10pizza

nice, clean looking body and cavities. good luck finishing it. Looks like the hard work has been done!

congrats! great build! 

8 hours ago, Prostheta said:

or a pickguard!

haha, ofcourse! you can tell by my answer I'm not used to building with pickguards

Hey , 

I see 2 options, depending on the type of finish you're aiming for:

1.If you'r going to finish it with a solid color paint job:  saw a piece of pine or other easily available wood in the shape of the pickup cavity, glue it in and fill up with flexible wood filler or two-component filler and then sand absolutely flat. This will then need serious priming to make sure you don't see the glue-lines throught the finish. I've done this on a few guitars with good result.

2. If you want a see-through burst or oiled finish: glue on a new top and cover the pickup-cavity with that. This will need some more woodwork and depends on the type of kit if it's possible. I've done this on a les paul copy once where I routed approx 5mm of the top of the body and then glued on a new flame maple top. You will need then to route/saw new holes for the neckpocket, bridge pu, controls.

or: option 3: make it an EVH frankenkit and just leave the neck-cavity open

found a few spare hours again yesterday, so did some work on my neck, routing it to desired thickness and shaping it after rough saw. Also routed the truss rod. Again I'm using material that I have lying around, so using a body-side trussrod-adjustment with a wheel. Used that on my first build as well, pretty happy with it. 

But... while preparing a setup to remove 5mm of the back of the neck I made a rookie mistake  ....   forgot to fasten the router bit so the routing depth went everywhere.

had to glue in a piece of maple to repair it, so a lot of extra work because of a stupid little mistake. 

Got the neck-pocket and bridge pickup routed as well. I'm using EMG pickups I have for this build, found out I need to make a new template for routing the singlecoil EMG first. Something for next week!

pictures: truss routing, fixing mistake and the result so far.

I use Ibanez/Chikyu diamond fret files. A set of narrow, medium and wide files with two sides, one rough and one fine.

not cheap but since I regularly have to do some fretwork for customers they are well worth their money.

I've had good experience with Rothko&Frost, you can do one offs, sheets and also in metallic colors.

they're in the UK, but shipping shouldn't be that bad in an envelope.

very nice looking table!

great result with the iron-on band on the table top. 

On 8/23/2020 at 5:05 PM, Prostheta said:

Making things to make other things is part of the joy.

timeconsuming, but indeed joy! 

here we go again.

this will be a build based on my last one, the prototype Swel AT1. 

goal is to learn from my mistakes building the first one and improve on aesthetics and finish. Like the blue one before, this will be a nice color finish.

Last week started with preparations for neck, yesterday did some routing, drilling and sawing. One of the things I learned from last build that it's hard to get a nice output jack access drilled at an angle to the body, so I drilled it before I sawed out the body.

also last time I used the router to route the complete cavities for pickups. Could have saved me a lot of time by predrilling, which I did now.

I'm also keeping track of hours spent on this one.

routing the headstock after joint-gluing

pre-drilling 

having fun

result so far

Great, stunning result! congrats. 

On 8/28/2020 at 6:07 AM, mattharris75 said:

Thanks! Yeah, we're both old timers. 2007 was when I started here as well. Lots of folks have come and gone since then.

Remember your avatar I believe!

very nice instrument build here, impressed!

Congrats @argytar!

nice pics!

how did you do the joint exactly on the neck? Did you glue a block on the angled cut and then routed the top flat with the neck?

Always love this discussion! Totally agree with @Bizman62

I'm sure there is an effect of the wood on sustain (ie, how long the string keeps vibrating) but that's all the pickups are able to 'pick up'. With all components involved in the electric guitar chain, this is something negligable.

playing it without an amplifier might make a difference in sound, but that's not the intention of an electric guitar, is it

Also totally agree with the 'traditional' wood statement. It's not like Leo spent 10 years building tele's and comparing all the tonal characteristics of different wood species, he just took what was easily available (and cost-effective)

good luck with the build, either wood will make it a great piece once you've built it yourself!

stunning result! congrats! 

good idea Prosthetha, I have a sail maker in my town, they probably can make a custom gigbag as well if they have a nice example to work from. I might want to have some custom made gigbags as well in the future for guitars I'm selling.

8 hours ago, mistermikev said:

i have a terrible habbit of not following my own threads and rudely not responding to people... I hope you won't hold that against me because I really appreciate your comment!  thank you sir!

haha, I have to admit I have the same bad habit sometimes! Not always clicking the notify button , so sometimes miss updates! No problem at all!

awesome looking guitars! Love the top one. Which trem is installed on that one?

Just reading this thread now, very cool project and great video! Sounds great!

very nice result using a mitre saw setup, wouldn't have dared to try it myself!

looking forward to the rest of this build!

Agree with @Bjorn.LaSanche, great book for setup and repairs. I still use it all the time for reference when I setup guitars, but as Bjorn says, it's good to also find your own ways and preferences by just doing it!

In the end I ordered some blank pickguard material from Thomann in Germany. Large piece for acceptable cost, allthough still on the expensive side given it's just some plastic...

However, I've made the cavity covers and installed them, so now ready for fotoshooting. As my wife is a photographer and I gave her some nice backdrops to shoot against for mothers day it's a nice opportunity to try those out with my guitar!

Hoping to get those done over the weekend.

As I'll be building another model identical to this one, i've noted my lessons learned for the next one. There were a couple of first times for me in this build, so I did learn a lot! 

- pre-drill jack-output hole before cutting out the body. It will make it easier to get a recessed output hole that is not perpendicular to the body

- use more primer to really smooth things out. In this guitar I fixed some holes with filler, but you can still see them in the end result if you look carefully

- use an extra can of colour finish and smooth sand in between every couple of layers.

- extra attention to finishing of pickup cavities 

-  As basswood is very easy to dent, be more careful in general and add additional layers of clearcoat 

Next week I'll start on the next one. I'm preparing as much as possible and I'll take another approach to the routing of all the cavities. I'll do the routing on my body blank  and then I'll cut it out and rasp/sand it into shape.

I'll be timing all the steps I take to see how much time I actually need to build this one.

they did play this song if I recollect correctly, but Amanda was not with him on that occasion. Still a great show though!

He did play the same Duesenberg guitar

the opener that night was John Moreland. Also a guy to check out. Amazing voice.

Very nicely done! 

I'm trying to score myself a nice cherry top table for a build

Looking great, will follow to see how it ends!