Bizman62

These come as large as 5XL

Now that's XXX'y!

I must say I actually liked the arrows, they added some lightheartedness to the build. For some reason it made me think about old ocean liner posters. Then again I can fully understand you may have reasons for your guitar not to look like the Lounge Guitar of the Love Boat!

My fault, I somehow mixed the "total wood thickness" with "top thickness" and kept repeating that. That said, a 1 cm top can easily be installed like shown in my last illustration, there'll be no weak spot. Heck, I'll draw it! Anyhow, as you say the distance from the highest point on the top will be 7.5 cm apart from the lowest point at the horn, there's quite big a contour. Are you planning on bending the top over a carved bottom or just carve the shape? Both are valid options, it's more about the looks and simplicity to build. Same for the lower bout between the bridge and strap button.

She's elegant!

That's a wise decision! Why take the risk when it's not actually broken.

The 1" thick top. The neck through will be carved into the body, under the top. Of course one could cut a step for the top but the structural integrity would severely suffer.

Without the arrow I wouldn't have noticed it on the picture. It looks so similar to the stripes on the neck! So if that really starts to bug you, "simply" take an alignable saw or router and open the seam, then glue in a purple veneer. The tool of my choice would be a circular saw with a fret slot cutting blade as that would easily be guided along a fence. A Dremel router with a 0.5 mm bit might also work.

For what I understand the biggest issue will be the neck break angle in the neck-thru. Let me explain: the top will be 2.5 (1") thick and cover the neck-thru, a notch will be made into the bottom wood only that means that the bridge will be about 3 - 3.5 cm (1 - 1½") higher than the fretboard as the top of the neck will be glued to the bottom of the top. as the distance from neck joint to bridge is about 25 - 30 cm (10 - 12") the angle would be about 4.7 - 5.7 degrees. It's in the ballpark compared with e.g. Les Paul a ~5 degrees neck angle would require quite wide a block to be cut from. There's two ways to cut the block to a neck-thru, illustrated below: The red lines illustrate using the edge for top of the body part, the pink lines show the angle been cut to both ends. The illustration is roughly in scale, the total length being 105 cm and the body part 4 cm thick. As the illustration shows about one third more wood width is required for the red lineup. A scarf joint in the headstock can be used to reduce that amount.

That's what I meant by "laminating the carbon fibre backplate to shape". Do you mean like a cup, the top acting as a lid? If so, our thoughts follow similar paths - again.

That's a very important feature in my opinion. The worst bridges I know are those with protruding set screws digging into your palm!

Glad I could catch your idea correctly! Yup, the second left is nice in its minimalism. However, preferring straight string pull, how about making it a bit more wedge shaped? Makeshift necks are a good idea, but corrugated cardboard will reveal the impression much cheaper.

You're most likely right. I've never had any feedback issues with my hollowbody but I don't use much gain. Also, we're talking about a semi-hollow with some extra space under the block and for what I've learned semi-hollows should suffer less from the natural resonances and such as the center block acts as a solid body.

It certainly ca be done but there's several things you should make clear for yourself. Let's start with the ergonomics: 7,5 cm is less than the thickness of an acoustic guitar, hollowbody guitars might be in the ballpark and semi-hollows a bit thinner. So nothing revolutionary there. Acoustic and hollowbody guitars usually have the neck join at the 14th fret whereas a single horn Les Paul has that at 16th fret and the Strats and Teles at the 17th. Dual horns allow a better access to the higher frets but the lowest frets are as far away as with single cuts. So if the neck break angle is straight like on a Strat you'll struggle reaching the lower frets if the body is thick. That said a neck break angle is recommendable You mentioned a full size backplate. Notice that a belly carve can't be done - unless you laminate the carbon fibre backplate to shape! If I understood correctly your design is like a semi-hollow with the neck being attached all the length to the top and the sides being carved out of a bottom block, a bit similar to this. Notice how you'd have to have a much thicker neck block to start with than just the 4 cm to get the neck break angle right: I wouldn't worry about acoustic feedback or other tonal anomalies as modern pickups aren't too microphonic. A wolf note may even be tuned off by reshaping the headstock or heel, a bit similarly to how you'd tune xylophone sticks.

The lowest left for 3+3 and the 5+1 second right are my favourites, the latter even more since it has a similar "clumsy Tele" vibe to the body. Note that 'clumsy' here doesn't mean anything negative, it's merely used to express that unlike the traditional models the outline isn't just a continuous curve.

Blimey! Even the ground wire hole under the bridge is honed to perfection!

The last percent will take almost as long as the previous stages. It's highly understandable that you'd like to get it finished as soon as possible but the last (five) percent(s) make 95% of the first impression of a random viewer! Get into the right mood for each task left, do only the amount you can before your hands start trembling, take a deep breath every once in awhile, flex and relax your hands... Concentrate on what you're doing and when the first symptom of fatigue hits, take a rest and continue when you really feel like it. If in any doubt stop immediately and take another look the next day - or week! Look at it, play it, feel it and if you find anything that makes you uncertain, make a note and check if you can reproduce the bugging the next day. Recarving the neck even with the strings on is totally acceptable if you need to. Same goes with the entire build, if you find out that some corner makes your playing position awkward you can simply reshape it. An oild finish is very easy and forgiving to fix, any patches simply blend in.

You've managed to build your puzzle pretty nicely without having to fill too many gaps with something else than wood. It also looks like most of the no-wood spots will be hidden or cut off. Looks like a parquet maker went nuts! A floor like that would drive me nuts... But on a small piece like a guitar it's simply stunning!

Now that's something Google didn't tell an exact answer for... I like this one though:

That sounds like it's built both for comfort and speed! Does the linseed keep the graphite from smearing your hand?

That'd be the cats of my daughter.

Now that's some neat wiring! It's hard to believe that you have never before built a guitar or soldered anything!

That raised my curiosity and I made a search for EVH playing the black and white guitar as that would most likely be "the real thing". The headstock was best seen on a couple of photos taken during the VH II recording sessions and it looked clean. The five burn marks are a thing to the degree that they exist on a mug. Also the MET museum pictures show the same marks on the red bodied guitar. But the black and white has a clean headstock. On some pictures it looked like it read Gibson or something close enough on it, on others it looks like the text either has been covered with pale tape or it has been scraped away.

"Mmmm... Beer! Yes, oh yes! Woohoo!" - H. Simpson -

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