jnewman

I mean, if someone just wanted to give me a Dean USA hardtail, I'd probably keep it . I like SG's, and I like V's, but yuck.

There actually is more to how caps behave than just their capacitance and voltage rating. You can see this if you put them under a fast oscillating load and watch them on an oscilloscope. I'm not necessarily saying that switching to some primo boutique cap will make your guitar sound magically better (or that it won't, I haven't tried it), but the statement that a cap is defined completely by its capacitance and voltage rating is incorrect. How many people are surprised that they decided their own caps are the best?

First, I'm not disagreeing with you about the fact that rosewood boards should be left bare. That said, I don't think maple boards get nasty because of the varnish/lacquer on the board. It's my understanding that it's after you've worn the finish off of the board, and your hand oils and dirt gather in the pores of the maple. So I don't think that's the best argument for not finishing rosewood. Just the fact that rosewood feels so good is plenty of reason not to finish it .

PRS is also making quite a few guitars with rosewood necks these days.

It's been done pretty much every way anyone has ever thought of. FYI, semihollow does not mean no f-holes. A semihollowbody guitar will have some connection between the back and top of the guitar beyond just the sides, for example the Gibson ES-335, which has a block of wood between the back and top under the bridge. A hollowbody guitar will not have any connection other than the sides - like a Gretsch archtop (at least I think most of the Gretsches are full hollowbodies). You'll find people with a solid area down the whole center of the guitar and two chambers, or five chambers, or fifty chambers. You'll find people with a solid area just under the bridge, and one chamber, or two, or five, or fifty. You'll find people with a braced, arched top and no connection at all. You'll find people with evenly distributed chambers through the whole guitar. You just have to make sure that your top is strong enough if you don't have a block under the bridge.

Guys-- that's what he already said he's doing. He inlaid the wood bits, then routed grooves along the outlines to fill with a colored (decorative) epoxy mixture.

There is absolutely no reason why you can't have a 24 fret, 25.5" scale neck. You just need a slightly longer fretboard than you do for a 22 fret neck. I'm not sure what you mean about difficulties with neck pup placement. If you've been hoodwinked by all that "harmonic node" BS, it's just BS. The neck pup can be pretty much anywhere and will work fine, the further from the bridge pickup it is the more different they will sound. You'll have to move things a bit from the standard Strat placement. If you just try to stick a 24 fret neck on a standard Strat body, you would either have to make the neck pocket a little longer towards the bridge or move the bridge toward the neck.

Setch, you do make good points... it was particularly easy for the cavity cover because the pieces were pretty small. I can see how it would be harder with long pieces. I'm stubborn enough that I still think I personally would do it my way, but I can see the argument for doing it all at once too . (For anyone who's interested, Setch has done a lot more of this stuff than I have.) If anyone should try to glue up veneers with the method I described, I can only vouch for the fact that titebond doesn't stick to wax paper. If you use more exotic glues like CA, epoxy, or gorilla glue, I can't promise that the whole thing won't get stuck together.

i dont see how you could glue that amount of veneer to each other without a sandwich of some sort between at least 1/4'' and even clamping cauls would get stuck to the glue coming through the grain It's easy. Take a piece of 3/4" MDF. Put a piece of wax paper on it. Lay down a piece of veneer. Slap some glue on it. Lay down another piece of veneer. Repeat until you have the thickness you want. Put down another piece of wax paper. Put down another 3/4" piece of MDF. Clamp the two pieces of MDF together. All done.

I made a cavity cover by gluing 8 layers of flame maple veneer together. I alternated grain direction 45 degrees between each layer. It wasn't that hard to glue up. It also is extremely strong and stiff, much more so than a 1/4" piece of maple. Essentially it's just really fancy plywood . If I were you, I would glue the three veneers together by themselves, then glue that along with the neck lams.

The only problem with that is that his amp would blow the speakers in record time .

Are you sure it's buzz and not hum? The wiring in a guitar can pick up 60 cycle hum even if the pickups are humbuckers. The 60 cycle hum inherent in the wiring could explain the low level of noise with the humbucker and more noise with the single coil. Most BC Rich's are humbuckers as far as I know - do you have another guitar with single coils to compare it to? Are the control cavity, pickup cavities, and wire runs shielded? Visit www.guitarnuts.com and look at the "quieting the beast" page for some tips on how to reduce 60-cycle hum.

The blade guides shouldn't even be touching the blade. The side blade guides should be aligned just behind the troughs between the teeth, and should have a clearance of a few thousandths between the guide and the blade - I've seen people recommend using computer printer paper or a dollar bill as a spacer, one on each side of the blade. The bearing behind the blade should be just away from the blade also, it shouldn't spin until you start cutting. If the wheels are a little off-kilter it will cause the blade to run forward or back of the center of the wheel. This is a really good way to make the blade wander hard to one side. You can get straight cuts without having a lot of tension on the blade. The recent "powertool basics" issue of Fine Woodworking actually had an article recommending that you run your bandsaw blades at one step LOWER tension than recommended (i.e. run a half inch blade with the tension meter on the 3/8" blade mark).

I have a Marshall JTM-60, a Trainwreck Climax that I built, a Fender Tweed Deluxe that I buit, and a heavily modified Marshall 18Watt that is mostly done. They all sound really good. The Deluxe and 18Watt are both low-wattage amps that are a lot more comfortable to play at home, so they're mostly what I play on. All four of the amps sound really good, though.

Well, you can put four 16ohm speakers all in parallel to get a 4ohm cab, or four 8ohm speakers all in parallel to get a 2ohm cab.

The Les Paul Jr. was a lower-cost alternative to a "real" Les Paul. It had a body shape very similar to a "real" Les Paul but was a non-maple-capped flat-top solid mahogany body guitar. Originally they had a single P90 pickup. I'm almost positive they were a standard Les Paul scale length, but I can't promise anything about the heel or neck pocket position or anything. Also, the Les Paul scale length changed a little bit over the years, so there are no guarantees exactly what length it is.

Well, basically, you wire the speakers up in the cab to get the impedance you want. With a 4x12" cab, you would usually wire either two pairs of speakers in series, then put the pairs in parallel, or wire two pairs of speakers in parallel, then put the pairs in series. They sound a little different because they have different branch inductance. Marshall tends to do it one way, Fender the other (sorry, I can't remember which is which). Either of these ways gives you a total impedance for the cab the same as a single one of the speakers, which is good because usually you would be using 8 ohm or 16 ohm speakers, which are also the most common impedance taps for guitar amp outputs (Your amp probably has 8 and 16 ohm taps, either with separate jacks or with a switch, but you should check to make sure before you build a cab. You can use a 16ohm cab with an 8 ohm tap safely with minor reduction in volume, and if you have to you can use an 8 ohm cab with a 16 ohm tap, but it's not really a good idea. You should NEVER use a cab with more than twice or less than half of the impedance tap of your amp). You should take some care to make sure that the speakers are all in phase with each other (i.e. all move forward at the same time). Gerald Weber's advice for testing this is to touch your speaker wires to a 9V battery, which will cause the speakers to move to one end of their travel. They should all move the same way. If not, swap the leads on the terminals to the speakers that move the wrong direction. Then you are left with some speakers all wired up, and two speaker wire leads coming off of the whole group of speakers. You wire these leads to a 1/4" jack on the back of the cabinet. Then you use a speaker cable, which is two wires with a mono 1/4" jack on each end, and plug one end into the cab and one end into the speaker output of the head. DO NOT USE A GUITAR INSTRUMENT CABLE FOR THIS. EVER. I use speaker cable to do both the internal wiring and make the cable that goes between the head and the cab (you know, the stuff you buy for running from a power amp to hi-fi speakers).

Why did you say no? It's not very difficult to build cabs. All you really need is jigsaw (or router and circular saw) and a drill. Then you can put in whatever speakers you want. There are tutorials all over the internet. There's some good stuff on construction here: http://colomar.com/Shavano/construction.html and some good stuff on covering with tolex here: http://thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=70200 . Incidentally, 2x10" cabs sound just fine. I built a copy of a Trainwreck Climax a while back - mine is a 2x10" combo with Fane Alnico 10's (like most of the originals). Last time I saw a real one for sale, it was about $4000. So somebody, at least, thinks 2x10's aren't useless . 2x10" speakers moves about 40% more air than one 12" speaker. 10's do sound a little different from 12's, but each type of 12" speaker sounds different from all the other 12" speakers, so that's not a big deal. In my experience, the main reason to go from a 2x cabinet to a 4x cabinet is volume. They do sound a little "fuller" but it's not a huge difference.

The truss rod channel only has to be arched if you are using the old-style one-piece one-way truss rod with a stop at one end and a nut at the other. If you use a modern truss rod, such as lmii's or allied lutherie's two-way rods (or the stew-mac hot rod, which requires an odd-sized router bit), then you not only don't need an arched channel, you can't have one.

There are several big problems with cheap jigsaws. The most relevant is that you'll get a lot of blade deflection, even if you use good blades. With a cheap jigsaw on tight curves in 1 3/4" stock you can expect the tip of the blade to wander as much as 1/2" or more. So stay away from the lines you eventually want to be the outline of your guitar! That said, if it's all you can afford, it's all you can afford - just make sure to budget for a router or rasps and sandpaper to work down to your final dimensions.

One of my best friends' dad has a pretty fancy Larrivee 12 string. I think it sounds great, and it seems to be well put together.

That's an SPST switch, meaning it has two terminals which it either connects or disconnects. It looks like it has a separate connection for the light and for the switched signal. If that's the case, then it will work fine as a kill switch but you will need a battery in your guitar to make it light up. 12V applications may mean you need 12V on the led terminals for it to light up, or it may just mean that the switch is not rated for high voltages (if this second is the case, you would need a current limiting resistor in series with the battery and light terminals on the switch). Either way it would work fine as a kill switch.

The switch on a push-pull pot is not in any way connected to the lugs of the pot. It's a wholly separate DPDT switch that just happens to be activated by pulling/pushing the pot shaft. So basically what you have drawn there is connecting to varitone to a switch and then not connecting the switch to anything. I'm not sure exactly how varitones are supposed to be wired, but that isn't it .

Another thing to try, as it's sometimes the simple things at the beginning that sometimes cause hangups. Have you actually tried recording with it, or have you just plugged the mic in, started talking to it, and noticed that no sound came out of the speakers? Many/most computer sound cards, even with the mic/line-in enabled, are not set up by themselves to send the mic/line-in signal to the speaker output.

As long as you use a DYE stain and not a PIGMENT stain, it shouldn't matter what base you are using. A dye soaks in to the wood and actually colors the wood fibers themselves, and the liquid base evaporates away. Aniline dyes are a good choice for bright colors. A pigment is actually a thin layer of finish which contains little particles of colored stuff that stick on top of whatever you put it on, and being a thin layer of finish you can run in to finish incompatibility problems. Dye stains are usually applied directly to the wood although some kinds you can mix in to finishes. This is per Bob Flexner's book, which is fantastic. It is my recollection that his book says it's ok to use dye stains under any kind of finish, and I believe he specifically points them out as the stain to use with oil finishes. Usually with tru-oil, you would not use a separate grain fill. Using a dye stain should not cause the wood to warp.