jnewman

That's some kind of shiny... I like it!

Yeah, you're right... when ash is good, it's pretty good - and when it's bad it can be awful . It never hurts to start simple, I'm just not very good at it.

Don't feel too bad... that's a pretty tough one to try to dig up without having more to go on . Somewhere in the forum someone did it with beer labels and someone else did it with comic book pages - that may help you find the threads (I'm not sure where they are any more).

Well, alder's a pretty light wood that's not terribly hard and is pretty tonally balanced (although I've heard people complain of it being "middy," and, to a limited extent, I'd agree with them). IN GENERAL Ash is a bit harder and heavier, and so has a brighter sound and more sustain. There are two kinds (well, they're the same species, but they can be pretty different), Northern or Hard Ash and Swamp Ash. As I said, they're the same species, but trees that grow in very, very wet areas tend to have considerably less dense wood - hence the distinction. A heavy hard ash body often sounds shrill, trebly, and bright, while a light hard ash body or a swamp ash body (the line's pretty blurry, really) will have a nice balance between clarity, warmth, and sustain. I have an actually Fender Strat that's made from a very light piece of northern ash (it'd be standard/heavy for swamp ash) that sounds fantastic, and if I were going to make a traditional strat myself (i.e. either ash or alder), ash is what I'd use. Ash was used a lot in the 50's and is used currently on Fender guitars with clear finishes as it has a more distinct and attractive grain. That said, a lot more strats have been made over the years with alder than with ash. You should be able to find a lot in the forum if you search for "tonewoods" or ash and alder, and you can also find information on www.warmoth.com by looking in their guitar bodies section and then clicking the wood information button on the right side of the page. If you decide on an ash body, most people will probably tell you to find the lightest piece of ash you can get your hands on, although I'm sure there are plenty of people who want the brightness of a big heavy piece.

As I understand it, professional outfits that do transparent colors on bodies that don't dye well do it with sprayguns (airbrushes), and spray a few layers of clear lacquer (or poly) to seal the wood, then spray lacquer (or poly) with alcohol-based aniline dyes dissolved in it until the colors are right, then spray clear laquer (can you see where this is going? or poly...) over the top to gloss it up and give it a thick finish and keep the color from fading as the top layers of lacquer wear off over time. Every ash-bodied Fender I've ever seen with a chip in the finish down to the wood showed unstained, natural colored wood. This is basically what Maiden69 is suggesting, just with rattlecans instead of airbrush equipment (please correct me if I'm wrong). Maiden69 - did you seal with clear before spraying blue, or did the duplicolor just dry quickly enough that it didn't really have time to soak unevenly into the ash?

I figured I'd go ahead and start a thread over here in the actual project forum since I've sort of gotten started. I came up with my design about a week ago, and here it is: The white is rock maple, the darkened area is black walnut (I left the fretboard off of the drawing so that I could see the neck structure). I have two lovely black walnut boards and a very nice rock maple board (about 10 bd. feet of walnut and 10 of maple) - way more than I need, but I wanted to start really from scratch with just lumber. At present, I'm still trying to decide on what to use for my fretboard - I started out wanting Pau Ferro, began to consider Paduak and Bloodwood, but think that I've decided on using Mesquite if I can find a good piece when I go home to Texas over spring break. It's a pretty heavy hardwood and is very stable, strong, and hard, so it should be perfect for a fretboard. It's also really pretty (I have some mesquite furniture), and I think the color would be a nice middle ground between the walnut and maple and really bring it together (although I may need to use a touch of red stain on the rest of the wood so that the red in the mesquite doesn't overpower it). I'm planning on making the cavity cover from laminated maple veneer, which'll be a nice contrast in the middle of the lower walnut wing. I also go the idea recently of trying my hand at winding my own humbuckers for it - so I'll probably be doing that as well, using Alnico V and winding just at (or slightly under) PAF resistance - I don't want this guitar to be bright, and if it comes out well, I mostly plan on playing blues and classic rock with it. It's going to use (as is obvious from the drawing) a tune-o-matic bridge and stop bar, and something like the Gotoh version of the Schaller M6 tuners - I don't really like locking ones. Oh, and Schaller straplocks, which have always been and will always be on every nice guitar I own. I may switch the knobs around - something like a concentric pot for volume of both bots and a 3-way switch where one of them is now. I hope to get started later this week, but I'm leaving town in about a week (the aforementioned spring break trip home to Texas) and won't be back for almost two weeks, so there'll be a big empty space for a while. I'll be taking pictures and carefuly documenting my progress in this thread throughout the course of my building - this being my first guitar build (although I have prior woodworking experience), I hope to be able to show things from a little bit different perspective that might be helpful to others just getting started in guitar building. Anyway, I guess that's all for now. Jimmy Newman

Don't mind him... he's been telling everyone to cut big holes in all their guitars in every thread he's responded to - and saying the same thing about body mass and size hurting sustain. I'd just ignore him.

You HAVE to ground one terminal on the pot for it to work properly as a voltage divider. This may not be what's causing your problem, but it's still true. Here's how a pot works as a voltage divider: you have a strip of resistive material attached at one end to your input signal and at one end to ground. Your output signal is the center lug, it is the wiper that moves along the strip of resistive material. As you move from the input end to the ground end, your output signal decreases slowly from exactly the same as the input signal to 0. (I just used 2V as a reference so I could put in some numbers). If you don't ground that terminal, however, the voltage divider aspect goes away - there's no 0V reference at the other end, and all you're doing is adding a series resistance between your pups and the output - which isn't going to do you any good at all, and probably will screw things up (I've never actually tried it before). I can't promise that's your only problem, that's a fairly complex wiring scheme.

Really? It just seems like you're doing a lot more work without any real benefit if you do it that way. I guess you have to be careful to make sure you don't sand all the way through your inlays, but you could do a bit of radius sanding first to make sure that doesn't happen. I guess I could be wrong.

From what I understand, closing the back improves your bass response... I'm no expert though, and I haven't messed with cabs enough to really be able to tell you all that much.

Mahogany is actually only moderately strong as far as hardwoods go. Strength as we need it for this is measured by a figure called the "modulus of elasticity," and the higher it is, the more load is needed to deform the wood. Using http://www.woodweb.com/Resources/wood_eng_handbook/Ch04.pdf as a reference, I pulled out numbers for everything they had that I've seen used in guitars: Limba : 7,000 MPa Alder : 9,500 MPa Basswood : 10,100 MPa Black Cherry : 10,300 MPa Mahogany : 10,300 MPa Black Oak : 11,300 MPa Black Walnut : 11,600 MPa White Ash : 12,000 MPa Sapele : 12,500 MPa Rock/Sugar Maple : 12,600 MPa Brazilian Rosewood : 13,000 MPa Live Oak : 13,700 MPa Water Oak : 13,900 MPa Pignut Hickory : 15,600 MPa Purpleheart : 15,700 MPa Bubinga : 17,100 MPa So, with all those numbers, if you want a pretty thin neck that'll be able to stand up to a lot of strings and won't bend too much, a GREAT option would be Mahogany with some purpleheart or bubinga laminated in - they're exotic woods that everyone loves and that are very beautiful. (For those who care, the modulus of elasticity E is defined such that (Load/Area of sample perpendicular to load)=E*(change in length under load/original length). While not actually a measure of strength under flexure (like a guitar neck), strength under flexure is directly related to strength under axial loading, and as such these numbers used purely as ratios of relative strength under axial or flexural load are still more or less valid. I think I may have to add another guitar at the end of the list of guitars I'm going to build made out of hickory.

My Fender American Deluxe series strat that has a one-piece maple neck/fretboard came with a lacquer finish on it - including over the frets. It chipped off the frets after a while but held tight to the wood, and now looks fine. Just for what it's worth.

Connecticuit, actually. I found a place up here that both sells wood for and builds pretty high-quality hand-made furniture, and I went ahead and bought some walnut and maple from them as I'd like to get started here in the next couple weeks. They were the ones at the top of my list from a search through the yellowpages last summer on an unrelated project, but I never actually got started on that one - I'll have to go have a look when I get home. The wood I bought is S2S (planed/thickness sanded on the wide sides), and is right at 1 3/4" thick... it's nice wood, but I bought enough for something between two and four guitars, depending on how wasteful I am (about 10 bd feet each of walnut and maple). I got pretty fair prices on it, I think. I've actually started thinking about using teak for the fretboard, as I think I can get a prettier piece more easily than pau ferro, and I feel like its oiliness would make it really nice to play on. Plus my dad used to have a boat with a little bit (although it was never taken care of the way it should've been) of teak trim, and it's really nice wood. I know it's hard to glue, but I'll come up with something... I hear gorilla glue works well with really oily woods? I guess I should probably move to a new thread in the "in progress" section of the forum soon - I'll probably be able to do the cutting/laminating of the neck pieces and cutting of the wings over the next week or two.

My favorite wood for making cabs and such is baltic birch plywood - it's stronger and lighter than MDF/particleboard, and a lot of third-party cab makers use it. In the near future I'm going to be using 3/8" baltic birch to make a case for my built-from-scratch guitar that I haven't actually built yet . EDIT: Like lovekraft said earlier, make sure it's voidless. A lot of people use 3/4" 11 ply voidless baltic birch for big cabs.

Superglue soaks into wood grain like crazy... I don't know if you could even get enough to stay on top to even out the finish (well, I guess of course you can, you'd just end up with a whole tube of superglue on the guitar), and it might discolor the wood around the spot. I can't give you any better options, never having done spot refinishing (people will probably tell you to get brush-on poly or nitro, but I'M not telling you that, as I've never tried spot repairs on lacquered wood before), but if I were you I'd stay away from superglue on exposed areas of wood.

I think nearly everyone doing inlay that covers multiple frets roughs out the fretboard, cuts for the inlay, puts the inlay in, then finishes getting the fretboard perfectly radiused, level, and smooth, then does fretwork. I suppose you could do the slots first, but it'd be a pain in the ass going back over with a really small saw and redoing every slot to cut the inlay. It might really dull the saw, too, depending on your inlay material.

Oak's been used before... the guitar Brian May did nearly every performance and recording he ever did on (that he made himself in the sixties) was a mahogany neck, oak fretboard, oak core semi-hollowbody covered in mahogany veneer. He seems to like the sound he got with it, as it's the only guitar he ever really used, and millios of his fans agree with him.

Those're great! Hideaway was actually the first blues song I ever learned how to play .

Anything'll work, but radioshack solder is TERRIBLE. (You can still use it, if you're just doing one or two things, but it's a pain in the ass to work with. You can get decent solder at any hardware store, the only really truly bad kind I've ever used is the RadioShack brand). Oh, well, it should be rosin-core not acid-flux, but it can actually be pretty hard to find acid-flux solder these days.

Let me clarify this a little bit: the way you get benifit is by using one in the middle position, and the only benefit you get is in positions 2 and 4 on the five-way switch - the combinations, respectively, of neck-middle and middle-bridge. Here's the deal: Your pickups have magnets in them, and your guitar strings vibrate through those magnetic fields which creates an induced oscillating current in your guitar strings, which generates an induced oscillating electromagnetic field, which generates yet another induced electric current in your pickup's windings, giving you an audio signal. All well and good. The hum in your normal use of the guitar comes from the pickup coils moving through the ambient oscillating electromagnetic fields originating from the large amounts of current flowing at 60Hz through your walls - your AC electrical power (the magnets in the pickups don't have anything to do with this hum, they just let the strings generate a field of their own). Now, if you wire one pickup backwards, you get the polarity reversed (the signal is upside down), which means that when you connect it to another one, the hum cancels out - but so does most of the audio signal (the different positions of the pickups means they have slightly different signals), giving you a very thin, weak sound. So what you do is put the magnets in backwards, too, which means that the induced field from the strings vibrating has reversed polarity at that pickup. Then the polarity gets reversed again by the backwards windings, and you have a correct polarity audio signal and a reverse polarity hum signal. Combine this middle pickup with either of the other two, and the audio signals reinforce each other while the hum signals cancel out, giving you a fuller-than-one-pup-alone, hum-free sound in positions 2 and 4 (Yay physics!) Jimmy

That's just a nickel cover over the pickup - you should be able to take it off to reveal the bobbins (the parts that look like a single coil).

I can't really tell you specifically for handheld routers, but Porter Cable and Bosch make the best power hand tools I've ever used - if you can afford it, I'd never buy anything else that plugs in or uses batteries.

Do you have any straight up blues backing tracks? I don't have a decent recording setup, so mine always sound like crap when I try to record my own.

You've gotten something wonky with your photo server there - it sometimes gives a forbidden message and sometimes come up, the forbidden message is what's making it say "user posted image." I'm not sure what's going on - you may want to try www.photobucket.com - I've never really had any problems with it. Is there somewhere in your account on webshots that you can do something like "allow hotlinking to photos" or "allow access from outside sites"? They give me a forbidden message any time I try to view them in your post or follow one of your links, but then show up when I refresh.

I'm not sure I agree... A TON of great modern blues was played on LP's (or guitars closer to LP's than stratocasters) - Albert King, Freddie King, BB King, the Allman Bros' bluesy stuff, some of Clapton's very early blues (he startout on LP's and such and only moved to strats later), and so on and so forth. Strats can be pretty good for rock/metal/whatever on occaison too. A lot of people really like Green Day's sound (although I don't particularly) and their guitarist plays (or used to play, or something) a HSS strat copy on a lot of their cuts. Also, while there are a lot of classic rock sounds you can't get out of anything but a Paul (or something similar), there are also a lot of classic rock sounds you can't get out of anything but a Strat (or something similar). I just don't think it's quite as cut and dried as you're making it.