pan_kara

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Nice save with the inlay. This is all done by hand? Looks really tight. Why did the two bolts have to go? The lip on the neck was too thin to screw into?

so this is after clearcoating? when I did my magic marble swirl I think I shot a coat of shellac to separate the swirl from the nitro that I then painted on. (but I think the problem that I gon in scrap tests was that the nitro dissolved the swirl, not cracking)

so 23 fret guitars are becoming a thing now, I see. maybe I should have joined in then .. I think I actually prefer the neck pickup under the 26th fret, not 24th. That way when you plat the 14th fret you maximize the weird effect of the second harmonic being almost not picked up by the pickup giving the funny "quack". I like to have the quack when I bend the G string on the 14th fret. I had it that way in an el cheapo guitar NNN years ago. 24 frets and HSS.

really? I didn't notice.. why, you're a fan of the major 7th? Or you like your blues in C? That guitar is not for me so I preferred to stick to more common specs and had to fix it.

I actually like the way the padouk only shows through the top on the hips, instead of all around (except the cutaways). It plays with the outline in interesting ways. For fingerboard I second the ideas above - I'd personally consider one of the three - black ebony to contrast the rest, padouk to match the .. padouk and maple but straight maple, not busy maple.

hah since you guys missed it I'm maybe not that bad count the fret slots. there's 23. I seem to have a thing for messing up fingerboards recently. At least this one could be saved as it was supposed to be 22 frets so I just had to trim it down, the only pain was the fact that I already did the binding. But its ok now. Glued to the neck and with side dots etc (in that picture the side dots were not yet there, what you see is dirty binding :P) but coming back to the strat - I had two new fingerboard blank arrive, maple and rosewood. So now I need to pick the replacement board for this build and redo it and finally move on. I thought of maple to balance the mostly-dark neck woods and match the accent lams in the scarf joint, but I think I'll go with the rosewood. It has some of the "follow the fanned frets" quality in the grain and could work well with the body that I'd like to swirl in the end. So time to re-cut the frets.

ok, you win I have no place to put a bandsaw so I'm stuck with buying ready-made tops @charisjapangood job with the fingerboards. you're planning to give them how long to settle down?

its funny how the combination of pine and satin finish makes me think IKEA at first glance, but then you notice the uniform straight grain, the "eyes" that it creates in the sides .. awesome! She turned out really nice. Love the body profiling you're keeping the electronics cavity open?

wow I did neck and headstock thicknessing with a hands saw but never fingerboards I guess whoever does a bookmatched maple drop top by hand wins

wow, this is going to be pretty cool!

Basically you need to put a lighter set on to get similar string tension when maintaining tuning but going longer scale. Compare for example the open A string and the low E fretted at the 5th fret - its the same note, but the vibrating length of the A string is longer now that the E string is fretted. And the A string is thinner than the E string. So as you increase scale length you'd need to get strings thinner. You can check any of the string tension calculators available online, apparently going from 25,5" to 27" is more or less compensated by taking a sting set lighter by one "step". So to reproduce the feel of 10's on 25,5" you'd need to put 9's on 27". (just checked on http://stringtensionpro.com/)

Some incremental progress on this build over the weekend. I'm finally getting along with the planing jig and flattened the front of the guitar: I'm leaving the section where the fingerboard will go untouched for now, when the fingerboard is in place I'll flatten the remaining bit. Routing down throught the sealer layers exposes more of what the body was made of - apparently it was pine blocks covered from the top and bottom with plywood. I'm slowly starting to eat into the plywood now. Here's a shot of the back after planing: and the body clamp-down mechanism - a lmi neck clamp run through one of the dog holes in the table: In parallel with this build I have two other guitars going and a bass.. and mistakes are not exclusive to this build. I've been binding two fingerboards recently, before gluing them to their necks, and .. what's wrong with this one?

ah, so that was the trick

so it this build going to be completely router-free? I built my first few guitars without a router, but I did use a dremel on a base to do things like the neck pocket and pickup cavities.

So apparently nobody asked yet: why 27" scale? Is this going to be a baritone, or you just want to go with normal tuning and a long scale? I love the design, on the other hand all the little slip-ups during building so remind me of my own work

looks great with the green burst! So what makes this new sealer ok, as opposed to previous one(s)?

and that's gonna be some switching system!

wow, cool build! Sounds great too! funnily enough I have a Kotzen Tele planned for the next round too (but with much fewer mods, probably just angled headsock and different heel design and maybe slightly different woods). Doest the original use EVO gold too or was that your addition? I love how gold frets work with gold/brown guitars, I was also thinking to go with these. Did you use any special trick for doing the binding channel over the armrest?

Anyway, use case - I used this to trim to fingerboards yesterday evening. The trick here is to secure everything down so I used the dogs in the table to lock down the fingerboard (putting another one below so that I don't route into the table surface) and then clamped down the prespex from both ends, fine-tuning the position of the edge of the cut: then its just a few quick passes (maybe I could do one with a spiral bit, but I prefer to do several to avoid tearout), repear for the other side and done result: There, maybe its stupidly simple, but works great. The middle of the same prespex sheet will have a channel for routing for truss rods, also with a guide bushing - I think I saw that done by @KnightroExpress and that triggered the idea.

Yea, I think I'm gonna do exactly that. Haven't decided on the new fretboard yet plus I had to finally do some overdue jig work - my router planing jig was something I wasn't getting along with since the beginning so that was up for an upgrade, I got a bunch of plexi sheets with the intention of making templates and jigs with those. Basically I think I'm going to slowly transition to the use of guide bushings (in combination with spiral bits) with the router instead of bearing-guided cutters. At least for things like cutting out bodies. I don't have a bandsaw and currently only have a 8mm/1/4" router so it is a bit of a pain. While I was at it I came up with this very simple arrangement for cutting straight lines with the router. I always did this in the past by setting up a fence and then in one way or another tried to figure out where exactly to position the fence to have the line cut in the exact location I wanted. For things like cutting fingerboard taper I'd usually cut 1mm overside on each side and then sand it down to size. (I did also use a shooting board and a plane for that in the past). I figured with a guide bushing and a piece of plexi I can set up something that will let me do this very easily and with good precision. So here it is, don't laugh, this is probably the very first thing described in any book on routing with guide bushings, but whatever - I'm going to share this here, maybe somebody will profit. Start with a relatively long piece of plexi, about 8-10mm thick and set up a straight fence. It could be mdf I guess, though I think for this particular application plexi will work better. I put a 10mm straight bit in the router and run along the face, cutting a ledge. The width of the ledge is somewhere around 6-8mm and the depth matches the depth of the guide bushing when attached to the router base, like this: So now I switch over the router to the base with the bushing and install the cutter that I want to be using with this jig - in my case a straight 6mm cutter (to be eventually replaced with 8mm spiral). I take the fence off and use the bushing to guide the router along the ledge that I just created, with the 6mm cutter trimming off the edge of the plexi below the ledge: And this is pretty much it. (modulo some cleanup and maybe getting the surfaces a bit more smooth with sandpaper). From now on any time I run with this bushing and this cutter, the bit will cut exactly at the edge that I've just created. So any time I need to cut at a straight line in a well defined location, I just need to position the prespex such that the edge is precisely where I want the cut to be and then run the router along in however many depth passes I feel like doing. Bonus: If I drew a line where the cut is supposed to be I can see it through the plexi since it's transparent. Really, the only way I see that I could make this more fool-proof would be to have this not at the edge of the plexi sheet but inside, so that the router cannot rock forward towards the edge.

I don't remember where I got the magic marbles here, I think amazon.fr or .co.uk. I didn't figure out where to get the humbrols (or borax for that matter) so I went the MM route. We'll see in some time if I can get them to cooperate this time around. I suppose small water surface area was my main problem last time. Dipping pickup-sized objects was indeed very simple (and fun). Kemper - there are a few settings you can tweak for the amp models, but its not like AxeFX. There's just a few parameters that supposedly alter tube sagging parameters, "character", compression of the pick attack, and a few more. The idea is that here you basically don't _need_ to tweak anything, the models are just so good. These are not based on modeling the actual amps' circuit but instead on their "profiling" concept - you run your favorite amp through your favorite cab with your best mic placed just the way you like, your best preamp, desk etc - and feed the end of this whole signal chain back into the kemper. It then sends a bunch of noises to the amp, listens to what comes back and somehow captures the characteristics of the whole signal chain. You can then tweak and refine it if you like, but if done properly (and there are tons of profiles done by pro players/producers/engineers available) its usable out of the box. After all, you've just tweaked your perfect signal chain. I've tried modelers in the past and this is the first one that really feels like the real thing. Not only sounds, but feels - as you play.

Magic Marbles are also a bit tricky to use, or I haven't found a good recipe yet (how much paint / water temperature / ambient temperature). As for the Kemper, yea - its mind-blowing. 100% recommended!

swirling is a pain .. I tried it once so far (incidentally also on a headless body), had to actually dip the body twice in succession since the paint wasn't enough to cover the whole body. I think this is because of the surface area of what I was dipping into - a huge trash can, so deep but little area for the paint to spread over. But I'm using magic marble, not the borax trick. The multiscale strat is supposed to be swirled eventually, I think I'll try a baby bathtub this time. Too bad about the bubbles, it came out pretty cool otherwise, love the color combination. Super nice playing and tones on the demo BTW. I did a song once purely on VST, using the LePou amp sims - I have to say they do sound pretty decent. (moved on to the kemper since)

wow,this is going to be pretty cool! can't wait to see it come together. acoustics for me are "hopefully maybe some day"