jnewman

That looks pretty interesting... where's it from? Are there any more pictures of it?

Actually, I take it back, I was using a smoothing plane (No. 4) not a jack plane. A No. 4 smoothing plane is basically a perfectly flat surface 9.5" long and 2.5" wide, with a perfectly straight blade that sticks an adjustable distance out of a slot in the middle of the flat surface. You set the blade so that it's almost not sticking out of the slot at all, so that when you push it along a piece of wood, it shaves off a piece about as thick as a piece of paper. Then what happens is this: if there are any low spots in the piece of wood you're planing, the plane is perfectly flat and the blade (in the middle of the plane) can't reach down into the dip because it is held level with the rest of the surface by the plane's sole (what the bottom surface is called). If there's a rise in the surface, the plane just cuts the rise and not around it because around it the rise holds the sole off the surface of the wood. Basically, a plane cuts very even, thin sheets off of a surface, removing any rises in the wood, until you've cut the wood down to a perfectly flat surface. That may not be the best explanation ever, but hopefully you'll get the idea.

Do you have any experience using a hand plane? A jack plane is plenty for something like this, and they're pretty easy to use - I got perfect glue joints with one the first time I really tried it. You don't need a $225 lie-nielsen one, either, a decent stanley one that's reasonably sharp is fine. If you want a straight cut out of a table saw, you basically have to use a fence and the fence has to be clamped down, hard - I've never seen anyone get a perfectly straight face just pushing wood across the table, no matter what kind of table saw they're using. With a fence, you can do it with pretty much any table saw, it doesn't have to be a particularly good one. If you wanted to do it on a table saw, you'd need a fence clamped down tight parallel to the blade and then a long piece of wood with the taper you want already on it. Hold the piece you want to cut against the piece with the taper and slide the two together along the fence.

I'm not the world expert or anything, but it sounds like maybe you're just not holding the strings down hard enough on your barre chords - experiment a little bit with playing single notes when you just hold them down hard enough to barely touch the frets and see if the same thing happens. It can be tough to press all six strings down the right amount.

If you're very, very careful you could do it on a table saw. What do you mean when you say you don't have the know how to prep the edges for that kind of gluing? It's not any different from gluing a body blank together, there are just a couple more pieces. Also, most neck-through guitars do have the stripes running parallel and look just fine.

That looks killer! I don't really want to tell you whether it's ok or not, but I can tell you there's a gap like that on plenty of production guitars (which does not necessarily make it a good thing).

I've got a piece of figured katalox for a fingerboard, too - it's beautiful. Mine's about the same shade as a middle-color piece of indian rosewood.

The only thing I'm mad about is the fact that everyone keeps calling flat fretboards "zero radius." This is NOT TRUE. A zero radius circle is a point, not a line. A flat fretboard is actually infinite radius, a straight line. Sorry... this just keeps coming up and it's making my nitpicking gland act up .

Lots of places sell them. You want to search for "rackmount enclosure" not "rackspace enclosure". mouser.com has some on pages 1234 and 1240. They're pretty expensive, though.

It's a cool idea, and I hope they keep it up and get it working better and better - but I'm personally in the camp that says "maybe I'll try it once I hear a solid-state amp that sounds as good as a good tube amp." It's absolutely possible that there'll be a solid state amp that sounds as good as a tube amp eventually, but I haven't heard it yet, and at this point I feel the same way about digital guitars (and other instruments). Feel free to yell at me for being old-fashioned. I'm not quite 20 yet, so I think I can handle it .

A lot of people swear by it, a good number of people are indifferent, and a few people really actively dislike it. No one can tell you how you'll feel about it, and you won't know until you have a guitar with an ebony fretboard. It is getting a lot harder to get good black-black ebony. You might also want to look at macassar ebony, which is very stripey looking and a little more stable/less prone to cracking than black ebony. It's what I'm going to use for my next project (current one is indian rosewood).

The little gem, if you'd actually looked, has instructions for a switchable gain boost, although from the way it's done I'm not sure how well it'd work. Every amp has some gain and some distortion, you CAN'T have no gain or distortion. Why are you so set on having a switch? Is it really that important?

Looks killer, man!

How do you think you change from clean to distortion? You increase the gain. It doesn't matter if you're using a gain knob or a switch that changes the circuit topology, you change from clean to distortion by increasing gain.

Absolutely - they're just two normal guitar pots stacked with a funny double shaft that lets you adjust both.

A push-pull pot wouldn't give you two volume controls on one pot, it's a normal pot with a switch attached. I think you mean a concentric pot, which is actually two pots stacked on top of each other.

That's only true on open strings. As soon as you fret the strings, you change the locations of the harmonic nodes and it stops being true. Further towards the neck still sounds warmer because almost everywhere you play (the only place it's not true is in the last few frets) the neck pickup is still closer to the middle of the vibrating string than the bridge one, since the bridge pickup is always a fixed distance away from the only fixed harmonic node, the bridge.

What I've always heard: The standard spacings are 50mm and 52mm. Generally you use 50mm in neck position. With a tremolo, you use 52 mm spacing in the bridge position, without a tremolo, you use 50mm spacing the bridge position.

If they're speakers with just inputs for speaker wire in the back, you'll need an actual stereo power amp to run them, a headphone jack won't be enough. You can buy Sony or Onkyo stereo recievers for about $100 that would be strong enough to drive 'em some, but to get them loud enough to be a decent PA you'd need a pretty big amp.

"Tinning" refers to coating parts in soler before you actually start soldering things together. For example, you would head the wire up with your soldering iron and melt solder onto it, ditto with the pot, THEN solder them together - it makes it a lot easier.

Hmm, if they're really that good I may have to pick one up - I really like using surforms, but that thing may not dull as quickly.

Actually, they wouldn't be high-tension, they'd be super-floppy. Too floppy to play. Shorter scale is higher pitch, so you have to lower the tension to keep the same pitch. ← What I ment is you would need strings that would put more tension because it would be floppy because of the short scale legenth. ← Gotcha

That's only true if you're playing open - if you're playing at the 12th fret, the vibrations are widest at the 24th fret . It changes depending on where you're playing on the fretboard.

If you don't have a switch of some kind, you'll be stuck with a single pickup configuration. How is it wired now? Is it wired at all? How do you want to it switch? You could get normal (one, other, both) switching options if you used two push-pull pots, one for each tone, so that pulling out each tone pot turned that pickup on. Bottom line, you HAVE to have a switch or you'll be stuck with one pickup, the other pickup, or both and not be able to change back and forth - period. You have to have a switch. Well, I guess you could also just have two volumes and no switch, but you're saying 1 volume 2 tone. What is it you're actually trying to do?

Actually, they wouldn't be high-tension, they'd be super-floppy. Too floppy to play. Shorter scale is higher pitch, so you have to lower the tension to keep the same pitch.