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FInally got some finished pics of my cousins. Note the reverse headstock, wooden knobs, neck laminates and engraved bare knuckle pickups!

Well we are going to have to see some damn nice guitars in this competition if anyone is going to beat Alan's Oh well, here goes nothing: Its a black limba body with burl maple top and the usual wenge andmaple accent lines running around the edge. The body has been really drastically carved away on the back for better access - i wasnt sure if it had worked that well (too close to be the best judge sometimes) but the guitar shop who are selling it for me loved it The neck is birdseye maple with a ziracote fretboard with ebony and maple binding. Tuners are the planet waves auto trim ones - i love them. Bridge is a wilkinson trem. Pickups are a bareknuckle crawler humbucker and two bareknuckle mothers milk single coils. They are amazing and i am going to try and stretch to bareknuckle pickups for most of my future guitars . This guitar gives pretty much any classic sound you could hope for, especially with the addition of a bridge coil split and neck adder switch.

Thanks for the compliments guys.

cheers ben, yeah the burst on the jnr is a bit abrupt and the black is probably a bit too wide as well. Its my cousins first attempt at a burst but i figure its got retro charm so we went with it

heres all mine finished: naths is done as well but he's been taking it band practice so i havnt got any pictures yet. The Red singlecut guitar is not going to be refinished in time so thats not going music live but i might see if the guitar shop want this one i have finally finished off: Its a hard ash body with solid wenge neck and Bare knuckle pickups BKP-92. Quite bright but the tone control (0.047 capacitor with 300k pot) is excellent and really does a good job of taming it, its quite a versatile guitar for a single pickup jobbie. It can do all the way from telecaster to proper LP Jnr!

he aint talking about fanned frets! Even wikepedia has slanted and fanned frets down as the same thing. They are wrong In the late sixties-early seventies rickenbacker made some guitars where the nut, frets pickups and bridge were all slanted to 'match precisely the natural angle of the fretting fingers', every string is the same scale, just slanted. they stopped doing it because nobody brought them. I cant find a picture of one on the web but apparently 8 degrees of slant is optimal Heres some info; http://www.guitarplayer.com/story.asp?sect...;featurecode=49

I never managed to get photo's up in time to enter one of mine (I am kinda glad with this much competition) Very hard decision this month... but i had to go with hooglebugs - he's given me a few ideas on things i want to try out. Toddler68's is obviously gorgeous, that finish is enough to make me wet myself. Lots of purple this month!! Godin nearly got my vote because his guitar looks like it would compliment my new bass really well - top notch as usual Rashin - thats bloody impressive!

Thx for the kind words I dont see the Myka thing but i certainly dont mind having my work compared to his I only really went with the wooden pickup covers because i made a mistake routing for the normal sized pickups so enlarging the pickups with wooden covers let me hide/fix that. Its not about having the skill to do it, its about having the need to fix it For me building is an organic process that takes on a life of its own - i was unhappy with the design of the bass neck join from the start and a few things went wrong like the pickup routes. I came very close to scrapping this project a few times, thats a new thing for me! Its only by carrying on and taking the bass to completion that i have come up with something that feels like the best and most original (and maybe even marketable) thing i have ever built. I plan on taking the design further maybe a 6 string through neck fanned fret bass, lots can go wrong there

Nearly done!! The bass just needs a backplate and inlayed truss rod cover: Same with my cousins: This one is put together now and sounds amazing, i have it wired with 5-way switch, master volume with coil tap, master tone and an extra volume for the bridge pickup that overides the 5-way switch so you can have neck and bridge or all pickup combo's. It really does have the best of a strat and les paul: You may remeber this one from 5 pages ago, its just getting oil and waxed then i can put it together. Check out the ziracote fretboards, all the guitars except my cousins have them but this one shows up the best in the photos:

I got pretty good results with the stuff when i used to brush it, infact i got it as good as the spray jobs we are doing now a couple of times. I found when brushing it that it would take a lot more than four coats, but you could do a light coat every 15-20 minutes. I would do about four coats( 1 every 15 mins), leave it an hour, sand out the remaining brush marks, rinse and repeat as neccisary. Now i have my cousin Nath spraying for me and he loves the stuff for its quick dry time and hardness.

I would use the 5-way switch wired as normal with 3 (either v/v/t or v/t/t) push/pull pots. I would have two of the push/pulls as coil splits for the humbuckers and i would have the third as a neck adder switch that overides the 5-way switch and adds the neck pickup to what ever selection you have (i.e bridge and neck together or all 3 pickups). I like doing stuff like this because the guitar appears completely stock so doesnt scare people away but it can still give loads of options Here is what you would get: the red ones are all unique so thats 17 different pickup selctions from 3 pickups. It gives you more of the bridge and neck sounds you might have on a LP or tele and dont usually see on 3 pickup guitars. Although obviously there are no series/parralel switches but i think i would get confused at that point The only thing i would say is make sure you use good pickups, most dont coil split very well and can be a little dissapointing in those settings

If you are doing a solid colour refinish you wont need to strip the body at all, just fill in any dings and sand the body with 240 grit (or close to that) sandpaper to knock the gloss off so the new paint can stick. Black gloss isthe hardest thing to pull off with little equipment because its very unforgiving - every mistake will show and its very hard to get rid of swirl marks. You can use regular car paints which should be freely available, its best to use a compressor and spray gun rather than rattle cans but they will ok for one body, wou will just need a lot of them. Like you said, mask of the fretboard and neck to spray the headstock. Dont sand the back of the neck too much to remove the dings, the last thing you want to see is the truss rod. instead put a small peice of wet cloth over the dings and heat it up with a soldering iron, this should create steam that will swell the wood fibres to their original size and hopefully fill most of the ding. As long as you dont remove anything that is holding tuners or strin trees you can reshape the headstock as you like. There is loads of info on the net about placing bridges in the right place, a quick search should tell you what you need to know!!

Finally things are starting to get finished Heres two of the guitars after the first few coats of Rustins plastic coating: I had a bit of a play with the back of this one (the black limba one), still not sure if it works aesthetically but it should have very easy access.

Not to be confused with me!!

IIRC the Rustins advice is that 'you do not need a sanding sealer' rather than 'dont use a sanding sealer'. We have been using shellac as a sealer.

thanks for the pics, the blue limba does look great.

Looks great but i am sure you promised us some blue limba pics at some point

I think it looks great, you really captured the feel of the manson guitars, heck i might even vote for it.

I have modified some normal black pickup rings before by adding 3 ply b/w/b scratchplate material to the sides to widen them. I wouldnt reccomend it for all guitars but on the one i did it to it looked quite classy. I dont have a better pic but you can just about see the white stripe here on one of my older guitars

So it does, its not intentional though. We started off with a normal strat outline, slimmed it down, lengthened the horns and ofset it slightly. No matter how radical i go i always get someone telling me it reminds them of something else, i dont worry about it anymore. It was bound to happen with a shape like this

gotta be chrome, i like to keep the rest of the guitar plain and simple and let the wood do the talking!!

Batfink is right, shell cannot be laser cut , i had an email from chuck erikson about it explaining the scientific reason. All you really need to know is that it disintergrates. CNC is good if you can find someone to do you a small order

Yeah but when you have one you find a lot more uses for it, and so do all your relatives that suddenly cant be bothered to saw anything by hand (actually thats a good reason not to get one). I have had mine since my second guitar and wouldnt build without it. Its only a little old delta though, cant wait to get something bigger