Lwguitar

I’m an Engineer that knows a little about machining. The plant I work in has a machine shop I have access to so I poped this out on lunch break.

Finished this prototype bridge piece. The first hole is for a lock bolt and the second is for a small height adjustable saddle. The hole on the front is for the intonation adjustment screw. The plan is to make 7 of these and anodize them black.

The string goes through here.

This key way will keep the bridge piece aligned properly.

The idea behind this bridge is to have a more comfortable and attractive bridge while maintaining full adjustability.

Have you ever tried hammering in frets? That press looks like a slick way to press in the frets. How do you like it?

1 hour ago, mistermikev said:

wow, you are brave.  that is a nice piece of wood!  I have a bandsaw that can re-saw but I'll be damned if I can get a good cut out of it... seeing your work makes me think perhaps I should consider trying this (not that I think I could do it but that I think I'd stand a better chance w your method than my bandsaw!)  Nice work!

It would be a sad day if I scraped this piece of walnut!

Thats the nice thing about hand tools! They are slow at cutting wood but they are also slow at making mistakes! It’s a lot harder to make a big mistake when it takes 5 minutes of hard labor!

1 hour ago, ADFinlayson said:

good job on the resaw, I've done that myself on a couple of builds recently, I made myself a kerfing plane out of a cheap tenon saw and some oak offcuts, I recommend doing the same, it will prevent the little hickups and give you a much better bookmatch result as you can get through the whole thing without having multiple cuts.

The guy on the video I watched didn’t do that step. 

Next time I will either do that or use a table saw with a thin blade to start the cut. (My dad has a table saw he might let me use if I bring his granddaughter along)!

Thanks for the tip!

I’ve spent more time sharpening my plane blade than actually working on the guitar.

The plane was my late grandpa’s, I found it in his garage and am working on refurbishing it.

This is what the blade looked like...

27 minutes ago, Norris said:

Very brave. At least you should get useable boards out of it eventually 

Brave, stupid or cheap! I’m not sure!

I couldn’t find any 3/4 inch thick book matched walnut that had the figure I wanted so this was my next option.

Got the walnut book matched. I don’t have a bandsaw that can re saw a board this wide so I had to cut it by hand.

This is what I used for a vice.

Marked the centerline.

I cut in about 1/4 inch strait across the top and then followed the line about 4 inches  down the close side of the board. Them turned the board around and followed the line down that side. The idea is to use the saw cut as a guide so you don’t get crooked.

This happened on the opposite side of the board though. 

The whole process took about an hour.

The thin spots are about 3/4 inch so I should be able to do a decent carved top. 

Still lots of work to get it flat.

A few minutes of planing...

Not to bad so far!

I love the traditional Fender shape but with the 3x3 tuner layout! That’s pretty cool.

what kind of preamp are you building?

It is pretty ambitious but this is the guitar I want so I may as well go for it. Plus all the extra little things that make it more difficult arn't really any harder than the basic stuff needed to build a guitar, just more time consuming. Ive never done any precision wood work before so the whole project is going to be new to me. I have been planning this project off and on for about 10 years though so hopefully Ive got the skills somewhere in my head to not mess it up to bad.

The plan is to make everything but the tuners, switches and pots completely from scratch.

Here are the full specs if everything goes according to plan.

Dimensions

Number of strings-7

Fanned Fret-Low B Scale Length 26

                          High E Scale length 25

Bridge Angle-16.5 degrees

Zero Degree Fret-Approximately the 5th fret

Fret board radius-12" at nut, conical section fretboard

Number of frets-24

Nut Width-Equivalent to 1.695 nut width

String Width at nut-E-B length -1.70  E-e 1.415 equivalent

Sting to string spacing at nut-.004 increase per string treble to bass

String width At Bridge-E-B length - 2.61 inches (e-E = 2.175")

String Spacing at Bridge-.435 Inch (same as wide fender spacing)              

Electronics

Pickups custom made slanted super low wind mini humbuckers with wood covers

Preamp- Bartaloni AGB/918-2 placed after all electronics to act as buffer so guitar cable won’t effect tone

Battery 9 volt

Main Controls; 3 way paddle toggle switch bridge/middle/Neck            

                             Volume control with push push for phase reverse    

                             3 way mini toggle resonant frequency switch for neck pickup         

                              3 way mini toggle peak hight switch for neck pickup               

                             3 way mini toggle resonant frequency switch for bridge pickup       

                             3 way mini toggle low cut for bridge pickup                                         

Hardware

Bridge-Custom made top load bridge

Nut-Brass adjustable nut

Tuners-Hipshot locking open gear tuners

Neck-Bolt on

Control cavity cover-Magnetically secured easily removable wood cover

Volume knob-Custom layered wood to match pickups

Construction and materials

Neck-Wenge with 2 carbon fiber re-enforcement rods and a two way truss rod

Fret board-Birdseye Maple with "crown of thorns" inlay and walnut binding.

Body-Figured Makore back, figured walnut top

Frets-Evo Gold Fret wire

I had to google "cut of your jib" haha. Thanks!

Well I finally started my first guitar build!

Got the body template cut out of 3/4 MDF and trimmed the walnut slab down to the correct width using a band saw and a plane.

Also finished my workbench! The frame is made from a 70 year old door frame and the top is 4 pieces of 3/4 MDF glued together. 

LW

I think a may have rather played the root beer float but all the details pulled of so smoothly on the V were just great. I think the v was the harder guitar to make and it looked flawless so it got my vote.

Your headstocks are amazing! I’m designing my first guitar now and am kind of stuck on the headstock look. I love how you have it carved!

How is that wenge neck holding up? I want to do a one piece wedge neck but I also want stability.

It was hard not to vote for that Tele, but that was just to nice of an acoustic. 

I love that headstock! Is there a tonal advantage to having the bass strings farther back or is it a just for looks!

All nice but I’m loving that bass!

Rural King had clamps on sale! I got all these for $45.00.  Getting my shop put together!

On 8/12/2018 at 8:39 PM, mistermikev said:

UPDATE: *-==========08/12/18==========-*

made a little more progress this weekend...

1 outta 2 ain't bad: toggle cavity control plate worked swiimmingly - that dewalt saw is awesome... used a bigger saw for the other cavity but failed as the blade was too thick... so I'll have to pickup some 1/8" mahog for that.

 

 

 

 

Very cool idea! I was planing on using a rip saw to cut 1/4 inch off of the guitar entire body of the and cut the control plate out of that but this looks like it could work better. Turns a lot of nice wood into chips but could be a lot better option than trying to get a straight cut through a 14" board.

I probably won’t be able to start this build until next spring but I want to see if this idea works well.

Ive spent hours on google looking for something similar and can’t find anything. I’m surprised nobody has done it.

Thanks! My initial idea was to have a U bracket something like this...

If you try it post here so I can see it!

This is my first post so...hi...

I am in the process of designing my first from scratch guitar build (other than a hobbled together college project) and I am wanting to have several 3 way mini toggle switches. In order to keep the guitar looking clean I want to have these switches recessed so the nuts are hidden. I've seen this done on other guitars with pick guards but never on a guitar with a just a wood top. I'm wanting to do a figured walnut top on the guitar and was planing on drilling a hole and then filing a slot for the switch to go through, there would be some sort of mounting bracket in the electronics cavity.

like this...

• Drag images/files here to attach, or choose files... 
  Accepted file types jpg, png, gif, rtf, mp3, zip, pdf, dxf, dwg, tcw, wav, ico, jpeg · Max total size0.49MB
• Insert other media 

Anybody tried this? See any problems with it?