Ripthorn

#3 looks like it might be luan, and I've never seen it used in a guitar before.

If you insist on doing it before a buffer, you just need to make it so that you have a really high impedance filter. This means large resistance and/or inductance and small capacitance (I think that's how they are ordered still). My only concern is that going all passive, having a filter that will DRASTICALLY reduce the frequencies less than an octave below what you want to keep is going to require a several-order filter. If you assume a standard butterworth topology, you are looking at 6 dB/octave per order. If we assume you are only getting 2.5 dB of reduction per order at the frequencies you want to get rid of (about half an octave below), you will need probably a 4th order at the minimum, is my guess. That means you will need inductors and capacitors (since you have more than one order) and inductors get really bulky really fast, especially for anything that will give you a cutoff frequency as low as you are talking. But do look into it and let us know how that goes.

I have a friend who has been a top level sound engineer for about 20 years and he goes to the ENT doctor every month or two for a professional cleaning. When asked why, he said it's because while wax is natural, the amount your body produces may or may not allow for the most critical of listening. Much like mucus, it's a necessary natural substance, but too much of it doesn't mean it's all needed. On a side note, I have found that musician's ear plugs work quite well for band situations and I won't play super loud without them any more. Then again, with a full time job and two small kids, I haven't played super loud in a long time anyway.

If you are doing the whole body out of one flatsawn piece of lumber, then at about 20" wide, you have to worry about the body starting to warp over time, since a flatsawn piece of that size will alternate through very large portions of the log it was cut from. That means that over time it is possible to see some bowing from side to side. For that reason alone I would shy away from a piece of wood that wide, not to mention the expense.

That looks pretty sweet if you ask me. I would consider getting one to stick in a custom build, but I don't want to buy the whole guitar shown there.

I say go for it. Those are extremely easy to do with a rotary switch and the appropriate caps. In fact, on my next build (a tele) I am going to do a wiring scheme that has 6 caps, two inductors and something like 6 switches so that I can do all kinds of crazy tone things. You could even do one that compares different types of caps of the same value (like polystyrene, polyester film, ceramic, PIO, etc.). I might want to make one for the PIO caps I just got to see if they will be better suited to an amp or a guitar, hmm.....now that's an idea.

Any push pull pot will do, even an spst. You simply put the switch between either the +V lead from the battery and the LED or between the LED ground and battery ground. You can tie all of your LED leads together, but I would suggest using a current limiting resistor between +V and the LED anode. This will make your battery last longer and keep your LED's from burning up. I would use something at least in the 1k area for the resistor. So to recap, +V from the battery to the center lug of the switch on the pot, from one of the outside lugs of the pot through a resistor to LED anode, then wire LED cathode to batter ground. Easy as can be.

The headstock is at about .65" at the thinnest point. But I totally agree on the headstock looking a little thick. I think I can take it down a bit without a problem. I took it in to work for a couple guys to check out and that was one thing that they mentioned, "thin the headstock a bit".

Ok, I need some opinions. Here are a couple photos of the volute as it stands right now. It looks so big and clunky, so I am wondering what you guys would do. I could take it down and make it so that there is virtually no volute, or leave it as is or ... ? Come on, guys, I need your help with this.

Well, since it's been a long time since the update, let's fill in some gaps. With the channel, let's just say that things went poorly, and every time I touched it, it went from bad to worse, to worser. So, what is going to be done is fill the channel with filler and do a kind of partial brown sunburst. That is, a brown sunburst around the edges of the lower bout. No pictures of that yet, but the test scraps I did look good. Now for the pictures. First is the ubiquitous "gazillion clamps gluing on the fretboard" photo. The next couple photos are of the neck carving progress. I carved it with a rasp and scrapers. Let me just say how much I dig my scrapers. The only beef I have with the neck carve so far is that the volute still looks chunky and awkward. I think that it's too thick, so I will take it down some and recarve and see what it looks like. The heel is still fairly rough, but I think I like how it is starting to look. Progress will probably be kind of slow, seeing as how I have other projects and very little time to work on it, but such is life.

I was drilling some polycarbonate and the bit got stuck in the piece, whipped it around into my wrist, broke my stainless steel watchband and sent the watch flying across the shop. Oh, and it ruined the template I was making, too.

The 386 is what gives all the gain. You can reduce the value of the gain pot, but that is all you can do from that standpoint. Running on a higher supply voltage will increase the amount of clean headroom you have, but only to a point. Make sure to check the spec sheet so that you don't give it too much juice and fry it. I would try 12V and see if you like it. If not, you might be able to try 18V (if that is in spec, don't know off the top of my head).

I built a neck-thru and it wasn't until I did a mock up after the body and headstock were cut that I realized the neck was too narrow side to side for my string spacing. I about gave up, until my dad had the brilliant idea of putting a couple thin lams on either side. Needless to say, it's a painted neck.

My reference to it being a long guitar is the fact that 27' usually means 27 FEET, which is a long guitar. But anyway, scrapers are great if you ask me. I don't have a finger plane, but I assumed they would allow for a great deal of control. A rasp would also work well, I should think.

27' is a loooong guitar. The first few fretw are like 18" apart As for making the carve, I would go with scrapers and a finger plane and go sloooww. A gooseneck scraper allows for tons of control. It will take a little while, seeing as they tend to remove fairly little wood each pass, but that ensures you don't screw up a beautiful piece of wood.

The capacitor will actually do something even with your tone on 10. Changing it out for a different value will have an effect, as will changing the value of the pots. If you put in 500k pots or 1M pots, you will hear an increase in level and highs. If you read about RC low pass filters, that's all a tone control is. In the most basic sense, capacitors store charge and let AC pass and blocking DC. Inductors do the opposite, letting DC pass and blocking AC and are thus used in series in power supplies while capacitors tend to be used in parallel. You can use an inductor in a tone control if you want, but they tend to be more expensive and bulky to get the same performance compared to a capacitor. Long and short, change cap value or pot value and you should see a marked improvement (as long as you change them the right way).

After working as an engineer for the last while, this topic finally gets me back to my physicist roots. So in the P-Rails thread, there was some discussion about how having two pickup coils next to each other will always alter the sound of each coil relative to it being in it's own space. Now, the real reason for this is because we are using permanent magnets as our pole pieces and at the pickup base (don't respond yet, read the rest of the post). So here is my thought, if we could have two coils next to each other that have pole pieces and baseplates that aren't permanent magnets, we could, in theory, have two coils next to each other that would sound probably very similar to what they would sound like if physically separated a "large" distance. Now, I know there are a whole lot of logistics to be sorted out with it, but that is not so much what I am interested in at this point. My question is more along the lines of "What if we were to use electromagnets as the pole pieces and base magnet and only activate the magnets in the coils we want to use?" I know this would most likely sound very different from a traditional pickup because of the difference in the magnet properties created, but from a purely fundamental standpoint, it seems like it would work. Now, I know that the physical presence of the other coil will have some effect, regardless of whether or not the pole pieces are magnetic at the moment or not, but that is a different debate. Any thoughts regarding the issue? I know that this would involve either batteries or phantom power, extremely small electromagnets, more complex switching schemes, and on and on. But I'm just interested to hear what thoughts others may have had.

Look for magnet wire. There should be several suppliers online. You may have to buy more of it than you would use for a single driver, but that's okay, you can just make more.

Mahogany is typically a mellow wood while ash is kind of middle of the road. So combining the two will most likely result in a guitar that tends to be on the mellower side of the tonal scale. Nothing wrong with that, especially depending on the kinds of pickups you put in. Should work well. I have been thinking about less traditional top woods for carving, and actually looked into curly ash, but it is kinds of hard to come by in pieces as large as bookmatched guitar tops. Would be interesting to see.

Any grounded shielding will work. Just make sure that it is shielded on all sides and connected to signal ground and you won't have a problem.

I find the 85 especially to have quite a bit of character. It is probably my single favorite pickup and I don't really do metal (classic rock and blues, mostly).

With actives, you actually should go with 25k pots. Yes, you CAN use 500k pots, but you are probably going to saturate everything else in your signal chain, including your amp. The actives have a preamp in them, so the signal level coming out is much higher. A 25k value pot allows more signal to be bled off to ground at max volume, resulting in a lower max volume than, say, a 500k pot. However, in addition to the volume increase, there is typically a huge treble increase, which means a 500k pot on an active pickup will probably sound like the loudest icepick in your ears you have ever experienced. Short and long, stick with a 25k pot for the right volume and tonal output from your pickups (that's how they're designed).

Stain is notorious for this kind of thing. Wood's response to it will vary widely, even within the same piece of wood. For that reason, dye is typically used for guitars. But to work with what you have, you can simply sand back the parts that are too dark until they are the right shade. If you have already put pre-conditioner on (nothing more than some kind of sealer), then chances are it will keep doing this. Perhaps others with more experience will chime in and correct me if I am wrong.

Stay away from enamel paint, as it can do some nasty stuff to your clear coats (I once tried enamel under nitro and it was not a good thing). What I would do is get some spray can rustoleum stuff that is the same basic makeup as their clear acrylic lacquer (usually will say all the same things on the front, except that one is clear while the others are the colors you want, usually in the immediate vicinity of each other). That way you can be sure that they will be compatible with each other. Plus, it's pretty cheap, like $5 a can, so you will need not more than about $20 for the paint. That would be the cheapest and easiest in my book.

All depends on what kind of wood the fretboard is. If you have a rosewood or ebony or similar fretboard, then you probably either don't need a finish or could just use a fretboard oil. I personally don't like maple fretboards because they are typically lacquered and have a strange feel to them. If you like it though, you can go for it.