mledbetter

it would stand to reason that active pups would be even more sensitive to wood's tone as they would pick up nuances of the acoustic structure that passives might not even pick up.

well i bought it from stewmac, so it's probably not celluloid. I have a couple rolls of celluloid stuff but it was too narrow.

I am absolutely 100% unhappy with my first binding job. My first route wasn't quite even and i fixed it up with a second pass (on another day using a different setup), but the second pass was a hair shallower than the first so I have a ledge. Seemed miniscule, however it has created a gap all the way around. bottom line, it lokes like crap and i can't remove it as it will pull big chunks of wood out with it. Could I just route it back out again? I know binding can catch on fire but I wondered if anyone has evver routed binding before?

search in this finishing forum. i don't remember exactly where but there is a tutorial by Myka on doing bursts with ragged on dyes. That's how he does his bursts. My advise, use a scrap piece and try it. You have to work while the dye is still wet so you can blend.

lol.. there you go. I will say that if you do a tele, pick up a set of templates from someone. It will make your life a whole lot easier. You can certainly make your own body template but getting the pup cavities right is a pain. You can usually buy a complete template set for about 50 bucks or less on fleabay, or if you want to make the outline yourself you can buy individual pup and cavity templates from stewmac for 5-6 bucks a pop and they are well worth it.

definitely a tele.

that'll be sweet. do a butterscotch blonde with a black bakelite pickguard and it'll really be smokin..

lol.. the simplist of questions can strike quite a furor around here sometimes Thanks Rich for that comparison, Good stuff to know.

The Kirn guy sells fender stuff and fender looking stuff because he has an allparts acct. I have an all-parts acct, big deal. You just have to have a resellers cert. which isn't hard to get. You buy stuff at 50% off and sell it on ebay for a little profit. AP makes licensed replacements of fender bodies and necks AND sells official fender parts. So if you see the actual logo, it might actually be genuine fender stuff. Not sure as I didn't look at his auctions. Since he is an all-parts dealer, he can sell stuff with fender trademarked words in there and is probably just acting like an ass trying to out other people that use "strat" or "tele" without permission to do so. As was said before, what a tool.

an LP has such a mass of wood. You can get away with making strat bodies and other heavily "cavitied" bodies out of soft maple.. I know several models of the dingwall basses use soft maple and they sound fine. But a full 2.25" thick LP body made out of solid maple will most likely sound like crap and possibly crack some vertabrae in the process

i had abandoned my tests.. but i decided that ash would in fact need to be sealed. Doing a neck with truoil will give you a great finish and it'll cure up great. But truoil doesn't cure by evaporation, it cures by oxidization. In porous wood, you get stuff trapped underneath that had a hard time fully curing. That being the case I would think sealing would help. I will say thinning it with naptha yielded a much harder finish and maybe the evaporation of the naptha allowed more oxygen into the tru oil to aid in curing. I have no idea but it worked. Just takes a ton more coats that way The other pitfal with truoil is that you can build it up to a glossy mirror type shine if you want, but it is not hard at all and will dent. I think if you're going to do tru oil it's better to be happy with a sating type finish than for trying to get lacquer type lustre out of it.

nice work. that's lookin awesome.

there is a thread way back in the "in progress" section where a dude converted a 2 hb strat into a 1hb strat for an EVH copy. He used some kind of epoxy putty to fill the thing and by the time he was done priming and repainting you would never know there was a cavity there. I've seen the putty at woodcraft. other places would probably have it. It's an epoxy filler i guess. comes in a squeeze tube.

i'm all about the red to orange burst. gonna have flat black hardware on that thing? that would look killer against the red/orange fade.

a guy brought one of those a few years ago and cut a bunch of wood from my dad's farm.. we got a bunch of nice cherry out of it. He's got a crew in now thinning out his timber a lot, only taking 50" circ. trees. They have a big-ass robot arm that picks up the whole tree, runs it across a 5 ft chainsaw cutter and tosses it in the log truck like it's a toothpick. pretty neat to watch. listened to the crack and thud of trees falling all day yesterday. Cutting mostly oak and poplar, nothing worth getting too excited about from my point of view Those woodmizers are awesome though. The guy cut 2x4s and 1x8s right on the spot out of poplar.. enough that dad built a couple of yard barns and some other projects.

That's awesome. I have that keychain.. my boys ran around the house for about 3 months saying "shut up foo!" I don't like push pulls personally. And i never use a tone knob. I do a lot of volume control with my pinky while i'm playing.. a habit of strat players.. and push pull would be irritating that way. keeps the face of the guitar clean though. What might be kind of neat is a little 3 way toggle where middle is normal, one side is tapped and the other side is a kill switch.. Could be useful for kill switch effects and a good place to hide the coil tap control.

what you want is carpet tape. it's a mesh. sounds like you had the foam tape which doesn't have the hold. carpet tape has great strength against shearing motion.. clamping is by far the best though. extend your template so you can clamp down near the butt end and i usually use 2 squeeze clamps and let the body hang over the edge of a table and that's plenty. Sounds like a couple of shims is all you need. The vast amount of neck strength comes from the faces bolted together. The neck pocket walls are more of a fit and finish issue than stability (i'm sure i'll catch some flak for that ) some danelectros and bolt on V's have hardly any wall to the pocket. Might affect the tone a little. Shim it, paint it or cover with binding and you should be good to go.

Thanks guys for the kind words and comments. I absolutely love the design. I can't wait to see it finished. Obviously I know all the warts and "uglies" on it that are my mistakes but i'm trying to keep them to a minimum and coverable. I hope to get the neck done this week.

you need to do some research. You're asking more than anyone could possibly spell out for you in this way, but luckily 99% of it is just a google search away. As for the acoustic stuff, if you understand how the pickup works you'lll answer your own questions, so I would start there.

I've een told That's called A Burntburst Am I wroung? Well what Ever it's called I think It would Look DEADLY on that V EDIT and for The Neck Do A Burst On it to!! I think That would Look SLICK !!METAL MATT!! ← a traditional sun burst is the fender 3 color (brown/red/black). clasically speaking, the brown to black fade is a tobacco burst but it all depends on who makes it. Burntburst is probably some company's trademarked name for a tobacco burst. but you were right in not calling it a sunburst

I also finished up the back of the guitar. Ferrule holes, control cavity, made the cover plate out of a piece of ziricote peghead veneer which will tie in with the fretboard. I also sculpted around the neck, contouring in for the thumb and the other fingers which make it actually pretty effortless to reach up to the 22nd fret. In no way like the standard tele/strat heel. All that's left is the neck screw bushing holes and i'm pretty much done. Oh and a small tummy contour was also rasped in. Back with cover plate on

Finally made some more progress on the body. Binding is installed (my first attempt at binding) there are a few gaps but I filled the worst one with CA/binding dust mixture and it's barely noticeable. THe other gaps are just filled with gap filling CA. I'll control what is visible when I scrape it and the very edge will be opaque black so the booboos should be hidden. Not completely unhappy for my first binding job. It was .09 thickness and was really stiff to work with. In the future i'll use .06. I just didn't have the bit for it.

One of myka's looked like that recently.. however, if I were to guess, i'd say just regular dyes but stain brown and sand back then go amber on top of that. Maybe leaving the edges a little darker to focus the effect towards the center enhancing the tiger eye illusion. The contrast in that atom though, i would bet it was a 2 step staining job but with brown as a base stain rather than black.

to your question about rings.. i haven't seen that with HBs but it's more common on single coils with no pickguards.. with the wood rings i bet it would look sweet. and if you recess them just enough to get a flat bed to screw them down to it should tie into the guitar really nicely.

Dang son.. you have been holding out on us Looks really nice. Man, i've got an extra digital camera.. it would almost be worth it to just sen it to you so we can see some more pics! lol.. really though, they aren't that expensive anymore but camera pics are better than no pics. keep up the good work.