Supernova9

Supernova - I kind of agree with you but at the same time, avenger was up front and honest about the quality of his work in the auction. For the person that bought it, yeah, he might be disappointed but that's what happens when you buy a guitar body from an unknown ebay'er with unknown rep. The chosen for tone bit... LOL! Who cares. Its all marketing BS anyways but its not because he didn't know what chechen was that he didn't think it could make a nice top.

For avenger though, its a good deal and all the power to him. I'm sure that most hobbyists and tinkerers would be satisfied with his work.

He wasn't up front and honest about it - none of the 'imperfections' were shown, all the photographs were of poor quality and too far away to see any detail. Is it fair that the person might be disappointed? That's why so many people here warn against people selling their guitars for a while, because it's happened many times before and the buyer is the one who gets stung.

Marketing BS is still BS, doesn't make it any more true, and it still smells like s***. And most of the hobbyists/tinkerers on this board whose work I want to emulate and respect I don't think would be satisfied with that. But hey.

What a shame that you're wrong. The mahogany and sapele were bought specifically to be used in bodies. I was well aware that they have been used for ages and have a proven track record. Likewise, the chechen was bought specifically to be used as a top. I won't deny that I wasn't exactly sure how they'd be assembled until I had them all, but the original intent was always to use them in bodies, and that I DID pick them for their qualities and tone.

Listen, you can disapprove of it all you like. That's your perogative. You can even refuse to admit that you don't like seeing me succede and get a result beyond my goal. You can try and burst my bubble and take a #2 on this all you like. You can even try and put words into my mouth that were never there. You're not adding anything positive, which means the only reason to do these things is to run me down in some way. I've lived through this attitude for 11 years in my ex-wife, and I recognise it a mile away. I also know through bitter experience that arguing this with you is pointless, therefore I'm done responding to you.

You didn't even know what the chechen was, I doubt you could have picked it for tone when you didn't know what it was, but whatever, you're obviously so stubborn that you'll do this anyway. My honest opinion is that you've got a good start base of skill, just you need to practise more before you start selling, because by your own admission (see quote in a second) you don't have the skills yet:

"Overall, I think it may be time to stop with this body. There's a point when you're just making things worse if you keep tinkering with it, and I think I'm there. I know there's a way around the mistakes I've made, I just don't have the skill or knowledge to do it right now. "

I really don't care if you succeed or not, I'm not emotional about this at all, I'm just calling it how I see it. I'd only care about you succeeding or whatever if I was the person who bought the body from you, which thankfully I'm not. To turn me into some symbolic representation of the way you feel about your ex-wife who didn't love you enough because I don't just say "YOU GO MAN, SELL IT A MILLION TIMES, YOU ROCK" is a bit unreasonable. Maybe you should ask a refund from whatever therapist was previously helping you through that, because it obviously didn't work.

For what it's worth I got a load of wenge in from Craft supplies a while back that was pretty much orange with a few dark streaks, leave it in a window in good sunlight for a couple of weeks or so and it darkens out to the chocolate brown/darkbrown streaks you're used to.

I was a naysayer, and I still am. I think your final sale price had more to do with the quality of your 'marketing speak' and possible buyer ignorance. You sell it with minor imperfections, and someone's willing to buy something with imperfections. I'm not. I wouldn't sell a guitar body unless I was sure there were no such imperfections, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy something that's not as good as it can be. I'm willing to pay the right price to get that though, whereas you're selling on the cheap.

Also, your marketing blurb is bordering on the ridiculous. You talk of mahogany and sapele mentioning their uses by Gibson or in acoustic guitars, as if you picked them for their qualities and tone. You didn't, it's plain to see from your previous posting that you just put this together from cheap scraps you have lying around.

I would have liked to have seen the final price if you'd included a link to this or the previous thread in your auction listing.

Telecasters are IMO the ugliest mass produced guitar ever made, I hate everything about them, the single cut, the pickguard, the bridge, the controls, the headstock, ugly ugly ugly!

/holds up flame sheild.

When people send out opinions like this, I always like to know what you think is the nicest mass-produced guitar?

The beauty of the telecaster is in it's simplicity. Or so I think. Strips away the ridiculous ornamentation of other models (though this is defeated by some boutique telecasters sometimes).

Sorry but I'd have to disagree with you 100%. If mid price range companies can do it on an assembly line basis then a high end shop could do it without issue. There are a lot of companies making guitars out of plywood right now and they will sound consistent with each other. How stable does a solid body need to when when it's slathered in a ton of epoxy filler and then an acrylic or poly hard coat? No humidity can get in so temperatures shouldn't be able to affect it.

Also, I'm sure we have all built guitars out of the same billet and experienced drastic differences in each one when it came to the way the wood acted. There really is no absolute consistency in a tree!

I'm also glad to see we are getting a plywood base counter part into the mix! This is getting fun.

Your solution to throw epoxy over everything is expensive and inelegant. If you're going to coat the guitar in that much plastic/glue, why not just build it out of acrylic?

Using stable wood is a more effective method than the one you describe.

This is my point exactly. I personally feel that wood makes little difference in the overall “tone” of a SOLID body instrument and the pickups, pots, wiring cables and amps really shape the overall tone of a guitar. But, a lot of people think high dollar manufacturers don’t use low grade wood because it produces lesser quality instruments and not because of the stigma off attaching the “plywood” name to their guitars. So you are basically saying the same thing I am but I’m not going to stick high dollar pickups on. I’m going to go with a middle of the road (no more than $45.00) pickup to make my comparisons from.

High dollar manufacturers don't use low grade wood because it does produce lesser quality instruments. Quality is consistency. Properly dried, instrument quality lumber is more stable than lower grade wood or plywood. It is also easier to carve etc. Those are desirable qualities. I don't deny that pickups, scale length and bridge type have as much if not greater effect on tone as the wood used in construction, but there is a definite effect.

You seem to be intimating that the use of high dollar woods is a conspiracy theory to extract more money from mindless consumers when plywood is just as good. That's a little bit tinfoil hat style isn't it?

My thought is that the saying "You get what you pay for" has survived so many centuries for a reason. It's true.

It's about disclosure. The company would need to disclose the type of wood they are using. Every add you see about a guitar tells you what it's made from because traditionally they are made from XX and XX which is socially accepted from the music community and when it is different, the noses go in the air and the potential buyer says exactly what you said. I can tell it's plywood. Well, I've played plywood (with maple necks) and I didn't know until I took a look into the cavities.

I've listened to plywood guitars, and more expensive guitars with the same pickups, and I can tell the difference. Sorry if you can't.

I feel that most manufactures don’t use this type of wood simply due to the stigma and not due to the sound they can get from the guitar.

If manufacturers could use plywood, get a great sounding guitar (if you cover them up with solid colour paint not many people could tell without removing pickups etc) and DRASTICALLY reduce their costs and increase their profit margin, of course they wood.

I'll take a bet I can, in a blind test with a construction grade plywood guitar and a solidbody using proper, instrument-grade lumber guitar, provided they have the same pickups, tell them apart.

You shouldn't need more than 2 bearings at most, or really 1. If you do you're doing something wrong.

Erm, I hate to break it to you, but that does not look great

If you're using a plane with sandpaper on the bottom, why not just use the plane as a plane??????

The router jig is way quicker than any sandpaper.

I've got a router. I'd have no idea what that jig would look like, but I assume someone's got a picture of one posted somewhere. When you did you miter box, did you build the whole box? My thought is that if you leave off the bottom part, and just have two independent sides that you clamp to a center board, it shouldn't wander much. I've never seen anybody do that before, but I don't know why it wouldn't work, if you line up the two sides correctly with a saw.

I'm all for the router jig. If you have plans, I'd love to see what you've got!

The router jig is the best Idea, even the nicest smoothest handsaw cut won't be smooth enough to join. Cut the neck roughly at the angle you want, then stick one piece on top of the other, so the angled part on both makes one continuous slope.

Then the jig you want is a flat piece of something like MDF that sticks to the bottom of the neck blank. Then cut two angled pieces (to the angle you want) and stick them to the sides of that base, to give a slope that the router base can run along. I'll draw a picture if you can't get it from that.

Just a quick suggestion - what about flipping the bubinga so that the red is towards the outside? How does that look?

From what I've seen, the bodies that don't sell for a worthwhile price on eBay are strats and anything made from standard woods (poplar, ash, maple, etc). The more exotic the wood, the less common the body, the better it sells. In my mind, that makes a carved rosewood top PRS a decent choice. Doing a search 2 minutes ago for PRS, there were no results with a body.

Example While this one has an ash body, the bloodwood top is what's making the difference. I figure there is about $25-$30 of wood there, which is selling for >$150. This seller has ash bodies constantly for $70 that don't move.

I can't argue with the quilted/flamed maple top statements - they seem to do well, but not cost effective. With the price of well-figured maple, the going price has you about breaking even. FWIW: I think I have the species narrowed down, and it IS a rosewood. I think it's from Honduras.

I'll have about $25 invested in this body. If it sells for $65-$80, I'll be happy; that'll basically double my money after the fees are deducted. I'm not trying to make a living off of this. I just want to try and generate a little income to slowly fund my builds. This'll also give me some practice at the techniques.

Please don't take this too personally, because you're just one particular case of this happening more and more on this forum. But why should you sell people your practise bodies? If it's not good enough for you to keep, why is it good enough to sell?

I seem to notice a lot of people on the board who come here with little building experience (correct me if I'm wrong, but a quick search of your threads shows only the rebuild thread for that small body guitar as any kind of recent construction work) trying to make some cash. It might just be my outlook on things like this, but if you can't make $65-80 without selling a guitar body, how have you got all the tools to make a build to a quality that someone paying for it could expect? Is your effort to make a guitar body only worth $40 or so? It seems like you're selling on ebay because it's an easy way of doing business, a few photos from whatever angle you try and the person's stuck with they buy from you.

That bloodwood tele body looks classy. At present yours just looks like something built from scraps - the sapele and mahogany are neither close enough in colour or contrasting enough for it to look good, and the grain on the rosewood isn't good at all and the figure's nowhere near consistent.

If you really want people to buy it, which I doubt you'll get much on eBay, but hey, don't use some random top that you don't know what the wood is, get some flamed or quilted maple, like most people are actually looking for from a PRS.

Sell it to a friend if you can find someone who wants to buy it.

I'd take the board off the neck and resand it. That way you can cut off the binding and re-bind without damaging the neck blank itself, which seems square and level (according to a quick check I just did with Google sketchup, but hey). That way you can deepen the fretslots as well if needs be. Plus if it's off the neck it's easier to radius properly, try running two parallel rails along a flat surface, with them being the width of your radius block apart, and double-stick tape the fretboard down on the centre line between the two rails. That way you end up with equal radius.

Those are standard wood threaded inserts - you drive them in with a hex driver, and the inside is threaded to the requisite metric thread. You can get them from places like:

http://www.insertsdirect.com/showStyles.asp?prodid=228875

http://www.nutty.com/cgi-bin/Shopper.exe?p...key=0000-EZW440 <-- sells in smaller quantities

http://www.rtlfasteners.com/RC/q.html <-- not hex headed, slot headed instead

I probably should have explained the top more clearly. anderekel had the right idea, sort of.

The problem with doing PH /Spalt/PH would be that I'd be relying on the spalted maple to rout perfectly for my neck joint and pickups, and withstand the tension of the bridge. I might be crazy, but I'm not that crazy. It's basically going to go PH/ SM / PH / SM / PH, with the spalted maple parts being a 1-2" strip down the body lengthwise, starting about an inch to each side of the bridge.

As for pickups, I'm definitely going to find some ebay or craigslist EMG's for the one I keep! The one I sell, I'm not too sure... if I get someone on board before the guitar is finished, I'll just charge them retail for whatever pickups they want and call it an 'option'.

Please God don't try and sell this guitar while you're still making it.

Nice build, I like the wood appointments like pickup rings and stuff - just one question though - if you're just painting the top, why the sides as well? I would have thought if you're painting the top it's a highlight, with the sides and the top painted it's like the back is supposed to be the highlight, which just doesn't seem right - unless you're going to paint the back as well?

Hey guys,

I hate to do it, but I think I'm going to put the whole thing up for sale in its current state to someone here to wants to finish it.

I'm either selling EVERYTHING together for 699 (i've spent $1400 so far)

Or I'd sell the body/neck with no electronics for 399, like what you see in the pics. I spent more than that just for the neck O_o

Then i'd sell the Sh4's for 50 a piece (half off), LRBaggs Piezo TOM with all electronics knobs jacks/control X for maybe $100 (more than half off)

and tuners for 60 bucks ($140 @ stewmac)

Everything is bran-spankin-new at MOST it was test fitted but nothing was ever USED used.

Welp... lemme know if theres any takers. I wont go any lower than what i've posted! Unless someone wants to trade a good flame maple neck blank I'll knock off $100

Any questions post.

Guitar is almost totally ready for clear coats.

Someone finish this project!!!

Thinking about it I'd really rather just sell it all in one I dont want to be shipping out a bunch of seperate things, $699. - Josh

Hmmm, any particular reason for the sudden lack of interest and attempt to offload? Something go wrong with it? And do you really think you're going to get $699 for it when I can see obvious tooling marks in the cavities and some substantial chipping on the fretboard. Smells fishy to me....

Now I have heard that browning of purple heart is from the reverse of uv, that if left in the sun it turns more purple. I am not really and expert though I have worked with it, fortunatly it came in the color I wanted.

That's just not correct. More exposure to UV turns purpleheart brown, not more purple.

As usual, beautiful work, lovely woods and really clean construction. I'm absolutely loving the sapwood on the amboyna burl piece!

If I were you, I'd do as Rich said, and think about the steps involved in making a guitar, and build your list accordingly. Seeing as you have a router I'd focus on how I could use that to accomplish each step - I mean with a straight edge you can joint edges for glue-up, build some sleds and you can thickness a blank, profile cutters allow you to do the body shape and control/pick-up cavities, you can do almost everything with a a router and a jig of some kind.

Well the two ways to do it is either install the neck and cover the whole of the top with a figured maple top or similar that fits exactly round the fretboard so the tenon is then invisible, or just modify the length of the tenon/position of the fretboard on the body so that the fretboard sits over the whole of the tenon (like it is on short-tenon LPs, which hold up fine)