demonx

Tasmanian Blackwood neck carved today, body Queensland maple with Sassafras top.

Roughed out with power tools, the rest of the carve is then done old fashioned hand tools and elbow grease:



After a bit of lovin':

that Rimu looks killer with clear on it. Nice job.

Sully

Yeah, I can't wait to get that one sanded up and painted as it's going to pop so much.

Not many update pics as I've been busy building a bench with shelves and building large doors that are like two gates for the CNC room.

Anyway, this is the first top I've carved for 2014. Rimu.

More necks carved today, here's one of them:

Black Limba Neckthru
Tasmanian Blackwood Back
Cocobolo top
Honduran Mahogany headstock with Black Limba cap

It's all on video if you jump on YouTube and search "Searls Guitars Part" and I can't remember which part is neck carving, but if you watch them all they're pretty short videos, you'll get there eventually.

I do fit the fingerboard first, then I carve back to the board. Most of my carving is done by rasp.

Bit more progress on the Rimu topped guitar.

Neck rough carved:



Scarf joint area rough carved and after a quick sand to see where its at:



Heel area rough shaped and quick sanded to see how it feels:



Neck given a quick sand to 320 to see the flamed figure a little bit more:

Another random video we shot today on the spur of the moment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtmPZsU5xVA&feature=youtu.be

I wrote this for my facebook page but I thought I'd post it here for the new guys as well.

Cheers

Allan

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TONEWOOD: MYTH AND MAGIC OR BULLCRAP?

Everyone who has had a custom guitar built for them has heard of Tonewood. The magical forces of nature creating the perfect pieces of timber that combined in the right combination create the exact sound we're looking for and if tapped in the right spot in the right wind direction will ring like a bell and sing like an angel.

Or is it all bullshit?

There will always be people who are 100% convinced that this timber makes the guitar sound like this and so forth, but does it really? It's one of those arguments like is God real, however in the Tonewood debate it's scientifically been proven to be fact and its also scientifically proven to be myth.

So which one is it?

So lets start with something that isn't argued. It has been agreed to be fact by the guys on both sides of the fence that in an electric guitar, the pickups contribute to at least 90% of the sound.

So if pickups are 90% of the sound, whats the 10%? Surely it can't be everything? YES! Everything else! Bridge and strings which are the next two most influential components in the sound of an electric guitar, and then after all that the Tonewood. All of that is divided up in the measly 10%

Now if we were looking at a acoustic guitar or a violin, there is no pickup, so all of a sudden the Tonewood becomes a much higher percentage. For example Tonewood used on the top of an acoustic is the most influential timber in the guitar etc etc, however in this case, we are discussing electric guitars with high gain pickups. But when it comes to peoples education on the matter, most of it comes from the books or papers written on guitar building by old school luthiers, most of which are educated from the Acoustic world. The knowledge used for them to build acoustics they just transferred straight over to electrics and then everyone just repeats all this like mindless parrots as if its all the same for electric guitars.

An example (and if you search the net you'll find hundreds of examples - I've even seen guitars made from concrete!)

A colleague of mine once built two guitars. One from quality "tonewood" and the other from cheap hardware shop Pine. Recorded one, swapped the hardware over and recorded the other. The recordings were made public for people to guess and they sounded virtually identical, so much so that it was 50/50 as to which was the Tonewood. I myself listened to these two samples and buggered if I could tell which is which.

So whats my stance?

I get asked all the time what my guitars sound like. I respond they sound like whatever pickup you put in them. If It's a Bareknuckle warpig, then it'll sound like a Bareknuckle Warpig. If you get that pickup and put it in a Fender, then all of a sudden that Fender will sound like a Bareknuckle Warpig, not a Fender. That pickup is high gain enough to override any influence the "Tonewood" has. Sure it may sound slightly different in each guitar, but it'll still sound like a Warpig. If you take out the Warpig and throw in an EMG, then all of a sudden it sounds like an EMG.

If you put an EMG in a guitar do you really think it matters sound wise if the guitar has a Maple or Rosewood board? You can get two identical guitars with rosewood boards, they'll both sound slightly different. You can get two identical guitars with the exact same specs and same pickups and most of the time they will still sound slightly different. That's the way it is.

So if the Tonewood only makes such a tiny difference, can we hear it?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In reality though, it's such a tiny difference with high gain pickups that you can walk over to your amp, tweak the knobs just a bit and its the same as if it were a different timber.

I've had other builders say to me: "How can you build a guitar that is all Mahogany, you can't have more than X% Mahogany oterwise the sound will be too deep and muddy" - well, um. Yeah. Guess I've proved that one wrong time and time again. Don't believe everything you read kids!

When I'm dealing with a new customer and planning out a build with them, I suggest they choose the pickups first and build the guitar around that. Choose the bridge second. Choose the strings third. Tonewood I advise to be selected for looks and for stability, as the looks and stability (in my opinion) offer much more influence in the build than their tonal characteristics will will be overruled by the pickups and amp. What I mean by stability is the guitars ability to stay in one piece over it's lifetime and not fall apart, bend, warp, split etc. Longevity.

There will always be people that want to argue this, I say whatever. I'm offering my opinion as a builder and player and you are more than welcome to your own. Sure there are always going to be other variables, but I'm breaking this down for the new guy without using words that have to be looked up on a dictionary, to the guitar player who has little understanding, so he or she will able to make some simple decisions based on what is made out to be way more complex than it really is.

I had to spray a couple guitars today, after spraying them I had a bit of left over clear in the gun, so I grabbed some offcuts from current builds to see the color difference in timber before and after clear.

This is Dayne's Rimu top, you can see the inner part has no clear and the top has an explosion of color now, add to that the contrast in darkness between the clear and uncleared. This top will look amazing once it's cleared!

Thats great news for you Doug. Hope it all works out.

I'm yet to be approached by any well known artists, as most builders probably do I get the weekly requests for "freebies" as you called them, small name artists just wanting a free anything they can get their hands on.

I've taken the stance that: If the person doesn't want my guitar enough to pay for it they don't want it enough to own it.

I can see however that having endorsement is a massive tool, I'm just not in a position to be giving out freebies. I had a discussion with a local luthier (acoustic scene) who has some pretty big name artists using his guitars, in his multiple decades of building he's only given away two guitars and he said he regretted it both times. Today is a different world however.

Every now and then during the build process we like to play hardware dress ups with the guitar just to see how its looking!

Pre drilled depth holes act as depth gauges while routing, they also give me a hole to drop the router bit in when turning it on.

A couple progress pics:

I started rough cutting bodies today, here is the Rimu & Flamed Maple one:

This is the closest shape I've done to what you're building. I did all these bevels by hand. Started out with greylead lines, took them close with a rasp, then swapped to a bastard file to take them to the lines. This pic was taken while they were still rough and not all balanced out yet.

Nice! What kind of resin are you using? I'm going to use z-poxy finishing resin for grain filling on my current project. I've heard it works well for what you are doing also.

West systems

Thought I'd share this pic.

It's Spalted Sassafras. What I have done is poured epoxy over it and rubbed it in, the spalt soaks it up, then I repeat and repeat until there is a epoxy film over the timber. This has to be done before I can do any routing to the spalt otherwise I risk it falling apart.

In this pic you can see the clean edge (towards the bottom) where after the spalt has been stabilized I was then able to safely run it over the jointer. In this case there wasn't a whole lot of spalt in that particular area which makes it even safer.

That was a great video about timbers, grain, work-ability, etc. Thank you!

I say that should be pinned in the tutorial section. I have made several bad choices on past projects, and would have benefited from your advice.

Finishing options would be a nice accompaniment to a tutorial. E.g., 'oil' means very different things to internationals builders.

And I like your selections for the current builds.

I might do some finishing videos in the future and touch in a few points. I'll try make an effort to do a few more spontaneous videos through these builds

Any topics people want me to address specifically? Don't be afraid to ask, even if it seems trivial

Whats your scarf joint procedure? Are the headstocks already cut out before you glue them?

As for the procedure, I simply cut, clean up the surfaces and clamp. You can find it all on my YouTube channel beginning to end, "Searls guitars part 1" - a lot of my methods have changed since that video but here's still lots of stuff on there that's the same

The heatwave here has started to die down, so I'm back in the workshop. Started this LP 7 string.

Here are the neck blanks for the current six builds, three in this pic have scarf joints in clamps

A pre planned wiring channel:



and the neck with a fresh routed truss rod slot to go with the above body:

Welcome to the forum

Start yourself a build thread and get into the mix of things asap!

The five neck blanks of the new builds in various stages of scarf jointing

You remember those marble cakes we used to always want when we were kids with all the colors swirled around?

That's the vibe I'm going for on this build. Stringers would break that up (fix the contrast as you suggested) which is the opposite of what I normally do.

I want the colors to wash into each other. It's an overkill guitar but not in a gordy way like the Clancy star I built, I'm still trying to keep this one classy.

Welcome to the forum.

I just replaced the fingerboard on a customers guitar two weeks ago - if I knew there was a newbie wanting to do it I would have snapped some progress pics.

In a nut shell I used a heatgun to heat up the existing board (technically the glue underneath) and pried it off with a paint scraper. I thin used a scraped (wood carving scraper, not paint scraper) to clean up the surface and simply made a new ziricote fingerboard to replace the rosewood one. I replaced the truss rod while I was there as it was the reason for the repair in the first place.