pan_kara

Yea I'm in the other camp.. to me all the variations of the classic "sunburst" and other shades of brown are the most boring finishes ever.. - personal preference. I prefer either all-natural or some funky colors. That said, I have no doubt this one is going to look mind-blowing. Having only done 2x flame maple veneer + 1x quilt drop top so far myself, I have to say that staining maple is one of the most fun and rewarding things .. when I was doing my last blue one I was all "ok now I need to quickly do three more maple tops with all the color combination ideas I have".

hah! from a blue hater this means even more thanks! concerning the order - this is an exception, not a rule for me. The thing is that this guitar is a bunch of first-s for me. To name just the relevant ones - its the first time I'm trying a set-neck and the first time I'm trying to do a faux-binding finish. The way I wanted to do the binding was to spray the back and sides with shellac, finish sand the top (also removing any possible shellac overspray/runs) and then stain the top. I wasn't confident I could do all this with the neck already in place, so I decided to shuffle the order a little bit - do all of that (and everything else that I could) with the neck off the body, then after staining seal the top with a couple coats of shellac and do the remaining parts: glue the neck, route the (neck) pickup, align the bridge and drill the mounting holes.. So far its working ok - the neck pickup route is in place and the bridge is mounted. The only problem I got is that the shellac seemed to dissolve the colortone stain I used and washed a bit of the color off.. And I got little blue runs on the sides after painting the top, but these sanded out easily. I'm now about to solder the electronics, test that everything works and then finish everything off - carve the heel, finish sand the neck etc. - and then its the real finishing, I'm planning to put rustins plastic coat over the whole guitar.

whoa my head is all quilted now.. what's the finish going to be on this one? natural or stained?

Thanks! Dremel (in the stewmac base) + fence indeed. I made a strat pickguard mdf template some time ago, I use it to lay out the 5-way slots. It has 4 holes drilled - two bigger ones for the screws and two smaller ones that mark the ends of the channel. I copy them to the body and then connect the smaller holes with the dremel, aligning the fence at both ends by sticking the dremel bit into the holes. The only problem is that the bit is smaller than the channel that I need to I have to do 2-3 passes, adding something thin between the fence and the base. But that's just me being stupid.. I probably even have a bit that would work on one pass somewhere...

Unless I get 666 as a result (or 42 for that matter) I don't plan to mess with any voodoo. If I do I'll have no choice.

its just a superposition of movements (at different frequencies) - if you swing your arm back and forth and at the same time make some fast wiggling motions .. you're superimposing two frequencies on top of each other. If you attach a smaller pendulum to a bigger pendulum.. the motion of the weight at the end of the small one will be the sum of the two oscillations. And so on. The string does the same, just superimposing many more types of motion at once. And then the motion of a "piece" of strings that is sensed by the pickup is just a sum of these motions. And precisely this motion is what the pickup reads. It just reads whatever movement the string is making. So to join in the game: to me the magic is not in the string vibrating with all those frequencies at once, its not in the pickup picking up the vibration - its in our ear (brain) that takes the complex movement and actually decomposes it so that we hear individual pitches in this complex waveform. Re why the bridge pickup has more treble. As Tim37 is saying - the pickup just senses a part of the string and looks at the vibrations in that one part. The signal strength (amplitude) is proportional to the amplitude of the vibration. At this point. The first harmonic is at the 12th fret. Moving a pickup from the 12th fret towards the bridge decreases the volume of the root harmonic. The 2nd harmonic has its maximum above the 24th fret and then again decreases towards the bridge. For the higher ones it gets of course more messy, the 4rd one disappears above the 24th fret etc. So the more you move towards the bridge, the less of the (at least) first 2 harmonics are present in the sound. The higher ones are more or less constant, so the balance shifts --> more treble in the sound.

wow, the red one is Evil!

I'm just trying to answer a few questions with the tools and methods that I happen to know, thats all. I was expecting someone would have done a similar thing long time ago, but so far I found nothing. So far I'm seeing more or less what I've been expecting, when I'm not I'm checking where my method is wrong. Which is the classic road to observing what you wish to observe

any time I work on a blue guitar and I post a pic on facebook it gets like 5x more likes than anything else

Just to let you know I havent been idle, I figured out which software to use (GNU Octave), learned to use it and wrote a bunch of scripts for analyzing wav files. I'm still establishing a baseline before I try do to comparisons of anything, but I think I'm close to having this part done. Anyway, here's the frequency spectrum of a low F, you can nicely see how its overtone spectrum is modulated by the bridge pickup's pattern of frequency cancelations. I had some problems with the lace pickup and I have tons of 50 Hz hum for some reason (also visible on the plot), but I'll anyway be re-recording everything later.. and here's the time dependence of the first few harmonics from the same note I believe these plots will carry all the information I need. The slopes for each harmonic should be independent of - pickup type and position - picking strength (as long as I get no fret buzz) - picking position (how close to the bridge etc) I'm in the process of verifying this now.

yea its true that they're probably easier to do than rings.. looking again, I'd probably round off the corners a bit though if I were you

I am happy to report that after some time spent planning out and making templates I am now able to produce a working rout for the lo pro schaller tremolo in scrap wood on to the real thing.. edit: yes, there saddles are out in the photo, I did check with them that everything is ok

wow, thats some serious intervention.. the surprise during carving was due to the spalt or its just something that happens from time to time? BTW you should not shield the cavity in the cocobolo top one - it looks so cool with the orange peeking through (not that a lot of people would get a chance to see that...)

good point. I was able to purchase "wood for 5-piece neck" once (no, twice already in fact) - five laminates that were 6cm thick each. With a cheapo borrowed rotary saw I cut them into stuff that will build me two 2cm thick necks plus I have laminations for a third neck left from the stuff that remained.

wow, nice! I'd probably round off the edges a bit, but otherwise they look great! As soon as I finally manage to successfully make a wooden pickup ring I gotta try this..

Wow, this whole run looks gorgeous! Plus, I was looking at the pics and I suddenly realized that my way of doing electronics cavities is completely stupid and yours is much better. Me: - figure out where I want the cavity, pre-drill, rout - later think where I want the pots etc, try to somehow figure out how to mark at the front where the cavity is - lay out the controls hoping that I didn't screw up and they indeed are inside the cavity - drill holes (chipout) and here I see: - roughly trace the cavity shape at the front - lay out the controls inside that shape - drill all the way through the body - lay out the shape from the back again (guided by the holes) - rout etc from the back This just makes so much more sense..

that piece of imbuia looks familiar.. I got a very similar one a few months ago mine is currently waiting for a project .. It'll be nice to see how your's turns out - looking good so far! Nice idea with the back strip. I had a similar thing on a guitar recently and didn't bother to cover it up, but I probably would if I had thought of this.

and now for something completely different: just a snap of a 3/4 I'm building for my daughter. my first try at a bound fretboard and natural binding. And set-neck - it was supposed to be bolt on but the heel ended up so thin that I decided I don't want to risk it - the neck is being glued as I type this. But back to the V: I did manage to clean up the bevels ok, the cleanup of the cleanup will be when I'll be finish sanding the guitar. The top is still not perfectly level anyway so I'll leave it at that for now. At the moment I'm preparing a set of templates for the floyd route, the friend of mine that I'm building this one for CNC'ed the shape for me so this is the starting point: here's the first template starting to take shape, along with an electronics test-fit (i routed the cavity, drilled the holes etc)

I was wondering how a flame figure would respond to burning. hmm... they do call it "black oil finish" after all.. it so happens that I used up 250ml of Danish oil on necks and fingerboards (and bodies to some extent) of my first three builds and got 500ml this time, but since I managed to get hold of tru-oil I completely switched to that for necks and some bodies. Now I use danish oil almost only on fingerboards so this would give some potential use to the huge can I'm left with.. and I did equip myself with some colortone dyes recently also. hmmm.... ok. I need more scrap then...

aah I get it now. Thanks a lot! I need to get a propane torch and burn some scrap.. I love the effect they got on that bass

Thank guys! What do you mean by "torching" or heat lamps? Not familiar with heat-based ways of coloring wood.. :/ Its not a heat gun or something like that, right? Wouldn't too much heat screw up all the glue joints?

Does anybody have an idea what technique way used here? They call it "antique black oil finish" - whatever they mean by that... maybe dark brown stain -> sand back slightly (and unevenly) -> oil any ideas?

I'm about to study these things a little, as some of you might have noticed. My current belief is that the wood (bridge, nut, frets etc) determine the sustain of the strings (both the primary tone and the overtones). Soft bridge/nut material dampens the high frequencies making them decay instantly - the string sounds dull. The pickups on the other hand will mainly amplify/dampen different frequencies, based on their characteristics. (neglecting the magnetic effects on the strings themselves). So in the first approximation, the effect of pickups is static and the effect of wood/hardware is dynamic. Which basically means that the faster you play the more the pickups become the dominant factor. (whether the first approximation is good enough is an open question, at least to me)

I'll come back to this issue when I give the neck its "few days with strings on". Its basically ready for that, I need to get the body up to speed. I carved the back of the neck, first roughed in the nut and heel area with a sanding drum in a drill press: then followed up with a spokeshave and sandpaper, arriving at this: I'm experimenting with the neck profile a bit, I need to actually play it to fine-tune it so I'll leave it for now. The one thing I want to still do now is to add some veneer to the back of the headstock, so that's up next. The V is at the stage of bevel cutting, I thought I'd run around it with a chamfer bit but then I realized that they are not constant around the perimeter of the guitar so I have to take a different approach. In the end I decided to mark the lines that I'm going for and then do multiple passes with the router, with increasing depth - taking care to not cross the pencil line. I've managed to straighten out the outer straight bevels nicely with a handplane, the back part where they're curving is still to come.

Looking at that top I conclude: this guitar should have no bridge.