djobson101

I'm curious about those Slick humbuckers, I've bought varities of the GFS humbuckers/single coils and was always very happy with the way they sounded. Great results with your work, glad to see it come together nicely!

Thanks all for the insight on this guys. Hoping I'll be able to dedicate a few solid nights to making a plan & working it out now that the holiday/new year madness isn't pulling me away from the guitars. I was thinking what might be a good idea to try, since I will undoubtedly get good use out of it in the future, is to build myself the thicknessing jig from the other thread in this section (thank you @Prostheta) The gluing surface of this top could probably lose about 1/16" - 1/8" to be in good shape to move forward, which is good because I forgot to mention too that there is still the remnants of the profile/coves/whatever it is that millwork guys call it on the back of these oak boards. I had run them through my old man's planer to get rid of them, but I was in somewhat of a rush that day, the blades on the planer were near the end of their life and I think the oak may have been the proverbial straw, if the blades were a camel If nothing else, using the oak will push me to get some nicer tools. Somehow I don't think the $5 rasp set I currently have from Harbor Freight will hold up to working on this

Not entirely, with the oak - it did happen to be in the right spot when the thought crossed my mind I suppose but I've been wondering for some time why I don't see or hear much about oak being used for guitars, I'm starting to think there's probably some good reasons not to?

That is one seriously cool guitar!

Some repairs. I am not sure what kind of wood this is that I'm using for filler, at the end of the summer I had broken down a bunch of pallets to use the woods for various little jigs and chachkies. Any guesses?

The main thing to get out of the way so far was to add some structural-ness to the thing, I am really confused why they did the neck this way. Both the half circle holes go a ways down into what should normally be a pretty sound area of the neck joint? And below that, the wood was so thin that it broke away, and what was actually underneath was the top, which was plywood. In the picture below, the treble side of the neck still had the thin strip of the neck there before I chiseled it away. I also cut away the pickup routs because they were so uneven inside it just bothered me, and if there is going to be a new top anyways this stuff will be mostly hidden.

Hello, After perusing threads of all the beautiful instruments being built on this site, I've gotten motivated enough to get started with a build of my own. Although I am planning on build from scratch at some point, to start off I'm doing quite a bit of work to an old beater LP copy, to work out some methods and basically a guitar to screw up on. The guitar was sitting in my folks' attic for the last 10 years or so. It was a bit of a beater in it's time, the playability of the thing was pretty lousy from what I remember. Well anyway, my brother had acquired it in conjunction with buying an old car or something, his buddy's dad had yanked it out of a dumpster somewhere. They promptly covered it with punk band stickers and from what I imagine it had a pretty short life before they had unsuccessfully tried to smash the neck off the body, but in the process the fretboard was totally knocked off... From there all the electronics and hardware were stripped and in the attic it went, so I snatched up a crumby shell to get to work on. So the plan is, I've begun filling in areas that needed desperate attention and will make new, cleaner routs than what was existing. The truss rod rout for instance was about 3/4" wide! I would like to chamber the body as well and put a top with f-holes. The cool thing too I guess is that now I will be able to practice cutting a fretboard and doing fretwork for the first time. I am planning on converting the scale length to 25.5", just because I have pretty lanky hands and never felt too comfortable on Gibson scales

Looks nice! What color hardware are you going with?

These are some oak wall panels that I obtained from my folk's house, they are about 1/2" thick. One additional question I have, is that I have a slight cup to this "top" - will this be acceptable to let the clamping take care of, or would it be good to address this before I start gluing things together?

This thing is pretty horrendous. Since I took these photos I've been epoxying some hardwoods into some of these really... questionable areas, like the rout for the selector switch wiring that is over an inch wide for some reason. And the truss rod cavity as well I adhered a strip into, to re-rout in the future because it too was much too wide in what is already a real flimsy neck

I am trying to make a punch list for my current project, and am having some deliberation on the order of operations for the top. Basically what I have is an old import LP copy that I have been tearing apart and dressing it with some better quality woods for improvement - I figure this is good practice before I start building one from scratch. I'm not sure what wood the neck and back are made of, maybe you guys will know if I can figure out getting some pictures on here. My old man suspected it was meranti? Anyway, the "top" just had to go, it was pretty much a piece of thin plywood that was bent/pressed over a little block that was adhered to the back for the bridge and tailpiece bushings to go into. I realize putting effort into this guitar is only really fruitful for sentimental attachment more than anything (a friend's dad found this thing in a dumpster when we were in high school ), but again I think it will be a fun way to sort of cut my teeth on guitar building. I'm in the process of making templates to rout hollow chambers in the body, and then I'm planning on having a carved top with f-holes. This is sort of where I'm scratching my head as far as which thing to do first. Is it wiser to cut the f-holes before or after carving? I will get some pictures going here shortly.

This pair of guitars is looking outrageous. Very nice to peruse through this thread and watch them coming to life!

Very cool! That is exactly what I was hoping to have a try at, @Prostheta. Looks like a nice jig to have around for other jobs too. Thanks muchly @RobSm!

Hey guys, I was thinking of ways to experiment with using a router to carve a top. Basically, what I was thinking would be a cool way to attempt to do this would be to set up guide rails on the base of my router, similar to a straight guide but instead of a straight edge, somehow manage to incorporate a bearing as the "guide" for the router to follow the shape of the body. I would probably start with the deepest cut/closest to the edges of the body, and then slowly increase the distance between the bit and the guide, each pass moving more inward to the center of the body while before each pass, raising the cut depth a little bit so the graduations follow the body perimeter shape. I have done a little searching and I'm not really sure what exactly I'm looking for, so I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction or suggest a similar method to what I'm trying to do. The router I have is a Makita RP1800. Thanks in advance for any info. And also Merry Christmas!

I ended up grabbing the tap and die, worked just fine. Thanks again!

Well, I don't have a tap and die set or the bushing puller so I think I might invest in the bushing puller, because down the road I could probably get more use out of it maybe during a refinish or something. A nice tap and die set looks more expensive than the puller and I wouldn't want to spend money on a tool like that unless I'm ready to spring for one of the nice high quality sets. Anyways thank you for the pointers, much appreciated!

I'm trying to fix up a borrowed guitar right now (LTD FX400) which has the basic Gibson style stop tailpiece. It was sitting around in a storage unit our band shares and being the guitarist/fixer upper guy I told my buddy I would go through the guitar and get it up and running again - it's been neglected/unstrung and missing parts for awhile. Anyways the first major problem I noticed is that one of the anchors where the stud mounts for the stop tailpiece is really out of whack. You can only thread the stud down about 1/4 of the way before the stud itself sits at an angle toward the headstock end of the guitar (basically it is far from being totally perpendicular to the body of the guitar) and you cannot drive it any further. My guess would be that there is some horrible cross threading in the anchor, because the stud appears to be pretty straight. Not sure how to go about fixing this, would it be better to attempt to pull the anchor out of the body, trying to bore it out to replace it with a new one? Or are they typically glued in pretty good. Any ideas or advice would be hugely appreciated thank you!

Cool. Well, I'll probably just go for it. I do like hard mounted pickups, but I don't want to bother with trying to hide the screw holes from the pickup rings. Plus now I will get to choose a snazzy pickguard to make this otherwise plain guitar a little cooler. I guess this will be one of those 'point of no return' decisions

So this might be an obvious question, but here goes. I'm thinking about slapping a pickguard on one of my guitars for no other reason than I can't stand the pickup rings around the two humbuckers (It's an Ibanez RG). Pickguards are easy to find for these and I'm just going to assume that they are mostly a uniform shape since the bodies are all pretty much identical. Here's the thing, to accommodate for the pots and the selector switch, I would need to get rid of some wood on the body. I'm wondering if by doing this it's going to have a significant impact on the sound of the guitar... even though it would just be a tiny bit of wood done away with, would it be a bad idea to have a hole that goes all the way through the guitar where the electronic cavity is?

Wow, a Kahler and synth access on a mandolin shaped guitar.. that's pretty wild!

Wow, nice work you guys do! Above and beyond what I was hoping to find as far as getting a look at that design in it's components. Very much inspiring too, to invest in building some guitars.. I'm working on a body at a friend's shop and am really starting to take a liking to guitar building (looking at the 'in progress' threads is always great fun to see some really nice guittys coming to life). And thanks again for the links guys!

Hey, nice idea for the pickup mounting. Looks like it will become a cool guitar.. Have to say too I love that depth gauge

Is there any chance it's coming from the spring claw area? I remember reading that on some guitars Vai taped pieces of tissue paper into the spring cavity to reduce different vibrations. Not sure if this helps.

Is anyone here into the 'Stephen's Extended Cutaway' heel design? I've had a jones to play with it, and by that I mean try to build it (and expecting probably to foul it up on the first try, because it looks tricky). I'm just looking for suggestions, how would those of you experienced in the field rate the difficulty of this joint? Ranging from easy for a person with basic woodworking skills, to difficult for a skilled builder?

Right on, thanks. Well I'm planning on replacing the body entirely, so I'll make sure to measure... a lot of times