jnewman

Fine. It's a first grade concept. Do first graders build good guitars? I never said you were trying to market anything. What I did say was that no one's ever had much success marketing such ideas in the past. What this means is that, in general, people've never been happy with the kind of "innovations" you've been talking about. On the other hand, if you come up with something really revolutionary, something that's really better - I'd love to try it and I'll be the first to say you found something great.

Well, I just ordered a PBF-49 and a PBF-57 to put, respectively, in the neck and bridge positions of the guitar I haven't started building yet (but hope to start this weekend). I'll let everyone know how I like 'em once I get them put in a guitar (likely to be a month or two).

Please read a book on luthiery to learn the purpose of a guitar's various parts and a book on structural engineering to learn what the word strength actually means. All the truss rod does is supply a flexural stress counter to that of the strings, with the strength and flexure in the wood itself. The truss rod is primarily a stabilizing element, not a load-bearing element. In a guitar with a wood neck, if you plan on ever moving out of one climate or ever changing the guage of your strings, you must have a truss rod or something that acts in the same way. If you want to build a guitar with an all metal neck, go ahead - I won't be playing it, and I doubt many other people will either. They've been done before and have never been all that popular.

Let's see. First, that a straight headstock makes trussrod access hard. This is not true, every standard Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster ever made have a straight headstock. Some have trussrod access at the heel, which is awkward but not disastrous, but most newer ones have access at the headstock and it's not the least bit problematic. Second, that gluing together pieces of wood "can never result in better strength." That is EXACTLY what it does. When you cross grain patterns, you get a MUCH stronger, more stable piece of wood on a size-per-size basis than a single solid piece. This is why people use plywood for building, not solid sheets. This is also why so many of the highest quality guitars and basses out there have laminated multiple-piece necks (not one neck piece and one fretboard piece, three or more pieces forming the neck itself). Third, that the truss rod is there to add strength to the neck. It's not. The wood gives the strength, but under load anything will bend. The truss rod allows you to tune the neck bow so that it is straight. Let's say you build your perfect neck with no trussrods and just carbon inserts so that it's perfectly straight with the (let's say) 9 guage strings you like so much (which would be quite hard to do, incidentally). Now let's say you want to change to 10's. The strings have higher tension and now your neck is bowed and you'll never have proper playing action. Finally, what need is there for more accuracy? This is work in wood, which changes shape and size drastically based on temperature, humidity, and load - extremely accurate measurements don't really have any value. Guitars are not poorly designed, although if you're really convinced they are, come up with something better and astound us all - some of us may be grumpy about it for a while, but if it's really better a lot of us will end up doing it your way. Let me just warn you that nearly everything anyone has ever thought of has been tried at least once.

You can't really drill truss rod slots. First off, with a traditional truss rod, you need a curved slot. Not happening with a drill. For a modern, double-action truss rod, you need a rectangular hole. Not even square, rectangular. And it has to fit pretty exactly. Also not happening with a drill. The way fender does 1-piece no-fingerboard necks is to route the back and then fill the hole with a "skunk stripe." I've never seen an electric neck in which the truss rod hole hadn't been routed from one side or the other. EDIT: Yay going to post at the same time!

Violins get plucked all the time. It's an interesting sound, and one that gets used more often than you might think. For that matter, I've heard people use a violin bow on their guitars. It's not as black and white as you might think.

I don't have enough experience to answer your tonal questions, but as for the coil tap, all you need is a humbucker with a four-conductor lead. It's almost standard, but some pups don't have it. It's pretty easy to wire; basically, at one end of the pup you have voltage and at one end you have ground. To coil split it, you ground the middle. One coil goes ground at both ends and therefore has no current. The other coil goes from voltage to ground, and that's the active coil.

From what I understand, it's not toxic, exactly, it's just that a LOT of people are pretty allergic to it.

If you carry out your plan, you won't have a Fender because all the parts and assembly wasn't done by Fender, you'll have a custom guitar you put together yourself. Will it be as good as a Fender? That depends on how careful you are. If you're careful and plan well, will it be a better guitar for you personally than any stock Fender? Very possibly. Besides, it's cooler to have a custom guitar than some assembly line piece of junk anyway . Yes, my only guitar right now is an "assembly line piece of junk" MIA strat that I love dearly, so noone get all upset about me calling Fenders "assembly line pieces of junk." My point is, a custom guitar is put together with love and care and tailoring to your very own individual tastes, something you will NEVER get with a stock guitar. Unless, I suppose, you end up being the next Clapton, SRV, Vai, whatever, in which case pick out your favorite builder and start tellin' em how you want your signature instrument . Oh, and it could be worse, I played the cheapest peavey they made for four or five years before I bought this strat. It's a wonder I stuck with it that long with how bad that thing sounded! Samick's can actually be pretty nice instruments if you give 'em some lovin'.

How off are they? If it's a matter of a quarter inch of length or a few degrees of armrest angle, I doubt you'd ever notice. Why does it have to be exactly precisely perfectly the right size? If you don't care if it's a standard strat body or a clapton body, you're obviously not going for a perfect replica attempt (which I've never understood in the first place).

Just curious, why have you used all ZBS's and no PBF's (to date) in your guitars? Have you tried out the ZBS's and PBF's and liked the ZBS's better, or is there some other reason?

I'm new (joined a month ago tomorrow) and I don't think I've said anything too stupid yet . That said, I've spent a good bit of time on a lot of different forums (just not this one) and it does get kind of annoying sometimes when people ask really, really basic questions *in the wrong forums* as has happend several times recently. Then again, I guess you've just got to learn how to use forums somewhere, and maybe those people've never had a reason to use internet forums before and haven't really figured it out yet. Then again, some people just haven't got a clue .

Hmm, I'm getting pretty interested in these pups too. They do mention Bartolini a few places in their site, including one place that say "Pickups manufactured by Bartolini." The Bartolini website, under the ZBF section, says they collaborated with Ron Armstrong of Star's Pickups on the ZBF series. Are the ZBS's active and PBF's passive? Are they all active? Are they all passive?Am I missing something important? There really doesn't seem to be much information anywhere on the guitar pickups.

Yeah, if it's still under warranty your best bet might be: 1. Tell them (politely) that they're wrong, it's a manufacturing defect, and they need to replace it. 2. If that doesn't work, tell them you'll be happy to get the return authorization number from Gibson yourself. 3. If that doesn't work, call Gibson's customer support, talk to them, get the number you need to call back, then go into the store and call Gibson from there. 4. If that doesn't work, see if you can get Gibson to replace it themselves. Whatever happens, I'd find a new guitar shop - that's inexcusable. They're just trying to get out of filling some paperwork and taping shut a shipping box.

It looks like it was just the glue that popped - It is almost certainly a manufacturer's defect and would be covered under warranty (is it new or new-to-you?). If it is not under warranty - If it's what I said (and it sure looks like it is), probably no wood actually broke, it was just the glue joint that broke, so all you would have to do is pop the fretboard off (it's pulled off a ways down the neck, you'd probably have to take it all the way off to glue it back on. And actually, that glue joint shouldn't have popped either - they must've used some bunk glue on the guitar), pull the headstock piece off, sand the old glue off, and glue the pieces back together. If you're not comfortable doing something like that, any decent shop that does work on guitars should be able to fix it. Also, if it's used new-to-you, you might want to take it back to the shop (or person) where you got it and see what they'll do. That's not the sort of break you get on a piece of wood with proper glue joints, and they'll know it's not anything you did. Unless you've been soaking your guitar in a hot bathtub . Seriously, you didn't do anything wrong, and even if it's not under warranty anymore and you can't get the shop/person who sold it to you to do anything you ought to be able to get it fixed without too much trouble.

Now I'm gonna have to decide between one of those and a Menatone Red Snapper for my first pedal... you're a bad, bad man .

Brian, the site owner, has an online store at www.universaljems.com. If you go to the tune-o-matic page, and all the way to the bottom, he has 'em in both gold and chrome. Please be aware that I've never used these nor seen one in person, but it is a twelve string TOM.

I can't actually tell you anything about it, but I was looking at the Vox website to see if it was anything like the Marshall Valvestate amps (which I used to have and really don't like), and came across something funny: "Nine standard effects indispensable for any guitarist are built-in. These include auto wah, compressor, phaser, chorus, flanger, tremolo, rotary, delay and reverb." Indispensible, eh? Funny how many major artists somehow manage to get by without them .

You absolutely can do that, and that's when you use a scarf joint. You basically just angle the cut so that there's more room to glue (most common is a 13 degree angle because that's what Gibson used). The traditional scarf joint yields a headstock that bends back 13 degrees, like a les paul headstock, but I don't see why you couldn't make one straight too.

If you want to do a whole new headstock to glue on, search for "scarf joint." If you just want to add wings, go ahead - the glue's plenty strong.

Question 1: Strip it, add the top, add the binding, do the clear. Question 2: No idea... I tend to stay away from paint stripper. Question 3: No clue - if you're sure it's fine for the body, I don't see how it could hurt the neck. I guess make sure the truss rod is loose so that uneven thermal expansion of metal/wood doesn't flex things too much. Question 4: You may want to grainfill to keep the clear from sinking into the pores as it cures. This should be done after staining if it's a water-based stain used on the wood, or before a few layers of clear and then staining if it's an alcohol-based stain dissolved in lacquer/poly/whatever. Question 5: Sanding sealer is a high solid content lacquer that you apply after pore filling to give you a strong base coat before you start buildling your gloss top coat with thin layers. It's completely separate from grainfiller. Random Questions: Small router: A hardware store. Including home depot. You can do the routing for binding with a dremel, dremel router bits, and by hand or with dremel routing stand. Or you can use a "laminate router" which is a very small router. A big router's probably a bit too much for this, as you're trying to get something that's about a quarter to half inch deep and an eighth to sixteenth wide. There are some threads here about jigs to make this easier, one is very similar to the stewmac dremel binding routing guide. You could theoretically do it with chisels if you know what you're doing. This topic properly belongs in the "Inlays and Finishing Chat" section - while all your questions involve tools, so does every aspect of guitar building, and all your questions are about how to finish your guitar, not really about the tools themselves. Not a big deal, don't worry about it, but that's where it goes .

First of all, there actually are 12-string TOM's available with individual saddles for each string. If you simply put two notches right next to each other on a 6-string TOM, it should work although you won't be able to intonate quite as well. You could always use two lines of string-throughs with ferrules, one for each octave of strings. If you did it right it could look pretty sharp.

Here's one way to figure out how much weight to add. What you're looking at is actually a sort of lever thing, so the amount of weight depends on the location of the weight - the farther from the center of gravity, the less you'll need (this is why tuners, which actually don't weigh very much, can make a big difference on the end of the neck). Put a thin line of tape across the body of the guitar where you want a center of weight to be (you want the line to be vertical when you have the guitar in playing position). Determine where you would like to add weight, and measure how far that position is from the tape line. Now measure that distance from the tape in the direction of the neck and mark it with a small piece of tape. Get a paper towel tube (or some other cylinder that will stand on its end) and set it upright on a scale and zero the scale. Hold the guitar gently on each side where the tape line is, so that it can tilt in the way its lack of balance makes it tilt. Set the small tape marking on the cardboard tube on the scale, and move the guitar down until the tube holds it up level. When the guitar is level, held only by the tube and you at the tape line, look at the weight on the scale - this is the amount of weight you need to add at the position you measured earlier. Sorry the explanation's so long. It's a pretty simple lever/center of gravity thing, but it's hard to write out without a drawing - if it's unclear let me know and I can post a drawing. Trial and error works too .

The only real problem I have with all this is that the last two times people have posted really easy, asked a million times questions, they've been finishing questions that haven't been posted in the finishing section - if people'd even just take enough time to look over things and realize that there's an entire section of the forum dedicated to the general topic of their question, and post there, I'd be more or less ok with it. It's just when people don't even bother to look at the forum long enough to realize that their easy questions about how to finish their guitars should go into the finishing section before they post in the general solidbodies section that it's really annoying. (I haven't been a member of THIS forum for a long time, but the same thing happens in every forum I've ever been a member of and it drives me crazy) In my short time here, it's looked to me like the mods do a great job, keeping things pretty well in hand without being thought police, and people should do less grousing about things . Filthy whatever was way out of line, and if he had modded a few boards as he claimed, he was even further out of line as he'd have to have SOME idea of how forums worked and wouldn't have done everything he possibly could have wrong since that first ill-fated post.

The only problem with this is that once the sticky tape burns through, you're back to reflective shell . I would think that'd work fine, as the black is caused by the oxidation of the material (the material's molecules are broken up then reform with oxygen added), and with no oxygen, that can't happen. That said, I've never tried it before and can't really tell you - and the edges still might get hot enough to melt and not give you sharp edges. It all depends on how the pearl behaves when heated, and that's something I just don't know.