pauliemc

The AANJ style heel does not get in the way of your thumb as much as the square strat styled design. It allows for mush better fret access & curving the edge makes it very comfortable when you are playing up thet far. Try playing a strat & then an AANJ JEM or RG for a comparison. Prostetha !! Brian mays guitar has 3 screws. A big fook off bolt that is visable in the back of the guitar up towards the heel, & then another 2 that are inside the pickup cavity holding the heel tennon down to the body. Odd set up, I make replicas of the red special, Although I do prefer to use better materials than the original.

A,C & D (purple) should realy stay where they are. Id move green C 1/3 of the way back toward E. then round off all the corners like Ibanez AANJ. It may not look like much is taken off but it makes a huge difference when playing. Just my opinion,

I did 2 a few years back for a guy. 01 bass & 01 guitar. They played well but the amount of effort that went into making them was not worth it. the truss rods were a total pain in the ass to do & have function correctly. The biggest mark against it, as far as im concerned, is that the guy came back about 2 years later & asked me to swap them out for trapazoidal profiled necks that were fanned. these were far far better. The ergo twisty thing is a nice challenge, but the gains are next to nothing from my experiance. So id only do it as a wood working - guitar building necktastic adventure

realy nice inlay work man. the whole moby dick/ying yang with the lightning bolt is cool

those are some fookin groovy lookin necks

+1 on that. Make it so a flat sided repair piece is glued in. Id also glue in a 3mm veneer into the bottom of the cavity to strenghten the thiner areas up. Then just do a burst to hide the repair. Maby even just an edge burst in black, similar to what I do on most of my Walnut guitars.

I prefer low output pups, 7.5 - 8.5. maby 9. the maple jobbies had duncan sh1 & sh4, Irongear Blues engines, & a pair of A2 unpotted buckers I made here myself. So no massivly over the top out put gain monsters. Nice for Jazz or blues, But could still scream like a scalded cat for the shredhead in me if needed.

Come on now boys, Meat is murder !! Tasty Tasty Murder Have not done an explorer in a while. Always makes me laugh the amount of timber the body uses up.

Dont know about this one yet. Not ready to go into an amp & play at this point. But Iv found Walnut to be a nice tone. Not too bright, certainly less so than maple. I suppose id describe it as smooth & warm. Iv done a few in sapele that had realy good low end with strong mids, But they screamed like deamons as lead guitars aswell. Not what i expected from a basicly all mahogany guitar. Then a few in all birdseye maple (those were funky lookin ) Id have expected those to be very very bright, But they had massive powerfull low end tone aswell as razor sharp top ends for lead. the walnut is a nice compromise between the two. So I tend to favour it.

very cool

Tell me about it. Not that a neck thru is any mere thing. But these single billet carves are in another world totaly. even just finding a suitable piece of timber can be a pain. But if the mood ever takes you I suggest giving it a go, its a realy nice challenge

Rear route is always an option. But that means a walnut fret board & That does not sit well with me. These things are my ultra tone mojo, voodoo, hoodoo, black magic, touched by the hand of God & all the other superstition funk all thrown into one models. I fookin love them, hate sellin them, Never built one I didnt want to keep. But that is just me, Some people dont realy dig them. Hey Scott, well done on the GOTM win !! Yea, the guy wanted mad fret access. So much so that the ring needs a little tweak on the neck pup. But the fret access is laughable, Hell boy could get right in there with his big freaky hand -_- . The guy it was designed for is missing the top of one of his fret hand fingers, so a slight mod had to be made to allow him the access he wanted.

Looks like you may have scored there. evilbay came up trumps ? maby ? Not a big fan of Jacksons work personaly, but then I have not seen many up close so I cant realy comment. Still, Your right to take this homage off of this gitir.

few more piks. Headstock sealed, decal goes on next then more clear coats.

Looks like this could be realy sweet lookin. But just a quick warning - Leaving your timbers by a radiater is a bad idea, especialy a body or neck blank during glue up.

Cool. me likey I made an explorer years back that weighed 12 lbs. I chambered the crap out of it & put on a maple top. I should have just drilled some big fook off holes in it. this looks groovey man. Although my screwed up little mind wants to paint the body yellow & inlay Jerry (the mouse from Tom & Jerry) running up the fret board. Now I think of it, screw it, You have inspired me, Im building the cheese explorer.

Havent done anything with this for a while so I gave it a few hours this week. Not much, just put some black stain down into the grain & faded it out to my typical edge burst for walnut guitars. Got the sealer coats of clear on aswell. For now it looks like this. Back Front, pup rings still need to be blacked out but I will get to that later.

Sorry man. But im a believer in timber having an affect on sound. Iv even done your experiment a few years ago. But having said that its still well worth doing this just as a learning experiance for your own building. But, to properly do it, you have to eliminate all variables except the body timber. So the hardware has to be the same for each guitar. Cant use cheapo wiring for one & good stuff for the other. Thats another experiment entirely. To do it right you need to make a neck & 3 bodies. All 3 bodies have to be identical, except for the timber species. So if the first body is a 3 piece ash, then the next is a 3 piece mahogany & the third a 3 piece MDF. All routed to the exact same depths etc etc. No finishes can be applied. Use the same bridge for all 3 guitars. I did it with a strat shaped thing. Just assemble one guitar & take a few recordings. Strip it down & transfer the neck, bridge & electronics to the next & record more samples. But you have to record the exact same sound samples as you did with the previous guitar. For the first batch I mounted the pickups directly to the bodies. Then re-did the experiment with the electronics loaded into a pickguard like a strat. Even that had a bit of an affect on the sound, especialy the clean tones. I had a mate record the samples & not let me know which ones I was listening to during the comparison. The differences are not too pronounced, but they are definitly there. The MDF was not all that bad, in some ways it was actualy OK. except for the weight & extreme mess working it made. But to an experianced ear there are definitly differences in sound from one timber to the next.

I did necks on a lathe for about a year. 2 at a time, cut the rear profile for 2 necks as a single bat/log. then run it thru the bandsaw to split them apart. By the time Id clean up the board faces, route for the rods, attach the fret board & profile the headstock/heel bla bla bla, it did not realy save me any time. Iv ended up using a router table with a 1 inch roundover bit if I want to just rough out a few necks now. Attach the blank to a template & run it down the neck as far as I need on each side. saves a lot of time & is much less hassle. Or just carve them with a spoke shave & rasps (I do this mostly) If time is not realy an issue.

usualy you get those soft finish problems if it has not cured properly yet. Id say Let it sit for a while to see if it will harden up, but your comment about your other build has me wondering about if it would make any difference. Has anybody else had this problem with this finish ? maby there is someone on here who can advise on a cure ?

What are the dimension on that ? thickness at the first frett, & body fret.

Sorry bout that, it must be the mediaction - heat & acetone fume combination. making me confused. You are indeed correct, I never fainted, I either passed out, Fell asleep abruptly, Or knocked myself unconscious with the realisation of my own awsomeness.

Few of the Omega custm neck under way. Rock maple, Walnut & Ash laminate. With a walnut headstock. Glued up, levelled & ready for the truss chanel. Getting my typical scarf & volute treatment, scarf will be around the third fret if I get it all correct. Volute will be similar to my shelby model (its up on the forum somewhere) It was going to be getting a wenge board, But im thinking maby ebony now, duno where to go with it. Ill have to make both boards & do a visual with the neck sitting in the body before glue up. Thats it for now. More during the week.

Yea. Plague sucks big time. cant realy do anything when you keep getting dizzy spells, coughing up krud, fainting & vomiting. Especialy vomiting, hocking your guts up into your resperator sucks like you would not believe , but at least its funny when you look back on it. Or at least my mates think its funny. Anyway. few more piks. Back of the beadstock on the Alpha neck. Ash with a wenge board. Heel end. this one is a bolt on. Wenge fretboard polished to 2400 grit. Abalone dot inlays & medium jumbo frets. Side dot markers. usual problem with one not being in line, 9th fret sitting a little low, about 0.5mm toward the back ot the neck. not much but enough to tik me right off. Sorry for the crappy focus here, cameras are not my strong point. Frets need leveling, dressing etc. & finishes need applying as there is only a light sealer on here. I like ash necks like this. the tiny recesses caused by the grain serve to make for an unusual feel, not quite as uniformly slick as a polished maple neck. I find them to be realy easy to move around on & even brand new ones have that funky 30 year old guitar feel to them.