Bryan316

Zyons' is the first example where I've seen it work correctly. I'll take take my words back, because his method worked. No one I've ever seen do a woodblock fill-in, has ever had success doing it. I've seen it done in alder, mahogany and maple. With blocks of the same species. That's my base for my comments. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work in ash, or oak, or even pine. But overfilling it with grain filler... that's a totally different technique.

Mmm mmm mmm. That is a tasty looking axe. I didn't realise the bottom of the guitar was asymmetrical, with more wood under the arm. TOTAL suprise to me once I saw it in your hands. That's such a subtle, yet elegant difference. Here's a concept. Trans green, with all chrome hardware and white binding around the fretboard and the body? Or is the body too curvy in three dimensions to allow an appropriate binding? Heck.... binding in aluminum, then buff it to a glassy mirror finish, with the body glossy green clearcoat?

Looking good. Damn good. Now, any progress on how you want to sculpt the bottom corner? Gonna leave it, or still considering testing ideas? Since you've got the top board in place, are you brave enough to drill in a strap button screw right now? Then you could go cut the bottom wing from a plain ol' pine 2x4 or 2x6 to make changes and cut off wood. Just use some masking tape on the front and back to stick the bottom wing to the neck, and see how everything feels. Once you come up with a bottom wing you like, trace it to the good wood.

Idea. Dremel rout the first letter of your name, fill it with a pearl epoxy to create a fake inlay, and then waterslide the logo next to the inlay. Cuz that long swooping cursive looks gorgeous! I'd love to see that right at the 12th fret, even. Hmm?

Zyonsdream! GRAIN FILLER! Never... ever... EEEEEEVER thought of using it that way!!! That's almost, like, GENIUS!!! Seriously! If you glue that wood in, and just soak that sucka with grain filler, it'll be like injecting epoxy hardener right into the fibers of the wood!!!

I've wanted to round over a headstock, but never with the intention of creating a contour line with a contrasting veneer! By the way... when this guitar is done... I expect to see some pics, of that guitar, being played, while FISH HOOKING another band member! Just snag their cheek and pull for the photo op!!!! Extra credit for doing it during a guitar solo!

No. The tension of the string only dictates the pitch of the note. For X thickness of string, it needs Y amount of tension, to produce Z frequency. Perpendicular force acting radial to the string does create a slight, ever so slight, amount of additional tension in the string. Why? Because the act of pushing the string down against the frets does, however so very microscopically measured, lengthen the string, creating more tension, raising the pitch. Ever fret a note just behind the fret, then fret it in the dead center between two frets and push the string all the way down to the fretboard? What happens? Pitch stretches and bends up. Same as with vibrato, if you bend the string by sliding it across the frets, it adds tension to the string and raises the pitch. But you must understand, the distance between the string and the fret (also called action) is also accounted for, in the setting of the guitar's intonation. However miniscule this measurement is, it does get accounted for in fret spacing. Of course, those who play with noticably high string action will notice some tuning problems when fretting around the 3rd fret compared to fretting up above, say, the 19th fret. To more accurately understand your initial question, I assume you're asking more along the lines of necessary force to keep the fret from buzzing, right? That's simply enough force or compression to keep the vibrations of the string below the fret. You want to dampen the vibrations of the string to an almost infinite situation, where it just doesn't vibrate, it stops the string's vibration right at the fret. We've all played a note too loosely and felt the note buzz underneath our fingers. Cuz we didn't dampen the string's vibration into the fret strongly enough. Yes, we need a minimum pressure on the string, to dampen and terminate the string's vibrations into the fret. At that point, all vibrations are transferred into the wood of the guitar neck. BUT YES, since the strings above the fret or above the nut are attached to the guitar, some of those sympathetic vibrations can travel up the neck as well as down the neck. They CAN vibrate the strings above the nut. There's no such thing as being able to completely isolate any vibrations below the fretted note. Otherwise, Fat Finger would be out of business! More like why one string gauge needs to feel tighter than another just to get the same pitch. A thin gauge wire needs less tension to hit a certain pitch, for the same length. A thicker wire needs more tension, because the added mass vibrates slower at the same amount of tension. It's an old wives tale, that any gauge set of strings is innappropriate for any particular guitar, or any particular gauge set of strings works best for any particular guitar. To the player, one gauge set might FEEL more comfortable, SOUND better, PERFORM more desirably... to HIS hands. For example... Angus Young uses 12's and 13's on his guitars. I know guitarists who have tried to string up one of their guitars with the towing cable sized monsters. Their hands were too weak to handle all that excess tension and super-stiff strings, their guitars needed tons more internal force from their truss rods to handle the now supertight strings, and their nuts needed to be filed wider so their strings didn't bind and pinch in the slots. Just that alone, is already three very subjective conditions that can change from player to player and guitar to guitar. As explained above, it's vibrations bouncing back up into the strings, from the wood of the guitar. Sidenote: I've actually tuned a bass before, just by feeling the waves of vibrations in the headstock. Fretted the 5th fret and open string, plucked em, then reached over to feel the headstock as I held the notes. Vibrations ar AWESOME, DOOD OMG***LOLBBQ Yup. Chicken bone, chicken bone, lucky lucky chicken bone! Naw, dude, I'm sure there's some serious science behind it, and some voodoo superstitions as well. All'z I can say is, I HATE Fender style headstocks and greatly prefer an actual angle to my headstocks to create the break angle over the nut. Fender's style was simply a cost-effective solution, by adding some steel bars to force the strings to bend over the nut. I'ma go with all the HUNDREDS of years of violins, cellos, violas and double basses whose luthiers have done it before Fender decided to get economical with their lumber usage. You could also get a few beers and turn on Ninja Warrior and say screw it! Heh heh. Just build it at 15 degrees like everyone else gets away with, and all that extra worry time could be converted to relax time! But... what if you built three different necks? Or at least... mockups of necks? Use cheap crappy tuners, get some nuts, make a 2x4 neck and cut the necks at 12, 15, and 18 degrees, and see how it feels? I know... playing devil's advocate. But why not? It would, at least, make a cool thread filled with lots of pictures for us, in the name of posterity. And cold beers.

I simply want you to be spared the heartbreaking experiences, man. There's a difference between screwing something up because you experimented, and screwing up cuz the idea was bad from the start. I don't wanna see you throw away a project cuz of this! Oh, and another suggestion. Do your crackle finish, by including the pickguard. Screw it in place, and do the paintjob over the pickguard itself. Then pull it off and assemble.

Now just hold on a second here. You mean to tell me, you glued on a veneer to the front of the headstock, then sculpted the edges, to sand back and reveal the lines as a contour, like a body top at the forearm cutaway? I love you. MAAAN I can't wait til you finish sand and show us a pic with a finish over that! Heck, Just go hit that with alcohol and take a pic for me!!!

Just bought a Black n Decker Firestorm jigsaw. Laser guide out the front, sidegrip handle for stability, awesome. Never used a really good jigsaw before, and now I regret not buying this thing YEARS ago. It'll be easy as heck to do thick boards now! When you're cutting, I'd suggest doing some fan cuts. Just slice in, perpendicular to your lines. That way, as you start cutting close to the line, the chunks will fall off and help to keep your blade from binding or trapping in there. And it'll lighten the wood as you go around.

Think of how your strings behave, when they aren't open notes. It only gets the same amount of perpendicular force, or downward force, as your finger provides. You really shouldn't need any more pressure against the nut than your fretting finger would normally apply when playing further up the neck. Consider how a zero fret works. There's a fret at the open-string position, and the nut behind the zero fret only acts to keep the string's lateral spacing. That means, at that zero fret, it doesn't really need any more downard pressure than anywhere else on the fretboard. If you're serious about this, you could do the calculations to figure out exactly what angle the string would need to cut over the nut. It's a simple static physics problem. First, figure out exactly how much pressure, or force, you apply with your fingers when fretting. A scale or a load cell would give you this data (I know, I'm cheating, I've got load cells and scales all around me here at my work! HAH!). Then, do the equation in reverse. You'll have the pressure force, then you need to do a strut or bending moment calculation using that target force. You'll be looking to find the bending angle that provides the equivalent force, which will turn into a basic trigonometry equation.

This gives me an idea... I wanna make tuners that look like great big hex bolts. Rusty, nasty, uuuugly, METAL!

My suggestion, because this helped immensely for me. Build it, from some plain ol' 2x4's glued together. Once you actually have it physically in your hands, and able to feel it in full three dimensions, you'll start to get new ideas. You'll start cutting, and then get spur-of-the-moment concepts. Moments of inspiration. Welcome accidents. And, it will prove design ideas and make you realise whether your ideas were good or bad. Best of all... it can go in the fire pit for a night of beers with your friends, and you won't cry about wasting precious woods on it! Glue up some non-pressure-treated clean pine 2x4's, and start chopping away. Your hands will tell you if it's a smooth, flowing design.

15 degrees is a very common angle for guitar and bass construction. I've never noticed any basses having a noticably steeper angle, so I think the nut was the culprit. I'd suggest replacing the nut with a blank one, and carving fresh string grooves into it. And don't forget pencil graphite in there. Lets the string shift in the nut freely without binding. It helped on a buzzy bass of mine.

My brother bought a "Jackon" Randy-style flying V which used to have a front pickguard. The previous owner had filled in the electronics cavity with a block of wood, re-routed the backside for a rear cavity, and painted over the front afterwards. Looked like the front was never routed. Heh! Oh yeah! I forgot! Except the wood contracted horribly and ruined, RUINED, the paint creating an indented silhouette of where the cavity used to be. Ugly. Awful. Amateurish. Retarded. It was like duct-taping a painted bumper to make it look chrome. The different, new block of wood behaved entirely different than the kiln-dried, aged, humidity-stabilized body wood. That block shrunk underneath the paint, and the whole block's surface now sits a millimeter below the rest of the guitar, and it is glaringly obvious that this hackjob looks horrible. The simple nature of wood! It is organic. It is still alive. It still breathes, moves, shifts, reacts. And your guitar body will of course be more stable and steady compared to ANY block of ANY species of ANY age wood you put in there. DON'T DO THIS TO YOUR GUITAR. YOU WILL HATE YOURSELF IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

Heck yeah! It can't get much more custom than that!

Mmmm.. not dumb. Curious, yes. Ambitious, yes. But I worry that the epoxy will reject any coloring you try, if you choose to go back over the joint and touch-up or correct the colors. Good old fashioned wood glue will take coloring better without creating a colorless, white line between the pieces of wood. When your test is dried, take some pictures for us to see how it turned out.

You're hired!!! Next guitar, I'm sending my neck to you, and you're gonna unleash some fury for me!!! Excellent work, excellent. Elaborate, detailed, yet elegant and classy. Not gawdy or complicated to the eyes, just enough going on to make it pop out at you and show off.

Go to an auto parts store, and look at their touch-up paints. Find one you like, take the color code, then go to an autobody shop and have them shoot your geetar. There's a shop local to me, who does LOTS of guitars. When we try the fluorescent orange, we're going to them to do it.

To me, it seems you could have done the center with a very very thinned ratio of dye to alcohol. It just looks like it was too much dye. Not necessarily too dark of a pigment in the dye. Also, are you familiar with drybrushing? The concept is to dip a brush in the paint, then wipe off all the visible paint from the brush. Only in between the bristles, should there be very light amounts of paint. Then, you do a lot of brushing to get a little paint onto your work. This can easily be applied to staining/dyeing. Mix up your dye with a much broader ratio, like maybe only a few drops of dye to an entire cup of alcohol. Then, get your brush dipped and clean off as much dye as you can. Then, even if you do strong strokes with the brush, only a little dye gets into the wood at a time. Then you'll increase the number of coats needed to get as dark as you want. Lots of control, lots of chances to go just a little bit darker as you progress. Also, it's not too late to sand back that body. Do a high grit paper like 220, or maybe even steel wool, and just scuff back the center until it lightens up.

Any updates on this build? Did you try a "test fit" to see if it'll be comfy enough for you?

Are those wood wheels tightened like an offset cam to snug up to the body? That's a really nice way to secure the body without marking up the surfaces. Very nice!

You can also go buy a single Forstner bit, with a large diameter, and use the drill-press method. Get a 1" or larger bit (they make em HUGE these days! 2-1/2" diameter is niiiice!), and make sure the center point is in the wood, not on the edge of the previous hole. Then each successive hole will be clean and smooth and the bit won't jump around or get dangerous on you.

My brother and I have had many piss-poor experiences with Floyd-style trems, not because of their design, but because of inferior materials. Original Floyd Rose systems are built with higher-strength steel than most of the copies or knock-offs or licensed systems like Ibanez or Jackson or Schecter. Our biggest problems, are the tiny screws that hold the saddles to the bridge baseplate. The screws are almost always higher-grade steel than the metal they thread into. The worst are the cast baseplates. Cast metals are horrible for tapping holes. The stamped platesteel bases are far superior. We've been looking for guitars with good Floyds or stores with replacement Floyds on sale, just to swap out his guitars. DO NOT OVERTIGHTEN YOUR SADDLE SCREWS. Yes, you need them to lock tight and not move. But cranking the crap outta them will wear out your threaded holes and strip them. Loctite or Threadlocker. Use the blue medium-strength stuff. Rely on the Loctite to do the holding, not overtorquing the screw.

Do you have the facilities to slice it up into 3/4" boards? Cuz then you could reverse half of the boards, and glue them back together, so the crossing of grain patterns counteracts any internal aging forces that might occur as the wood dries or absorbs moisture.