spyykko

Pretty much the same idea as Flaxwood has, replacing the more and more rare quality tonewoods with some sort of plastics and composite materials. CoolAcustics guitars look nice and the material seems to have the qualities needed to replace wood as the material of quality instrument. These type of innovations have only one big enemy, the old fashioned consumers who still want to buy traditional products instead of ones made with modern techniques. I'd really like to test one of these plastic acoustics. Hopefully the company will be able to really commercialize their product in the near future!

Sorry, my mistake. I got a bit confused with the foreign language terms. Thanks for the links. How on earth have I managed to miss those, I've even bookmarked the link for strat bobbin design at lollar's website You managed to answer to my next question before I even asked it, thanks! I think Ill make the spacer out of polyacetal plastic (POM, Delrin). It is commonly used here where I work. Now I just have to move fast, I'm about to change my work soon and therefore have an access to a simple winding machine and coil wire only for a few weeks. Thanks Monty for your answers, this helped me a lot!

If i've understood correctly a P90 pickup is wound between two fiberboard bobbins with adjustable pole piece screws and two rod magnets in touch with the pole piece screws poking through the bottom plate of the bobbin. But where are the pole pieces screwn? Is there a some sort of bar with threaded holes hidden inside the coil where the screws go, or how does it work? At least according to the pictures I've managed to find there is no such bar between the magnets, so where it is? Rockinger.de used to have a complete winding kit for P90, but they seemed to have removed it from their web-catalog, so I can't check what parts was included in their kit. I've never held a P90 pickup in my hand, nor played a guitar equipped with one, but still I've decided to make one as my first attempt with pickup building

* Thinline Tele meets ESP X-Tone -type guitar (see my avatar) as a gift for my friend's 30th birthday (next september and I have just started making templates, but still haven't got a clue where to buy the woods ) * Short scale bass with same body design for myself * Some travel guitar (with built-in amp) for myself * PRS/Carvin/Ruokangas Duke -type carved top electric * New neck for my first built strat * AX84 or similar tube amp Loads of other projects on my mind (ES-335, acoustic(bass), JEM...), but the ones listed are probably the first to become true.

Birch is tonally quite close to maple. For example Ruokangas makes guitars with flamed birch tops. I have also one blank of flamed birch waiting for carving a guitar top out of it.

First question, do you want to do only 2 dimensional outline drawings or 3d models? There are plenty of free or cheap 2D CAD softwares. Only problem is that they are normally designed for doing mechanical designing or contruction / architectual planning. Therefore softwares have a lot of tools for making straight lines and circles, but free form tools, which are quite necessary for guitar designing, are quite poor. I've heard some good comments about TurboCad (available at www.guitarbuild.com) 3D makes things a lot more complicated. I've never seen free 3D CAD software, at least not one which can be used for some real work. Even the commercial 3D cad modellers are quite limited (or way too difficult to use) when making difficult shapes, like a carved top guitar body. I agree with MzI, in my work as a mechanical designer, and also when fooling around with guitar design in my spare time I always do sketches wit pen and paper first. Computer somehow kills your creativity and you end up doing designs which are easily made with your software, not the ones you really tried to make.

If it just has enough travel in x- and y-axis it might be a suitable tool for milling quite accurate routing templates out of acrylic or plywood.

I prefer using water slide decals printed with laser - or even better - with an ALPS printer. There are lots of tutorials for printing decals in the net, here's one: http://www.beldecal.com/laser-instructions.html And here's an example from my latest project: http://seppopyykko.net/vee/kuvat.php?gal=1&pic=41

On ULSINC's website there is a example of making an inlay with the machine ( link 1 ). There seems to be also pictures of MOP-inlays made with their laser ( Link 2 ). Sounds like a cool piece of machinery, I'd really like to try one sometimes!

Just keep on looking, bearing-guided router bits with metric shank do exist, they are just very difficult to find. I manged to find such bits only in one place in Finland. One alternative is to make the blade yourself, just buy a straight 16mm bit with 8mm shaft and a 8/16mm bearing (e.g. SKF 618/8). The bearing can be locked in place with a short piece of 8mm plastic pneumatic hose.

Looks great mledbetter! I'd consider carving the horns and maybe increasing the size of the headstock just a bit. It looks a bit imbalanced to the heavy rear end of the body Otherwise looks great, I can't wait to see the pinewood prototype!

I'd try to make some sort of scale template with NC mill and saw the slots by hand according to that template

Same problem here. I've tried different sweep cuts and loft cuts using the edge as the path and scetching the profile(s) with some results but not even near realistic. I've also tried starting the modeling by sweeping the basic neck shape first between two cross-section scetches. This creates accurate back (and fretboard, if done simultaneously) shape, but leads to problems with heel / headstock transitions. Unfortunately I don't have my cad-models here now, but I can post some pics when I get home from work.

I've also done this only once, so i'm not an expert neither. I used Bare Metal Foil's clear laser decal sheet, printed with normal color laser printer and added one thin coat of clear laquer on top before applying the decal to the headstock (because the decal was so darn thin, i just couldn't apply it without it getting wrinkled). The thermal printers probably refer to ALPS thermal transfer printers. These are great gadgets especially when working with decals because they can print white (and gold and silver). The availability of printers is very limited because they are no longer manufactured, but you can still find these on E-Bay.

Took me a bit longer than 10 minutes

There are plenty of new features, but apart from the new explode view -tool I haven't found them too useful with my work. For guitar modeling there are interesting new features though, like flexform tool, I wish I just could find the time to read the tutorials and experiment with the new features. The SP 0 has still a lot of bugs and the software hangs quite often, especially if you work with files (especially drawings) created with SW2004. So far, I've modelled the necks by startiting to lofting a neck between two sketches and protruding the headstock and heel afterwards. I've also tried to do this by protruding a "neck blank" and cutting away unnecessery sections, but ended up having even more problems with the transitions between headstock and the neck.

Both guitars have been built from scratch, with pre-slotted fingerboards. More pictures at different stages of the projects are available here and here (the pages are written in finnish, sorry) Seppo

How about neck shapes? I use SolidWorks (currently SW2005 SP 0) daily at my work too, but I haven't made any trials modeling a guitar until recently. I didin't have to guts to even try to modell a carved top body, because even modeling the neck seemed to be too difficult for me. The fingerboard and back shapes are easy, as well as the headstock and the heel, but the transitions from the neck to the heel and from the neck to the headstock seem to be very tricky to model. Any hints? My work is mainly traditional machine designing where you have very little chance to use other than straight lines connected with arcs, so my experience with difficult shapes is very limited.

Hi everyone, Just popped up to introduce myself, I'm Seppo from cold north, from Finland to be precise. I've been into guitar building for bit over a year now and I've managed to complete a Strat and my Flying V is currently beeing lacquered (as it has been over six months now, I've been way too busy with my new work and upcoming wedding to really concentrate on guitar building). I still have found the time to read the forum, though I'm waiting to learn more from the forum (and getting laughed at because of my english, since it's not my mother tonge I sometimes make incredible mistakes with my spelling )