Narcissism

That looks pretty cool! Oh, and you have the same heating unit that I do

If God played a Les Paul, it would look like that.

I'll be keeping an eye on this one. I love fixer-uppers!

Wow, that's so shiny i would almost assume that it was made of plastic! Really good job on the finish!

The only thing that isn't covered on this site as far as neckthrough tutorials goes is pics of the body being glued together. Lex has a thread, but there's no pics. So i took the liberty of showing how its done in my build. There is lots of information here on every other part of the building process though!

well, in a perfect world, i'd install bushings and just bolt everything to the body. But that would require me to modify the bridge, pickups, order custom bushings bla bla bla, expensive not worth the time or effort or hassle plus there's already a way to do it that works you just gotta do it right run-on sentence without punctuation etc. that rollpin idea is awesome though. I never knew what a rollpin was till now... I actually still don't know what they're used for other than extracting screws now. Thanks! This beats the hell out of drilling, tapping and/or filling!

I used two blades for a test on my bass. I used an agressive blade which came with the jigsaw, and that cut pretty fast but had a lot of gnarled edges. When you're trying to get rid of a checking area, that's not the best thing. I will always use a fine toothed blade on mine from now on. It may take a really long time, but i'm happy with the results in the end, and it makes sanding SO much easier. I have a Black & Decker jigsaw with variable speed, and they're made by the same company. On harder woods use a slower speed, and on soft things (particle board for example) use a faster setting. You'll burn your wood if you go too fast, and you'll tear out if you go too slow. practice on some scrap wood of the same kind if you have any.

or maybe a steel drum like case with "Parable Guitars" scorched into it and ooz... I really like that clear Emergancy case idea though!

I like that top. It reminds me of the inside of a bees nest.

two necks?

So i figured out the problem. Turns out when you lose power in your house, and temperatures go below 10F, screws get brittle (no matter what type apparently). Two of my pickup screws broke off in the body, along with 2 different types of bridge screws. One bridge screw was brass (the one covered in this post), and the other was stainless steel. So in total, that's 4 screws i've broken off in this project. I was thinking that maybe EMG was just sending me crappy hardware, or that i was just plain having a bad batch of screws, but i guess that cold weather did it. I mean, yeah, it's obvious that that'll happen, but i never put two and two together. So what have i learned? Keep your instruments in normal climates. Don't screw in and unscrew hardware constantly. Just make sure it fits and then get rid of it till its ready to be put on perminantly. Drill your pilot holes just enough so that the thread from the screws is biting. Mahogany and maple are strong enough to hold them... Basswood is another story. Don't install screws into softwood using a power drill. Thanks for your help everyone! I'm really good at extracting screws using a drill and a pair of needle nose pliers now!

Been a little while, but i managed to make a deal with my lady about the guitar. I drove her somewhere, and in return, she's not going to bother me for the entire week about working on the bass. So here's some progress! Today i did some routing work. I decided to start working on the control cavity, as i haven't even planned that out very well. I spent a few days reading up, and learning how deep to make the cut so i could get the knobs to poke through, but make sure that the router bit didn't poke through, lol. So here's the basic idea: I was also having this idea with sideways knobs, like on Maverick Guitars. I could potentially do this, but i'm far too lazy, and i have a show this saturday and i'd like the thing to be in at least playable condition. I need to have two basses for the show because we're doing different tunings. There was also an issue with the contouring. I had to do the contouring before i did any routing, that way, i wouldn't sand into the control cavity. I was having a little trouble coming up with a good shape, since this is such a unique design and i'm not the most creative person in the world. so I sat down with a piece of paper and basically just doodled on it until good contour lines came out. I think this came out pretty good! So you could say, She's getting curves. And she's even sprouting knobs! Tuners and knobs are on their way here from Warmoth, i've got my jackplacement decided, and i've installed the strap buttons(hooks) which make this bass a very well balanced bass! It'll be better once the hardware is installed!

hahaha, this is pretty sweet lookin'!

Look at Ibanez's Erogodyne bass. I don't actually know what they're made of, but I think their "scientifically resonate synthetic material" is particle board.

If you check out the section on "in progress/finished work" you'll see plenty of guitars that are made from several different materials, ranging from all of the woods you mentioned, to plywood, and even copper and aluminum! Bacote, bubinga, walnut, bloodwood, zebrawood, hardwood flooring scraps, etc. If you think you can build a guitar out of it, there's a chance that its been done on the forum and you can check it out. We have one member who's building an erogonimically correct guitar out of foam or something like that. That might just be the prototype though. But yeah, check it out! There's some talented builders here that you can learn a lot from! And use that search function!

it came down to Kenny and andyt for me. Andyt, i love the coloring on your guitar. I'm also a big ibanez fan, and i'm sure that thing plays like a dream and has a sweet sound to it. I followed that build from beginning to end and I'm super jealous of that finish. Kenny, that quilt pattern is BEAUTIFUL, and i love the light coloring. Both guitars have a pattern to them that completely matches their body shapes. So it was a tough decision as to which one to vote for. In the end i voted for Kenny's, because it was the one that said to me, "This guitar is niiiiiiice." Not that Andyt's isn't nice. Its amazing! But there's something about ibanez that tells me "Take me apart and put me back together differently!" I don't know what i'd do to that guitar since its already so freakin awesome, but that was the fraction of a stat that lead me to vote for Kenny. Everyone else, Beautiful designs! I love the creativity that i see from everyone on this board. I just hope one day when i finish my bass, that i can wow all of you the way you all wow me!

You are correct, wes *thumbs up*

So i went to work on doing this thing. I got out the trusty jigsaw (because i don't have a chop saw) and i dug in! And i found the truss rod! And i found out that my jigsaw isn't tuned properly so it cuts at a funny angle! And i found out that Ebony snaps really clean! *sigh* i'll call this more "practice" and get a stud finder next time. i wasn't really too concerned about the looks... so i can deal with it. At least the bass plays well and sounds right now. I think i can cover that up with the spare pieces of fingerboard and some of the maple i have lying around. I've seen people here completely fill in pickup cavities and make that look amazing, so if they can do that, then this little pocket/void shouldn't be too much of a problem. Damn i feel retarded though, lol. But i really can't help but laugh at how ill prepared I was and how much prep work i didn't do before tackling this job. I guess i should stay away from power tools and projects when I'm running on 4 hours of sleep... Lesson learned... On a side note, this neck looks a lot better without the pinstriping on it! I'll have to use black pins instead of silver next time.

I adjust mine at least twice a year. Mostly when the temperature change is enough to effect the humidity in the closet that i store my guitars in. I'd have a wall, but my apartment doesn't have enough room in it

You could sink the magnets into the body a little bit. Then you can just stick some metal posts or other magnets onto the cover plate. Or you could just have a metal cover plate!

along with the other suggestions, this should come as obvious, but use lubrication... on the blade i mean...

Nice! I really like the beveling work you did. It looks like a major improvement over standard RGs.

http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i195/djh...EM/PB080266.jpg So THAT'S what that little extra bit in my RG250DX was for! That would totally explaine why my posts have been leaning ever since i replaced my double locking trem with an OFR! *digs through old boxes* ahHA! *fixes* Thanks dude! You ****ing rock!

in 2000, i bought my RG250DX. Since then, i've scalloped the fretboard, scraped and refinished it with a new coat of polyurethane, swapped the original HSH pickups for a Duncan JB and a Hotrails in the middle position, then swapped again for EMG 81/89 combination, leaving the single coil area filled with foam from the pickup box, and then i swapped out the old Ibanez Double Locking Trem for an OFR. Before i bought the OFR, i came here and made sure it would fit in my guitar. I looked at the floyd measurement thread. Sure enough, there was a floyd out there that had the same measurements as my cavity, however there were lots of posts saying it would not fit in an RG. Well, i bought it anyway because i had a few hundred burning a hole in my pocket. So i got it, ripped out the old trem, along with the posts and everything and threw the new one in there, only to figure out that the trem just bearly didn't fit. Ibanez trems have a bit of an angled back part... i don't know how to describe it, but its just a slightly different shape than an OFR. So the OFR crashed into the body whenever I wanted an action that was playable, or whenever i wanted to do a reverse dive. So i just shoved it in there, blocked it, and said "yay." That was 2 years ago. Today i got some tools out and routed out the trem cavity so it would fit the OFR. Through this process, i learned something: Basswood SUCKS. The trem posts were leaning so much that i had to fill the bushing holes with dowils, redrill them, fill the holes with epoxy to strengthen them and then redrill through the epoxy so i could put in the trem posts. Then i chipped away the corners where the floyd was crashing into the body using an exact-o blade (it cut like clay). Then i covered the exposed wood in the only paint that i had which was automotive jet black. So now i have a white guitar with what looks like a black burnhole where the gold OFR is placed... And the trem posts are leaning again. I think i'm ready to chuck this body and make a new one. The neck was scalloped improperly as well, and i ended up scraping the frets up a little bit, so it'll give me some refretting practice as well, though i think it'll be pretty difficult with scalloped frets... in which case it'll give me an excuse to build a neck... Basically, the end result will be a lot of practice and hopefully a new guitar with the hardware that's currently in the RG250DX. On the bright side, this guitar feels a lot more playable now that i've spent the time setting it up properly. I've never intonated an OFR before, so doing that feels pretty good. Hopefully something good will come out of this. I'll be using this thread as an update space for this project with pictures. -Narcissism

Its funny, i was at work today putting dremel bits away, and i was looking at that exact bit going "What the hell is this thing?" I guess i'll give it a shot then. Couldn't hurt to get the old Rotozip out and play around on a few scrap pieces of Mahogany!