ZekeB

Resaw the mahogany for the backplate cover.  Took a while but was a nice clean cut.   Shouldn't be too much planing 

Glued.  Here we go.  

Thanks!  Yeah, my first guitar didn't turn out so great either.  You still have that sketch lying around?  I'd love to see it.

I'm on board with you for originality.  I love fender and gibson but I just want to see something new.  I could look at the GOT winners for hours.  I've got a pretty good sized collection of ideas so its really fun to finally build one and bring it to life.  I can tell its going to be pretty addicting.  Kind of like building your own line of guitars.

21 hours ago, ZekeB said:

Made an Edit to the signature.  Was inspired by some of the guitars I saw on here to put their logos in different areas so i decided it would be need to inlay the scratch board.

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I like to design guitars when I'm not trying to figure out how to build one.  Just thought I'd share here.  Calling this one the Osprey.

Wanted a really bold binding with purfling.  Also worked around the idea of having pieces of hard woods like ebony and rosewood maybe as the scratchboard like an cello or stand up bass.  

Your right about the knobs I'll definitely be spreading those out

Thanks.  I copied the the areas I filled in from the vector file and lowered the opacity on photoshop.  Then I used the eraser with a very low hardness to taper in the edges.  All about the layers

So I've decided I don't like black.  Took pictures of the actual wood and hardware and used photoshop with the blueprint to play with colors and proportion everything correctly.  what you guys think?

52 minutes ago, ScottR said:

Other than scale length and fret spacing, there really are no rules to electric guitar building. Everything else is aesthetics and comfort....and a signal chain.

And strings...you can't play without strings.

SR

Haha, I agree strings help quite a bit.

That's a beautiful guitar andy.  I'm relieved to hear you can be a little lax on some dimensions.  

I'm inspired by your knobs too.  Time to Rev up the lathe.  Think I have some padeuk and some ebony from my last project. I going to attempt that.

Have you ever made homemade pickup covers?

Hi Prostheta.  Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experiences with the timber.  I made a few changes and have gone with the honduran mahogony in part with exactly what you were talking about.  I'm also going to use honduran for the neck as well.  I'm shooting for the theory that my nice 3/4" thick maple top and ebony will give me a nice big tonal spectrum.

I'm thinking about sticking to a 1 3/4" so that'll leave an inch of mahogany on the back.  You think that will be sufficient?  

I'm going to resaw a piece of the mahogany to be the control cavity cover too.

Taking an extra day to modify the size of the body to be a little larger.  After making the model it doesn't feel very ergonomic while sitting down.  Also allow me to have a larger control cavity to counter the heavier weight and enough room to work in.

Eager to start but I'm sure it'll pay off.  

I like to get a base it off of somethings that starts with functional and you make sacrifices or accommodations based on what your end goal is.  I love designing guitars and I typically start with developing a base shape then I can start developing different themes or qualities of that guitar.  I think it falls into those 3 elements for the body for the back middle and horn.  Basically they'll either be parallel, symmetrical or inverted.  Regardless of the shapes you come up with they all seem to accommodate the same principal.  After I have a design and pick one I'll start to think about practicality and fleshing it out.

I don't want to make it too scientific because I think your capable of coming up with some pretty amazing things when you don't try to constrain it with logic as long as you find some easy base lines to start with.  Kind of like having a broad mission statement so you can still steer in the right direction when your not sure which way you'll be going exactly.

Here's a few shapes I've come up with to demonstrate the method I've chosen.

Sounds like a good idea.  Thanks for the going through the trouble of moving it.

So I've got the wood.  Really is beautiful.  Got it from NorthRidgehardwoods.  I'll definitely use them again.  Something I had not thought of was routing the control channels before gluing the cap on.  This is my first build and after seeing how nice the wood is really makes me think twice about the plan.  Its not your typical Lowe's lumber.  Anyways, here we go.

I'm going to go with your advice.  The model feels really good.  I don't see any reason to make things more complicated.  Thanks for the input

I do have another question regarding putting an angle on the top face.  When I carved it seems pretty full all the way through and I've heard that having a little angle to the neck helps playability.  This may be just subjective but I wanted to get your guys opinion on the matter.  Do you guys have a preference in angle of the body to the neck even if the bridge doesn't need the angle?  Here's an illustration of the two ideas.

  So basically you would just plain down the top piece to a very slight angle.  thanks guys.  

Hers a more detailed conceot of what I'll be shooting for.  

Yes it will be 25.5".    Slight changes made.  The neck and body will be honduran mahogony.  Just bought the lumber and carved a prototype out of some cheap oak.  Will have a 3/4" top with about 1/2" of carving room. 

First hand carve and a lot of mistakes were made including the infamous splinter between fingernail but I really enjoyed hand carving it.  Something really special about shaping it by hand.  Anyway, I'll post some pics soon as I get that far.    

Thank you guys for the help.  Really great source of information 

Awesome.  Thank you, Scott.  I'll post a pic when its complete.  Just finished my final dimensions and task plan.  Thanks again!

Hi,

I'm new to the forums and I've been watching it for over a year now and I'm going to try and tackle my 2nd guitar design.  Before I start pulling the trigger on materials I wanted to see if I might be able to pick the brains of more experienced luthiers out there.  My biggest worry is that I'm setting my guitar to not be acoustically pleasing.  From the characteristics of the materials and practices I've read I think it may have a lot of low's and mids.  I don't need twangy snap but I do want it to be sharp enough for lead and good cleans.

I know this is a matter of perspective but what I have so far isn't really traditional and I know there's folks out there who have experimented more.

Anyways here's my main specs and design so far.  Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Mako

Neck - 5 piece laminate - maple, wenge, mohogany

24 frets

Set Neck

Body will be a carved flamed maple top on Mohogany body (considering possibly Basswood as well)

HSS Tom Anderson Pickups and wiring

Will have a Schaller Non tremelo hard tail bridge (no tremelo cavity cut)

I think those are my main attributes.  Here's the design.  Thank you guys in advance.

Here's more of the conceptual vision: