dansk

hey guys, i'll be attaching the neck to my first project soon and this has come up. should i use a neck plate? i'm thinking no, seeing as i want to keep this guitar as minimalistic as possible, as to better showcase the nice wood i got (imbuya). it is a fender style neck/joint... so what are the advantages/disadvantages of using a neck plate and not using one? thanks a bunch

hey mattia, thanks a bunch dude yeah, i was thinking about just not filling the grain at all. i suppose it just might work out better with a oil/wax finish... about the oil.. is there a generic name for tru-oil (i'm guessing that's a brand name right?). i'm from brazil and it might just be kinda hard to find around... carnauba wax it readily available, since it's commonly used to buff furniture and whatnot... anyone else got any ideas? thanks yet again

hey everyone, i've been lurking around for a while, mostly reading and checking out the great work that's being done here on pg (although i have posted on some ocasions).. a while ago me and a friend decided to try and build ourselves a couple of guitars (actually, just the bodies). so we went out and got ourselves a nice imbuya board long enough to do two two-piece bodies. we got the blanks glued up fine and cut out the outline. as of now we're not having much time to get on with the build (he goes to university a few hours away), so we're stuck on the routing (which started out pretty good for a first time). so, while we don't have time to actually make some dust, i'm stuck doing research for the next steps.. the one i know the least about being the finishing. well after all this babbling, here's my actual question(s): - after being planed down to thickness and lightly sanded the wood feels pretty damn smooth (imbuya is an awsome wood). anyone know if imbuya needs grain filling? my guess would be no. - there are a few small knots and a superficial cracks that we have no idea of how to fill... my friend suggested we make a mixture of epoxy and imbuya dust and apply that with a syringe or something. does that sound reasonable? - finally, the finish itself. i want to go as close as possible to the natural feel of the wood, so i thought of an oil/wax finish - anyone know if it would be suitable with imbuya? any products you could recommend? i just went on and on about that didn't i? well that's something i do every now and then, hope someone reads it anyway thanks in advance for any help and for all the great information that floating around on this site! -daniel

damn that's looking pretty freaking nice lee... i really really like that body shape (kinda looks like a bass, but that's sweet) and you seem to do very clean nice work.. however, i should tell ya, i don't think that's imbuya... i'm from brazil, and have a guitar with an imbuya top and am building another two from a long board of imbuya and it is a dark, long grained wood, looks nothing like that... mine's even darked than that, i'll try and get a picture of it edit- i think i sounded a bit rude up there.. i know jack about wood really, it's just that i recently bought a large board of imbuya and have been staring at it for a while, plus my main guitar which has an imbuya top... that's some nice looking wood either way

humm.. that's a nice design, i like it. has kind of a custom bass vibe to it with the neck through construction, natural satin finish displaying the wood... i've thought for a while of making a guitar that looks like a high-end bass of sorts.. i just might take that up as a project as soon as i build up enough experience -daniel

rio grande has a couple of models that look very nice.. i've never actually tried their products, but i've heard nothing but great things about them! http://www.riograndepickups.com/p90.html there's even a nickel covered version... myself, i would LOVE to get my hands on a bluesbar/jazzbar p90 set from rio grande for the jazzmaster kinda thingie i'm building... too bad we don't get those down here -daniel

can't see the photos... it says you've reached your bandwith limit for the month.. maybe you should try and set up a PhotoBucket account or something like that do it! i wanna see! hehehe

well, first i do not know if it is indeed Brazilian Rosewood, as in the correct species (it's grown in brazil - duh).. i do know for a fact that it is legally cut, i took a good look at the papers and it was all ok.. that makes it legal for sale within brazil, i don't know about exporting. my concern is not about getting it into the US, or any other place for that matter, but out of brazil - that's what i think might be complicated anyway, i think i might just point some other builder to that wood and let them make better use of it than i would...

so i'm just getting into guitar building, kinda started already on my first body, along with a friend of mine.. these past weeks we've been looking for wood and we've come to find that there is a whole lot of awsome wood around here! (i'm in brazil, btw) that first body we've started is solid imbuya - a very dense, beautiful dark wood. although ours is pretty much plain, it can have some pretty wild figuring, such as my own guitar's top.. anyway, enough with the blabbering... last week me and some friend were out in the mountains for a few days, so we decided to check out the local sawmills for interesting stuff. we met some great guys who work there and showed us an awsome (and large) stock of rosewood boards.. most of them were 1 9/16" thick, almost large enough for a one-piece top and as long as three or more bodies.. i'm inclined to think it might be a rare species (duh - brazilian rosewood), since he made a point in stressing that it was all legal and he had the adequate papers for it. it IS illegal to cut down such species down here... anyway, after much yadda yadda, my question is: how good a wood would rosewood be for a solid body? i tend to think i wouldn't be suitable as a one-piece body, but how about a top/back? i actually thought of selling this wood over the internet, but the legal hassle wouldn't be worth it thanks a lot for the help guys rock on - daniel

yeah, thanks man, i downloaded the cad yesterday from that site, as well as the software they have listed there, but it froze my computer... i'll try again...

thanks for the help man yeah, i understand all the stuff about camera angle and whatnot, i used to work a lot with graphics and such.. the photo i used was pretty much perfect as far as angle goes... i'm not actually concerned with the shape of the template i drew - it does seem pretty accurate for me. what i want to know is whether or not i scaled it to a larger size than it should have been, because it looks large, even while being within the proportion and shape of the design here's the photo i used as a base for the template:

so on monday me and my friend went out looking for wood.. we got a really nice board of imbuya (native brazilian wood, nice figure, very dense) right now i'm working on the main template for the guitars (we are actually getting 2 bodies out of the board) and i'm trying to trace over a photo i got from the internet.. i got the body shape alright and then went and tried to scale it up according to the scale length the shape i'm tracing is that of a fender jaguar, so that's a 24-inch scale. i did the math and came up with a certain size for the body and printed it out. the problem is, looking at it, it looks weirdly large the template came out about 14, 75 inches wide (blue in the pic) by 20,5 inches long (red).. does anyone know the aproximate dimensions of a fender jaguar? i looked around the guitar shops but can't find one (such models are kinda hard to find in brazil) btw, the neck pocket is not accurate. we're buying a pre-made neck and taking measurements from it to get the pocket right thanks a lot... p.s.: we have the wood cut and clamped for gluing (each body will be 2-part).. i'll start a thread and post some pics as soon as we have the body blanks glued and planned...

woot drak, looking awsome... i've come to really love the look of that buckeye burl you use.. where is it native of? expensive, hard to find? about those voids on your top, how about something like this? can't wait to see them all rockin'

*portuguese below* ae marco, tu é da onde? sou de sampa..... ... sorry bout that folks, not sure if anyone's bothered by that, i was just asking where he lives, since i'm from brazil as well

wow, that's quite a project to undertake..... *excuse me while i shift back to portuguese* ola, você por acaso é brasileiro? ou português? legal encontrar outros conterrâneos hehehe well if anyone's curious, his pics have portuguese comments on them, so i'm just asking if he's brazilian (which i am myself) or portuguese... anyway, i'm eager to see the progress of that!

btw, the little yellow line coming from the 4-conductor wire in both pickups is the bare wire... thanks again daniel

so a few months ago i changed the pickups in my les paul copy (got a JB/'59 combo) and had them wired for coil-splitting with two pull-push pot (the tone knobs for each pup) first thing is, when the 3-way switch is in the middle position (both pickups active) each of the volume knobs act as a master volume.. i wanted to change this so that i could control each pickup's volume independently and blend them differently also, the volume pots are really scrachy and noisy and that makes volume swells sound baaad... what can i do about this? so i opened up the back cavity to check it out and, although i know pretty much nothing about guitar wiring, it looks like the guy who did it (kind of a friend, didn't charge me for the labor, only parts) wired it kinda weird so i drew up some schematics of how it is right now to see if anyone can tell me what's up with this wiring... thanks a whole bunch everyone (aaah, i'd also like any wiring and soldering tips/tutorials/whatever, since i wanted to learn to do this myself) i know the drawing is kinda confusing, so if anyone has any doubts just post and i'll try and describe it to make it clearer... here's a pic of the guitar i'm talking about (my only electric) *shameless pic-whoring* also, this is my baby, so i'd hate to screw it up trying to wire it myself.. is this tricky in any way? (this topic was also posted at the guitar.com discussion forums) thanks once again, daniel