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The swede is right, the kind of hum that's being cancelled travels at the speed of light. It hit's both coils at virtually the same time, even if they're a good distance away. On the threads topic, I've done quite a bit of 'wiring two SC's together as a humbucker' lately, and I'm pretty stoked about it. It just plain sounds great. On my Coyote Dancer strat, I moved the middle coil down next to the bridge so that both are side by side. http://c2.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images0...3d5c658de15.jpg The sound of two SC's together by the bridge is much fuller than one SC, without losing any of the pick sensitivity and 'chime' of the SC. Like the best of both worlds. There is at least one commercial axe, the Jon Jorgenson model Tele with a setup like mine; And, Rio Grande makes those Twangbuckers, but they're way expensive and might not sound as good as two low impedence stock strat coils. Also, SD makes the Stagmag, a HBer with magnetic polepieces. To my ear, it sounds almost as good as my two strat coils next to each other. Almost. Here's my friend playing Red House on my Coyote Dancer with the 'slantbucker' (coils in series) In fact, I like two single coils down by the bridge so much, I built this axe (the body) for the friend who's playing Red House; http://c3.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images0...fea65b9af9a.jpg Those are a GFS fatbody Tele and an Alnico 5, 5.35k Strat coil wired to a 4 way. The tone control has a 3 way switch that chooses one, the other, or both caps in the circuit.

Massive maple bodies reduce highs, not increase them. Mass interacts with a system to the degree that lack of stiffness allows. The less stiffness, the more highs are rolled off by the existing mass. The guitars that I've played that have cavities do sound different. They sound to me like the primary effect on the tone is through mass reduction, and little or none through acoustic resonance of the cavities themselves. In other words, they sound lively and bright with even neck response and long sustain, like all light weight guitars.

I have an extra length drill bit, you can find them in the hardware store. The extra length allows you to angle low and avoid scraping the finish with the drill chuck. Most pickup and control routs can be joined with a low angled drill hole, otherwise you need to use tricks like WesV mentioned.

I'm pretty sure water based fabric dyes are aniline, no? I've used them to dye wood and tint shellac for french polish, so I guess they're alcohol soluble too. Dylon is our brand that works best, but Ritt is good too.

While I don't know the history on this axe, I'd have to side with the idea that Eddie built the Frank from 'cheap parts', because I know from experience that structural considerations are more important than material choices. By that, I mean a well assembled and set up'cheap' guitar can sound better than an expensive one with a few small changes, which were not exclusively Eddies ideas, either. For example, solid mounting pickups is not his idea, I did that on an EB I built in '78, and I'm sure others (didn't Music Man make 'em that way?) did then too. Also, the issue of single piece bodies being better than multiple? Recently, I've made 3 bodies with slab cut poplar boards glued up 'butcher block' so that the surface grain is quarter sawn. I'll be sticking with that configuration because it's lighter and stiffer than a solid piece of poplar, or alder. And, even though the poplar is 'cheap', it sounds better. But, that's no matter to you and the Frank. I wouldn't be afraid to chisel if I were you, Eddie was smart to choose that tool over the router for at least two reasons. One, it's much quieter (and important consideration for those piano techs among us), and two you're much less likely to slip and cut half the body, or your hand, off. I have a Steinberger L2 that has no volume or tone knobs at all, just a jack. But, if you want a volume control for your Frank that sounds close to none, just get a very high value pot, like a 1Meg. That way, when it's turned up to '10' it's almost completely out of the circuit. If I were you, I'd stick with inexpensive body and spend your bux on a good trem system and a tasty pickup. Remember, you DON'T get what you pay for, you get what you know. And, the more you know, the more you get! People that think value and price are the same thing just haven't learned enough about guitars yet.

It does look like a good jig, and I looked at this thread in case there was actually a machine method that would convince me to change from my hand plane. Nope, I'm sticking with my method. The easiest, and I'm certain the most accurate, method of making a compound radius FB is with a hand plane. I wouldn't even think of using a radiused sanding block, as a matter of fact, I avoid sanding in general on guitars. Even on a block, sandpaper is vastly inaccurate compared to a scraper blade or plane when it comes to leveling surfaces. In fact, it really surprises me that a reputable supply house like Stewmac sells so many of them. Not only is shaping a compound radius with a handplane easy and almost mistake proof, it's fast too. William Cumpiano outlines the method in his exellent book. No, for me to change to a machine method, it would have to make a more level, smooth FB than my handplane, and I just can't see (or feel) that happening soon.

Small jointers and planers just plane suck, period. I did custom cabinet work for years, and I wouldn't let most of the little garage montsters anywhere near my guitar, let alone some kitchen job. Big, professional machines are another story, and work fine if you don't mind the noise. One big problem with small machines is that they're in the workload range of a hand tool! Nothing can compare with the quality of a hand planed joint or surface, and if your tool is sharp it can actually be faster than setting up that little shop monster. A 22" jack plane can be bought from Grizzly for about fiddy bucks and it will make fast work of those edge joints on solid bodies.

I actually did this in the late 70's without a preamp, because I didn't know any better. It worked out ok, the piezo has a more powerful output than the magnetic pickup, and probably would have sounded better with a preamp. It was years ago, so it's taxing my memory banks, but I think I used a normal volume pot to balance it with the magnet pickup. Any way, you can do it without preamp, it's possible.

I've made a hippie sandwich neckthrough with rock maple/walnut and cherry, and worked with cherry on countless cabinet installations. Cherry is harder and stiffer than mahogany, but not as much as rock maple. Probably similar to softer maples, like the Western Big Leaf that we get the lovely quilted patterns from. Cherry is a very nice tonewood and it's often substituted for the flamed maple sides and back by violin luthiers. My 'hippie sandwich' neckthrough is far from painful to the ears

I'm with Southpa, single action rods set deep in a straight channel only. Not just for ease and cost, not even because they work better, but because only single action rods actually balance string tension as opposed to applying bending pressure to the wood. I think the only reason curved channels and double action rods and such are used so much these days is because luthiers, even some good ones, don't take the time to think about how a truss rod actually works. The cross section of a neck is roughly a D or C shape with the greater mass towards the flat side. The round side is more easily compressed lengthwise which is what a deep set single action rod does. This balancing of the tension allows the wood of the neck to resist the string pull in its strongest natural way, which is directly down the grain rather than being torqued sideways as with curved channels or two way rods. If you've made a few necks from scratch and tried both methods, you'll find that you can even hear the difference. A single action rod makes a more lively and resonant neck. Plus, single action rods require much less torque at the adjusting nut so they strip less, or never.

One of the reasons (there are so many) I choose hand tools over power tools is that I can bring my work upstairs into the livingroom in the evening. Of course, I'm very lucky in that I have a girlfriend who tolerates chips and curls (I never use sandpaper either) piling up as we watch the TV or dog. I own a top quality router, but haven't heard its musical (NOT) voice since my cabinet making years.

Here's a clever way to combine two different cap values and an SP3T switch to give you three different tone pot curves; http://www.guitarnuts2.proboards45.com/ind...amp;thread=3883

"Most of my problems are only about 2 cents, so this raises another question, what do most people reckon is acceptable? If a note is only a cent high or low would you worry about it?" There is 100 cents between each chromatic scale step. It's kind of like dB in that it's a way of putting a consistant number on something that increases exponentially. Hz is a measurement of pitch. At the lower end of music notes, Hz doesn't increase much from note to note, while at the top end, it increases by thousands of Hz each scale step. Cents are a constant 100 between steps. When we hear two pitches that are 'out of tune' to each other, we hear a phasing sound, or 'beats' that are exactly at the rate of difference of Hz. In other words, if I play one pitch at A=440 and another at A=442, we'll hear a beat rate of two beats a second. Down low, one hundredth of a semitone will be a fraction of one Hz, while up higher, it could be many hundreds of Hz. You could calculate from Cents if you know the Hz, but the real bottom line is Hz, which is what you hear. I say if it sounds ok, it is!

I'm a piano technician and I've noticed that kids under five or so often have very strong pitch memory, or 'perfect pitch' as people usually say. I played a friends (gibson?) short scale flying V and though it's made with good components, it sounds dreadful and was untunable, even by me (and I'm a decent guitar tech too). Now, maybe for some reason, the one you made can be tuned and played 'in tune', but I'm skeptical. It seems to me that shortening the scale only makes playing up and down the neck on a single string easier (Yngwe?), while making the neck slimmer or narrower would make chording and cross neck intervals easier, which is what most beginning guitar technique consists of. I guess I'm saying that I'd only shorten the scale as much as can be without losing pitch integrity, to fit the young ears, and go for a narrower, slimmer neck to fit the small hands.

I recently met an older (than me, I'm 52) guitar tech in my SoCal neighborhood who goes by the nickname Docfret. He is personal friends with Bill Lawrence. He was telling me about working on such a setup for, I think, Carl Thompson, the builder of basses. His story was that he had some round coils, like bobbins, that were originally solenoids or something, lying around. He took rod magnets, like those in SC pickups and pressed them into the center of the coil and viola,...er voila. One thing he said was, in his original design had trimpots for seperate coil balance, but that he discovered in subsequent designs that moving the magnet up and down in the coil did a better job of balancing the volumes, so he later eliminated the trimpots. I have docfrets card around here somewhere....grr, I remember that his e-mail was docfret@yahoo.com He's a very approachable and friendly dude, he actually started the conversation with us when he overheard us talking. If you contact him, just say the guitar builders that met him in the bagle shop referred you. He'll remember us, it was only three weeks ago. I'd e-mail him if your serious about making this pickup.

Er, wow. I'm so used to being shot down for my unpoplar opinions! You guys are actually considering the possibility that my verbage is based in reason, a rare compliment indeed. I was trying to point out part of the relationship between mass and stiffness. As stiffness is decreased, mass interacts more. Less physical energy is needed to flex a piece of wood at higher frequencies than at lower ones, mainly because of excursion. Excursion (distance of movement from a 'still' position) is frequency dependent, lower frequencies flex the wood more and require more energy. So, at a given amount of stiffness, high frequency transmission reduces with added mass. Violin bridge shaping is a study in this aspect of sound producing structures, but the principals apply equally to solid body guitars, or even steel piano strings. I guess the summary of what I meant to say is, I'm fairly certain that, the stiffer and lighter you make a solid body guitar, the less you will 'hear' any materials used in the structure. And, that structural considerations trump material choices. Again, I'm flattered that you guys included me instead of ridiculing my ideas, which I agree, are left field. It's a subject I'm vitally interested in, but usually stay away from public discussions of like the plague. Oh, I was just having a look for links to my Flamed Redwood front, poplar body and CF reinforced neck Big Apple style strat. My GF is much more savvy with photosites and myspace and all that, I'll just have to ask her when she gets home. I finished it just a day or two before I delivered it to NYC last year, so I only have a couple of candid photos and no well lit detailed ones. I'll post a link soon as I find out where they are.

I recently reconfigured my stratclone by moving the middle coil down next to the bridge coil and wiring them together as a 'slantbucker'. I call it the Coyote Dancer; http://www.strat-talk.com/forum/non-fender...lantbucker.html It basically does what a strat with a HB in the bridge position does, but by using the stock single coils the strat-ness is preserved and tonally expanded. I used that tele wiring scheme with the 5 way super switch and an on/on/on 2P3T mini toggle to switch the slantbucker to series, single and parallel. The resulting 13 combinations (! and no dead spots) include all three coils in series or just the neck and bridge, which literally are sounds you can't live without once you try them. The pickups in my clone are 5.3k-5.5k-5.7k with alnico 5 polepieces so they sound very sparkly and 'vintage' by themselves or in parallel combinations, but when switched into series combinations they gain considerable oomph and fatness so the various combinations are quite distinct from each other. I don't know from experience, but I suspect that hotter pickups might not reconfigure with so much tonal variation as these. For one thing, when all my singles are switched in series, the impedence is already in the 15k range and sounds dark, loud and even a bit compressed like a humbucker. I'm not sure if a darker more driven sound would be that useful, at least for me. One of my friends is a fearfully shreddy metal dude and when he picks up my axe he usually dials it to the slantbucker alone with both coils in parallel which has very low impedence (2.75k) but good drive and midrange fatness, great pick sensitivity and very bright clear sound. All in all, the 13 sounds are very 'strat like', but since I moved the stock bridge coil even closer to the bridge, the only sound which is technically stock is the neck coil alone, which could be the main weakness of my design. The upside is that the neck pickup alone was the one sound I couldn't possibly live without, and I think a fair amount of other strat players would agree. It's only been six months since I built it, and I'm not primarily a guitar player so I need to wait for more ligit players to weigh in too, but at this point it seems like an amazingly versatile axe. My metal playing friend recently made me a video of it, which I'll upload to youtube as soon as I get it, for those that want to hear the sounds.

I've never tried one, but there are 'no load' pots that effectively switch themselves out of the circuit when turned to '10'. Also, you could use a 2P3T on/off/on mini toggle with the two values of caps to get a third combined value when both are in parallel. Just some thoughts.

I'm pretty sure that's how my partner in shop crime is making his fingerboard right now. He just made the 'hippy sandwich' neck thicker and sliced off the front section for reinstallation as a FB after the truss rod is in. Should look cool with laminations running right through. I think that in most aspects of instrument building, structural considerations are more important than material choices. Not always, but most of the time. We tend to blur our thinking about structures. Take these three examples; a string, a soundboard, a guitar neck. They all vibrate, they all flex, but they have very different functions when it comes to making sound. A string has very little pneumatic resistance, but a soundboard has a lot. Without flex, a string could not be heard at all, but the stiffer a neck is the better it supports string sustain. Then there's the issue of mass. Clamp a C clamp onto the headstock of your axe and hear the sustain increase. Does that mean mass increases sustain? Yes, but only because it reduces flexing. If the neck were ultimately stiff, no difference would be heard. The body and neck of an electric guitar are mostly structural. They should be as stiff and unflexing as possible to bring out the most string and pickup character of that particular structure. Mass interacts by reducing highs (violin bridge shaping is a good study for learning this concept), so if stiffness is equal, a lighter structure will be more lively and bright. 'Plywood', or laminated wood, is more stable and more structurally homogenous than solid wood. In most structural considerations is is just plain better than solid wood. I think the bad reputation of plywood comes from people who, knowing little about guitars, try to judge the value of a guitar based on how much it costs. Obviously, big pieces of wood are more expensive than little ones, so this one that's built with a single piece body must be better because it costs more. I'm presently building my fourth body and second neck out of laminated poplar. I made the bodies 'butcher block' style with 3/4" poplar slab cut boards arranged with quarter sawn edge up. I have a solid alder body S-style guitar hanging around and the poplar block bodies are MUCH more resonant and 'ringy'. Last year, I made a poplar butcher block body 'big apple' strat with a CF reinforced mortised poplar neck. The owner swears it's the most acoustically live, most sustain-ey guitar he's ever played. Oh yeah, it weighs about half of what his Les Paul does.

I would laminate, or at least do the middle rip that Geo suggests. A single piece of wood is nice, but a multi-lam is even nicer. I think choice of glue is very important. My only choice other than the obvious best choice; hot hide glue, would be a powdered formaldehyde resin glue. I'd stay away from titebonds and epoxies like the plague. A few years ago, I did some experiments with edge gluing pieces of quarter sawn spruce into little mini soundboards with different glues. While you might not be able to easily hear the differences between glues used to laminate a neck, you can easily hear differences when you glue up soundboards. Only HHG and FRG glues sounded like a single piece of spruce. All other glues deaden the tone quite a bit. Titebond is very dead sounding. It's true that we're talking about laminating necks, not soundboards, but I think we want to make all structural parts as 'live' as possible, and even if it can't be heard easily, the knowledge of it is enough to make me choose the better sounding glue.

Yes, nut slot isn't deep enough. That's it for sure, don't bother to think about scale length or anything else, just file that slot. I check it with finger pressure. If I hold the string down on the first fret, then use another finger to press the string down on the second fret while still holding the back side down, that's the amount of finger pressure I should feel when pressing down at the first fret. Any more pressure felt will be extra tension added, sharpening the note. This is a better method than measuring string height because when it comes to sharpening notes near the nut, it's the tension (which varies with string guage) that counts. I doubt you made an error in nut placement, I'm betting it's the height of slot.

Thanks for your interest and encouragement psw, I'll post back here directly after I put up the CD vid on yewtewb. Can you believe that John Jorgenson? One of those musicians' musicians that the general public hasn't really heard of and I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't either. Or, to put it another way, you wonder if non musicians can really 'hear' what he's doing in the first place. I was reminded of Tommy Emmanuel there for a second, then I saw on one of his other vids that and TE have done some stuff together. I guess it's a small world when you play like that. Serius13, the hum cancelling effect appears to be complete on my Coyote Dancer setup when both SC's at the bridge are either in parallel or series. When you switch between one coil and both the disapperance of the hum is dramatic, it's gone. When you use combinations of the slantbucker and the neck single, the hum comes back a little. The way I have it wired now, the three SC's are in the same order they were in a stock strat, just that the middle is moved down next to the bridge. Problem with that is, when I combine the neck PU with just the single bridge coil it's not humbucking because it's the middle that's RPRW, not the bridge. I thought about swapping the middle and bridge which would work fine except that the three SC's are all slightly different impedences at; 5.3k, 5.5k and 5.8k which mean's the tone will be a bit different. I may just remagnetize the Alnico 5 polepieces and swap the wires instead. The other thing is, I'll only gain one humbucking position. You might think I'd be gaining two with both the series and parallel option on my five way, but since I'm losing the OOP (out of phase) it's only one. Since I'm ranting, I'm actually building a T style version for a friend right now. It has a custom T-ish body, a G.E.Smith 'cutoff' bridge, two SC's (a tele and strat) paired at the bridge and mounted to the body and wired with a four way switch to select the four slantbucker combinations; S-coil, S-coil parallel with T-coil, S-coil series with T-coil, and T-coil. . A five way switch to choose combinations with the neck for a total of 17 (!) sounds and no dead spots. We're going for a bit of an unbalanced 'slantbucker' so the T coil will be hotter and mounted very close to the bridge. The guy I'm building it for is a 'guitar god' dude with a huge collection of axes. He's used to just grabbing whatever to get whatever sound. My goal is to build this guy an everything axe that he prefers over his others. Good luck to me, huh?

I did exactly that just recently with my Coyote Dancer mod. http://www.strat-talk.com/forum/non-fender...lantbucker.html My design moves the middle RWRP SC down next to the bridge SC to create a 'slantbucker' and uses a 5 position mega switch and a 3 position minitoggle to choose a total of 13 very different and useful sounds. This is such a unique axe it's hard to pry it out of folks' hands once they start playing it, especially if they're accomplished players. I recently got a shredder friend of mine to make a little video on it which I'll post on youtube soon as he gives it to me. In my research on SC's wired up as humbuckers I found the usual stuff; the PRS 513 and all, but here's a rare and little known FCS axe with a similar setup and very similar sound; Again, I can't recommend this mod enough. If you have low impedence vintage sounding SC's the variety of sounds possible is amazing. I'm not so sure how well it would work with hotter PU's though.

Looks like it should be easy. Is your concern that the 2mm gap will show? If so, cutting a new pickguard won't be that hard either.

Making boards out of logs is one of the many uses of the bandsaw. Mine is a Grizzly Ultimate 14" and I can't recommend it, or any other Grizzly tool I own, enough.