pan_kara

Interesting idea.

I had something similar in mind for some time in the future, though I hadn't though of making it rear-loaded. One extra thing that I though of was making the pickup position adjustable - so that you could take one pickup and slide it all the way from the bridge position to the nut position to watch the tone change.

I like the pinstripe on the headstock. Happy accidents, according to the late Bob Roth.

I thought you drew the outline with a pencil for some reason stupid me. Nice!

How are the pickup rings coming along?

From a guitarbuilding newbie:

I think simple geometry will tell us that there will indeed be a twist in the neck plane introduced as you "tilt" it - if you treat the 2 front screws as forming a pivot on which the neck rotates. If this pivot line is not perpendicular to the neck centerline you will by construction be putting in a twist when tilting the neck downwards. In fact your centerline will also loose alignment. The question is whether

a) these movements will be big enough to matter (depends on how much you want to tilt the neck I guess) and

whether this can be avoided.

To avoid this you'd have to somehow force the neck to rotate around a different axis than the one formed by the two bolts. I don't think I see a way of doing this that is practical. You can add a fifth bolt mirroring the position of the one that is moved back to form the contoured heel but I imagine you'd get into all sorts of trouble whith having to adjust the tension on all bolts to keep the neck geometry the way you want it. So in the end I dont think this idea is practical, unless the tilt adjustments are meant to be really small.

The stick is 1.75" thick- and my slot fretting jig is designed to cut a single board (well- a board taped to a master board template).So I had to make a new one. I stole this jig idea from someone in this group back a few years ago- I went looking for the posts- but couldnt find it- so if it was you I lifted the idea from- my apologies for not giving cred where its due.

I'm also using a jig of this type - I believe the post was linking to this page: http://www.sixgunguitars.com/fret_slotting_jig.html

Time to attach the neck. I shaped an AANJ-like joint freehand on the sanding drums

I put the neck in place and double-checked the body and neck centerline alignment. Once everything was nice and straight I clamped the neck in place and drilled the screw holes.

Then I went ahead and rounded the joint

And the neck went in the clamps together with the fingerboard:

Wow, it turned out really nice. The walnut really pops now after the oiling.

Do post sound samples!

Stupid question #1: how come the saddles stay in place? Friction or there is some means of fixing them that I failed to spot?

#2: I have linseed oil, I have mineral spirits... where do I get oil based varnish? Should I just go to a hardware store and look for lacquer that will say "thin with mineral spirits" on the tin?

I love the headstock shape and the wood choices. Can't wait for more!

the only thing that comes to my mind would get 2 strings to consistently NOT be able to get intonated is some problem with the nut - as already suggested. Maybe the slots on the locking nut are worn in some weird way making the final point of contact with the string move a little towards the headstock?

The name of this chapter is: making the neck pocket with a Dremel. I conclude that this can be done, but I'm starting to appreciate the need for a full-size router. The routing itself (not counting set-up etc) would have probably taken 5 minutes instead of 2 hours or so. Anyway - on to the pics.

I glued the fingerboard to the neck with double-side tape and shaped the heel to match the fingerboard:

I then carefully aligned the neck on the body and clamped it between two straight edges of mdf - a jig with unclear purpose that I ended up not using

Well, ok - I did use it to show me where not to drill with the forstner bit:

After drilling I cleaned up the edges with a chisel and set up for routing. I used a jig that a friend of mine build with me, I was planning to use it for truss rod slots (in fact I did already - works pretty good for that) but I realized that basically anything requiring straight lines can be done with it. So I mounted a routing bit in the dremel, took measurements of the neck heel, drew the lines on the body and started taking wood off. Along the edges, down all the way to the depth I planned for the pocket (or so I thought).

By the time I was done I realized that the router bit slipped out a bit and one channel ended up being deeper than I planned. The two obvious solutions would be gluing some wood in there or making the whole pocket deeper. To see I'd need to check vertical alignment i.e. string height at the bridge. That will come later. For now I only made the pocket as deep as initially forseen. I first chiseled out the wood in the middle of the pocket and then used this nano-planer:

..and finally after some fine-tuning I could test the neck fit:

Its pretty much spot-on. I think that the nut is 1-2mm away sideways from where the body centerline would extend, but I still have room to correct that when I do proper alignment. Which is the next step.

indeed, nice heel joint. I do have a bass build hopefully planned some time down the road, taking notes

Thanks guys!

One of the points of this build (and another two I have running in parallel) is to try to do without bigger tools. I'm starting to appreciate the need for a bandsaw (though I would have no place to use it I think) and of course a router but I'm trying to see if I can manage without them.

I managed already to smooth out the bottom of the electronics cavity in another body by mounting the dremel in my drill stand. Worked pretty good so I'm already planning to use the same technique for the neck pockets.

If it turns out that I'm able to create a guitar that actually works (i.e. plays) I'll think about investing in new tools

(I'll probably need a blue bosch or something else in place of my green bosch drill. I've already managed to make it wobble through too much sanding). Hadn't thought about fix-mounting a router to use to thickness stuff as opposed to the sliding rails idea that I typically see people use. hmm...

Before I post my headstock progress let me show a snapshot from another build I'm doing in parallel. I arrived at a point where I needed to get a neck from 30mm thick down to the 21-22mm I'd have at the heel. This would mean potentially hours or plane/robosander work so I decided to try an alternative (encouraged by having success with this method when bringin heastocks from 30mm to 15mm):

to my surprise.. it worked ok

But back on topic..

I glued the face plate to the headstock, drilled the tuner holes and shaped everything. I still need to take some thickness off, as this quick mock-up clearly illustrates. I'll probably sand off the bottom part.

ok, after shaping the edge of the headplate its obvious that the face side will need to be lowered too

nice build! I'm also doing my first build in parallel.. in fact I'm doing three guitars - but only one got its build thread. I guess that's cheating

My neck laminate is similar to yours - wenge - (flame) maple - bubinga 5pc. Good luck with neck-thru!

funny I was just trying to figure out what to use to make cavity covers.. so you're saying the stuff they sell as "heastock veneer" is good for this? gotta check prices...

I have some thin 0,6mm veneer and I was thinking of gluing together several sheets or just laminating one to a piece of thin hdf, but this looks like another good option.

for pickup rings you need to stack two anyway, right? The ring should be 5-6mm high IIRC.

nice job with these, can't wait to see the rings done!

Fingerboard time! I'm running two pieces of wood in parallel until I am capable of picking one. Here is the merbau one in the high-tech fret slotting jig:

(in the background in the clamps is the neck, getting a layer of flame maple veneer that will go to create an accent line between the neck and the fb)

Here's my high-tech thicknessing jig - basically a ripoff of the luthier's friend. With the ebony board being run through.

Both boards were slotted and trimmed to final size using a shooting board, which makes it easy to very accurately dial in the size (by extending the plane blade I shave off fraction of a mm deeper of the sides).

Over to the body. I mostly did the belly cut starting with a chisel, then a rasp, then a spokeshave and finally a scraper. Still not perfect but close. I'll need to work on it some more.

The top got sanded, I sill had some small pinholes where I put the epoxy so I repeated the procedure,

changed from 40 to 80 grit on the robosander and ran around the edges and here we are, basically waiting for the neck to be done so that I can start on the neck pocket:

thanks! stupid question: by "turned backwards" you mean the top stays the top and you rotate the piece horizontally by 180 degrees, right? Or flip it upside down too? (not sure if this makes that much difference...)

I love that top!

are you sure you want the vol and tone so high up?

I love the neck sandwiches! Wenge and padauk.. I have a baritone six string in my head with a neck like this. But cutting neck laminates is a pain when the best tool you have is a cheap borrowed rotary saw.. lol.

Do you have a method for the orientation of the pieces that go into the laminates? The padauk on the right looks like you just put wenge strips in the places where you took out the narrow padauk strips, or are you turning the pieces around?

ok, after-weekend update time.

First, the body - tried to fill some imperfections in the top with imbuia dust mixed with epoxy (I made a lot of dust when I was thicknessing the headplate). Here's the body just after putting on the epoxy:

I haven't sanded it off yet so no idea how it will turn out.

Most of the work was on the neck. I glued the headstock and after unclamping I cut out the shape roughly with my jigsaw:

then I took out a template I made some time ago for the headstock, and checked again on paper that the tuner hole placement should be giving a straight string pull. I attached the template to the headstock with double sided tape, drilled the tuner holes and shaped the edges on the robosander:

I narrowed down my choice of fingerboards to two pieces of wood, I couldn't decide between the two so I'll continue working with them in parallel up to the point where they're ready for fretting and gluing to the neck. I'll post when I get the fret slots cut.

After cutting the scarf joint I had to tackle another thing - reducing the thickness of the headstock piece from 2+ cm to about 5mm. I built something resembling a homemade version of the "luthier's friend" to do thicknessing jobs, but taking off 15mm of wood would take ages. So I decided to use my manual bandsaw substitute:

To my surprise I ended up producing this:

Now I can smooth out the surface with the sanding drum. I figured the offcut would make a nice cavity cover - but nope. Too small.

I did some shaping of the body also. First I lightly radiused the top with a hand plane, then I pulled out my double-action polishing machine that I got some time ago to polish car paint. I stuck some P40 sandpaper on it to smooth out the top. It turned out that I can also shape it a little this way, so I ended up adding a delicate bevel all around the edge of the body.

Funnily, after sanding with P40 this imbuia is already showing somewhat of a gloss. I wasn't expecting this:

Finally got time to move ahead a bit with this. I planed and sanded the neck blank to get it reasonably straight last week and it remained such, so I set out to do the scarf joint. And here's my scarf cutting... jig.

that produced two very nice surfaces

after some hand plane (and sandpaper) fun:

This marks my first planning error as I just realized that I did the scarf upside down. The board is asymmetric to fit the headstock, and the way I cut it it would beed to be reversed. I don't want to do that so I'll probably end up modifying the shape a little (I'm only missing 2mm or so) or gluing in a small piece of bubinga.

But the tricky thing I'm facing now is planing down the headstock piece. I will have to cut it down from 2cm to something like 7mm, I have a 1cm-thick headplate to go onto it (that I'll have to thin down also I guess). The tools I have available for this are the hand saw, the planes and the robosander. We'll see what I can work out.

I also love the hand tool work. Will we hand planing fingerboards soon too

wow, this is turning out great! Can't wait to see it with the finish on.

Prostheta, so did you find a good source for TruOil in Europe? The homebrew option also sounds interesting, though somehow I thought TruOil is tung oil+varnish and linseed oil+varnish is Danish Oil. But maybe I got it backwards. What exaclty is "varnish" in that case?

Wow, this is looking good!

I'll soon be doing my first binding job but I decided to use plastic binding before trying to bend wood.. And the top is completely flat.

what is the finish on this one?

I don't thing you need a vacuum system to do veneer - I did one already following the tutorial on this site, and another one is in preparation. I think I remember seeing a thread about bending tops over the forearm cutout too. What I remember is: lots of steam, lost of clamps, go very slowly