SD83

As the wood is pretty plain Jane and would most likely be a better candidate for paint.

If it would look like these I would never think about painting/staining them... I like darker woods, but a would that is nearly plain white would be really cool I think.

Or you need a different tuning... one string above the high E instead of below the low E

Flea, Jean Baudin (if he counts as a bassist), Dominic Lapointe (Atheretic & more)... a lot of others, but Myung & Entwistle are definitly worth mentioning once more

3+3. I'm so looking forward to see this one in wood, the shape looks really cool & I bet the pieces you chose (whatever wood it will be for the top) will look great as always...

Update: Neck shaped & sanded (up to 180 grid at the point where I took the pictures).

(click to enlarge)

Any reason you are using lacquer build up and sand back to grain fill on this one, or is it just the mood you were in?

I'm curious about that aswell... as I'm using the same method and I know where I got the idea from...

Mockups (black, good choice!) look great, the switch ring... well... no, I don't like it. And as we all see the top wood looks great, what about the back? Any more pictures of that?

Neck is completely (rough) shaped, headstock, volute, heel, fretmarkers, everything. Still far from perfect, but I have never been that close Feels good, hehe. The entire guitar with all the major woodwork done (with "major woodwork" I mean the parts which take away weight. There still are days of sanding ahead...) weighs just under 3.2 kg (about 7 lbs).

new Headstock with volute

New headstock front view

"Frets" are done, I will have to fix some, but so far it looks pretty much as I expected.

Favorite parts must be shaping & sanding. It might take days and days, especially if you're just working half an hour or one per day, but I think it's cool when you start out with a piece of wood and every minute it looks just a little bit more like your "final shape" or it looks better every minute you work on it. Sometimes I'm a bit impatient and get mad because it takes forever, but still those are my favorite parts ... there are no parts I really hate, just some that I still not understand at all (wiring) or am scared of (fret positions). I'm not sure about finishing the instrument... on the one hand it is great to see the progress, on the other hand I just hate all the "wait until it's dry" periods...

I ain't a stopbar man myself . . . I like my ferrules! But I can imagine in ebony it will look rather smart! I have to say I am liking that body shaping and that ebony centre strip.

Me too The ebony centre strip was not planned in the beginning, the piece of walnut just happened to be smaller than I expected.

Right now I'm thinking about one question: Do I build a fretless baritone (with alternating veneers as fretmarkers) or not? Right now I tend to say "yes" and "because I can" and that it will be used for jamming and playing weird stuff rather than songs anyways (I guess I'll stick to playing bass and try to become a good bassist rather than being a mediocre bassist and a mediocre guitarist). Opinions? Will Ovangkol be hard enough as a fretboard for a fretless guitar? It won't be played that often, but if it looks like crap after some month that would be sad... it feels rather hard to me, not as hard as ebony maybe, but at least on the same level as rosewood or padouk.

EDIT: Did I mention that I glued fretboard & neck together and that the neck fits perfectly into its pocket?

And again, another hard decision to make...

I will vote for davee5 or SJE or dickie, but I'm really not sure yet. They're all great.

- jvillavicencio: great work. I don't like the P-Bass shape too much, but that conversion from old to "new" is amazing

- southpa: nice guitar, the holly laminates look very interesting.

- feral_smurf: if I can't decide between my three favourites, I will chose this one. VERY cool!

- andyt: WOW! another very cool guitar, I love the colors...

- avangers63: good work, but honestly, to me it just looks ugly...

Wow... those will be kinda the first good looking (in my opinion) Tele I have ever seen. Especially the second one of the first pictures and the first backside look incredible. Man I wish I had such domestic hardwoods... the only ones from where I live that might be nearly as good looking are walnut (european) & plum.

So many questions... Are all of them chambered as shown on that last picture? How heavy are they? What have you planned for the necks? And why does the picasa-link not work for me?

"now there are..." but otherwise it looks totally accurate.

Hi

Jetzt sind schon mindestens 3 Leute ausm Gearbuilder-Forum hier.

greetings

btw: hobby workshop down in the basement... now that sounds familiar to me

Those front inlays keep confusing me, can't decide if I like them or not... the rest of the guitar looks great as always, especially with the new headstock, really nice design

The prototype of the stopbar for my guitar (7 string walnut/ebony body & ovangkol neck) is kinda done... made of a piece of plum. it's rough sanded (120 grid) and a little bit to high right now, but you get the idea The final version will be made of ebony. What do you think of it?

Did I already say "WOW" in any of your topics? Those woods look incredible (especially the neck and the fretboard), the shape also looks great (and seems rather slim, but that might be caused by the huge PU cavities) and now this... 8 string TOM. Cool stuff! I can't wait to see the final thing...

Guess the same would apply for veneer but the costs for shipping would be insane.

Luckily no one was around when it happend. Just a poor door... but while I was on my way to get some beer, I had what will hopefully be THE idea to fix the whole thing without having to buy new wood (I'll have to get some new bright veneer). I'll just "disassamble" the whole thing, maybe use what is left of the headstock for something else in the future, redo the neck and use some left over piece of walnut from the body for the headstock. Doing that, I will also solve the problem of getting the headstock from 3 cm down to max. 1.7 (or less, because I wanted to put 3 layers of veneer on it, then shape it), because that wood is already at 1.5. Cheers!

EDIT: looks like sending some veneer to any place via German Post is rather cheap... (I thought about ordering some stuff from the USA some time ago, UPS website told me it would cost over 100$, which is just rediculous) so if it is about the same cost in the other direction I might PM you someday I successfully disassambled the neck and now got 5 pieces of wood again. Still, this sucks!

And I wish it would still look like that. I f***ed up the sawing for the scarf joint (is that the right word?) and lost too much material to use it as a 36-inch bass neck... and as if that wasn't enough, one of the sides just broke off. Gonna get me some beer, get drunk and when I'm sober I'll think about something new...

but thank you I wish I could get some of the wood you use for your guitars...

Some progress on all the instruments... the maple-baritone works great, the more I play it the more I love it, stays in tune, rings forever, amazing clean tone, great feeling, I can't say how proud I am The walnut-baritone is getting closer to being done, the cavities are done, the trussrod will be inserted during this weekend or early next week and: the neck-blank for the 7-string bass is finally ready. As the body is Wenge-Walnut-Wenge with veneers of Ash and Makore between the massive pieces, I decided to mirror this for the neck, so the neck is Walnut-Wenge-Walnut-Wenge-Walnut with Ash-Makore-Ash veneer between the pieces. The sound of this monster is in my ears far superior to that of all my other necks

WOW!

.009 and about 3mm at 24th fret... for someone who is used to heavy bass strings and strings so high above the fretboard you can easily put your fingers between fretboard and strings, this is extremely light and really low action. String tension feels great when tuned down to C.

Wow! I think this is the first time I ever see a fretboard binding that looks great to me. I'm not a big fan of bindings at all, but this one is just beautiful. Just like the entire instrument

I once had a broken Stagg bass... sanded of the paint, tried to glue a veneer on top and failed. So I decided to just attack it with the sander and keep that look. And I added four more tuners, which worked perfectly. Self-made machine heads They stay in tune (bad thing is: tuning requires tools ) and the new 8-string sounds great, never heard such an instrument live before, it's cool.

From this

to this

and another closeup of the headstock

WOW! That maple billet looks incredible...

btw: I found this in my plum root... at least the middle one big enough for headstock veneer. Colors are kinda accurate...