jnewman

Go to www.tapdie.com. At the bottom of every page in the taps and dies sections, it says: "All other sizes manufactured/supplied & LEFT-HAND in stock - ask" And they DO have about a million different sizes - pick your poison . They're pretty cheap, too.

You do realize that a "button" is still a switch, it's just one that you push instead of toggle, right? I'm not sure I really understand the attraction of a kill switch, but if all you can find is a push-on pushbutton momentary switch (SPST), connect it from signal to ground and you're done. (EDIT: Uh... yeah. Like lovekraft posted five posts ago. Remove the toggle if you don't want to be able to kill your kill switch.) I'm also not sure about this... but I bet that Jack White's POS plastic guitar from Sears that only has one working pickup doesn't have a kill switch .

Hey, don't get me wrong... I wasn't arguing against stranded, it's what I prefer to use, too - it's just not a lot better than solid core wire from an electrical point of view. Mechanically, absolutely .

True... I always forget about that part . I only ever use them in power supplies anyway, so I guess it's fine. Heh.

A copy carver would work well, it's true... but I like carving things straight by hand without templates . Besides, copy carvers leave things pretty rough, and with things as different in hardness as buckeye and purpleheart, sanding those straight out would likely cause the problem just as badly. Sanding around joined edges of very different woods like that causes the problem too. Just get a shallow, wide gouge and go slow - then you'll be almost done before you even start smoothing. A gooseneck scraper would probably be your friend here, too, although I've never used one.

Because with 10 gauge wire, you could have about two loops around the pickup. Resistance is not important in a pickup coil. What IS important is the number of loops. Here's how a pickup actually works: The magnets make a fixed magnetic field. The strings vibrate through said magnetic field, which gives the strings a changing magnetic flux and induces a current IN THE STRINGS. That induced current in the strings then generates a changing magnetic field on top of the static one. The coils of the pickup have a current induced by the changing magnetic flux generated by the induced current in the strings, and that current is what goes to the amp. The current induced in a coil is proportional to the number of loops in the coil and the magnetic flux in the interior of the coil and has NOTHING to do with the resistance of the wire. This comes from Stokes' law, which in this case says that the line integral of the curl of the magnetic flux around the coil is proportional to the integral of magnetic flux through the coil itself. Adding extra loops means the flux isn't enclosed once, it's enclosed as many times as there are loops - making five thousand loops instead of one is the same as making the flux five thousand times stronger with a single loop. The magnetic flux created by the induced currents in the moving guitar string are TINY. A single loop of wire enclosing that flux would generate such a tiny induced voltage (on the order of a tenth of a millivolt, perhaps). Moving to, say, five thousand loops multiplies that induced voltage by five thousand, up to something on the order of a volt, a usable voltage that can be transmitted down a guitar cord to an amplifier and amplified without too much background noise. You need a TON of loops to have a coil sensitive enough to pick up the tiny magnetic field flux generated by the moving strings - so you need to use thousands of wraps of tiny wire. Having one loop of really thick wire simply does not work.

Carving where two different woods meet isn't THAT hard... but you have to be careful or you won't remove as much of the harder wood, and you'll have a dip in the soft wood and a lump in the hard wood. My best advice from past experience would be that when you're carving where the join is, do all your carving along the join (as opposed to across it) so that you can keep it even on each side of the join.

While it's true that a higher guage wire has lower resistance... stranded vs. solid core doesn't come into play with regards to the skin effect, because the individual strands are not insulated. Not being insulated, they're in constant electrical contact with each other all the way down the line, and so are effectively (to a close enough degree that it doesn't matter) electrically equivalent. The skin effect occurs because electrons repel each other, so they move as far away from each other as possible. Electrons repel each other across an entire stranded wire just as well as across a solid wire, and so they stay skinned on the outside surface of the entire cable with stranded wire as well as solid wire.

Increasing the capacitor value decreases the corner frequency - so more highs are rolled off, making it sound darker (darker=less highs). Anyone who tells you any different hasn't taken physics. The different materials in caps affect how linearly they respond to frequency changes. The bottom line is that some (particularly ceramic) capacitors introduce more noise into the signal. Otherwise, there is NO DIFFERENCE in this application. In ultra-high end stereo equipment, you can maybe kind of make an argument for it (I've done a bit of audio amplifier building), but in a system already as noisy as a guitar? Use whatever's handy. You only really use electrolytic caps when you need really high capacitances (above 1 microfarad), and most have the unfortunate problem of being polar (they only work properly one direction, which is bad for an AC signal). Below that level, good 'ole film capacitors (the little orange ones that are EVERYWHERE) are nonpolar, cheap as hell, and work great. There's not any reason to use anything but a cheap polyester film cap in a guitar (unless you're trying to do something like the $800 solid silver power cables you find in idiot hifi circles - in which case buy the hundred dollar oil-filled caps and charge your customer until he's dead from blood loss).

Necks don't have scales. Fingerboards have scales. There is ABSOLUTELY no standard, and you could have a 22 fret neck that is longer than, the same length as, or shorter than another 21 fret neck. You CANNOT make general statements about necks like that, because the fingerboard can be placed differently on the neck itself, letting you make a neck essentially any length you want. Please buy Melvyn Hiscock's book and read it - or read everything on the www.projectguitar.com mainsite, then buy the book anyway. You've asked a lot of questions recently that would be MUCH better answered by buying a book and getting a holistic background in what makes up a guitar.

Actually, I've seen some Mesquite (another acacia variety) that looks not unlike Koa... it's hard to get big pieces of it, but I've seen some pieces with flame that looks a lot like that, just redder. I've got a place out west of San Antonio and I've been meaning to cut a tree down there and make a guitar out of it for a while.

C'mon... can you really say that's NOT a beautiful guitar? Sure, it doesn't have disgustingly figured topwood like a PRS or the best of the Pauls... but I love it, and it almost feels like a part of me when I'm playing it. I played a Paul for the first time about a year ago and it felt like I was trying to play, I don't know, a sharp-edged heavy hunk of wood . I do like the way they sound, though, which is why I've been lusting after an SG for a while. Heh. I've been playing that guitar for so long that an RG/JEM's pointy little horns just look WRONG to me. Oh. And I LOVE the ****** headstock, too. So there.

Woodcraft actually has some REALLY nice ones. They're german and they're 10 inch/250mm brad point bits. They cut perfectly clean nice holes and don't deflect much at all. They cost $10-15 depending on the size. You can also get "aircraft bits" from good hardware stores.

Go get Melvyn Hiscock's book... it'll help you out a lot. To answer your questions, the distance from nut to saddle on first string is fixed (the scale length) and that dictates how far apart the frets are (the frets on your 24.75" scale LP are spaced differently from on a 25" scale PRS). You can slide the nut and bridge together wherever you want; you just need to see at what fret the neck joins the body on a PRS, which has a 25" scale. The bridge pup is usually as close as you can get it (~.5") to the bridge and the neck pup is usually as close as you can get it (~.25"-.5") to the end of the fretboard. Get the book and get a good tape measure. You should measure everything to a given value, not try to copy off another guitar - if you try to copy, you're pretty likely to wind up with something completely unplayable.

It won't not work if you use 500K pots, it'll just be a little brighter, which you can compensate for by rolling back the volume or tone pot slightly.

Changing how long the neck pocket is won't change how far the pickups are from the bridge - because it doesn't look like he's planning on changing the neck, just where the join is. The neck pickup will always start something like 1/2" from the 22nd fret. From what I understand it's about half the thickness of the body and half the fact that the cutaways start on both sides about a half inch past the end of the neck pickup cavity. Done right, there shouldn't be any structural problems with either pcoket length - I personally like te 4" better. You've gotten about even votes on both sides, so pick the one YOU like the best!

I actually really do like SG's - but some bands in the 70's and 80's played them because it was so easy to break the body off the neck by slamming it on the floor at the end of the show .

Which have the most notorious neck-cracking-off-the-guitar problems in the history of guitars . (I love them too)

It will stop it sliping when you clamp up though Only messing! ← Actually, there's a REALLY good little trick to take care of that. Take a normal old stapler (the kind you staple papers together with, not a staple gun), and put three or four staples in along one face of what will be a glue joint. They should still stick out about 1/8". Now cut the part connecting the two brads off with some wire clippers - and you have a set of tiny, thin brads down the joint that will hold it from slipping as you clamp it. Press the two pieces together and the staple brads will slip right into the grain on the other piece, and then clamp away.

Or the guy from Cheap Trick's five-neck...

If you REALLY want to reassure yourself... take a scrap of 1x4 or something else small... cut it in half... sand the cut smooth... and glue the two pieces back together. Now wait a day then break it in half - it won't break on the joint (assuming you're using decent/fresh glue). Wood glue is amazing stuff .

You can have no neck angle with ANY bridge... it's just that with a TOM, the neck has to stand way proud of the face of the body for everything to line up. With a Fender-style bridge, you basically just end up with the fretboard proud of the body, with the surface of the neck under the fretboard flush with it. So, to answer your question, a Fender-style bridge is the easiest/best looking way to have no neck angle, but not the only way .

No offense... but that's kind of like saying "I don't think I like cars with gasoline engines... I tried this one car and it was kind of slow... It's diesel for me from here on out." Go tell Mesa/Boogie that their Double Rectifier and Triple Rectifier amps don't distort enough .

I have a friend who moves a huge bridgeport mill around his shop with one friend and five or six pieces of three or four inch steel pipe... Of course, that doesn't help you get it in the truck.

Walnut's not oily... it's really easy to work with and glue. Actually, it's a pleasure to work with - it responds REALLY well to hand tools.