erikbojerik

When you apply it to the top, you need to be REALLY careful to get a very even and thin application of the glue; if you have high spots in the glue you'll get ridges in the veneer, and that's where you'll sand thru (at least that's what happened to me). Now I go with nothing thinner than 1/16" for the top; it leaves room for re-sanding due to momentary finishing madness.

One of their selling points seem to be that the bodies are made of "Solid Wood!"....OK not plywood, but some solid woods are probably worse than plywood. Makes you wonder what kind of wood...I emailed and asked once, but got no reply.

What Frank said...I'm doing my first-ever neck that way now (back-contour last), and I must say I can't imagine doing it any other way.

ooops...my bad. I was thinking Fender "Kingman" (7.25") instead of Newporter (9.5").

I already did that inlay trick... CRAYON !!!

No No No No No No Nope The Newporter has a 7.25" radius; the necks used on those 60s era Fender acoustics are actually electric necks, just with a different heel (and decal). Find a neck from a Shenandoah (12-string version of the full-sized Malibu) and you can make yourself a nice 12-string Strat easy.

Don't wind 'em. Or go digital. Or both.

Put clocks in the holes.

All different kinds of screwdrivers....or screws, for that matter. Nuts and bolts. Or different kinds of nails.

In my experience, if you almost always play with fairly heavy distortion, then with good pickups (and amp!) it almost doesn't matter what the body is made of. If however you play 'clean' then the quality of the body really matters, that's where the 'tone' really comes out of the tonewood.

The whales are killer...so is the rest of it. Man, talent & time is a dangerous combination!

Cool...nice job. This could perhaps be easily modified into a tutorial on installing a truss rod into a 1-piece neck, then adding the skunk stripe... ...for those of us with killer 1-piece flame maple neck blanks...

With the edge $ander...I am guessing that you weren't able to get the results you wanted with just a drum sander on your drill press, right? Nice shop!

In my limited experience (3 maple tops), this is standard behavior for figured maple. I've had exactly the same thing happen on all my tops, all freshly cut from supposedly dry wood. They were all 1/8" thick glued down onto other blanks, and they all clamped down and held nicely, sanded out fine, and are now nice & flat. I think the issue is the grain; it goes every which way in figured maple, and the thinner the slice the more apparent the prevailing warp will be.

modern Fenders have a 9.5" radius. Vintage Fenders have a 7 1/4" radius, and for the record, Gibson Les Pauls are 12" radius. DON'T go fretless...at least with a guitar (its OK on bass where you won't be playing many chords). The fret wire will cost you maybe $5-$10, pennies when you come around to the cost of the rest of the hardware (bridge, tuning keys, pickups). On the neck, go flat and try it out. If you don't like the feel of it, yank out the frets, radius-sand either 10" or 12", then re-fret.

Very cool, body shape and finish, but I like the carve best!

E-Dog, that is so great, very cool! I'm really keeping a watch on this wood-burning thing. I remember doing some as a kid, with a fairly wide iron, but I recall that it made distinct depressions in the wood (which is OK for a body, could be strange for the fretboard of a neck). As a real artist, I imagine you can get the effect you want without denting the wood too much, eh? One other thing; on the body you showed, the design near the bridge (where the 9 holes are) will be mostly covered.

Gotta love that 'sausage' quilt, well done!

I've done both, maple veneer ~0.050" and maple 'drop top' ~0.125" (1/8th). The drop top was infinitely easier, although both were done on a flat top body (no forearm contour or anything like that). I glued both down with Titebond. With the veneer, in addition to the bookmatching problems Drak mentions, another problem I had was that my glue thickness was not uniform across the body, so I had a whole series of bumps, dips and swales that were subtle, but still there. They would have been accented by the finish, I'm sure. When I flat-sanded the whole thing off, the higher parts sanded thru to the glue before the low parts, confirming my intuition. Maybe thinner glue, or better clamping, would have done the job better. Best results are probably obtained with a vacuum press (I'm waiting for my wife's vacuum cleaner to fall apart so I can scavenge the motor...) After the veneer fiasco, I sanded back down to mahogany and applied the 'drop top'; got it lined up and flat in no time. I was able to plane it down with 80 grit on an orbital sander and still have plenty of thickness. I think 1/8" will bend OK as long as you steam it first (follow the tutorial on the 1/4" top). If you go thicker than 1/4" you might have enough thickness to do a carved top. I've heard that anything thicker than 1/8" will begin to affect the tone. best of luck

Yeah, I guess the 'all natural' approach would be slightly out of character for this forum. Yeah, a material finish would be cool. That's something I haven't seen much of on other sites. Speaking as an average joe and relative newcomer who has (probably) not yet developed the level of skills to participate in the construction, a material finish might be a good way to get everyone involved. It would not be difficult to have people nominate a bunch of patterns, whittle it down to a reasonable number, then poll the membership. Having that established, the same perhaps could be done with: body shape body wood type pickups wiring options neck/fretboard wood headstock shape tuners trem/bridge etc It would need to have some oversight to assure that the axe doesn't turn into Frankenstein, but it could be a cool way to go. Guitar by committee. Then a small number of our recognized experts do the actual assembly & finishing, then PG gets the proceeds after selling it on eBay for probably $250 (per neck; do you honestly think it'll go for more than that?). The sale would probably be good pub for the forum.

Derek nails it! That's a really great idea, thanks man!

Cool...just not blue. I seem to recall there's already a bunch of blue axes being built. In fact, I'd go quite the opposite way. All natural woods, no dyes, clear only.

I've roughed out 2 necks from some really great flame maple (no radius or back contours yet, still squared off). But now I'm thinking about the truss rods, and I'd like to keep the flame maple for the fretboard. My options are: 1) Go 1-piece and install the truss rod from the back w/ skunk stripe. Does anyone have experience with this (tutorial?)? 2) Go 2-piece, by having someone saw off the fretboard-side (thin rip saw?), do the normal top-loaded truss-rod thing, then glue the 'fretboard' back on. One problem with #2 might be the thickness of wood removed during sawing...I'm already down to about 0.85" to 0.9" thickness because I had to plane off some warp. Radiusing & back contours will come after this step. Which way should I go? thanks!

Since this would be your first home-built guitar, the quality would not be as good as a mid-level production job. However, you would learn so much that the second one would definitely be better, and it would be built exactly to your specs, no compromises. As for cost, it is a no-brainer. If you have access to a good woodshop for free, it could be similar in cost to a mid-level Epiphone. If you have to invest in the tools, it is far and away cheaper to buy one off the shelf. I think the main reason to build is not because it is cheaper (it normally is NOT), but because you just need an axe that you can't find anywhere else. At least that's the case for me. It's a great endeavor to build yourself, but cheap it is not.

On a Fender strat, the neck pickup is near the position of the (would-be) 24th fret. The middle pickup is half-way between the neck pup and the bridge. The bridge pup is half-way between the middle pup and the bridge. All for reasons of fundamental open-string harmonics.