dugg

Well, this post is a few weeks old and no replies yet, so I'll just pitch my 2cent. I Think a nitroC finish is almost acceptable, but I've never seen (or more importantly felt) a good PU finish yet. I say almost acceptable, because in my last few builds I've used either a home brewed long oil varnish similar to a violin, or french polish, which both feel far better than Nitro or PU. It's also likely that a long oil varnish will outlast any other kind, but if Nitro or PU are in the same category of durability, it will take a few hundred years to find out. I recently saw a beautiful Schecter bass with a perfect chunk of quilted maple on the front that was ruined by a crappy (factory) PU finish. The PU was all powdery and scratched by belt buckles on the back, a real mess. My long oil varnish, by comparison, is barely possible to scratch. Its not that hard, its just tough as hell, and a sharp object just 'squeaks' along the surface, depressing it but not cutting into it. The best feeling neck I've played was finished with nothing but tung oil. Glossy nitro necks grip my palm too much and I can't play fast. I really don't have any experience with applying Nitro, and I don't mind those finishes much (except on the neck), so I'm not trying to discourage you there, but I'm pretty firmly against PU. I home brewed my long oil, but good quality marine spar varnish is very similar and can be polished to an amazing sheen that, to my eyes, beats Nitro.

Bad wire and fried pots seem possible, but much less likely than a short as Ripthorn suggests. Multimeter will help in a big way, but close visual inspection will probably find the problem too.

I don't have a table or radial arm saw, and won't be getting one soon. I do have a Grizzly ultimate 14" bandsaw though, and it gets used constantly. I did professional cabinet making in NYC for years and used a table saw all the time, but can't for the life of me see a use for it in instrument building. Ok, so I often choose hand tools for their greater accuracy and lower noise. When I need to cross cut a piece of wood that won't fit the bandsaw (or it's too early for me to hear loud stuff), I grab a hand saw. Part of my reason for not having a table saw is space, but the other part is safety measured against usefulness. Not many lutherie uses for a wickedly dangerous and large tool.

I recently tried hand planing a compound radius on my last build. It was really easy and came out absolutely perfect. I doubt a machine could do as accurate. I would guess that an asymmetrical curve would be equally as easy. The key is aligning the plane with the edge, not the middle line, of the FB. William Cumpiano 'splains it real good in his book.

There are many kinds of oil and long oil varnish recipes that have been around for centuries. A good place to start researching is violin family instruments. The varnishes used on violins have many similarities to those used on fine oil paintings, which is another source of info. Oils come in three basic kinds, essential, drying and non drying. Essential oils are like turpentine and evaporate. Drying oils don't actually dry but absorb oxygen and polymerize into entirely different chemical substances, hence the reason for the mysteries surrounding Stradivarius' varnishes. I'm very skeptical about modern finishes comparing to those old finishes in any way except ease of application. Serious luthiers should be looking at these finishes, not messing with laquers and urethanes.

My preference is for J style pickups mounted as close to the bridge as possible. I even cut off the screw bumps on one side to get it hard against the bridge. Extreme pickup placement is better than worrying about 'harmonic nodes' or any baloney. Look at MM for examples.

soapbarstrat, that's too weird. I used BRW (old stash I've had for 30 years) on the FB of the BAstrat I made for my friend. We had a laugh, because the rest of the axe is poplar and redwood, both from HOdepo. BRW in FB sized chunks is around $250 last I checked, but the rest of the wood cost less than fifteen bucks. Never the less, they made a beautiful marriage!

I was thinking about doing a similar thing recently. With violins, they use an oil varnish over the whole neck, then use a scraper to remove the finish on just the back of the neck, then french polish.

Prostheta nailed it down. I'd second the hand plane as a final step rather than a sander of any kind. You get a much flatter surface and less dust in the pores, which probably doesn't make much difference for gluing strength, but it makes me feel better.

Years ago when a good friend of mine was working for N. Steinberger in Bklyn, we hooked up a circuit to do a listening test on various kinds of caps of the same value. I'm a piano tuner by trade and am well known to be able to hear minute variations in sound that other musicians don't. Well, I couldn't hear poop. No difference at all between caps. I hate to burst bubbles, but I'd suggest that if I don't hear it, neither do you.

I've made a neck from solid poplar and one 'hippie sandwich' with poplar and mahogany. The solid poplar neck is on a redwood/poplar solid body 'big apple strat', and the 'hippie sandwich' is a neckthrough Ebass. Both have CF reinforcing. The BAstrat has 3 1/8" CF rods like you get in the hobby shop placed as far to the three (cross section) corners of the neck as possible, and is stiffer than the neckthrough which has big CF 'beams' like the kind you get at stewmac, but placed more centrally to either side of the truss rod slot. I'm guessing that the solid poplar neck is stiffer because the rods, though smaller than the beams, are placed in a better way to increase stiffness. The BAstrat has incredible sustain and even response around the neck, which is counterintuitive since the whole axe weighs about 5 pounds. The poplar is great wood to work with and I'll be using it with every axe I make from now on. Poplar varies quite a bit in stiffness and weight, and of course it's important to align it 'quarter sawn', so it's nice to be able to pick through the stacks. I'm guessing it's a bit softer and lighter than mahogany, but many of the pieces I used for the 'hippie sandwich' bass were as stiff as the mahogany. It's just one of the many great woods out there that conservative luthiers are afraid to try.

Many guitars with bolt on necks suffer from too little clearance on the high E side. I recently played a nice gibson semi hollow body with quite a lot of clearance on both the high and low E strings. In other words, the strings get further away from the edge of the FB as you go up the neck. This was a nice thing I thought, and I plan to build my next neck just like that. It made some really cool vibrato techniques possible that I can't even think about doing on my strat....

avdekan, making an extremely even compound radius with the plane is quite a bit easier than you would think, especially if you're skilled with your plane, which you are. I was skeptical at first too, but I was bolstered by William Cumpiano's exellent book and gave it a shot with an inexpensive chunk of Ipe. It came out so good I did the second one with some brazilian rosewood (!) I have stashed. No problems planing either one. Like many things you do with a plane, your fingers will tell you more than your eyes can see. I calculated the two radii (?) a simple, but probably stupid way. I made a pile of miniature cardboard FB's with the same relative dimensions and taped them together edgewise until they made the cone cross section. Then I just measured the size of the top and bottom circles. If I were smart, I would have done this in a CAD program real easy. With a template for the top and bottom, planing the FB to match the curves was a piece of cake.

Quite a few 'hippie sandwich' neckthroughs are made with maple and walnut. The most resonant, 'live' neck I've ever made was solid poplar with 3 CF rods placed as far to the edges (cross section) and bottom of the neck as possible.

Compound radius is the way to go. If the fingerboard was the same width at both top and bottom, then it could be thought of as a cross section of a cylinder, but it's not. A fingerboard is a cross section of a cone which has different radius' at all points. Very small 'single radius' fingerboards are prone to fretting out, which means the string loses clearance when you bend it. Compound radius solves this problem, so the strings can be set lower without fretting out. It's quite difficult to build a jig to make a compound radius by machine, but luckily it's easy with a jack plane. If you align the edges of the plane with the center of the FB, you'll get a cylinder. If you align the edges of the plane with the sides of the FB, viola....er voila! A compound radius is achieved. This sounds hard, but in practice it's easy. Just use a fairly long body plane. Mine is 22", but I'm sure you could get exellent results with just a 12".

A few years back, I did a bamboo floor for some friends and saved the scraps, which I've used in 3 axes so far, one 'scratch built'. Recently, I mortised a block of bamboo under the trem bridge of my alder body partscaster with the grain running crosswise to the body. The cross grain supports the six screw bridge much better, and people noticed an increase in sustain. The bamboo is marvelously hard, tough and 'springy' and has very low internal damping. One of my younger friends made two necks from the bamboo and they have outstanding sustain and even response. Putting a block of hardwood under the bridge of a softwood body is a very good idea. I also did that on a recent poplar/redwood scratch build, but the block was rock maple not bamboo. They both sound good. The poplar/redwood has a poplar neck (!) with 3 CF reinforcing rods. That axe has almost twice the sustain of a stock bolt on neck strat yet weighs about 5 pounds.

I'd go with something light like alder or even poplar. How about a nice spankable knotty pine?

Drawknife, various chisels, spokeshave. You can hog off an amazing amount of stock with a drawknife, or even a 1" chisel if your tools are sharp. I hate dust and noise, so I often choose the hand tool for those reasons, but the results can often be faster and finer as well.

Just sit down somewhere comfortable, and have a good look at it. I bet you'll find it by eye.

Putting single coil strat pickups in series definitely makes them sound much fatter. Because you're adding the resistance of each pickup together, the output is louder and fatter. It also gives some of the creamy compressed quality you hear in humbucking pickups. Wiring pickups in parallel halves their impedence, which gives a lower output and brighter tone.

I've found flamed and dense 'heartwood' redwood at my local home depot for normal prices. Of course, I spent time searching through piles of ordinary lumber. I've also found beautiful poplar, which makes nice body wood. OK, so I've made a neck or two out of it also Also, looking through the stacks of poplar (or whatever) for stiff, 'ringy' pieces with good cut is good practice because it, like any kind of wood, varies a lot.

Ok, I guess I'm obligated to 'splain a bit. The equal temperment system is not 'broken' as Buzz claims, nor can it correctly be called a comprimise. It is simply the only logical way of tuning any instrument, be it stringed, brass or wind so that it can play in all twelve keys and sound 'in tune' in all of them. To put it a different way, music itself is tempered, not instruments. In other words, even a non fretted string instrument or voice uses tempered intervals, though it is common for string players to insist that they don't. To produce an equal temperment, all you do is divide an octave into twelve equal distances. This was probably achieved first on early fretted stringed instruments since a geometric layout of the frets is easily done with a long low triangle and a compass. So, the guitar, rather than being a relic of older tuning methods, has been equally tempered for perhaps longer than any instrument around. Doing an equal temperment with geometry is obvious, but doing it 'by ear' took quite a bit longer to perfect. Around three hundred years ago J.S.B. wrote the 'well tempered clavier' to feature the relatively late emergence of equal temperment on keyboard instruments. But, even today there are piano tuners who do fairly decent octaves and unisons, but can't lay out a very accurate temperment. This is because it ain't easy by ear. Before you suggest that tuners buy twelve tuning forks, let me point out that it would not work. The reason is that a little problem called inharmonicity causes octave harmonics on strings to be sharper than a theoretical doubling of frequency. Since the upper string in an octave must be tuned to the lower strings octave harmonic, the distance of that octave varies from piano to piano. Does that help?

ToddW, there is only one way to tune a piano. The idea that there are different opinions about how pianos should be tuned is only discussed amongst ignorant clients and less skilled tuners. At the top of the profession, all good technicians tend to agree.

I have a Grizzly Ultimate 14" (G055), too. Like any bandsaw, there's a learning curve to setting it up and tuning it. If you've used bandsaws before, you'll have a head start. Like all Grizzly tools, this bandsaw is top quality, and it can be tuned to an amazing degree of accuracy. I currently have the thing so well tuned that you can cut with the blade quite a bit looser than normal without any wander. It's such an inspirational tool that I made a bunch of 'bandsaw boxes' just for the kicks of using it.

Composting is about carbon nitrogen balance. Wood chips are high in carbon and low in nitrogen, so by themselves they compost slowly. Add some nitrogen in the form of grass clippings, kitchen waste, or some urea and your wood chips will compost in a few weeks. Myka, you said it so well! People often jump to the conclusion that machines are more accurate than hand tools. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just try to flatten and radius a fingerboard with a CNC or radiusing machine as well as I can with my 22" jackplane. I seriously doubt if any machine could match the flatness. Or the smoothness of a scraper. Machines can do AS good at best.