pan_kara

I cut the headstock piece from the neck blank when its 20+ mm thick (around the thickness of my bolt-on heel) but when I take the thickness down for the actual heastock I do it either after the glue-up or only do the part that will not be glued. An image illustrating my possibly failed attempt at explaining this: after: you can see I made a stupid mistake there with the headstock wings being too close to the neck so the volute ends up in a stupid place. But I think otherwise the geometry is in line with what you're trying to achieve.

maybe I got some terminology wrong or something.. I am getting convex fingerboard i.e. a bump in the middle - something that string pull would straighten if it was stronger. Since the truss rod is double action, I'm trying to counter it with the truss rod.

I held off with fretting and leveling the fretboard as long as I could, which was to the moment just before carving the neck, but after the initial thicknessing. I prefer to press the frets in while the back is still flat. Then I always left the neck a long time to adjust when I was removing wood from the back, once the frets were in. I'm suspecting maybe my fret saw makes slots that are too narrow for the fretwire that I'm using.. and the less wood I have in the neck the more the frets manage to push it into backbow. Well, at the moment the strings are off and the neck is still pretty much straight. I'll probably be levelling the frets when all the other work is done, so something like 3 weeks from now. We'll see.

Getting there.. here is the V with strings on, I wanted to play a bit and tweak the neck profile Carving the neck left me with a problem since the neck went into a backbow .. I tried correcting it with the truss rod but after turning the thing a bit it gets stuck, I don't know why, whether its the thread or simply the force from the wood, but I'm afraid to push it further by force (I already used quite a bit of force). I clamped the guitar into a forward bow for a few days and at the moment I'm at a situation where the neck is basically perfectly straight under string tension. I'll probably be able to get away with this when I level the frets with strings off, but the fact that the truss rod is already at its adjustment limit is making me a bit uneasy.. But this didn't stop me from finish sanding the neck, and now I'm putting on the first coats of truoil

I actually like the fact that when you carve a bookmatched top it looses the symmetry. You get more variety.

It was one of my first three. The woodwork is ok, considering it was my first try I'm very happy with it. The finish is crap. There's a bunch of runs, a few small sand-throughs and in the end the RPC started cracking all over the place. But it was for me so I can live with it. BTW I suspect there might be a better market for oil-finished guitars nowadays, my impression is that people are more into non-gloss spectacular-top wood guitars. Like others say, a break is probably what you need. Finish up what you have going, then take a break. Then build something different - a baritone, a piezo, a 7-string .. a bass? a multiscale? Take it easy, you're not burning any bridges after all.

well I'm a newbie so coming from me "I suck at finishing and its frustrating and I can't seem to even get it near-perfect ever" doesn't have much weight I guess.. I'm limited to working 95% of the time in my apartment, a spray rig is not an option so I try to brush on nitro or RPC and then somehow sand it flat (Psikot did manage to do that!), I'm experimenting with TruOil.. But I'm really a hobby builder, every guitar is trying something new, new woods, new shape, new bridge type, scale length, neck joint etc. For something like that working without a proper workshop, just for fun, it ok. I'm not trying to make any profit.

I was thinking red too. I think people typically leave spalted tops natural, all the better reason to color it. Looks fantastic!

nice score

Thanks Sancho! Love how your wenge-top turned out BTW! yea, I'm really enjoying this build. (Etna, the other one is a bit on hold at the moment, I'll come back to it when I'm done with the V and a few others). I wonder if I will suddenly begin to like explorers if I end up building one at some point... I'm slowly doing some work shaping the neck and heel, and starting to sand the body (I still have to do the cavity cover recess and the cover itself but the perspective of having to route more mdf templates keeps holding me back...) I acquired a stationary belt sander recently, just in time to shape the heel:

that bloodwood binding is sick. love it and great job!

or a more adventurous method - design some inlay that would cover that (which would probably also involve glue+ebony dust around the inlay edges in the end)

Wow, these are stunning! What's the neck profile there, some sort of asymmetric V?

won't I get in trouble once I bury the blade do much that the teeth on the other side get contact with the wood? I was thinking something like this might be better for a start.. http://www.axminster.co.uk/japanese-kumagoro-universal-kataba-saw

Thanks! I'd be interested in seeing how you do it. Pro - I get the basic concept and the advantage of japanese saws, in fact I will probably need to pull the trigged on one at some point BTW will a saw like that be good for something more brutal? I use saws sometimes to "thickness" neck blanks - for example I had a 10cm wide and 5cm thick neck-thru blank that I cut down to 2.5cm or so in the neck section with a handsaw...

could you elaborate on the scarf-related work with the japanese saw? Is there some trick to it, or am I just wondering because I never used a japanese saw myself? I also cut my scarfs by hand, but my methods are very crude, I have a lot of plane work to do later - so that's why I'm asking

I hear you Scott. I fell in love with the "vintage copper" thing Schaller does from the moment I got the stuff in my mail. I'm with you on the V's too - I never really felt any attraction towards V's or explorers, but not that I'm building one I'm liking it more and more

My first Floyd routing: started: Done. Alignment turned out spot on. Phew!

thanks Ripthorn for the comments. Octave is indeed proving to be good for the job. I asked around and got a bunch of suggestions from people, but I'm glad I settled on this one. It was trivial to learn and works very well. For the 50Hz hum... I'm having a problem with the wiring of the alumitones. I had just one in the bridge, wired straight to the output jack. Now I've added another one in the neck position (and a 5-way switch) plus a mini-toggle for the coil split. For whatever reason the hum is gone when in split mode, which is ok for me since I decided that I prefer this mode - the first dip (and the following ones) in the freq response of the pickup is shifted higher in this case. So I'll be doing the tests in split mode, but I don't understand why the humbucking mode has more hum.. the wiring of these pickups is strange, and there's little documentation online. If you look at my previous plots you can see some of the harmonics have higher background than others - these are the ones polluted by the 50hz hum - 177, 349. Now I get my decay times by fitting a straight line - if I did that in these cases I would get incorrect results since the constant hum would bias the fit. So I need to cut off the signal below a certain amplitude - this is the case in these plots in fact, but dut to the 50 Hz hum the background still can be seen in the ones I just mentioned. BTW I've changed my method, I'm now using FIR filters to pick out the individual frequency bands and then I draw the envelope plots. This is much slower than just looking at FFT bins, but I can have more narrow filtering so the cross-talk between different harmonics is gone now. I'm checking all the fits to make sure that they're fine. In split-coil mode I get very good results. For some frequencies I do have poor fits due to low initial amplitude (the pickup is filtering some frequencies out), but this doesn't give me shorter decay times, just less precise fits (I have a shorter time range to fit to). The 1049 Hz line in my previous plots is an example of that - the slope is lower than the previous ones, but it hits bottom after 5 seconds because the frequency is damped by the pickup. This is clearly visible in the results since I'm collecting results from several plucks of the string and then averaging them, for these frequencies I'm having much more scattered results. I'm combating this by combining results from the bridge and neck PUs - currently by recording them separately, but I plan to wire a stereo output so that I can record them simultaneously and then intelligently combine (probably by simply adding the amplitudes). Overall its pretty clear by now that the pickup location does not affect the results, besides affecting the precision of the measurement for some of the harmonics. Otherwise the results are very nicely compatible.

unless you record a few samples and send me wave files but I need to first demonstrate that I can indeed "test" anything... we'll see how that goes. one set of hardware only makes the tests cleaner, you can always record and do "side by side" in post production. for sure thats what I'm planning, I try to keep as much as possible constant (hardware, electronics, body, neck - depending the test)

interesting.. another Tonewood Test coming up?

interesting. so how thick is the guitar now? If I were to do something like this I'd probably try to thickness down the body before putting the new top on... love the way it turned out BTW!

what he said

I believe they're all made by a korean company called Jin-Ho: http://www.jinhomusic.com/wilkinson/wilkinson_2.html as you can see they make tons of different variations - top locking, ez-lock, back locking.. I used the back locking version on my Nylon 1 build. The quality of the mechanism seems very good, there's basically no slack in the gear movement. The edges of the posts are pretty sharp, already killed 2 high E nylons strings, the plating quality seems to be a bit lower and the tuner screws are soft and crappy. The other korean company that probably makes most of what shops sell as no-name is Sung-Il: http://www.sung-il.com/ here is also says they make TonePros ® and Floyd Rose Original ® hardware..?? They make the Wilkinson VS50 series bridges, the VS100 are made by Gotoh. As in the case of tuners, the tremolos are half the price of the Gotoh ones.

I'd second the comment of curtisa about not putting a tremolo in your first build. I'm somewhere around my 5th and I am actually finishing up a strat with a trem and a V with a floyd. This is much less forgiving than just dropping in a fixed bridge. For a fixed bridge I wait until I have the neck fretted and on a stage that I can bolt it on in the neck pocket, and only then I recheck that I didn't mess up the centerlines and positions along the scale length etc, in fact what I usually do is take a top-loading bridge that I can attach strings to, I take the outer E strings and clamp the bridge to the body. The first time I did that I even intonated the strings to make sure the position is correct, in addition to checking that the strings actually run over the fretboard and parallel to the edges. Once I'm sure its ok, I mark the position or even drill the mounting holes already then. So with a tremolo this is more convoluted. You can of course take the trem block off, lay the trem on the body and do a similar thing. In some cases. But then you have to drill the holes for the posts and get them spot on. Then route all the cavities and get them spot on with relation to the holes. And so on. The margin for error is small at each step, though cleverly prepared templates can reduce the danger. I have no woodwork experience from before, so maybe I'm exaggerating but this is just something to consider. There is nothing wrong with a hardtail strat If you do decide to go for a trem - I have all three wilkinson trems at the moment - the VS100 in a strat and the VS50 and VS50II waiting to be put on current and future builds. The VS100 is a very solid unit for sure. The VS50 on the other hand does appear to have cut a few corners here and there. For example the plate to which the saddles are attached is completely flat - you can turn the saddles in various directions if you like. The VS100 has grooves for the adjustment screws to ride in. Funnily enough, the VS50II which is more or less the same price as the VS50 also has them. Or at least one IIRC. The other differece between the 50 and the 50II is the string spacing - 50II is more narrow, I think its the usual 10,5 vs 10,8 difference. Finally, the post spacing is different - the VS50II seems to have the same or close as other 2-point trems, VS50 has a slightly different configuration. I don't have real life usage experience from the 50-series though so I cant say how well they hold up.