds them up. http://www.zeroguitars.com/pages/210658/index.htm 6061 tig welds and wire feed welds quite easily if you have a welder who can plan the weld sequence so it doesn't twist up. Homebuilt aircraft makers use epoxy to glue their spars together - they're aluminum tubes telescoped together for a taper. For a guitar, I think you'd have to use a square bar on the inside corner of the panels in order to get enough area for the epoxy to grip but might work nicely.

Didn't have a pic of the back on the latest but heres the first lp back. They're all diamond plate keyhole shape.

A sandbag some rubber and wooden mallets and you get most any shape you need. Copper sheathed strat? hm.

If you're planning on hand forming (hammering) alu sheet you might need to pick a softer grade. Alu in the t6 hardness will crack after forming very much. If there are no soft grades available you can anneal alu sheet by first using an acetylene torch and blackening the aluminum then clean up the flame and heat the alu until the carbon burns off and the alu is clean looking again - no farther. Then beat the snot out of it. 3mm sounds a little thick For a similar dimensioned piece alumiunobtainium is a lot heavier than wood. Plus if you're hammering compound curves into it, that increases the stiffness and you can go even thinner.