thegarehanman

i've got 4 routers, my slowest runs at 27k rpm's, the fastest is (don't quote me on this) 37.5k rpm's.

so here's a progress report:

-the top has had the back carved and has now been glued to the body

-the inside has received its shielding and has been sealed with vinyl sealer, black laquer will follow shortly

-the truss rod and CF rod(s) pockets have been routed and the CF has been glued in place and trimmed to length.

-the peghead has received its ebony overlay and all neccesary drilling(on the peghead) has been completed

-the control area has had the holes drilled to accept all electronics and a hole has beenmade in the side to accept the stereo jackplate

-the back of the guitar has been cut out and is about 1/2 way done with carving

-and i now have amazingly high quality maple humbucker rings

ah, prs had it coming. paul's always willing to sue other people anyhow. as far as i'm concerned, it's a fairly blatent rip-off of a les paul. i'm not saying the prs singlecut is a bad guitar; i'll take one any day. i'm just saying they could have altered the shape a bit more(as opposed to just the carve of the top) to make it less obvious.

wes, if you want i would be willing to do a write up on that laminate tapering technique with pictures if you'd put it up on the main site. it'd have to wait a month or so though, this guitar i'm working on is top priority.

the guitar i'm working on(which is posted as "neck thru semihollow" in the work in progress section) has a neck tapered all the way through. also, every single laminate in it is tapered. that's the only way i feel comfortable doing it. tapering each laminate give the laminates a more even look as the neck tapers towards the headstock. it's a piece of cake to do if you have a thickness planer. i just countersunk holes in each end of the laminate and screwed it to a (perfectly straight) pine 2x6 with a spacer at one end holding the laminate at an angle. a few passes through the planer and you've got a perfect triangle...or trapezoid, whatever.

i used indoor/outdoor carpet to redo a cab of mine. it looks just like the carpeted cabs you'd get from jbl or that you see bands touring with. the carpet is incredibly durable and forgiving. I did a perfect job of putting it on with just some carpet adhesive and a staple gun. It's so easy to hide the seam too. Carpet won't rip like tolex.

my $.02

schaller tuners are my fav.

*EDIT* i'm so fanatical about them i bought my girlfriend a set of their special pegs for her violin *EDIT*

I'm gonna need a case for this, i know i could build a good one, but i don't know if i want to dedicate the time to it. does anyone know if ibeam cases does carved top/back cases?

i use a sliding compound mitre saw with a wedge of wood(85 degrees) against the fence. You can lock it in place too. Cuts the wood perfectly and then you have both your neck and your headstock mitred.

we play the ones we build...

MDF stands for "Medium Density Fiberboard." It's the wood you see at home depot or lowes with no grain. It's essentailly sawdust and glue shaped into a board. You can get it really smooth too(assuming you're using the right technique), so it can be good for templates.

it's solid? the only difference should be asthetic assuming it's joined well. i made a blank for a les paul out of 5 pieces because i wanted it thick like the old specials. the boards were joined so well that the joints were almost imperceptable. what it really comes down to(with me) is how well they match up the grain of the boards, do it right and no one will ever notice it but you.

*EDIT* too slow with the submit post button i guess, *EDIT*

I am building an archtop semi hollow right now. as i understand it, you can expect substantially less feedback if you used wax or epoxy potted pickups. I'm using kent armstrong potted PAF's and an X-bridge by lrbaggs. i know the bridge block(or tone block, whatever) is normally a seperate piece of wood. I integrated the block into the top as i was carving, i simply didn't carve the section underneath the bridge. It's a neck-thru so this uncarved "block" will get glued to the neck. there is also a very tiny block in the back of the guitar to avoid any damage to the back. The ribs(which are also typically glued on) are also integrated. I'm confident this will give enough resonance for a good semi hollow sound and still enough sturdiness to avoid excessive feedback.

the epoxy is a valid idea. i'll probably wait until i'm further down the road to decide because i could very well have to order a few more things from stewmac. i think i have all of what i need...but you know how these things work. As for the dovetail, regardless of the orientation of the dovetail in relation to the grain, the dovetail has more gluing surface than the wood. that combined with the fact that the glue is stronger than the wood gives me great confidence. you also have to remember that there will be a maple top and back. realistically, the only reason i was entirely sold on the dovetail was because i wanted to put the poplar and ebony in the joint for asthetics. Anyhow, no offense taken.

about 4" remains at each end of each wing. so there's about 8" of dovetail total for each wing. That had been my plan all along though. Had I not routed away that much, the guitar wouldn't be so semi-hollow. more like semi-semi-hollow, ha. if it were a butt joint, you could be concerned, but considering the inate strenght of a dovetail, everything is just chipper. The dovetail looks really nice at the ends where I opened it up and added strips of poplar and ebony inbetween the mahogany too.

*EDIT* I was always under the impression stewmac had a $30 minimum purchase, but maybe not. *EDIT*

haha...decimals. you don't paint your guitars w/ road tar too?

Man! I just ordered 700bucks in parts and i forgot side dot material! it seems everyone that sells it has a minimum order and it isn't $2. would anyone be willing to sell(or give ) me a few inches of black side dot material and just mail it in an envelope.

if you use bondo, be really sure to use enough hardener. in my first car, a 1986 nissan 300zx, i stripped down the whole body to metal to repaint it. I found a spot that had been bondoed and the bondo was still soft! needless to say, not enough hardener.

paint gun

I'm looking into buying an economy paint gun. For the last few times I've needed one I've borrowed it(just the gun) from a friend. I don't do tons of finishes a year and i can put out a pretty good finish with a bottom of the line gun. Is this gun acceptable? I noticed it has a 8mm nozzle, but from searching the forum, it looks like 8mm is a pretty good size for nitrocellulose laquer(sp?).

bandsaw and sandpaper and a neccessity.

when i have a neck laminated from several different woods, i use a dremel and foredom bit to shape it.

when the neck is one wood, i use a spokeshave.

those fordom(sp?) bits are amazingly better than dremel's. they just don't wear out, and they cut a lot better to begin with.

As of now I'm using a siphon feed "touch up" paint gun for painting my guitars and equiptment. However, I've seen a lot of people use gravity feed guns and it seems like a gravity feed gun would waste less paint(due to a siphon's feed tube). Can anyone tell me the advantages and disadvantages of a gravity feed gun vs. a siphon feed gun? Also, how does a pressure feed gun stack up to them?

Black isn't hard to get right as long as you're spraying it on a very flat surface and you spray it on nice and even. the reason why people say black is hard is because it will show any dips(etc.) in the wood that you did not sand out, and any runs in the paint stick out like a sore thumb. my first car was a 1986 nissan 300zx turbo, i shaved the door handles on it and then painted the hole thing black. and i did it all right in my garage. everyone thought the paint looked great. sooo what i'm getting at is...(drum roll please)...black paint is completely do-able. i say go for it.

*edit*poor grammar strikes again! *edit*

like i said. i already painted them. they look just as good as that too. i actually painted them 3 years ago when i built the guitar. you can take a glance at them on the link in the thread for the new guitar i'm building in the works in progress section.

I have a bit of an idea how glad i'll be i have the recording. we're actually quite popular in our town. we're right outside of new orleans. so i have all of the newspaper clippings and different flyers that were put out for our gigs. I figure the cd will also be valuable in auditioning for bands at LSU too.

Painting pickup rings works fine. You can do it so well people won't know they weren't that color originally. When I was building my first guitar, I tried to get truely white pickup ring. Everything was cream, nothing was as white as i wanted. I ended up spraying them with auto paint(as I did with the whole guitar) that had a flex agent added to it.