Mattia

If he wants to build a strat, let him build one. Why? Because it's more fun than assembling, by a long shot. Buy or make templates, read Matt's excellent tutorial on strat building, and go for it!

I completely disagree that you should expect only a mildly playable guitar: thing things through, go slow, think about what you're doing, take your time, and read read read. You can make a complex guitar on your first shot, even without much prior woodworking experience. Worked for me, anyway. The later ones are better, but the first plays wonderfully, rock solid tuning, comfortable neck, no probs. I've seen plenty of more impressive first guitars than mine (mine: carved top semi-hollow set neck PRS type thing, after having assembled a warmoth strat, which taught me little to nothing about construction, but was fun anyway), generally from people with prior woodworking experience, but still. It's possible.

Aww, c'mon! Neck making is a lot of fun, and it really isn't that difficult to do right.

Re: tone, I'd blame the body and the neck, I guess. A 5mm cap isn't going to do much to affect the 'mahogany family' warm, middly tone you'll get out of a limba body. Thicker top, LP style, might have more snap to it, but yeah, a new neck might be the way to go here.

You're definately right here: It's probably not thick enough, but altering the body is not possible anymore unfortunately!

Well, quite. Also, I'm a bit vague on this whole 'curly vs flamed vs tiger stripe vs quilt' thing. I thought 'curly' was a generic term, much like 'figured', whereas things like quilt, flamed and tiger-stripe (subset of flamed) refer the the kind of figure in particular, none of it really clarifying what wood we're talking about. But maybe that's just my problem.

Oh, and NICE guitar :-)

I am not against CF rods. But the two Bubinga stripes are 8mm each which is quite massive, I doubt that CF Rods would made it stiffer. Especially because I would have to route part of the channels for it out of the Bubinga stripes and I suspect this might even make the neck weaker. Youre sure it would be an improvement?

Nah, in that case, probably won't improve things much. But, if it were me, I'd do it anyway. Reason: wood is plastic. It creeps over time under tension, and eventually gets 'set' there. It deforms. Takes years and years, mind you, but deform it does. CF springs back to 'straight'. This said, plenty of guitars out there without them that are fine. I just like to see it as cheap long-term insurance.

Anyway, I think you're right about your original plan: selecting a stiffer piece of harder maple will hopefully help things out. Heck, maybe using something more like a Cocobolo fingerboard (or Brazilian), since both have less damping than ebony, and are nice, dense woods that should have some good snap to 'em. Seems to be a concensus among acoustic builders, anyway, that BRW board guitars have more snap to 'em than ebony ones. Just a thought..

Whats up with the headstock? is that the scarf joint all the way up there past the nut???

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Perfectly normal, bog-standard way of scarfing necks. The vast majority of acoustics are done that way, IIRC, and I've taken to doing my scarf joints that way as well, on both electrics and acoustics.

Two basic ways of doing it: gluing the scarfed bit on 'under' the neck blank, so the fingerboard gluing surface is continuous, or on top, so part of the scarfed on piece becomes part of the gluing surface for the neck. Advantage with this method: you can pretty near hide it completely if you veneer both front and back of the headstock.

CF is good beause it's consistent. And yes, I do have bubinga, and I know it's stiff as heck. Thing is, it's only part of the neck. The CF provides an even stiffness along, and is flexible enough that it shouldn't make a neck too stiff. Gone are any potential dead spots, and you've got a slight additional amount of stiffness if your neck needs it.

Curly (as in flamed, anyway) maple is fairly common in necks (I've got a couple made of striped hard maple), but I've rarely if ever seen quilt used in necks, which is what I think you mean.

Re: tone, I'd blame the body and the neck, I guess. A 5mm cap isn't going to do much to affect the 'mahogany family' warm, middly tone you'll get out of a limba body. Thicker top, LP style, might have more snap to it, but yeah, a new neck might be the way to go here.

Mix, then draw a vacuum to pull any air you've mixed into the stuff out. I've never seen a tutorial, but I've seen it done a number of times on the discovery channel for silicones, epoxies, etc. that need to go into moulds.

Lookin' good! I need to do a bit of thinking as to what exactly I want (I think I'll get m'self some strips of various kinds while I'm at it..) Perry, you got an inner diameter on the curved strips? Ie, suitable for rosettes?

I'm going to contact a few local NL folk, see if they're interested in partaking as well.

'inches of mercury' is the silly merkin non SI way of expressing pressure, which should clearly be in pascals, but just to be a little more 'mainstream' without giving in to weird imperial measures, in mm of mercury ;-)

Seriously though, you need a vacuum of some sort. Pull the air out of the container you're mixing the epoxy in, which will take the bubbles out as well, would be my guess. I can't see it not making a mess if you do it after putting the epoxy in the routers. Old fridge pump should do the trick, although I'm hardly an expert on this kind of topic.

WalMart?

It's a gunstock oil finish, should be easily found. If not, stop by Birchwood-casey's website and ask them for a local distributor.

Methinks he means these two:

Perry: http://www.ormsbyguitars.com/

Jeremy: http://www.lgmguitars.com/splash_guitars.html

for me, if you're epoxy filling, it's an extra reason to radius then route, because you don't need edges that are perfectly perpendicular to the gluing surface, but you DO want the shape to be right after radiussing, not changing shapes as your change the shape of the board. Pre-slotted, radiussed boards are easy enough to find.

Best way to join the dots is the two extreme (first and last fret), and double-check the 12th is the right width.

Thanks alot for the replies. The last neck I built was made of two 8mm wide stripes of quatersawn Bubinga and 3 stripes of curly quatersawn western bigleaf maple topped with an ebony fingerboard. As you see I used only quatersawn wood AND selected the woods to result in a stiff neck in the end. However I am not really happy with the guitars sound. Not enough attack/bite and to mellow for my taste. I suspect it is the neck, but I cannot be sure. Therefore I started building a new neck with the same woods and dimensions except for using flat-sawn curly red maple for the maple parts. I was told that red maple has about the same properties as regular rock maple. The reason I started this thread was that I wonder if this will give me an improvement at all....what do you think? I don't want to alter the curly maple neck look of the guitar....

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I'd be wary of blaming any singular element for the lack of 'snap'. My first place to blame would have to be body wood, then pickups, then hardware, then setup, then neck construction, then neck woods. I'd also reccomend adding a pair of CF rods to your neck, laminations or not.

This said, I'm no expert. I like my mellower tones (I've built, to date, two maple necks, the rest almost all being mahoganies, at least chiefly).

I had some African Walnut (remember I'm in the UK and wood names vary between the UK and US).  It was lovely wood to work with but soft as hell.  I don't think that this type would be suitable for a fingerboard.

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General thought on 'common names':

'African Walnut' (much like so-called 'South American Walnut') isn't actually Walnut. It's just got the name because it's vaguely similar looking, and says nothing about the relative properties. It's like 'Brazilian Cherry', ie Jatoba, has nothing to do with 'real' cherry, and is actually quite a bit harder. To get even vaguely useful descriptions, you should try to figure out which species, or at least which family of species the wood you're talking about is (which particular species of western maple/rock maple you've got doesn't matter as much is whether it's a hard or a soft maple, but f'r example, if you're calling somehting 'Sycamore', you really need to point out whether it's the UK Acer Psuedoplatanus, ie a maple, or an actual US sycamore, a Plane.)

Wikipedia is insanely helpful in this regard, although google should do in a pinch, so it'd be nice to it used more often.

General rule with pretty much all sanding where you want to maintain an accurate surface: use sanding blocks of various shapes. Cheap and easy to make, and they'll be more accurate than your fingers.

I'm with Perry, for the same reason, and I know Craig Lavin does 'em this way too, and I'm fairly certain people like Grit Laskin do as well.

Yeah, but gluing a few cleats for support is easily done.

Ha! No. I just thought it was funny that you said necks were "holding up fine" because they're not. Without the rod they'd be bananas. It just sounded funny the way you made your comparison. That's why my first point was to agree with the feasibility.

To a point, I'd say. There are quite a number of guitars out there that play just fine for a very long time, sans rod, including acoustics. As I see it, the rod's there to correct slow creep over time, to maintain a constant amounts of relief (which could, theoretically, be adjusted on the 'board itself), not for neck reinforcement. A set of 9's isn't exactly a huge amount of tension. If I want to reinforce my necks (and I do, all of them, because it's cheap insurance), I use carbon fibre.

Slot the board, then taper it, then radius (although this bit's debatable) then inlay. Makes centering dots (if that's what you're doing) a whole lot easier; you simply draw diagonals from the edge of the fret slots, making an 'X' in the fret in question, and voila, instantly centred in both directions.

Mark the centreline, mark the nut width, and the width at the end of the fingerboard. Connect the dots (scribe it with something), fill with some chalk or similar, and use a good old hand plane (or a router if you must) to trim the fingerboard to the right size. Quick and fun, what's not to love?

Depends on the chunk of wood. As a rule, figured wood has higher dampening than non-figured, but it depends on the piece.

As for softness, I don't know if that's a useful criteria in general. For maples, maybe (although mandolin necks? often made of flatsawn soft maple), but mahogany's softer than bigleaf maple, and is a lovely neck wood.

Works fine, although I've never done more than 4 a day, usually I stop at 5. Nice, thin, just barely wet coats, let 'em dry for an hour or two, coat over the top. Takes a month++ to cure (for lacquer; minimum 2 weeks for waterbase) anyway.

Question here: why hollow it? At standard size, a solid WRC body would already be 2/3 the weight of an equivalent mahogany body, maybe about the same as the lightest Swamp Ash you're ever likely to find.

I've been playing with the thought of building a WRC guitar, but I've got too many others that need building first. If I find that one special piece of wood though, who knows what'll happen...

Yeah, my method really only applies to previously hollowed out (ie, seperate top) bodies. I pretty much only build that way, so I tend to assume that as a given. Oops. The resawing method's the way to go otherwise, or if it's something like mahogany, simply a piece from further up the board can provide a good match.

My method, step by step:

1) Take guitar

2) Flip guitar onto its front, exposing the back

3) Mark out electronics cavity shape

4) Scribe around the line with a nice, sharp, new #11 blade do give the dremel something to follow.

5) Get dremel in a router base (like, your inlay setup) with the smallest diameter bit/end mill you can find.

6) Route along the line you just marked very carefully, taking many small steps. If the back is flat, I'd say make a template and use that

7) Once the cover's loose, clean up the edges, and add binding to the cover (or several layers of veneer, whatever works for you) so it fits nice and snug.

Done.

Dude, by all means. Y'know that bit where I'm a wood addict? It's not just stuff I can buy/I own m'self. I'm perfectly happy to look at other people's 'wood porn'. I encourange the posting thereof, in fact.

I ain't sure, but my bet is on Wall of Death.

Might be a tad soft for fingerboards, methinks. Honestly, while I suspect some guitars have been made with walnut 'boards (stained so you can't tell, most like), and I've seen a few acoustic guitar bridges made of Walnut (when weight was the issue), I'd simply use the stuff for necks.