jnewman

How much experience do you have with tools? That's the really important thing. If you don't know anything at all about guitars but can follow directions well and are good with all the woodworking tools, your first guitar might turn out just fine. On the other hand, if you don't know how to use a router and don't know much about guitars, you're probably going to run into some trouble - you might want to go down to the hardware store and buy a 1 inch MDF sheet to practice on. A 1 inch thick piece of wood is what one-piece fender necks are made out of, so you could make a few practice necks no problem, and you could practice routing out control cavities and pickup cavities and edge bevels and stuff on a 1" piece until you had a real nice template. A sheet of MDF is a lot cheaper than nice guitar wood, and you could practice on it till you're plenty comfortable with everything you need to do.

No kidding... I'll probably be getting one of those (or maybe the 64ths and .5mm one) before too long, it's a great deal.

A lot more than you're likely to need in the near future .

When they say "string lies" they just mean the lines on the fretboard where each string is, as opposed to the spaces between them. It's not telling you to do a compound radius or anything, just to relevel the frets so that they're all at the same height - laying a ruler down on the fretboard where each string goes just lets you make sure that all your frets are the same height. If you can't see any light between the ruler and the frets for any fret, you've got it perfect and you shouldn't have any more issues with buzzing.

When you tighten the strings on a steel string guitar to keep it in tune, the strings bend the neck forward. Without a truss rod, this can sometimes damage a neck and at the very least will make it bow enough that it's hard (if not impossible) to get the action set well. The truss rod is a screw contraption that bends the neck in the opposite direction from the strings, and you use it to keep the neck straight. You don't need one if you're building a classical acoustic (nylon strings have much lower tension than steel strings), but for everything else you basically need one.

$30 seems really pretty good to me... of course my only rulers right now are a 4' 16ths ruler and a 12" 32nds ruler (I'm using a template for fretting). I may have to pick up one of the good ones too.

This is a purported "Nut Slot Spacing Calculator" that says it gives you good spacing numbers. You have to tell it intended string widths and distances from the ends of the nuts. For what it's worth, I think my fingers want strings that are evenly spaced (same distance from string centers). It doesn't matter if strings get thicker, the distance from the first to fifth string (four spaces) should be exactly twice the distance from the first to third string (two spaces) or I think I'll get out of whack. That's just me though. I've looked for a half an hour (because I got curious too) and haven't been able to find the discussion I'd seen somewhere.

I hate to rain on the parade, and I'm sure the Woodcraft ruler is a nice ruler, but it is NOT a 24" ruler with 1/64" divisions over the entire length. If you look at the photo on the page, the first three inches have 32nds, the fourth inch has 64ths, and the rest of the ruler is 16ths.

Try giving it a quick sanding if it's real rough and then rubbing it with a cloth that's damp with either naphtha (zippo fluid) or water - even really highly figured wood can look pretty plain when it's dry and unfinished, and wetting it like this will show you more or less what the grain will look like under a clear finish.

You might want to try the "Inlays and Finishing Chat" section, as opposed to the "Tools and Shop Talk" section . Just a thought...

Have you ever machined glass before? I'm not sure how well a CNC mill will work...

You may want to think about (just as an option) thickness sanding off about 1/4" or so, routing your cavities, and then mounting an entire top to the guitar - it'd certainly be easier to make look good than thin pieces recessed over the cavities. Just an idea.

I don't think you can machine it with a mill but it can be ground into shapes (that's how lenses are made - a very, very fancy grinding wheel). If you were going to do it, you wouldn't be able to have fret tangs (too brittle if its that narrow) and your biggest problem would be holding the glass down.

First double post - score!

I think the consensus is that, as far as major, commercial-built instruments go, neither is correct - they do get farther apart as you go towards lower pitch strings, but not by the widths of the strings. At least that's what I've heard from people who're obsessive enough to take the time to measure these things .

Window glass and stainless steel are about the same on the hardness scale. I'm not sure where tempered safety glass or pyrex fall in (which are what'd really be pretty much your best options), but they can't be that much higher. I've never used glass in frets and don't know anyone who has, but I imagine you'd have a pretty hard time shattering tempered safety glass frets (can't promise anything). I doubt it would have a lot of impact on sound, but glass is much stiffer than metal, so if it did anything it would make things brighter.

Well, the idea behind it is that if you do a lot of bending or tremolo work, it keeps the string tension on the playing side and the tuner side of the nut even and keeps the string from catching on the nut or being pulled by it and helps the guitar remain in tune. I've always kind of thought it was marketing babble because I've always played a tremolo strat with a normal nut and have never had problems with it going out of tune (stays in tune for months). I think they look stupid, but that's the only negative I can think of .

You're close - but modern bridges have saddles that move forwards and backwards, so it's defined as twice the distance from the nut to the 12th fret. Your high E string is usually at about the scale length distance, with the lower strings progressively slightly longer. You can do pretty much any thickness you want... an inch and a half to two and a half inches is a range from pretty thin to pretty thick. Sure... Laminating a neck (gluing together several pieces to make the neck part) makes a little bit stronger neck, but it's mostly for show. Sure you can... they're usually about 1/4" thick. Common woods are the different rosewoods (indian rosewood, cocobolo, pau ferro, etc. etc.), ebony, and maple. You can do it with screws, a "bolt-on neck", or you can glue it (a proper wood glue bond between two pieces of wood is stronger than the wood itself) making a "set neck", or you can build it so the neck goes all the way through the body, and glue the oudside pieces (the "wings") to it, a "neck-through." I'd suggest buying Melvyn Hiscock's book on guitar building - it'll answer a lot of your questions, and a bass is built exactly the same way as a guitar.

This is something that, to my knowledge, noone on this forum has tried - so you should start by planning out EVERYTHING. Very carefully. What parts you're going to use, how you're going to put it together, how the parts will fit and work, etc. Are you trying to make it exactly like a frameworks, with the tuners at the heel? Personally, I wouldn't, as it complicates things a lot. You probably won't be able to find a seven-string anything that will, stock, allow you to build a guitar just like a frameworks. I'd have the hardware in the normal direction, and then I could just build it like a normal guitar. I'm not sure... they might cut the strings. Most nylon-string guitars have the normal tuner-through-headstock tuners, so this is something that probably hasn't been done too often.

Heh... I'd never play one of those myself, but I have to admit, it's a pretty cool design and an excellent build.

I can't see why you coudn't, or any particular problems you'd run in to. I guess if you try to do it EXACTLY the same way, with the "headstock" where the bridge normally goes you might have trouble finding the right sort of thing to put where the nut normally is. There are plenty of places everywhere that can bend pipe; you could get the two pipe pieces for pretty cheap, and then you'd basically just be building a backwards (tuners at the bridge, tailpiece at the headstock) neck-through blank. EDIT: They look sort of silly, though - it looks like they're trying to make it a solid-stick acoustic with a piezo pickup or something. I can't imagine it'd have enough volume to play without an amp, and if you add an amp 1. the portability (which seems to be the whole point, to me at least) goes down the tube and 2. you might as well just use a regular pickup. If you want to make an electric guitar like that, go for it - if you're trying for an acoustic, I would think you'd be much better off with something like the martin backpacking guitar (they don't sound very good, but at least it has a sound chamber and you'd be able to hear it).

As long as it's decently built, I wouldn't worry about it. Plenty of people use cheap pots in guitars - you're not really concerned with keeping the signal absolutely amazingly pure, you just don't want the thing to fall apart after you've been using it for a year.

The nice thing about the gear method is you could make it so that it blends colors as the pitch changes, it wouldn't just be a different color whenever you were using it.

What are you trying to accomplish? Do you just want your strat to only have neck, neck/bridge, bridge positions? If so, I'd just wire it that way, because adding a dummy coil, whether in series or parallel (which you didn't specify and would make a differnce) WILL change the sound. I'm not sure exactly how, as I've never done this with a strat, but it would certainly be different. If all you want is a strat with only a bridge and neck pickup, why not just unwire the middle pickup and leave it there so it looks normal, and wire the neck, bridge, and neck/bridge positions into a three-way switch? What is the point of the dummy coil? A split humbucker sounds different from a single coil because it has (in general) fewer windings and has a bar magnet under it and ferrous pole pieces as opposed to magnetic pole pieces, as well as generally shorter/fatter bobbins (at least on the traditional ones - I can't promise anything about the crazy loud output newer ones). A normal strat pickup doesn't have a magnet you can take off the bottom, the magnets are the pole pieces themselves, so if you took them out you'd have what looked like a pickup cover with nothing in it.

That depends on how long they've been out. If they were bleached white and looked clean enough that you didn't hesitate to pick them up, and if there's no marrow when you cut them open, you're probably fine. I've used a bit of found bone in other projects, but never in a guitar - but those rules seemed to work fine for me.