Bizman62

For some reason this made me think about the girl sitting in front of me at middle school, aged 15...

Hi and welcome! As @mistermikev said going too deep with the headstock will weaken the transition. Actually the 4/2 construction needs less depth than a Fender style 6 in a row. If you look at any guitar of that type you'll notice that the string closest to the nut has the steepest angle. Bringing the two farthermost tuners closer to the nut will steepen their string angles, making the nut contact stronger. Thus you'd only need a string tree for the two middle strings, if any. Now that you made me think and wordify my thoughts I feel an urge to build that sort of a neck myself! Or two! As inexpensive 4+2 tuner sets may be hard to find, using two sets of 3+3 tuners should do the trick for one normal and one reversed headstock!

After having seen the animal video my first thought was that some sort of gopher had stored some food in your box for a rainy day.

That's some seriously beautiful timber you've got there! A natural finish is definitely a good option, although @Drak widened my perspective in one of his builds called Beryl. Natural or supernatural, that's the question...

Congrats for a win well earned! The competition sure was tough.

Hello and welcome! As @mistermikev said a shim is what you need. A simple flat shim might be enough to lower the action and still allow you to raise the bridge so the bridge screws won't rip your wrist. Hardwood is the most often used material but for testing purposes you can choose other solid materials as well. Perspex, aluminium etc. are available as perfectly flat in various thicknesses, pieces of soda cans can be used for fine adjusting. Just make sure that the screw holes are wider than the screw diameter so they don't grab! The common consensus seems to be that a piece filling the bottom of the neck pocket is best for the sound and sustain although even big name guitars have had models with a tilt screw. If a flat piece can't fix your action, tilting the neck will. Finally, when you've got the action as low as possible you can file the bottom side of the bridge screws if still needed.

One option - given that you'll have a bolt-on neck - is to install a piezo pickup into the neck pocket.

Many of us have various pieces of guitar building wood - tops, fretboards, necks and bodies - stored on some shelf. It has happened that when you finally want to build something out of them especially the thin ones may have warped, potentially beyond being usable. Here's a simple solution. A bunch of slats and some masking tape will keep air flowing around the pieces. If needed, a level board with some weight on it will further ensure the stability.

There's a guy in YouTube who's got several videos about repairing cracked headstocks from the bottom side, often leaving the cap unharmed. That would leave the splines more or less visible from the underside, though. But it's doable and quite easy to hide if the angled area is painted - many guitars have a burst at the ends of the neck. I wouldn't bother, though, since it requires a jig to get the grooves right. Too much effort for fixing something that isn't broken...

Scandinavian bed legs often are some common local hardwood, either birch (pale like maple) or beech (light pinkish brown with tiny longitudinal dots all over). Both are stiff and strong.

I have a theory about that and it may be totally wrong... Anyhow, a spline reinforced neck angle is most likely stiffer than the original. Now my theory is that in a simple angled headstock the nut flexes, counteracting the vibrations while a reinforced (splines or volute) angle won't give in, allowing the neck vibrate longer and stronger.

I just sanded back the pine floor of our daughters' room after 25 years of Osmo. Agreed, the most hard wearing places had already the finish knocked off and as the wood was slab sawn I had to use quite a lot of glue to reattach the harder splinters to the fast grown soft wood. I did the sanding with a 4" random orbital which could follow the convexity of the 5" wide planks - they were sold as "rustic" with beveled edges so the unevenness is sort of a feature. Not to mention that I had no interest to hire a big machine which I can't really handle (I've tried) for levelling the floor and blowing dust all over the place. The vacuum I used with the orbital kept the room surprisingly clean. Had the wood been of better quality, more like quarter sawn with tighter growth rings the job would have been even easier. Anyhow, the point was that Osmo is a pretty good finish for guitars as well as floors. It's not as hard as lacquer but if you get a dent it's fairly easy to fix by steaming, sanding and reapplying. Lacquer would crack and it's hard to blend a spot repair.

The right one is what caught my eye by being familiar yet unique.

That seems to be a common concern, yet it's fairly simple to calculate the height difference at various places on the radiused fretboard.

Somehow the math doesn't match... I thought it was about three guitars but I can see four. Which one of the two is the FiftyNine?

Since there's no big difference between the clearcoat or paint on cars and guitars, why not use the same products? The younger partner (20+) at my regular car repair shop swore by King Carthur All In One PolishCoat which cleans, removes small and fills deeper scratches, polishes and protects all in just one pass. For an oiled finish or bare wood I'd prefer "real" wax, though.

A bunch of wedges and a length of rope, possibly assisted by a couple of 60 cm pieces of 2x2" would do the job.

on second thought Fender seems to use thin fretboards. My AmStd looks like 4-5 mm measured at the highest point at the body end.

I very much like your attitude regarding the headstock! Since it's not a carbon copy of a Jag, why bother copying the parts you don't like... Per the 5 mm thick (thin) fretboard, you can always add a veneer on the bottom side to make it thicker! A contrasting stripe with side dots on it could be quite fancy!

I'm with @Charlie H 72, and like him I'm no expert either. It took me a few looks before I found out what you meant with the short grain issue but the exaggerated version clarified that. We're talking about a millimetre here, both in length and depth. If structural integrity depended on that very millimetre, we should have strict plans for all sorts of wood as their strength varies. Brittle woods should be left thicker than stiff ones and we should have tuners of various lengths to match the thickness needed for the most commonly used woods. As this isn't the case I believe there's quite a lot of headroom. A bottom side headstock plate is a classy feature. Further, you could even make a separate volute piece to strengthen the joint if you wish, either contrasting or matching. Carving the volute piece so that it minimizes the end grain area would make a very solid glue joint, perhaps even stronger than a volute carved from the actual neck.

At first I was looking for the experiment about rubbing an ebonite pole with a cat's fur. But as I was double checking that I learned that it depends on the materials whether the rubbed object gets a negative or positive charge. That made me wonder if the guitar could be buffed to repel dust by choosing the right material for the buffer. But no, the same laws affect dust as well, dust particles can be both negatively or positively charged depending on what they make contact with while floating through air. So there'll always be dust of the opposite charge flying around, waiting for a freshly polished guitar...

Looks like a valid method to me. As you noticed the back of the saw despite keeping the blade straight comes in the way when you're almost through. I guess such a wide blade wouldn't warp if you take the back off at that stage or change to another saw, whichever is easier. Just as a side note, super glue comes easier out of the bottle if you take the cap off...

At first look I thought there's a scratch on the upper horn but on the next photo it was obvious that it's a hair as I could see the reflection of it. That's the problem with highly polished things, all dust particles and hair show double!

Can't wait to see where this journey takes us!

If your fretboard is 10" your frets should be something like 8" so the ends would be hitting the fretboard first and the centre would follow. The tasmanian myrtle is a bit harder than oregon but still in the same ballpark. You can level the frets quite a lot, they're taller than it seems. As you know they can be recrowned several times so I guess the maximum to level off is about half of the height of the fret. Most likely you aren't pushing that hard! So yes, tighten the radius and use moderate power.