mledbetter

the dean cadillac has some of the same issues.. but it truly is an explorer top with a standard round lower bout.

The proportions aren't a whole lot different than a telecaster body. 1/2 inch less width at lower bout and 1" total width less at upper bout.

I realize there is nothing new under the sun, i don't claim to be 100% original but there are so many les paul and tele copies out there, breaking up the curves was one of the easiest way I could draw attention away from that and give it it's own personality.

Thanks for the input so far.

This is a mockup of a design I put together for a friend. We've bought all the wood already and hardware/electronics. Just finalizing the shape. At first it was going to be a tele copy, but he wanted something a little different so here goes:

(image removed.. see below)

Thoughts? Opinions? Let em rip..

any fine woodworking store. woodcraft sells it.

there is a beeswax/carnuba wax blend that is pretty nice. Gets a great sheen. the carnuba component hardens it up a good bit.

I tried to get mine perfect on the table saw but in the end had to plane it anyway. The more I do this the better cutting tools I'll get but i just used a 10 dollar block plane from home depot. Got the blade nice and sharp and it made quick work of my gluing surfaces. Then after I glued it, i left the peghead sitting slightly above the fretboard surface and just planed that off as well and all was good.

For sliding, i found if I didn't over saturate with titebond and waved the board in the air for 4-5 seconds it was sticky enough that it resisted sliding. Then just careful clamping in areas that didn't distort the joint first, then extra clamps to fill in the gaps.

Wow.. sounds like some people need to get off their high horse.

funny thing is..no matter how you try to be p.c. about the constructive critisism,there is always some bleeding heart waiting in the wings to totally deny,deny,deny.

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It's hard on forums like these where no one REALLY knows anyone.. but i can assure no one has ever accused me of being a bleeding heart

I just think that it's perfectly ok to "construct" your criticism in a way to gets your real point across first" rather than the method of step 1) piss the person off then step 2) explain to them why you said it and hope they get over their initial defensiveness and accept your original point, which in this case was completely valid. It's much more efficient to craft your words to ensure the most important concepts are communicated first. That doesn't make me a bleeding heart in my opinion.

I deal a lot with corporate communication via electronic means and justsomething you have to be careful of. It very easy to be misunderstood in written word. Even with the smily's

~ stepping up onto soapbox ~ ahem..

Wow.. sounds like some people need to get off their high horse.

It's easy to bash someoen then hide behind the guise of "i'm more experienced and i only bust your chops to make you get better" IMO that's a bigger load of BS than the topic here.

The forum rules require refraining from personal attacks, name calling, derogitory comments, etc.. If critisism is constructive, then even though it may be a tough pill to swallow, the recipient can learn from it. Being called a liar, BS'er, a charade.. isn't in the least bit constructive. I don't care how you try to justify it.. you're kidding yourself if you think that you are being constructive going down taht road. I'm all for being blunt and "telling it like it is" but that's an easy copout when you want go off on someone. The comparision to Litch is ridiculous and shameful. period.

~ off soapbox now ~

Godin.. the way you conduct yourself on this forum and the work you do, i would never have guessed your age. You're a far cry from the usual "kid" that dreams of "one day i'll buy a CNC and make the coolest guitars and take over the industry" and all that kind of crap...

so.. be proud of your work, always strive to make it better, and good job on this stuff. You have the guts to try out a new design and while it's not necessarily my favorite shape, i applaud you for havnig the guts to stick it out there. Hell - your first attempt almost won the GOTM even with the misaligned ferrule holes. Folks obviously like your stuff but with any really custom shape or different style, you'll find it's a love or hate kind of thing.

You've taken all this stuff amazingly in stride and that's to be commended for as well.

Good job man.. Sure there are things you could probably do better next time, but often it takes a few days of letting the finished product soak in before you can really discover the best nd worst features of a custom creation.

all you need is an under saddle pickup.. b-band, baggs ribbon transducer, there are a ton of em. b-band and baggs are probably your best bet. You don't want a straight thinline style piezo.. quack city.. You need something that will pick up all the nuances a bit better.

so you're talkin a chambered solid body, maybe an f hole with an classical style bridge and a classical peghead. Shouldn't be too difficult.

Hey no fingerboard radius to worry about either

damn!!

Building your first guitar is an experiment and a learning process. Nothing is wrong with striving for perfection but it's helpful to expect failure. Failure isn't a bad thing unless you give up. If you never fail, how can you learn? What's trial without error?

Think through jigs and templates, measure twice, do lots of drawing and planning and your next guitar will be wonderful in comparison, an you'll only get better. If you don't have at least the Hiscck book, get it.

Good luck!

mix dude..

little blue, little green, adjust the strength.. Or might have better luck with adding yellow to blue on second thought..

You dont' even have to order stewmac, if you have a woodcraft around, check out the transtint powered dyes. 10 bucks a bottle but it makes a ton of liquid dye.. like 2 quarts or something. so you can monkey around with amounts till you get a formula you like.

or order the dyes from lmi lmii.com i think they are 3.95 a bottle for 1 oz insted of the 2 oz you get with transtint but it's still a heck of a lot of dye

If one were really of an engineering mind.. you could figure out a way to make the back fit perfectly with some recesses, etc.. and use embedded rare earth magnets to hold it on. They aren't expensive and you can get little button mags that generate 5-10 lbs of force. 3-4 of those spaced just right and you could effectively have a removeable back that would have no chance of falling off.

not to mention, you said this was your first guitar and a carved top and back is a pretty big undertaking. I'd try to build something fairly normal first.

The whole LP supreme thing is pretty, but doesn't seem very efficient to me. Getting to electronics would be a pain, and building it would be a pain.

Looks to me like they wanted to brign the old-world look of carved back instruments (fiddles, mandos, banjos, etc) to the paul. Doesn't make sense to me though. That's why hollowbody styles exist - with their f-holes and traditional designs, i don't see where the LP supreme fits in except another way for gibson to overcharge for stuff

if you have a solid start on scales and chord formation, keep it up. That'll get you further ont he keyboard than anything. Especially if you want to be able to improvise.

My advise.. start your own schedule of practicing scales and working on hand coordination. You can pick up a primer somewhere for beginning piano as it's important to learn the proper methods and hand positions.. but once you're past that, it's all the same. guitar, piano, whatever - if it's a polyphonic instrument then all rules of chord theory apply.

You might pick up some books on jazz improv, blues style piano, etc.. things that are more geared toward the self-taught and improv crowd.

You guys are killin me.

yeah i didn't realize it till I got it but it is a nice piece of wood. Hell, everything Rich has sent me has been superb.. I just hope I do it justice I had thought about binding originally but i kinda did like a PRS and deep carved the lower horn so I don't have a plane to bind anymore. I'll probably just leave this sans binding and try that on my next one, which will be a flat top.

Thanks Robert - I wanted to do something different than just a stock tele. Hopefully it'll all come out a-ok.

My allparts box came today.. 3 guitars worth of hardware in there!! have to get to sorting.

double post

I don't nkow about the streaks but photography I can speak intelligently about Looks like you have a point and shoot camera so this may not work.. but you need good light and no flash. That's easier with an SLR where you can adjust it manually. If that doesn't work. Shoot it outside in natural light, and turn your fill flash off. Also if your camera has any sort of white balance adjustment, set it for warm.. Looks like you're a little on the cool side. warming it up some might capture the color better.

Reds are hard with some digital cameras as it is a primary color in the sensor panel and it can really excite the CCD. You may have to shoot it the best you can then take it into photoshop or paint shop pro or something where you can adjust the hue/saturation levels to get it more realistic to what you see in person.

Studio photographers rarely send a photo of a product out untouched. They get the best photo they can get then they retouch the hell out of it. There are all kinds of tricks but don't feel bad that you aren't getting the pic straight off the camera. It takes post-shot manipulation to get some colors like that perfect.

Hope that helps. If you're going to shoot a lot of product on the cheap for your auctions, check into a canon digital rebel. you have total control of everything, and with the raw image output, you can change anything in post you don't like on the image they are readily on ebay for 500 or less and well worth it. Good pictures make all the difference.

that reads like an article from The Onion..

Looking pretty good but I noticed a couple've things. First off, like you said, next time you might want to scale up the headstock a little bit. It looks like you still need to carve a bit of a recess so that you can adjust the truss rod without banging into the sides of the channel. Everyone likes different kinds of carves, but I think that you should make the carve go all the way up to the bridge. It's more of a gradual graceful curve than what you've done and it also gives some variety all the way around the body. All in all it's one of the few projects I've ever been really excited to see updates about!

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Well thanks.. that's quite a compliment Of course several of us are using the same wood! When you gonna get a digital camera? I'm anxious to see how yours turns out..

I just chisled a hair off the edges of the TR slot opening so the nut would fit. I do still have some cleaning to do. The headstock I like so far, but this is an experiment. Once it's done i'll know if i'll do it like that again. Next time i'll glue a couple of wings on if i want it wider.

The carve.. for a tele, this is comfortable to me. It's supposed to be a flat top guitar and if you don't have a defined boundry, you kind of lose the definition of the top. But that's just me. My next one will have a more rounded, LP type lower bout and I intend to take that all the way up, in a nice dome.. to the bridge.

bump.. (more like resurrect this from the dead.. 4 pages down )

OK.. Update time FINALLY!!

The tele is coming along. I put in some recesses for the knobs, and am not through sanding out the lines to smooth out the bottoms. My buddy has his drill press set up with a mortising attachment and until he's done with that, i can't get to the press to finish up post holes and other stuff.. Here's a shot of the body as is. Carving si finished (it's dusty still) and I have a little bit more finish sanding to do around the top horn but here it is:

Also, I still have to turn the knobs. The knobs will be dome knobs made on the lathe with limba bodies and ziricote caps, from offcuts of the fingerboard.

Now.. at long last, the neck!

I foobarred the scarf joint the first time i cut it so I recut the scarf, lost about 1/4 inch of wood (not too bad) and redid the joint. Very happy with it now. Set the joint, routed the TR channel and test fit, then I bandsawed the profile to a rough point (i'll take off the last 1/16 or so with a straight edge and a flush trim bit)

Body And Neck

I realized i didn't take a shot of the neck without the FB laying on it. In the picture above you can see the back though. Obviously the back is unprofiled so I can have a flat surface to work with until I am to that point.

Speaking of the fretboard, this one turned out beautiful. It's the Ziricote I picked up from Rich (wood for sale thread) along with the limba the body and neck are made out of. Stunning. This was a quick run through the grits - i'll sand some more but it's got a nice reflective shine. Here is a closeup:

Close up of Ziricote Fretboard

I made a little jig like in Hyscocks book that I stuck the fb blank to after I tapered it on the table saw, leaving about 1/8 inch on either side overhand. The jig is really just a board a hair wider than the fb blank that acts as a straight edge. Took a while to sand the radius into it (i'll be exploring some router based radiusing options real freakin soon!!!) but once I was done I just left it on the jig and used the edge fo the mounting board as a straight edge for my marking square.

I have the slotting template from stewmac - as I bought it with the mitre box. The mitre box was junk and I sent it back but the template is actually nice as the notch is just the right size for a mechanical pencil. So I scribed the board up in about a minute, then with the marking square and my backsaw (stewmac with depth guard) I slotted. Ziricote cuts really easy and slotting only took about 5-10 mins. Really pretty easy and I cnecked the slots to the template afterward and they were all spot on (whew)

The peghead. I made this up as I went ad i think it may be similar to some others I have seen around here but that's not by my intention, so if i've copped anyones peghead, I apologize.. Here is a closeup though. It's roughed in but I still have to refine the curves a bit.

Peghead Closeup

If it looks kinda skinny, well it is a little skinny.. 3 inches wide at widest point but i like them kinda narrow. However, remember my FB is about 1/8 wide on each side so that throws it off too.

That's all I could do this week. Next week I hope to finish the neck as I have 2 more bodies to get gluled up and cut out.

One more shot of the carve I really like how the lower bout turned out. It's a very comfortable, organic tele to play.

I got my flap disk at wal-mart (do they have those in canada?)

drive for the border my friend

I wasn't bashing CNCs at all.. It's more the surrealness of having the money to have a setup like suhrs.. The Plek got me more than the CNC even.

If you go the route of resellers, you really have no choice because your margin is cut in half. You would have to personally build 15-20 guitars a month, or go the CNC route and shoot for more. There's really no way around it.

Now one thing I do have a hard time justifying is that suhr's flat top models are about 2500 and when you jump to a carved top the base is 5600 or something crazy like that. Honestly, i know a carved top requires more hand sanding, somewhat deifferent approach to finishing but 3100 dollars worth? There's certainly some perception marketing going on there.

But mostly i wanted to clarify that i'm not baching CNCs.. People like Suhr are trying to be more along the lines of PRS. They aren't in it to be one-man-show artisans..

Heck.. James Olsen is still primarily a one man show but he's got a kickin Fadal setup. Interesting.. handmade, his guitars were 5-6k a few years ago.. Now that he has a CNC his guitars are 12,500 each!! demand is higher than ever. For an acoustic i'm sure the precision of CNC along with his engineering genius makes for one hell of a guitar.

Awesome lookin stuff man. The original b/w drawings don't do it justice. I like the beveling idea too, think it'll make it very wing like. The cutouts in the notch of the V don't look as generic in the real body as they do in the illustration. What you have looks more organic.. almost flame like. Very cool.

keep in mind too that you can get all sorts of blades for the scroll saw.. the little hair thin detail blades will probably snap right and left with ebony, but you can get wider blades that won't be so prone to wander.

I have a robosander and it definitely has it's place. Very agressive though and leaves lots of scratches.

i'm pretty sure the deft in a can has a lot of retarder in it to make it brushable which means longer dry time, longer stink time. Don't know that it would be an advantage for using indoors.

Deft in the rattle can dries pretty darn fast. If you wanted to speed up the process, search for one of the IR heat lamp discussions.

given what you have done, and the fact you don't have a band saw.. I'd cut the fingerboard on your table saw and leave yourself a mm or so extra material, glue it on and trim it up with a hand cutting tool. A small plane or scrapers as Setch mentioned. You'll have a lot more control and won't have to worry about under cutting it any. I'd be hard pressed to throw pre slotted ebony into the router bit.. It might be perfectly fine but i've ruined a few pieces of wood with tearout and i'd just rather true something up with a plane or scraper than rish ruining the whole thing.

Just don't leave too much wood though, ebony will take a little elbow grease to work flush to your maple