jnewman

I did it that way because it's the only way I can get to the intonation adjustment screws - it has that big fat schaller roller TOM that needs a big pocket, and it has to go down low enough because of the no neck angle that there has to be a little taper there for the screwdriver to fit.

Which finish are you talking about?

I've never built a kit guitar or bought any pre-made guitar parts. I'm in the finishing stage of my very first guitar project, and I started with nothing but rectangular lumber, fretboard, neck laminates, body wings, etc. It's not perfect but it's come out very well so far, the neck feels nice, and I radiused the fretboard, cut the slots, and put in the frets myself. Looking at them with a straightedge they're almost perfectly flat, they'll just take a very quick level and should be fine. Beginners can certainly build necks .

You can get the same press for about half the price at harbor freight, although you'll have to machine (or have machined) a way to attach something to the end of the ram - I think the harbor freight one comes with a solid ram while the stewmac one has a hole in the end and a set screw hole. I'm not sure how you could use the cauls to make sanding blocks though - most of the ways people around here talk about making them involves a router on a swinging platform.

Woohoo! Started finishing, here it is still wet with its second coat of General Finishing "Nordic Oil" an oil and resin varnish sort of thing. I have it hanging from a coat hanger. I like how the Nordic Oil is looking so far - with even just the first coat dried it darkened almost this much and looked great!

For what it's worth, my current in-progress guitar has an LMI truss rod, and it seems to be quite well put together.

Why not just go to a material that's already as dense as you want? Like metal, or rock. Someone built a guitar out of granite a while back, and it sustained forever - but it had to be held up by a stand because it weighed in at something like 50 lbs (20 kilos). Pressing/rolling/etc. metal is one thing - the microscopic crystalline grain structure is made more uniform by those sorts of things, resulting in a stronger material. In wood however, putting that much energy into the wood will break the much weaker bonds between cellular structures, causing the wood to fracture. If you somehow managed to hold it together while you crushed it, you would destroy the microscopic structure of the wood, and unlike with metals, the structure would not reorganize itself - you might end up with a denser material, but it would likely fall apart as soon as you started poking at it - unless you impregnated it with glue or some such, but then you'd more or less just have MDF and you might as well go buy it.

Yay! Finally someone who's figured out "zero radius" doesn't mean flat ! I can't tell you anything about the Parker Fly headstock, but I'm sure you'll make something good happen - don't forget to show pictures as you progress. Is that picture you posted from a kit guitar?

On fender necks, that line is made these days with walnut, not rosewood (it used to be koa). It's not actually there "to strengthen the neck," it's used on one-piece maple necks in which the fretboard is the same piece of wood as the neck. A slot is routed from behind, the truss rod is inserted, and the skunk stripe is glued in to fill the slot. It's very nearly impossible to glue a light-colored patch into a light-colored wood without ugly lines, so they use a darker color wood and dark tinted glue so slight irregularities in the fit aren't so apparent. In recent years of manufacture, the spot around the top where it rounds off and stops is particularly poorly fitted.

Whitey, veneer by definition is very, very thin - standard is about 1/40", and 1/10" or so is very thick. 3/4" can't possible be called veneer. It would be better to say "add a top" rather than a veneer, but even then, 3/4" is much thicker than normal. 3/4" is almost half normal guitar thickness, and doesn't let you make deep enough chambers to make a difference. Standard top thickness is 1/4", although they're sometimes a little thinner or as much as 3/8" or 1/2". What you've described is a very common practice called "chambering" a guitar, or making a guitar semihollow.

This is just my opinion, but: There are two main reasons to use a laminate neck. First, it's stiffer than a single piece neck (at least theoretically). This can be important with woods that aren't terribly stiff, like mahogany and whatnot, but with a very strong, stiff wood like maple, isn't a big deal - so maple necks raen't usually laminated for this reason. The second reason to laminate a neck is because it looks cool - and if you're using all one wood, you can't really see that it looks cool . All that said, there are some 3-piece maple laminated necks out there... there are a good number of them on old RG's, I think... I've seen pictures of 80'sish Ibanez necks with 3-piece necks, anyway. I'm not really into Ibanez guitars, so I can't really tell you anything more than that.

I have a strat (hot rodded american series, which doesn't exist anymore) with a normal 2-point modern strat bridge, and I only have to tune it every couple of weeks (unless I travel with it)... it stays in tune almost perfectly. Maybe I'm just lucky .

I'm almost done with a neck-through (my first guitar) and I love doing it this way... my next guitar's going to be a set-neck, mostly because I couldn't find a piece of rosewood big enough to do a neck-through with a rosewood neck. I love neck-throughs, but they do have the cons people have already mentioned. On the other hand, you can probably charge more for them . borge, it varies in public schools a lot based on school district and state, and in private schools there's just no telling. I know they're too low to bring in enough teachers, but I can't give you any actual numbers.

As to the last part, it's a good idea to solder all the grounds to the same place ("star ground"), but it doesn't matter what you actually solder to - a pot back is just convenient because it's already there and it's metal. I'm not sure what you're supposed to use the shielded wire for - you can use the wire for signal and shield for ground and just use the one wire to go to each pickup, if you want... By the way, there's no point in using a shielded wire if you're using the inside wire for ground, and the shielding really needs to be grounded to be effective.

Ah, you're calling high school secondary school. That's part of the problem... I was calling undergraduate degrees at university (like BSc) secondary school.

Killer! I love the slightly spalted flame top on that strat body! So you like the sound of the verawood?

so anybody not smarter than their teachers is average? i guess youre right, after all most highschool teachers (here anyway) have only had 5+ years of tertiary education. any above average highschool student would know all that stuff easy. i dont find it hard to believe at all, you come across as a remarkably intelligent person. i bet you dont even need to assert your superior intellect with trivial doctorates and such,theyre way too easy. everybody knows youre "smarter than most". ← Come to the US and attend a public school in one of the states in the lower half of the public education system rankings. It's pretty depressing. The schools are not held to a high standard and there's a bad shortage of teachers. Also, I doubt there is anywhere in the world that "most" high school teachers have 5+ years of tertiary education, at least the way that term is used in the US, i.e. graduate work. In the U.S., five years of graduate work is enough to get a master's degree, a doctorate, two master's degrees, or a master's degree and a doctorate. Very few people with that level of education work in the primary educational systems in the United States, because, quite simply, primary school teachers in the US are not paid nearly as well as they should be. All that said, it's possible that in New Zealand every high school teacher has a doctorate, but I kind of doubt it.

Which Gibson P90's are they? Does Gibbie even make more than one kind of P90? Are the same ones that come in a P90 SG? .

Man, when I though it was just a tremstop, I just WANTED one... now that I find it's also a beer opener, I *NEED* one . I think my texas special strat wants one of those bad - it's my only trem guitar, heh.

For larger diameters than you can get brad point bits (or if the size brad points you need are prohibitively expensive), look at forstner bits - they make very, very clean holes (although not quite as good as brad points), and start at about 1/2" and go up to around 3" at most shops.

thomann.de has it backwards - with humbuckers you (usually) use 500K log pots for volume and 250K or 500K linear pots for tone.

Do you have a drawing of your design that you can post? I'm afraid a 3'x2' body, no matter how much wood you cut out, will be horribly uncomfortable to play (as skibum said). Also, as has been pointed out, for a neckthrough you don't use a single piece of wood for the body, you use at least two pieces with the neck wood sticking through the middle - if you have a single piece with the neck glued to it, it's a set neck.

You've got things messed up. Guitarists dying on stage from being shocked is from guitars with *grounded* strings plugged into an amp that has a ground fault or an amp plugged into a power outlet that has a ground fault. In this instance, voltage goes through the hot "ground" channel to the strings, and if the guitarist grounds himself or herself and touches the strings, they can get the crap shocked out of them. I had this happen with an outlet that ran 60VAC on the ground pin, but fortunately never really got grounded so it just tingled like crazy. If you have ungrounded strings it just makes the guitar noisier because the strings pickup electromagnetic interference that isn't shunted to ground and that gets picked up by the coils.

Actually... the kind of pots that have a linear VOLUME control have a logarithmic RESISTANCE control (Logarithmic D-Taper (sometimes just called "audio taper") are the proper ones). It sounds like what you have are actually linear pots, the wrong thing for volume control, which gives you exactly what you've described .

Finally an update! I stopped work just before finals ended and hadn't done anything at all on the guitar until Sunday. Since Sunday, I've worked 2-4 hours each day, and am almost done! I chiseled out the neck heel more to almost a normal AANJ except for the little ledge that I always thought was silly. Next I routed the pickup cavities, drilled the holes for the pot shafts, drilled the rear cavity with a forstner bit and chiseled it out clean, chiseled out the ledge around it, drilled with another forstner bit recesses for the knobs. I then chiseled out the recesses for the bridge and tailpiece (the tailpiece posts aren't there in the pictures because I accidentally left them in the wood shop), then drilled the hole for the bridge grounding wire and installed it and put in all the studs. I glued wings on the headstock, sanded them down, and cut out and shaped the headstock. I chiseled off the ledge for the gibson-style nut. I also drilled the jack hole in the side (tele-style) and put a hole in from the electronics cavity to the rear pup cavity. There was already a channel there that I routed in before I glued the wings, so the front cavity's already connected. I don't think I forgot anything... all that's left to do is drill out the tuner holes, use the Nordic Oil (a tung oil/phenolic resin mix I got at Rockler) I bought to finish the guitar, and put on all the hardware. Oh, and make the nut from a little piece of fossilized mammoth ivory. Anyway, pics: It's not all sanded yet, so there are still little scratches all over the body. I'm really, really happy at how it's been going. EDIT: Oh, there'll be pickup rings, too... I just stuck the pickups in so everyone could get a better idea of how it's looking.