henrim

Decorative designs are out of my comfort zone. I mean I cannot do them myself (nor do I feel urge to attempt) but I can appreciate when some one does them well. Like I said before I feel you have an extraordinary skill to make all those shapes go together. To me the bridge looks like a perfect fit.

I bound the fretboard with birch plywood strips. Also thicknessed the body to final height (at center of the body) by planing 5mm off.

Bound the fretboard with black ABS. And while I think it was technically sound the black-on-black thinking didn’t work as well as I thought it would. In my head I had this idea that even though both black, the two different materials would have been different enough to make an interesting pair. Kinda like matte and glossy black go well together in some places. But it didn’t work very well. The ABS binding blended too much in to the wood and it didn’t really look that good. Stripped the binding off and cut some birch ply strips. To keep them clean I applied danish oil to them before I glue them in place. Need to apply a few more coats and then decide whether I really want to use them. An other alternative is to make a new fretboard without bindings.

Roughly cut the neck and worked the fret ends a bit.

Sawed and planed an angle. Did as much as the stock allowed. Not quite as steep angle what I have done on the scarf jointed necks. Still about 9 degrees.

Truss rod and CF reinforcement channels cut.

Sounds like a challenge. To me the biggest difference between these two guitars is how the horns are shaped. Gibson has more complex curves while Epiphone has a more “mitten like” loose shape.

Neck fitted. Pretty much. Some fine tuning needed but got the worst part done.

Looking at the builds I have done, guitars or what ever, I can always spot errors. So in that sense I guess I leave them. But they are mostly something I didn't see while building. Or in some cases I think I chose not to see them That said, if make a cutting mistake I generally either fix it or redo the piece. Or change the plan and redesign so that the mishap gets removed. On my padouk top single cut I was trying to force myself to get it finished. When I was almost there I dropped my reading glasses on the top which got a small dent. I have no idea how the glasses could have done the dent so maybe it was already there and I only noticed it when I dropped the glasses. Anyway, I first thought I would just leave it there. But couldn't, so I scraped the area, sanded the dent down and spent several days applying shellac to fix it. Now that I have playing the guitar carelessly awhile there are already a couple of bigger dents on it. So was the fix worth it? In my opinion it was

Just to add to the list of possible causes. I had this one superstrat that had a rattling noise I had hard time locating. In the end the noise source was the tremolo arm tip that didn't tighten properly. It was a metal tip though. A drop of Locktite thread locker was the cure.

Yes, that's the thing. I'm afraid using double sided tapes because of creeping. The last roll I bought was good in that sense. At least with a larger surface like a fretboard which stayed solid on table top. Came off easily with a drop of xylene too. Better use xylene than acetone which makes a sticky mess.

That CA glue/masking tape trick is something I should remember to use every here and there. I have seen that used before but when it comes to temporarily fixing two pieces together I don't ever remember that option. Guess it comes from my habits in metal working where you bolt pieces tightly for machining or even tack weld them together to create a temporary bond.

Pocket sized and pickup holes routed/chiseled. I didn’t route recesses for pickup mount brackets as I had planned because I want to fit the neck first and see then how I actually want them.

And this. I hope this change is unintentional and can be reversed without much effort.

Something happened to the type faces on this forum. I’m not 100% sure what the font was before but today regular paragraph text seems more condensed. Harder to read. I’m not visiting front page that often so I can’t really say how it was before but at least now it looks like a total mess with that script font all over the place and every word capitalized.

Got a new flush trim bit and cleaned the sides. Routed the neck pocket roughly. It still needs to be cut to final size and depth.

I was going to route the back side pocket today but I could only trim the top side of the edge with a template bit. I can’t find any flush trim bits to route the rest from the back side. I need a clean edge to position the pocket properly. I know there is a flush trim bit or two in the house somewhere but can’t find one from the usual places. Template bits I have to order but a flush trim bit is more likely to be available locally. If I can’t get one tomorrow I may have to find an other way to position the pocket.

Actually two pieces but I was going to get away with it

Yes, you’re right. About IPA. Not long ago one Friday evening I laughed alone noticing that I had some IPA along with a bottle of hard liquor on my workbench

Sorry about that. Hipshot bridge has wide spacing (Fender, F-spaced) and I happened to have a DiMarzio Super distortion bridge pickup with that wider spacing. Both pockets are now cut to wider length (70mm) so there is plenty space for the pickups to move freely and maybe fit a cover. Neck pickup bobbins are about 1,5mm shorter than the bridge pickup bobbins so they have different margin to the pocket walls. Not much but quite possibly enough to be noticeable. It depends. Anyway the two pickups I had thought putting in to this build (PAF 36th Anniversary for the neck position) have different looking poles too, so I most likely make some sort of covers. Wood or metal. Machined aluminium or stainless steel sheet metal covers would be the most straight forward option for me but I'm tempted to make them of swamp ash. I guess I try ash first and if it doesn't work I go with metal. By "if it doesn't work" I mean more about the looks but the covers would be quite thin walled too so there is some figuring what would be the best way to build them.

Decided to cut a little fat away before calling it a day.

Fixed the template and attached it to the body blank with three screws in places where I put the potentiometers and a switch. Drilled string holes and routed pockets.

Beautiful work! I’m amazed how balanced it looks for such a complex shape.

Tell me about it. I did that one guitar with padouk top, fingerboard and head plate. The body is ash and neck neck is maple. It was a bit tricky to prevent the light colored backside from getting stained when sanding the sides!

Normally there wouldn’t be any difference because the base plate is of same size on normal and F-spaced pickups. Bobbins though are naturally wider on F-spaced ones. This guitar will have back mounted pickups so I want to make the openings just a hair larger than the bobbins. But I have to think this over again because I want the neck and bridge pockets to be same size. My previous back mount guitar has EMG’s so I didn’t have to think about this before. Not probably the biggest problem in the world right now.