Ripthorn

I don't know the finish you are speaking of, but I have found that I really like Tru-Oil on a neck. I put on one or two coats, then scuff with 0000 steel wool, then apply another thin coat or two, scuff with steel wool again and call it good. It is satin-y smooth and I quite like it.

Only problem I see with using a bearing on an old bit is that the old bit might be a few thousands smaller in diameter than your bearing, which would mean you wouldn't get any cut at all. You can always give it a shot, though.

I would actually go with a 4x2 arrangement. I think that would look really good on this body shape.

I would put one thin coat at least on the heel, if it were me. Also, 320 seems a little too rough, perhaps 400 or 600 to rough it up. Other than that, you should be good to go.

Kits are a great way to go, but start with something simple first, to get the hang of working with high voltage (and yes, it really CAN kill you). A champ is a great starter amp. Something like a JCM800 is a little overkill for a first project. There are actually a ton of fun kits you can build with submini tubes that are lower voltage, compact size, lower power requirements, lower wattage, but still sound awesome. Let me warn you that it is addictive and that there is a ton to learn.

Instead of renting a scope, you can buy a little digital one that will do exactly what you want for about $50. I think the brand is JYE. It is a rather popular scope in the DIY effects building world. Also, if you have hum on your heater supply, it most likely won't damage your tubes. It would have to be a bad bias or too high of a plate or screen voltage to really damage your power tubes.

The first two things I would check would be the tubes themselves and then the heater supplies. If your heaters are run on DC, you could have insufficient filter caps. If it is an AC heater scheme, you should check the lead dress to make sure there is no funny business there. Also, I would get a scope and look at the signal path starting at the input jack (with no guitar connected) and work my way through to see where the 60 Hz is coming from. Also, make sure you aren't in a room with big fluorescent lights while the chassis is open, as their ballasts will emit very strong 60 Hz EMI.

A standard three way toggle will never work as you are wanting, because the center position is always just the signal from each of the two leaves to the output. You are describing an on/on/on switch, which you would have to purchase in order to do this, but they are typically smaller in size and less aesthetically pleasing. If I were you, I would just put in a separate submini on/off SPDT where one position shorts the output jack to ground. Much cheaper than buying an on/on/on switch (especially since you would probably have to fix the toggle switch hole).

I was cruising lumberjocks last night and saw this post and thought I would share. Brilliant use of leftover scrap wood, if you ask me. Luthier Clamps Video

Pardon my ignorance, but how did you cut those fret slots only part of the way? I always thought a bound board had to be slotted first, but I guess I am wrong (never done a bound board myself). By the way, builds are looking fabulous.

Actually, by your own theory, if one were to have a guitar with 24 frets and the neck pickup at the 26th fret position (not saying that is where it is on most guitars, as it likely is off a bit), then if you capoed the guitar at the 2nd fret, you should have the exact same harmonic mix as a 22 fret guitar with a neck pickup at the 24th fret. By your same argument, that 24 fret guitar should have the exact same tonal progression (since, by your own admission, the tone changes from fret to fret up the fretboard) as long as it is capoed at the 2nd fret. Therefore, the guitar would have all the same tonal progressions with the addition of slight tonal variations to the open string and 1st fret. Now, the open string of the 24 fret guitar will have a different tone than the open string on the 22 fret guitar, but the 2nd fret on the 24 fret guitar should have the exact same harmonic mixture as the open string on the 22 fret guitar. This all follows from your own analysis.

As a side note I find it funny how you claim to not be a scientist, but at the same moment make a remark saying this is all very scientific. While an accurate analysis is very scientific, what you have done is not. I'm a physicist who researched acoustics and has done a lot with strings, and you have not even ventured outside the realm to the absolute simplest representation of a string, which is not particularly accurate. Of course, I am always lead to believe the data, so if you provide solid data that supports the use of an ideal string model, then I would be happy to say "close enough", but there still is not any real scientific substance to this beyond what has been conjectured (and not scientifically shown) by thousands of others.

Anyway, I always appreciate someone trying to share their findings, but my academic nature always leads to me to question any statement not backed up by hard evidence. I don't dispute that you have found a pickup location that you like, which is really the whole point of changing pickup locations. Just be aware that blanket statements not supported by solid data is not likely to be accepted without a lot of questions.

So I found a great local supplier of hardwoods and stocked up for the next two builds. I brought the wood home and bandsawed the rough shape of a neck, put my template on there, and fired up the router with my brand new 3/4" template bit. All was going well until I hit the transition from end grain to side grain and turned a beautiful piece of black walnut into garbage by taking a large chunk out of what would have been the headstock. I am wondering if I had the speed of the router wrong, since I haven't used a 3/4" bit before. What speeds to you guys use when you are template routing bodies and necks? I would like to avoid this kind of thing in the future. I know that it depends on how hard the wood is, but I would be interested to hear what others have to say. Any other tips for template routing would be much appreciated (seeing as how this is my first go at building with templates).

A couple thoughts:

First, standard three way toggles are not on/on/on. Those kinds of switches are even less intuitive to wire up and harder to come by (and expensive).

Second, why a kill button in addtion to a switch?

Third, I think you are going to need a lot more poles than you anticipate.

Here are some rough guidelines to help you think through it. First, every coil is going to have to go to the neck/bridge switch, which will then come out and go in to series/parallel switch. Then the signal will have to routed (using a pole on the parallel/series/kill switch) to the correct volume knob. So far that is at least four poles on theneck/bridge switch (one each for the two coils, one for grounds, and one for volume, you might need one more for the other ground). Getting the right combinations on the series/parallel switch really only relies on getting the right coils to it, which just means you need a real on/on/on switch. Then you can route the output from both volumes to the kill button. You will need to get probably a pair of 4PDT on/on/ on switches, which are about 20 bucks a shot at mouser. It can be done, but you will have to draw schematics and trace every possible signal combination to make sure it works.

do you mean popping when you touch the pickups? Do you have a bridge ground?

There are router mats and sanding mats, but i have recently really come to like my bench cookies, available at Rockler and also Lowe's, etc. They elevate your workpiece enough that you can pattern route an entire guitar body without flipping over or whatever.

Why design your own preamp when there are tons already out there? I did a solid state adaptation of the alembic F2B and think it works great as a tone shaping option. Low parts count, easy to build. The tube version is next on my bass projects list. Response characteristics of the pickups aren't widely published, as far as I know.

You can try the free-way switch at stewmac. It is a six position switch and I think it would work rather nicely on a double neck.

With all due respect... it seems that the point of the OP is getting lost here. Where the string is plucked is obviously a huge factor in the final tone, as are all other aspects of playing technique, guitar and pickup construction, and amp technology. But I don't think we're talking about the final tone yet.

OP, correct me...

The only factors in the OP's entirely theoretical point are:

1) harmonic nodes and anti-nodes along a theoretical vibrating string that has no harmonic bias from pick position

2) placement of pickup along the length of the string, and portion of string length over which the pickup senses

Of course all other factors are important, but perhaps they should build on each other.

Carry on.

I see your point, but a guitar string is not an ideal string. The simplest representation of it requires a differential equation that requires an initial condition, such as pick placement, string displacement, etc. Any other representation is entirely too simplistic. In physics, we have a joke referred to as the "spherical cow" which pokes fun at our habit of simplifying problems as much as possible in order to make the math nice. Using a purely ideal string is much like modeling a cow as a sphere. Pick placement is not merely a technique or some "other" factor. Pickup placement and an analysis of the spectral output simply cannot be looked at independently of where the string is plucked (or struck, which is a totally different initial condition). I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just think that a lot of the people who talk about strings vibrating simply don't know (usually because it gets very mathematical) about the interdependence between the two.

On a side note, what if you were to chill a guitar neck so it contracts ever so slighty, and then put it into the neck pocket for an extremely tight neck fit?

I figured since we were talking about Heating, why not cooling?

Bring it down to around 33 Degrees Farenheit so the water inside the wood cannot freeze and expand, and the rest of the material will contract. Insert into neck pocket, Attach screws, allow guitar to sit in shop for a while, and get an amazing neck fit.

Is this feasible?

Two questions:

1. Why would you do this when you can already get a very tight fit without doing so and risk wood warpage due to the (probably minimal) expansion of the neck.

2. What happens when you need to get your neck out for a repair and can't because it is wedged in too tight?

I use a safe-t-planer to get the main part to thickness and then a sanding drum to get the scoop part.

Yes, they are connected. The heavy dot in the lines indicates where wires are soldered together. In more typical schematics and diagrams, you would see a U shape in the line indicating where a wire "jumps" over the other wires and thus there is no connection, but the heavy dot is a very typical symbol indicating the lines there are connected electrically.

Yes, there are nodal points everywhere for every note on every string. The nodal points, however, shrink as the number of them increases. Additionally, your pick placement plays an equal role in determining your tone. So as soon as someone with a different pick technique and placement comes along, your sweet spot is no longer so sweet. In fact, the mathematics dictate that you could straight up swap your picking and pickup locations and get the same frequency response out of your string. It's something called reciprocity and is really quite neat. Every time you pick a string, there are lots of harmonics that you are not producing because you are picking on a nodal point for those harmonics. Thus your pickup is not doing all the work. That is why one pickup sounds so different when an open string (just for simplicity) is picked above the 12th fret and right next to the bridge. That is the entire secret behind getting acoustic guitars to sound so radically differnt from one player to the next.

You are right in that harmonics are always cancelled by pickup position, but the same is true of picking. One could just as easily leave the pickup in the same place and experiment with where to pick the strings and claim they have found their sweet spot.

This is an awesome guitar. I have been wanting to do a nylon string guitar for a while, but was not able to get past the startup cost of doing an acoustic classical. This project has added one more build onto my list. My wife will be cursing your name in no time.

This is all very basic stuff you presented. The stuff about harmonics and such is true, but only to an extent. A steel string under tension will exhibit a nonlinear harmonic spectrum as compared to an "ideal" massless string with no internal stiffness or modulus of elasticity. So while it is true to an extent, your strings different frequencies won't be exact multiples of the string length. Thus the idea of compensation. You are never going to get a pure sine wave out of a guitar. In fact, you won't really get all that close, because your picking technique is just as important as your pickup placement for your harmonic spectrum. The origin of initial displacement in your differential equation is going to introduce and in turn dampen all kinds of harmonics.

Again, thanks for the time and effort, as I always love getting into the physics of these things (that's what I spent 6 years studying, so I should). Unfortunately, there are a ton of variables. The short and long is that you found something that works for you and you shared it with us, so thanks again.

Most distortion stompboxes are simply a preamp in a little box. If you cruise through some stompbox forums or look at runoffgroove.com, you will find several designs you can use as-is. Also, tubes are not much more expensive than other stuff. Yes, you need transformers and tubes, but if you do it right, you can get a great sounding amp cheap. I did a five stage tube preamp into a push pull tube power amp for really cheap. Of course, it is a low power amp, as I don't gig, but it works great for what I do. A tube preamp might run you upwards of $50, but you could do it cheaper if you used submini tubes.

The short and long is that most any stompbox design will work. You can even do two completely separate circuits to have two independent channels for your preamp. It all depends on what you want and the kind of electronics experience you have. no need to reinvent the wheel, just dress it up the way you want.