mledbetter

i've shopped at a few wholesale seconds outlets and never seen an actual gibson. Epis get stamped as seconds all the time. Generally it is an agreement with the wholesaler. The Serial must be defaced and a new serial put on the guitar. Gibsons quality is horrendous these days. Last time I was in Nashville I went to the Gibson showcase and spent about an hour playing there. Hands down the best guitar in there was a G&L legacy. I couldn't stop playing the thing. All the pauls were gritty, not set up, rusted strings, sounded horrible, etc.. even 6000 dollar custom jobs., It was pitiful. Now their acoustics were all nice, and you get a 6000 dollar gibson mandolin you'll get a nice instrument, but the electrics are some kind of afterthought to them i'm afraid.

a good buddy of mine is going to work for gibson. one of the employee perks... he can buy a standard paul for 300 bucks. I told him that's about what they are worth you can luck out though and when you do it's a damn fine instrument.

The setups I have seen are IR lamp based, not UV. IR is excellent for curing water borne finishes and according to Myka in another thread works well curing a nitro finish too. Search for that thread, it's back a few months. I have no idea what UV would accomplish, but I do know blasting paint with UV isn't a great idea.. testing it's color-fastness for the sake of drying it. The vast majority of the stuff you will paint with cures by evaporation. Some oils and other finishes cure by oxidization, and they would be unaffected by heat - tru-oil for instance. Back in the thread I mentioned I believe it was Doc that said a lot of cabinet shops use IR light banks to fast cure large pieces. Esp. waterborne stuff that can take forever to evaporate by itself.

ouch. that was some serious suckage.. Some really low budget filming going on there and the whole imagery of the piano smashing I just don't get. Cliche and predictable and the solo was way out of place as were the hair flips during the 3 note guitar line leading into the verses. but on the otherhand, if it was a heartfelt tribute by one of dime's buddies then who am I to judge. It cracks me up though hearing folks call this country. I guess compared to what wylde usually plays it could sound kinda country-like but to me it wreaks more of the token love ballads from all the 80s hair band albums. You have to have at least one song for everyone to fire up their lighters for

it's gotta have some bling

Hardboard is easy and cheap but doesn't last as long. I've made several out of 5/8 ply. Some like acrylic.. but whatever you use, get a good master and dupe it. Never work off your master. I've made thatmistake and blew out a 50 dollar template I purchased. Luckily I had made a decent copy so I just made a new master, but still - it was a headache. On tearout and router bits. I had almost written off routing because I had ruined 2 ash bodies but having a good bit makes a huge difference. I bought a brand new 2" 1/2" shank flush trim and I have never had tearout. Minor tearout in figured wood, so that's still an issue, but in regular body wood you should be ok. Ash is prone to tearout because of it's grain structure so you have to keep the wood in mind too. If you really want to be careful, pick up a spiral flush trim. not cheap, probably 40-50 pounds in uk. they are about 80-100 bucks here in the states. The up or downward cut motion though will slice the wood rather than pulling it away from the edge. Last thing on patterns, making your first out of MDF is nice as it cuts easily and sands really smooth, then dupe it onto ply or something for a durable master. You don't want to work off the MDF ones as it will burn and if it ever gets wet you're screwed.

I've cut thick stock with scroll saws too. I have access to a nice bandsaw so that usually gets the pick, but as long as you don't rush it a scroll or jig works just fine. Scrolls and Jigs will both go off angle and can screw up your edges if you force them. Breaking blades isn't a huge deal for me. If i'm cutting thick stuff I use a 3/8 blade and it does well. The little 1/16" blades and stuff are for scrollwork. They'll snap like twigs under stress. Only other question I would add is are you goingn to do template work on a router table? If so then all you are doing is rough cutting the body and if that's the case, use whatever works. You'll true it up with the flush trim. If you are not using templates then you need a good sander to get the chatter out of the edges that a scroll saw will leave. If you are considering building for profit then templates are pretty important for quality and productivity, unless each guitar is a one-off custom. You'll want to have a good routing table setup. 9" bandsaws suck these days. even some of the delta <trumpets blare> ones. Delta now is a far cry from Delta 10 years ago, but still a heck of a lot better than some of the other brands. So, if money is tight, you'll get a lot better scroll or jig saw for a hundred bucks than you will a band saw. If you have 350 or so to blow however, you could get a grizzly 14" bandsaw and have a pretty nice tool on your hands. or, if you're patient you could get the scroll saw and spend the extra 250 on wood

how goofy. not everyone here is doing this as a business and not everyone is a professional, so snubbing someone because they don't do something that you, as a pro, would do makes no sense. we've got enough hotheads around here without having hothead mods running amok..

why not just learn to do inlay by hand and become a master at it? if you really like inlay then it will be worth it to learn. If the only way you'll touch it is to have a robot cut it out for you then maybe inlay isn't for you. Sure, for production and if you're making money, a CNC is a great option but for a project, are you really wanting to shell out a thousand or two for some toy that will cut inlay cavities in your fretboard? Folks have done inlay by hand for centuries. You don't really NEED a cnc. Monkey, i'm not sure what the obcession is with you and CNCs.. if you're in a robotics club then building your own CNC would be a venerable task and worthy of learning. Buying one?? for what?? how does that help you learn about robotics.. I remember middle and high school.. kids fantasized about having super computers, robotic this and thats, etc.. I can't for the life of me think of one valid reason a school would dump 15Gs into a CNC for their robotics class with teachers as underpaid as they are. That just isn't realistic. I know around here if some fringe class like that got that kind of dough in their budget, the math and english teachers would take up arms and revolt! and i think they would be right to

just depends on your style.. a blues player often likes heavy strings and high action as you get more tone out of the string.. a speed player likes lower gauge and lower action to facilitate faster articulation. I'm a blues player so i tend to prefer high action. Low action doesn't communicate the blues tone as well for me, and it's also hard to dig in on bends when the string just slides under your finger

talk to a machinist. A collet is a simple mechanism. Maybe they could take the one you have and bore it out a touch.. or re-fabricate the inside portion. Is the bore too small or is the diameter of the threaded part too small and loose? Fabricating the outside part I would think would be much easier. Milling a little piece of steel and throwing some threads on it shouldn't cost too much.

cool. that sounds like a plan.

ok that iceman/parker thing is one bo-fugly guitar.. The ideas here are much more elegant i have to say.. of course i'm biased

why thank you folks.. Honestly the parker and the iceman have very complimentary curves.. makes a nice hybrid. You mentioned the 006 design too and I think you could incorporate that into it with the beveled carve.. use the parker and the iceman for the profile and the 006 for the carving treatment and you'd have a kick ass looking guitar body.

no dude still wants the tele bridge.. i am a big tele fan so i don't mind it. That is mine though. I wanted the wraparound PRS style.

dude.. that is awesome. Love the color.

the design committed to wood It's not finish sanded yet, this is just the bandsawed profile. The parts show the scale a bit better. It's very comfortable. Body is african mahogany with about a 1/4" strip of curly maple in between. Not so curly on the top but very curly on the back edge. The body will be topped with sycamore.

i present to you.. the IceFly

it does look a bit better.. might split the difference

it's a PRS style joint.. the neck heel extends under the neck pup. gives me better upper fret access that way.

it's guys like that i get cracked up at having a signature guitar. Not that he isn't deserving of a sig guitar, but you think you want his sound, then get his guitar with the bevy of switches and VERY personalized pickup configuration and wonder what the hell to do with it. he's amazing to watch play. So much of what he does is blistering chromatic runs but he makes it musical at the same time.

ok.. my buddy wants the tele bridge.. that's not my preference. Here is it mocked up with humbucker routes to scale and should be a better representation. And some of you stil lmay think it sucks but it all seems to be in better proportion to me at least so this would be a more fair example to judge.

Yeah i've decided that too, but something looks off and it may be as simple as I don't have the proportions of pups and stuff right in phptoshop. I just eyballed that stuff. The second one is ugly. The first one as a black silhouette looks great i think.. but mocked up something is wrong

OK.. thanks for the feedback. If you will humor me.. Here are some tweaks based on the suggestions here. Before . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . After body slightly offset, non-cut horn is enlarged slightly and rounded a bit more. And obviously some just won't like this style at all but for those on the fence, what are your thoughts after these tweaks? Thanks again...