mistermikev

you would think they would have some bit of training for the employees on something like that lol.

you could make a little piece of wood kind of shaped like a football and do what ibanez does on the saber series. also carl thompson kind of does something like that on his basses as the cavity is so shallow. then the 5 way sits "on top" of the pickguard. might even become a feature - not a bug.

so went to my local spot and found a lovely piece of 1 3/4" super figured hard maple... couldn't pass up. paid, and went to the guys who will cut it in half. the guy puts it on the chop saw (this is 1 3/4" x 6" x 10') and i can see he's just barely holding on to the thing... I wrestle with saying something but didn't. then saw kicks back. dude shits himself... gathers his courage to finish the cut... but this time decides it'd be safer if he just didn't put his hands anywhere near the wood. naturally I took 27 steps back. I don't want to offend the guy, and i don't want to make him feel bad... and I wrestle with saying something all the way back to my truck and even right now. how would that have gone down if you were there?

yessir, I'm in there. sm avatar.

looks lovely in a 'smokey' kind of way!

"Perfect is the enemy of good" - I've always interpreted the same saying as to mean good is what you get when you fail at achieving perfect and in that sense -they are enemies.

saw a guitar with similar pink floyd inlay on facebook recently and thought "wonder whatever happened to that one pink floyd inspired prs build from proj gtr"... mystery solved! nice dye job, looks great.

with all those elec probs... does not make sense all that great goth metal y'all got goin on!

jeez... keep one hand in the pocket!

yeah, that is lovely.

is an interesting wiring, clever. they are sending the bridge series link to live to give you the slug coil, while sending the neck series link to ground giving you the screw coil. bridge, bridge and neck, neck, both split, bridge slug by itself -if I'm reading it right. that's a nice dragon inlay. I've seen that seller (from thailand or malasia?) and thought their inlays really look nice esp for the price. would love to see a bigger more detailed picture of it. gonna look sweet. EDIT: side note... man I'd like to slap these fools who list thousands of inlay "stickers" in the luthier section on ebay. makes it almost impossible to find actual inlay.

i had no idea. I would likely only use actives too if that were the case for me. I imagine any sort of home recording using a mic is nearly impossible.

"I think we're going to need a bigger boat" - tru dat! don't get me wrong... a while back I had a les paul with an emg in the bridge and it was quite nice. long story long - I like all sorts!

well... here's my "list" of things I should have had in mind anyway... the order of the coils. you def want to ensure you are using a top coil in every combo which means attention to the wiring order. that also complicates polarity because to hum cancel you need the top coils of either to be opposing polarity if you are going to combine them... but if you are trying to combine the top from one with the bottom from another - then you are going to need them to be the sm polarity (and winding of course) so that the partner coil is opposite to your top coil... that's where this build got into trouble. Another thing that I'm just figuring out... is despite the fact that these pickups are humbuckers... they need a 250k pot. you heard right... I'll be going in again to either replace the pot or put a resistor across it. I was thinking about it this morning and looked at all seymour wiring diagrams for any stacked coils... surprise - all 250k. in my current setup I'm running a 500k pot but modifying it in the 1 position (single coils position) to be 250k. surprise position 1 sounds much more full. to my ears 500k is just too bright and you loose some bass because of the shift. I think ideally I want a 350k pot. have not faced any shielding issues as everything is pretty quiet when in series or parallel mode (less so when mixing coils but that is to be expected).

I'm sure others will weigh in on this but number 1 and 3 are functionally equiv. #2 would be way more stable due to the opposing end grain.

certainly all things to consider. I'm not contradicting at all... but I wouldn't necc rely on any of those things thinking that they woudl guarantee a good neck. lots of folks build necks that aren't multi lam and they are fine... idk what they do but for me - just need to spot that sort of thing earlier on... which means planning to make an initial cut on some wood and then giving it some time to potentially change.

right on... it's very true. it is really the part that you will always be in contact with the guitar on... and small variances in the shape effect each of us differently. twist - well.. .I hear ya there... would be a shame to toss such lovely wood. that said, make sure to consider also how you'd feel if you get all the way done on this guitar and find it doesn't play well due to twist. I think most importantly... figure out how you got there and how to prevent it going fwd. easy for me to say as I live in a giant wood seasoner! afa preference... I have boatnecks I like... and I have thin necks I like. They all have things to offer. I think you just decide what's right for THIS guitar and go with that.

I have large hands compared to other folks... but because i learned guitar fisrt and spec 3-notes-per-string... I struggle quite a bit playing a 34 and it always feels like home on a 32. feel like I can just manhandle it and it plays so fast. Hard to believe 2" at scale makes such a dif... but it does to me. Hope it does for you.

the best part here... shaping the neck. even using the facets method - everyone does it slightly different. Such a personal part of the guitar... in my mind it's the equiv of a "signature" on a painting. looking fwd to seeing how you sign yours.

"what I did not know at first, I learned by doing twice" billy joel well I must have learned the shit out of the electronics on this guitar cause I re-did it 10 times! Odd thing is that I have done almost the sm wiring on humbuckers... did not think doing it on stacked humbuckers would really be that different... but it was. Now I get to figure out the sm questions for a set of stacked dimarzios. i'm told they are quite different in terms of how the coils are created. The secondary coil is apparently an underwound coil by comparrison so... more fun to come! I guess an upside is my wiring layout - having been redone another time... is slightly more organized. anywho... this one is now verified...

right on. the dreaded 4 way switch!

thank you for the encouragement... I think you are absolutely spot on - it's the wrestling that makes you better - not the times it just comes together easy. I'm wrestling all right... wired it up white->black->green->red and it caused more issues than it solved. so... I'm absolutely convinced wire color is right... need to go back to the multimeter and step through it inch by inch.

lol allready was (in there again) this morning! never ending electronics... still not quite happy. so I flipped the polarity on my bridge pickup and all went great - perfect - south up now(scarry process)... sounds great as a humbucker. now... at this point I face a conundrum because I went back in there and flipped the wires back. still... my neck pickup in parallel mode doesn't sound right. wracking my brain. further complicated by the fact that I think now that I can't have the bridge wires fwd - black-white-red-green because this bridge pickup was wound opposite of neck. and I can't have them backward... because then I'll have the bottom coil active in certain split spots... so what I think I actually need is... lol... white-black-green-red! lawdy... blind racing school. big old space - wise words. unfortunately in my case a bigger space would'nt have been weight reduction as the thing is already as fully hollow as possible on either side of the controls!. further... any bigger and it would run into the f hole... (see below)... I did not like the idea of moving the controls... i wanted them to be positioned right yet fully sealed/shielded (ie not going into f hole territory) and hence here we are. the funny thing is... I do this to myself in every venue. with pedal builds... sm thing... rarely a square cm to spare. I would like to say I'm going to heed those wise words in the future... but I just know no matter how much space I have gonna try and get as much in as possible to my own misfortune!

i did this once... on a lovely piece of birdseye. thought "i can go another mm deep" - nope. tossed it and started over. I know that's hard to hear... but I'm glad i did. despite how much you've invested in this neck... when you start to think about how much total time you have invested in a build... at least for me - don't want to be unsatisfied at the end. worse yet put another 10 hours into a fix when you could have spent the time building new. that said - i never like to waste wood and i was ashamed to toss that neck. You have to make the right choice for you. never hurts to try and fix... but don't be afraid to chalk it up to learning experience and start over either. I think yours - it's hard to tell... if that is right under the end of the rod - it's going to be problematic because that is where the pressure will be - the ends and the middle. if it's say "an inch or two" away from the pressure points... less likely to be a structural problem. you also have to consider "how thick is the wood in that area now?" unfortunately any routing is going to be very dangerous as your bit could hit your truss. you could manually carve out a stripe and put a skunk stripe in. You could sand the backside of it flat enough to get the truss out... then sand it a bit more flat... then add a contrasting piece of wood and it will look like a feature... but a lot of work! here's hoping something there helps.