pan_kara

Interesting, I don't remember having such problems when cutting the fret slots in ebony, I did two boards last time with an old (non-japanese) fret saw. And I always cut slots before the taper and before radiusing, but I agree about the tear-out problem. I've been trying different methods for cutting the fingerboard taper, first I was using shooting boards and going very slowly, but now I converged to a spiral router bit and staight-line jig. I have a 3 or 4 flute down-cut spiral and that when used carefully practically eliminates tear-out.

That said my radiusing technique definitely needs improvement, on the other hand I still haven't figured out a reason to use a fret-bender. I just cut the frets from the spool and press them into place, letting the press and the fingerboard bend them to the correct radius. 

Ok, on to the second build that's currently on the bench.

I came across an unfinished mahogany Strat body in a guitar parts shop in Warsaw that I visit from time to time. I think it was discounted or for some other reason came into my possession. So I figured I'd build a simple mahogany strat and try to sell it. Then as usual I started dumping various ideas into the build. Not many. Starting with a maple burl veneer that I bought too long ago and it was time that it got used on something. Bye bye mahogany top

I want to blend the edges with a black burst all around the body, so I went around with black-tinted epoxy, also filling in some voids in the veneer:

On to the neck. I'm using the same ex-shelf oak (?) as in the bass body from the previous post. Here it is after a rough cut, routing the headstock shape and gluing on another piece of the maple burl veneer. And the truss rod slot. Here to hide the edges of the veneer I'm adding black binding instead of doing a burst.

Binding slot done with the old stewmac base:

pre-bent and glued in with .. I forget what. Possibly acetone. This was a while ago.

So the fingerboard. This is a nice black piece of ebony, I decided to add cocobolo binding to it to make it just a little bit more fancy. I had an ancient strip of cocobolo binding that I once ordered added to a stewmac order, thinking "cool, cocobolo binding for a few bucks, might come handy one day!". I had since realized that one strip of binding will not allow me to bind anything (except maybe a headstock). In fact it wasn't enough even for this fingerboard, but I have a cocobolo fingeboard blank that's wide enough, so I cut a slice off and thicknessed it with a simple spindle sander+fence setup. 

Then I cut the fret slots, glued on the binding with epoxy and radiused the board:

The fingerboard got glued to the neck (again epoxy), side dots were installed and the next step was the dot markers - a standard pattern made with abalone dots.

Actually I see now from the pic that this is still before radiusing (you can see the marks from the spindle sander that I used to thickness the board) - makes sense, I did the radius after the board was glued to the neck.

Another non-standard thing on this build is the neck joint. I was already poking some people in their build threads about a kind of "deep set bolt-on" neck pocket and the possibility to get a smooth neck-body transition with it. So I made the neck 3cm thick for this purpose, and a bit longer than the fingerboard - basically stretching to the end on the humbucker route in the body.

So here's my usual neck pocket jig (guest appearance by the neck after radiusing an d fretting):

The procedure is: align the neck with the centerline while it's resting on the guitar, clamp the mdf rails to the neck, then clamp them down to the body and also fix the spacing on both ends, finally take the neck out, optionally add some layers of tape on the inside to have a tighter fit, and route the pocket. Here's the layout with the neck jammed into the pocket:

The neck is going to be held in place with a set of 4 M5 screws into threaded inserts, moved back from the usual position:

I'm hoping that such an arrangement will allow me to make a seamless transition between the neck and the body. 

wow!

indeed you don't see leopardwood that much, looks fantastic when carved. really a great build.

All right, I've focused my threads on (mostly) one guitar at a time, but I think I'll join the popular "joint thread" movement. Maybe because since I finished the blue multiscale strat I don't have anything fancy in the works (until I start on "The Druid 2.0").

So here are the three builds that are running right now. The strat had a head start and then I wanted to finish it quickly so I shifted most of my attention to that, but now I'm back to the other three, that are moving more or less in parallel. So let me back-trace the builds a little and show you where I'm at. 

First is a bass - I need a 5-string bass for my personal recording projects (mainly rock and metal covers of various stuff that I'm doing since ~2000). So I figured I'd build one, making it multiscale to have a nice long scale for the low B.

Here's a pic of the body wood:

from 2015.. 

This used to be a book shelf, actually a couple of shelves - was enough for this body and some necks. I'm not sure that this is, I suspect oak.

Anyway - this is not quite thick enough for a standalone body, but with a quilted maple cap it's perfect:

(I slapped some dark veneer between the layers to get an accent line).

The neck is plain old maple, it turns out that it wasn't exactly long (and wide) enough for the headstock after doing the scarf, so the headstock is some horrible patchwork of maple pieces - that will be covered by the maple cap so not a huge deal. 

new way to thickness the headstock: run the outline with the router to a depth which is the headstock thickness + a few mm:

then saw off the back part along the bottom of the route:

I think I then cleaned it up on a spindle sander with a fence. 

The fingerboard is bocote, slots cut by hand over a template printed out from fretfind using a complex purpose-built jig:

Then glued to the neck, using LMI epoxy:

The template for my usual 12-th fret inlay marker pattern:

Then pressing the frets in, cutting the neck pocket, rounding over the body edges.. I don't have pictures of that. Fast-forward to now - measured the bridge locations and drilled the holes for the ABM single bridges that I'm using on this build. Mounted the two external bridges to verify alignment (and make a sound   )

There you go, now I need to profile the neck and carve the tummy cut, which will be an interesting exercise since I made some weight relief holes in the body but forgot to photograph them and I don't remember if I took the tummy cut into account when laying them out.  In other words I don't know how deep I can go, exactly. Sounds like fun.

Yea, this thread should be called "how to be lazy and still get a decent instrument at the end". Or "don't be lazy or you'll end up building a crappy guitar". We'll see. 

nice, gonna be doing some of this soon (though on a bolt on mostly-flat top so much simpler)

thumbs up for the video! awesome work with the inlays!

ok, so it's tinted lacquer over a dye coat. makes sense

I still cut my necks to rough thickness with a handsaw (no bandsaw for me either ). Then I do some cleanup with a spindle sander and a fence. Recent plan is to follow that with a router in a "thicknessing jig" to get the thickness within ~1mm of the target before carving the profile (like @KnightroExpress is doing for example).

1 hour ago, ScottR said:

It's interesting how the wenge top does not look particularly book-matched along the glue line--until you get to the bottom where you carved it down to that point, where it looks quite book-matched.

Usually it's the other way around.

SR

the grain lines in general turned out awesome!

right, I didn't notice this detail at first. Is it just sanding the chamfers back? I'd also think you'd get some bleed..

lol go for it man!

@Carl I didn't see the other post of yours with the link, interesting. So he does manage to get a pretty awesome result still without having to go with nanotubes (aka sorcery). hmm I'm now thinking what I could go and paint with that stuff...

or try to source some Vantablack

7 hours ago, curtisa said:

I reckon you'd be hard pressed to detect any differences in intonation.

Feel might change a little. Less string behind the saddle to flex suggests that it should feel 'stiffer' to bend. But I'm not sure I could personally detect the difference in bendy-ness between a LP Tune-o-matic and a wraparound given exactly the same guitar. It'd be an interesting experiment to conduct if you could arrange it

there is a sister experiment that might be easier to implement: take a double-locking FR guitar (optionally - lock the bridge in place with some wedges or whatever) and compare feel with the locking nut engaged and loosened.

Never tried it myself so I can't comment on how much of the difference can be felt. There's also talk about reverse headstock vs non-reverse in the context of string lengths behind the nut etc.

yay \o/ thanks!

well here's the Bohemian Rhapsody video. Was supposed to be ready a week ago but you know how it is...

probably too long but whatever. hope you like it!

thanks, gentlemen 

I'm loving this build. That top and the way it's finished is beyond epic.

I've always had a soft spot for crackle finishes. It's always fighting with my love for beautiful wood... looks like you might be on to something here 

That was my secret plan but looks like the numbers speak otherwise. Funnily enough, one nut from my test collection sounds (and measures) almost as bad as the pencil ... 

Black limba (I'm guessing that's what it is) .. it's been on my to-try list for quite a while. For some reason I have a hard time finding a reasonable source of the stuff in Europe. 

That other one, is that 100% padouk? That's a cool idea

I'm constantly learning things with this project. Turns out my method is super-sensitive to various things. Which echoes @Prostheta's comment about having all variables under control. I keep discovering new ones. I already mentioned some of them - nut slotting and sting age. String age started being an issue since I was on the same set of strings from the moment I started the nut comparison recordings - they have been taking a while to complete, I think ~2 months or so. Every once in a while I had some time to do some recordings, once or twice I figured I need to redo everything because of some new discovery...

To put things in perspective - my current test sample is about 25 notes in sequence letting the string fully ring out. For the low E that's about a minute. So every recording is about 20 minutes of basically just sitting there and hitting the string every 40-60 seconds. 

Anyhow

The difference between a 2-month old almost-not-played string is small but definitely measurable, as I verified over the weekend but simply putting in a brand new string.

I was also having repeatability issues, doing seemingly the same measurement after a day or two was giving me slightly different results. Well guess what. It depends on how exactly the body is supported. I made a series of tests, just changing how the guitar is positioned on the pink foam that it's laying on (see pic 10 or so posts back). There's a clear trend. It's not very strong, but it is there, especially for the lower frequencies. Which makes sense, I'm damping body resonances in different ways when I change how the guitar is supported.

So I had to start from scratch again. I made a new setup with the guitar supported by 4 bench cookies on very rigid support and then I put on the fresh E string and recorded all the nuts in one day, so I'm pretty confident the only thing that's changing is the nut. I checked the tuning of all strings after every nut swap. I checked that the guitar is in the same spot each time...

I think the results are much more consistent this time. I need to work on the data analysis a bit and then I'll post something.

Also, please welcome the new guest star in the nut shootout:

@Prostheta you want to check the influence of neck angle on tone? 

in any case once my analysis is off the ground I would actually like to start collecting sound samples from people, it's pretty simple to implement (I'm not relying on any fancy stuff, my code takes as an input a wav recording of a guitar string being plucked several times in sequence and works from there)

shooting boards are cool. I used to get my fingerboard taper spot on with this method.

I like the improved access to the screws. Especially from a practical standpoint it's a very good idea.

a really nice no-nonsense strat build. I agree about that swamp ash piece. Super pretty.

Thanks Andy  

I wish I could say that the scarf was planned out to be like this, but unfortunately I can't  I should save the dimensions though (headstock thickness I guess), I'd keep this design element for future builds.

It's coming

On 11/17/2017 at 11:40 PM, pan_kara said:

As for strings, well, here's my starter purchase - 10x sets of 3 strings for tests plus low E going from .042 to 0.054 in steps 0f .002. And a few nuts - brass, bone, graphite (I already have tusq and plastic).