davee5

And a few more detail shots that came out nicely. :: Dave

Well, finally the uke is back from finishing and I'm happy to say this thing is, for all intents and purposes, complete. Will I be tweaking action and intonation for another month? Sure, but at least now I can play it and I've put away most of the tools. Man, though, scraping up finish to glue on that bridge is danged nerve-wracking. I'm not 1000% stoked on the bridge carve, though I do like the shape. I think whenever this thing gets transmogrified into a full-size acoustic for the next big project, it may be tweaked. Also, I do wish I had means to make bridge pins from the apricot, as the bone pins look strange to me. All in all, I'm pleased with how it ended up and glad to wrap up 2+ years of dalliances so I can flipping build something else for a change. I may post more thoughts at a later time when I'm a bit less consumed with work, but I did want to share pictures with you all. Enjoy! :: Dave

When buying tools for fine metrology we need to be really clear about a few things: the differences between accuracy, precision, and the role of tolerances. Once that's clear we can talk about applications. Loosely speaking... Accuracy is how close the displayed measurement is to the actual dimensions, Precision is how repeatable your measurements are, and Tolerances are how accurate your measurements are guaranteed to be with the out-of-the-box tool. Consider the analogy of, say, a rifle that's being pointed dead-nuts at a target bulls-eye. An accurate rifle is one that is consistently close to the center of the target, though the hole pattern may be super scattered around it. A precise rifle is one that is consistent from shot to shot, even if that tight grouping is waaaay off-center. The tolerance of the rife is the minimum accuracy and/or precision the maker guarantees it will have out of the box. Now consider this when you buy cheap-o digital calipers. Your calipers will always always always display a precise looking, +/-0.001 inch measurement on that nice, simple readout. This number has ZILCH to do with your actual dimensions if the caliper is not accurate, precise, properly zeroed, used correctly, or well cared for. Digital calipers are tools that are only as precise as their manufacture and their operators, but their displays will not imply this. When you read "0.007" on your calipers, when it should say "0.007+/-0.020 manufacturer's tolerance, and BTW you're holding it off angle, pressing too hard, and the tips are bent." SO, caveat emptor when buying things that seem precise but may not actually be in reality. Regarding digital vs. dial: I like digitals for their switching units, zero-setting/relative position measurements, and easy reading... it's what I use at home and at work. However, one thing I do love about dials is being able to see caliper flex. If you press too hard you can watch the needle move, even if the piece is not changing dimensions... something far less obvious on digital calipers. Also, dials are old skool and I love watching that needle spin without a dang battery. Applications for guitar building. I've only built a few instruments, but making guitars out of wood is not like making aircraft parts out of inconel. Measuring to +/-0.005 (Mitutoyo tolerances) so you can shape wood is silly, it's an organic and highly heterogeneous material that will swell and contract with humidity changes. Measuring your thickness planing to +/-0.005" is dandy, but it's wankery. I once stopped by my local shop, Gryphon Stringer instruments (jealous, anyone?) to aks Frank Ford of frets.com fame about how closely I needed to cut my fret slots. His response? within a 1/16! I was flabbergasted! All these people pushing micron tolerances on their CNC machines are not accounting for environmental changes, finger pressure, and everything else that changes your guitars are you play them. If the great Frank Ford says you only need to hit +/-0.060, I'm inclined to believe him and still try to do one better... but I'm not sweating that last 0.005" anymore. SO! In conclusion: Any cheapo digital calipers you find will probably be just fine for guitar building, but know how your tools actually work and don't rely too much on false accuracy. Happy building! :: Dave

Bummers all around on the busted axe. I got a bunch of individual mini-tuners for my ukulele project from LMI, they will sell pretty much any of their tuners individually right off the website. (Aside: why are uke-specific tuners so crappy? Anyone need a set?) Just go to their tuner page and you'll find what you need: http://www.lmii.com/CartTwo/thirdproducts.asp?CategoryName=Tuning+Machines&NameProdHeader=Gotoh%99+Steel+String+Contour+%28510%27s%29 :: Dave

Almost one and a half years after starting this project the body and neck are complete and ready for finishing. I still have to carve the bridge, bridge pins, nut, saddle, and do all the fretwork & setup, but it is tantalizingly close to done. This week I'm sending it off for finishing with Addam Starck, as I did for the first guitar project. Addam does brilliant work for an exceptionally reasonable price and I am in no way setup to do world class finishing in my dusty, doorless carport in the backyard. Here are a few teaser shots of the uke before it gets all glossed up. A recap of the final all-California native materials: - Sinker redwood top - Claro walnut back and side - Apricot fingerboard, rosette, and bridge - Monterey cypress neck - Curly sycamore binding - Monterey scavenged abalone inlay - Big Sur jade heelcap - Redwood burl fretboard markers w/ silver outline The completed body & neck. The tail at the body, showing the hourglass endgraft and the best purfling miters I've ever pulled off. The neck as it meets the body. The purfling on the heelcap should properly meet the body after finishing, as the bolt-on neck will sit a little higher as the soundboard thickens. The heel and the body, showing the completed heelcap. A few notes on the heelcap. I had long planned to make an homage to the iconic CA Hwy 1 sign that designates the lovely road that runs the length of the California Pacific Coast. It's the right shape and a nice touch for Uke # 1, but green wood is hard to find. After looking over lovely jade work on many of my business trips to Asia I decided to try my hand at working with some California jade from the Big Sur region of the central coast. As I mentioned last time the heelcap also has to push into the body somewhat to cover up a small binding routing boo-boo, which made for pretty delicate work and careful alignment. I may have to do some more fitting work after the finish goes on, but the fit ended up well after lots of very careful sanding and scraping. As for my first experience with lapidary work... I cannot really recommend working with jade in the same way I did: a dremel, cheap grinding wheels, and necklace beads bought from local hippies. If you are actually setup for lapidary work and have large pieces of rough then you can ignore my advice and continue doing what you do. Basically I first tried crushing the stone and inlaying the dust & pieces the way some builders do with turquoise. This looks like crap, the jade turns a clearish, greenish, yellowish color that does not return to its deep lustrous green when wet... it's wrecked. To combat this I tried to grind out puzzle-pieces of jade to fit around the abalone "1" and fill the cracks with the dust. This is OK, but the stone cracks under the heat and vibration dry grinding and the flaking layers make it hard to work confidently. The seemingly fraying edges start to have the same ghostly look the crushed rock does. This effect is easy to see in the final piece. All lapidary sources I read implied the proper way to do this is either really, really slowly as the ancients did, or with wet fine-grinding wheels. The pieces that are intact look beautiful, but the overall effect of the final piece is not working as I had hoped. Add jade work to the doing-it-the-hard-way list with the aforementioned scavenged abalone shells. Experience, character, and learning... I've learned more things on this project than I could possibly have imagined when it was started in July of 2010. Final beauty shots to follow when finishing is complete, probably in a month or two as it takes a while for real nitro to cure. So close, sooooo close. Cheers, Dave

Thanks for the kind words, all. The camera is really, finally finishing up and I'm really, finally getting more time with the build. Since the last update the uke has been boxed up, bound, and scraped. Now it's down to inlays aaaand fixing a little area where I did a dumb thing. (Note to other builders, if you think it will be easier to make a nicely fit tenon by laminating 3 identical blocks for both the neck and neckblock, you are right: it fits great. BUT, I recommend making the tenon not run the full height of the block because then you will have no material behind the heel of your neck and the binding won't work just so and you'll have to come up with a clever looking inlay/heelcap to fix the whole deal because you DIDN'T THINK THAT THROUGH VERY WILL DID YOU?!?) Here are few shots of the body and the headstock inlay I've been working on. The headstock logo is a play on a Chinese name seal, in my case a baiwen (red stamp with cut-away characters). The letters are from a logo I did for a custom bicycle project (too many projects!) that turned my last name EVANS into heavily blocked and attached letterforms. Here they're rearranged so the top/bottom line should read a stylized EVA / NS. Fun times, nice look, good plan. Where my plan fell apart, literally, is in the selection of materials. In an effort to keep using local materials I decided to try and make my own abalone blanks from shells scavenged off of Monterey, CA beaches in the years I and my wife lived there. I got out 3 big shells, put on the respirator, pulled out the jewelers saws and went to work. I'd get about 1 inch into a cut and then POOF I'd have a pile of glittering dust and confetti all over my hands. What I learned about how shells "rot" is this: they delaminate and cleave across the nacreous layers. This is not easy to predict, as some layers will be pretty strong and others will explode if you look at them funny. These properties make cutting details into shell a massive, massive pain in the butt. (Note to other builders, just buy shell blanks, the process of doing it yourself is dusty, smelly, frustrating, and yield largely inferior results. I will almost certainly not do this again, unless maybe I can get fresh shells from abalone divers.) Over 2 days of non-stop work I cut up 2 full shells, leveled the blanks on sandpaper, threw away the bursting pieces and ultimately yielded about 5 square inches of pretty shell blanks that emerged intact. I then took the backside of a piece of red abalone that looked pretty lousy from the MOP side and used the red outer shell to create the cinnabar-colored field of the baiwen "stamp" inlay. I rigged up my dremel with a tiny endmill, clamped a steel rule down as a guide, and carefully carefully routed out the channels for the design. The shell delaminated twice and was CA-glued back into place. This was not fun. I then rigged up a makeshift shell-tablesaw by using the dremel in a vise with cutoff-wheels and a clamped scrapwood "fence" so I could cut appropriately sized strips of abalone to inlay the white centers of the stamp. I cut about half of the blanks I got form the previous 2 days of work and ALL of them delaminated mid cut, regardless of how careful I was. Demoralizing. I ended up essentially giving up and trying to use the least damaged pieces very VERY carefully reshaped witha diamond file, cut with great intensity while wearing magnifying goggles, to yield barely BARELY enough pieces to inlay into the routed shell. Many of these pieces were being held together, in layers, with tweezers while they were filed to length and dropped into place despite an imperfect fit. This was not my most rewarding weekend, but I sure learned a lot about shell and the limits of my dexterity. As an aside, if you are as lucky as I am and are married to a very accommodating surgeon, I suggest you not let her watch you fumble and mumble with such delicate operations because you will not live that down until she stubs her toe in the middle of the night and you still won't win that argument, now will you? The reality is the results of this effort are not up my usual standards of quality and finish, but I'm happy to just be done with the thing because it was driving me bonkers. This is exactly why I'm building a uke before a guitar, to make my mistakes and test my assumptions on something I'm not as passionate about. Ultimately I'm glad for the learning experience and I know these trials will make me a better builder, improve my character, etc... but I'd still be happier if the shell looked like a million bucks! Next week's lessons: grinding green jade from Big Sur to make a heelcap inlay that looks like a CA-1 highway sign whilst also fixing the issue I created with the neck block shortcut. Happy building, Dave

Aaaaaand, here comes the slightly conflicting information based of armchair theories! With the little research I did into HPL I found basically nothing about the actual type of resin that impregrantes the fibers on the top layer of the laminate. That said, I would probably expect it to have pretty high surface energy and for it to act like a big plastic surface. Epoxy bonds relatively poorly to plastic because its adhesive mechanism is not solvent based and it does not modify the bonds at the plastic surface. Ideally you want toe adhesive to essentially make the glue an integral part of the resin itself, for example CA bonds plastics that have an acrylic component astoundingly well. In wood it's my understanding that most of the bonding comes from the glue acting like a tiny filler in the microporous wood grain. Here the thinness of most CA also helps, giving it a physical/mechanical hold on the wood structure, which is why it's effectively even though it does not modify the chemical bonds and it's actual "adhesion" to wood is poor. Now epoxy will definitely have some hold on plastic, even if it's not great, and it will definitely act as a mechanical bond within rough grooves. It will probably work fine at the forces we're talking about but it may not be the truly "ideal" candidate. Broadly speaking, the best adhesives for plastics are: cyanoacrylates, polyurethanes, acrylics, and some UV-curing bonders. Of these polyurethane and CA will work the best on wood. That said, all of this is about ADHESION. Adhesion does not equal bonding, as bonding is much more complex and bring about details such as the aforementioned mechanical bonding and other influences over holding strength. If you really, really want to nerd out on this stuff (as I often do) you can read up here: http://www.evenfallstudios.com/woodworks_library/wood_adhesion_and_adhesives.pdf So, in short: CA and epoxy will both probably be fine, but you're in a situation that does not really have a perfect solution.

Thanks for the kudos on the Lytro camera, guys. I definitely have light-field pictures of this project but the way our files and the player works can be thought of a lot like YouTube: since we have a totally new file format we upload it to a central site and then we can embed it elsewhere in HTML 5 or Flash. The issue here is our hosting site isn't public yet! So... in due time, in due time. Meanwhile: regular old 2D, non-interactive pictures! Taken with a camera whose battery charger died during the bending-stage! Since I've been in the country for almost a full, uninterrupted month I've made some decent progress. First I tried to bend my first set of sides by hand witha crap-tastic bender that I used for bending rosewood bindings a long while back. Boy what a disaster. Cracked my lovely matching sides and scrapped 'em, bought new near-match walnut and planed them to thickness by hand AGAIN, cut 2 side sets from the new flitch, and then bought a fox bender with a blanket! The bender is guitar-sized, so my quick & dirty little uke jig was a bit challenging to use but HOLY CRAP is it easier to bend with a machine than by hand. Yes, skill is good to develop, but this is a hobby in which my fleeting spare time is far far most precious to me than a couple hundred bucks. Your mileage may vary, but this was a great investment for me. After bending a practice side pretty well I got my real-sides just about perfect, glued up my head & tail blocks, and installed the linings of Port-Orford Cedar (man, does that stuff smell good). The front and back were sanded with new, purchased radius dishes and cleaned up for boxing up. Note I chose to buy new dishes because the ones I made using the slightly experimental method shown above worked out pretty poorly as the ply I had used as a foundation was not particularly straight and bent too easily to hold the correct curvature. Then I set about bracing the plates. I rough-cut the back plate and glued on the centerstrip and back braces, one at a time under the weight of a very very large bike lock. (I was too lazy to pickup thin sticks or fiberglass for a proper go-bar deck, let alone make camp-clamps. The weight seems to have worked fine for uke-sized braces.) The bridge patch was glued in from an off-cut of the back plate, which left a really nice accent in place. Since the walnut is far stronger than the softer cedar bridgepatch I almost used, I took some liberties with the bracing in that area to add some visual flair and showoff the inlayed strip beneath the center fan brace. Scalloping braces by hand with a sharp, sharp chisels is very satisfying, if not a bit unnerving when it gets thin. Only a few minor nicks in the plates, and it all cleaned up reasonably well. So at this point my box parts are all cleaned up and pretty, the next step is boxing up! It's really nice to see this coming together in a very real ways after more than a year of intermittent progress. The plates sound amazing to my untrained ears, very bright and lively response to taps; the redwood has lovely bell-like overtones that I really hope come out in the final instrument. More soon, I hope! -Dave

Well this is sliiiightly off topic, but today I can finally talk about why this uke has been making such slow progress: Lytro. I am the lead product designer, mechanical engineer, and manufacturing guru for a startup called Lytro that today released a camera that will change the future of picture taking. I don't drink a lot of kool aid, I used to be a Apple and I got a bit inured to the taste, but this thing really is the first step towards a totally new way we take pictures. Anyhow, the work has had been busting my buns for ~80 hours+ a week for the last year, traveling to Asia >50% of the time, etc, etc. Clearly the personal projects have suffered for it. That said, now that we're on track to ship, my time has opened up a week bit. I've bent my sides, shaped the braces, glued in the linings, etc. Pictures of the progress being slowly made are forthcoming, but I mostly wanted to share this momentous update with you all. Cheers, Dave (edited to fix link)

I had all my finishing done by the very skilled Addam Stark, formerly finishing guru Santa Cruz Guitars and now independently operating in the same neighborhood. He charged me $450 for pore fill, a bunch of nitro coats, wet sand, and buff, all in his nice dust-free facility. The quality of finish was unreal, like it had been dipped in a nice thick vat of magic shininess, it was a totally different beast than the pile of wood I dropped off. Given I have no finishing equipment, space, skills, or patience I considered this an absolute steal. Since I had some f-holes he was also dealing with funky masking issues and buffing cleanup. Clearly I'm pleased with the work. Your mileage may vary, but he's doing all my future projects for sure. As an aside, he told me that his big biz these days is doing finishing for some very high end (not to be named) single-proprietor acoustic builders. They pay him a flat rate of X thousand dollars per year for as many guitars as they build, which means he gets a decent pile of fixed revenues and they get to spend all that slow finishing time building another 1 or 2 $10,000 guitars. Everybody wins, the best kind of business model. -Dave

OK, time for an update on the Golden State Uke. Update: it's been cold and wet out here in the SF Bay Area, I've been traveling a bunch, and I switched jobs last week. Times of transition are good, but they do slow down the hobbyist luthier guy... But that's not what you all want to hear about, is it? Uke Update: The neck is basically done and the box materials are all prepped and ready to start building. Here's a few shots to hold you guys over until I get some better closeups of the good-looking parts: The Rosette - wedges of apricot wood, shown here being flycut before being inlaid into the redwood top. This was nerve-wracking to say the least. Horrible noise and thrown at least once. This was the kind of thing you do while you mind yells "THIS IS EXACTLY HOW NOT TO USE POWER TOOLS." (Please do not let my shop students know that I do dumb things at home... or my wife, the apprenticing surgeon. When I do this sort of thing I have these visions of being carted into the ER with my arm lopped off, carrie by my good hand in a bag of sawdust covered ice. Then, when she appears to put me back together, she starts berating me for shoddy work. Weird? Yes, so let's hope that never materializes...) The Backstrip - curly sycamore inlaid in 2 strips with a break that will fall right into the waist. I think this will be a nice accent and it was surprisingly easy to do, though my execution is far from perfect. I attribute inspiration for this detail to Galloup guitars, though others have used it and I have my own interpretation. The Neck - the neck is now shaped, the fretboard has been cut, the nut fit, and the whole thing bound and leveled. My workspace is pretty tight, but handtools keep the dust down. The flamed cypress feels great and the binding really sets it off, it looks like the necks I lusted after in Benedetto's book rom some angles - at least if you squint real hard. The pile of materials, ready to keep moving - 90% complete neck, inlaid top and back, bracewood cut to gluing size, and neck/tail blocks. Note that I also scored the new benchtop when a local lumberyard went out of business (Boo) and I grabbed a 2" thick solid maple door panel for free. Unreal! Now I'm motivated to keep my workspace a bit tidier. Anyhow, I'll post some detail shots of the inlays and neck shape when I have some better light to shoot in, after all the trouble it gave me the apricot fretboard looks great. Also, I hope to never cut my own fretslots again (at least, not the way I did it... clumsy), paying LMI to take care of that detail is worth the ~$10 by a mile! Gad to have the experience, though. Ok. I swear I'l have it done by spring... I'l keep you all posted. -Dave P.S. for Mr. BBB - The guitar you saw that got the Solomon treatment was a rather busted up old Yamaha that I got of craigslist for $30 and was unable to fix. I decided to scavenge the parts and use the body for my edification. All my life I've learned about how things work by taking them apart, so why not a guitar? I've kept it around because it's amusing and a cheap point of reference, if not a particularly excellent one.

Oh man, I may just pony up $140 for that book. Master Somogyi in print! He's based out of my neck of the woods, I've been trying to muster up the courage to pay a visit to his shop for years. While we're lauding heroically talented luthiers based in Oakland CA, I would like to submit my personal favorite of Michihiro Matsuda. Matsuda's lines are the most beautiful I have EVER seen in luthiery, and almost in all design work I know of (and I am a professional product designer, for whatever that's worth...). His eye for details and curves is unparalleled, as is his courageousness in experimentation without resorting to purely ostentatious novelty. But don't take my word for it, he apprenticed under Somogyi and Mr. Ervin himself claims Matsuda is the most talented luthier he's ever met! Matsuda's website is here:http://www.matsudaguitars.com/gallery.htm More complete, if not less organized, is his Flickr account here:http://www.flickr.com/photos/matsudaguitars/ (Note that you will have to slip past many non-guitar related images to see his oeuvre in full, he's not too diligent about tagging his work into his formal albums). Inspiration all around! Dave

Maybe you should email this guy, because his '59 replica build is one of the most impressive bits of work I've ever seen! http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-home-depot...paul-build.html

If that guy wants to waste his time and money chasing a patent, that's his call. (Note the remainder of this post is relevant to US IP law only) A trapezoidal neck doesn't strike me as particularly "non-obvious to someone well versed in the art," nor particularly defendable in court anyhow. It's a veeery broad functional improvement, which means it likely won't pass, or if it's a design patent (not a patent of invention) then it's not very useful in a litigious context. My guess is this guy is slightly misusing the "patent pending" legal phrase. Legally this means you have (1) had an officially accepted application for a provisional patent and (2) have, or are planning to, file for a full-patent within one year of filing for the provisional or publicly showing your invention. That's it. Patent Pending, as a legal status, give you one significant advantage: IF the patent you applied for, within a year of the provisional or the public revelation, is granted to you at a later date (typically many years later) THEN you may extend the legal rights that are commensurate with said patent back until the date your provisional patent was applied for. Note that a patent only grants you one significant right: to sue the pants off anyone else who (A) manufactures, ( uses, or © sells work that is legally and definably derivative of your patent. That it, it's a tool of litigation only. So, why is a provisional patent is important? Because it costs a little over $100 to file and the language requires no legal expertise. (Nobody reads it when it's filed, it only gets read if your patent is contended by other people... in which case they'll dig it up and see where you started, so fudging it entirely is not super advisable.) Why this Patent Pending business is deceiving... That mean any of you guys can fill out a very, very simple form with any idea you want, mail out a check for $120 to the USPTO, and suddenly you, you dear forum reader, will also be able to claim you have a "Patent Pending." Any could apply for a patent on breathing, or sand, or guitars, and you can legally claim you have a patent pending (for one year) on that item. After that year, since you will obviously never have a patent granted to you for breathing, you will have merely wasted some paper and $120. Why this Patent Pending business is useful... Let's say you apply for a real patent on your genuinely innovative electric guitar sustainer. You do the provisional yourself and then pay a real lawyer lots real money to get all thelegal language in order (do NOT do this yourself, you will certainly mess up the wording and that single misplaced "shall" can invalidate your patent). If it comes through you have a real patent of invention, along with legal rights dating back to that first filing! Let's also suppose that, in the meantime, some evil guitar corporation (let's call it Gitar Senter) has copied your design, or come up with it independently but later, and started making and selling the device that matches yours. For the 4 years that it takes to get your patent granted they make 1,000 units and $200,000. Once your patent is in you can start to excercise that legal right to sue them all the way back to your filing date! YAY! So you can sue them to stop making the devices, and selling the devices. Then you can sue them for damages projected from their sales, damage to your brand or business, damage to your mental health, legal fees, etc, etc. Money money money, waaaay more than the $200K they profited in the first place. This ends up meaning that "Patent Pending" becomes a very powerful tool for the Little-Guy against large corporations (in theory). With $120 you can gain enough legal leverage, that lasts until your filing is granted or rejected (remember, that's many years of limbo), to put some real hurt on that company. It's a powerful deterrent to others if the patentability of the device is credible. The credibility of the claim, then, is the real kicker. If you have a "Patent Pending" provisional patent filing that will never turn into a real patent, it poses no threat to competitors. If you have a Patent Pending that may very well come through, the competition has to think carefully about their next move (go for it anyway and tie you up in litigation until your broke if they need to will likely be the response, FYI). I don't think the trapezoidal neck has much of a chance at becoming a real patent, so if I were Warmoth it wouldn't bother me much. Lastly, as we have all just noted, "Patent Pending" is a great marketing tool. To those who don't know what it legally implies, it makes the product seem super innovative and like the company has their stuff together. Sometime yes, most times no. After all, Gibson never did get that Patent they Applied For on those pickups from way back when... Like most things in life, your mileage may vary. -Dave (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am an engineer and designer who knows a thing or two about IP law. I am not truly qualified to give legal advice, so think for yourself like you always should.)

I had (and continue to have) a great experience with a kit from the guys at Brown Note. Homepage here, their well supported building forum here, and their webstore here. I built their 22W kit, styled tonally after Dumbles, and have been very very happy with the tone and quality. Their support is top notch, instructions and kit completeness exceptional, and my amp is now the envy of other players at every gig I play. You can see how my turned out on my webpage, in the link in the sig, though I have no sound clips. Still, I'm not much for electronics skills but I'm careful in my building. I had no real issues at all with this build, so I'm confident anyone with a modicum of skill could pull off a fabulous kit amp from these guys. -Dave

I've ripped at least 10 strips of Grandpa's old Apricot branches, starting small (not helpful) and moving to larger pieces. The wood is prone to checking, slow to dry, and very hard. After yielding a bunch of warped, unevenly shrunken, wannabe fingerboards out of these branches it became clear that the wood grew with a slight twist to it. Not. Helping. I'm getting pretty tired of wearing down my ryboa saw with long, slow rips of wet boards only to yield useless pieces. I've only got a couple more attempts worth of goodwill in me before I start looking for a new fingerboard material and get the rest of this lumber (i.e. the nice big trunk) milled professionally. The apricot wood, though, would be perfect fingerboard material. It's hard, close grained, a bit waxy, and rather pretty. I have a couple pieces that will serve well as the tailpiece, chunks for rosettes and inlays, and I'm hoping the pieces currently drying will come out straight enough to use as a finger board... even if I have to bookmatch the pieces to get enough stock out of marginally straight sections. Meanwhile I've built a pair of radius dishes. I've been looking for ways to do this easily, cheaply, and with minimal sawdust for a long time. It always seemed like making a sled for a long compass, and then shaving MDF for hours in a cloud of toxic dust, was far from ideal. I've since seen 2 ways to create the curve by screwing & gluing a thin MDF/fiberboard over a thicker one with cauls or spacers of appropriate size in between. The best explanation I've seen yet is here: http://www.ukuleleunderground.com/forum/sh...e-a-Radius-Dish My take on this was to stack washers of known thickness and calculate the radius at which I should space them out before screwing at the thin MDF board down to them to create the radii. Here you can see see the layout for placing the washer stacks of {1, 2, 3, 4…, n-1, n} over a center-punched MDF board & ply base. Here's the view down the side, showing the generated curve a bit. It sure looks okay, but I haven't sanded any test pieces down just yet. I'll let you all know how it works out. I've built a 25' and a 15' dish for about $25 and without any sawdust to speak of… not to bad. Prep is no real fun, but at least it's real progress. Now I just have to build a workboard/light mold, prep neck and tailblocks, and then I can stop messing around with prepping the wood so i can start working it. All in due time when you're doing things by hand, all in due time. -Dave

Slow progress getting the rest of my materials ready, delayed in part by one of those pesky business trips. Here's a progress report with some eye candy. Lesson learned: milling and seasoning wood, at home, in a hurry, entirely with hand tools... is hard and slooooooow. I highly recommend buying wood that is dry, trued, and quartersawn. I'm taking some measure of satisfaction from milling woods that are from places that are important to me, but it doesn't feel like it's worth it at the moment. Here's the figured Monterey Cypress, finally trued up. It was ripped from that block behind it in the shot, and the planed on 4sides till flat/quartersawn, and then oven dried (pilot light on only, a few days at 80deg) until weight stable and retrued. Once dry this stuff cuts beautifully and has almost no discernible grain. It has lovely figuring and a light golden-pinkish hue, smells good too. The neck has been scarfed jointed, had the heel glued on with a tenon pre-laminated, and the beginning of a volute carved in. Soon I'll inlay 2 carbon fiber rods and route it to size. So the cypress is great, but I've been struggling to make usable blanks out of my grandfather's old apricot tree. See the next post for more pics...

+1 the graphtech saddle being non-conductive is no real issue at all. when i have used them on string through guitars i have drilled between ferrules, then from the high e one to the cavity, which was a lot easier than i expected. The VG99 system looks awesome as far as the outboard side of things goes. I have only used the graphtech system for its peizo sounds but its a relatively simple system to install because its modular, the 13pin connector bing the added complication with midi, but not really a problem It's no issue IF you anticipate the issue. I built my axe thru-body and discovered, ex-post facto, that my strings were not grounded. It's tough to fix that issue once you're "done", so I'm pleased with my hack. Next time, though, such issues will be anticipated and dealt with accordingly.

That circuit looks good to me, at least at a very casual glance by an inexpert eye. Just dig up an op-amp equivalent (there have probably been a few model rollovers since 1976, but I'm sure you will find replacements to drop in), toss it all on a breadboard to make sure it works the way you expect, and then hard wire the exact same layout onto perf... or something like that. Truly, without being humble, you have now pretty thoroughly exhausted whatever knowledge I can provide (especially since I've provided the references from which I learned it in the first place). Good luck, and keep us posted on the progress! Dave

Quick note on using the Graphtech TOM bridge (maybe other ones too). The piezo saddles are a hard plastic, which sounds fine BUT is non conductive. Thus your saddles are not grounded, which if you're using s tuneomatic style (like I did) you find your strings ungrounded and invite serious buzz under certain conditions. I ended up putting bits of copper mesh (soldering wick) in the gaps around the saddles so the strings hit it, and then grounding those directly. A kludge but functional and I haven't had any trouble so far (plus it blends visually with the gold bridge hardware). till, the acoustic tone the graphtech puts out is pretty rad. Mine is the only one I've heard, but it sounds like playing an Ovation, though a bit less resonant/reverby. Pretty dang impressed and it's a nice feature to have if you don't want to switch guitars all the time mid-set, let alone mid song! Dave

Add me to the "NO ROUTER BITS" chorus (I prefer brad points, FYI) The router bit has a couple of very serious issues from a safety standpoint, non-centering not withstanding. 1. Router bits cut on the edges by slicing SIDEWAYS, which creates significant torque on the bit. 2. Drill bits, by contrast, cut with scraping/cutting edges that cut DOWN and OUT. This creates much less torque. Most 3-jaw chucks are designed for vertical loads and light torque ONLY. Using an end mill or a router bit could (a) pull your spinning bit out of the chuck, ( pull your chuck off it's tapered spindle, or (3) be generally not nice to your equipment. Granted using flat-cutting cutters in wood is less of an issue than in metal, but this is why you never will never see end mills in drill presses in a respectable metal shop. Be careful out there! -Dave

The old fender units were more like small reverb amps, if you will, with all the pre-amps and so forth built into what looks like a very small head unit. That wouldn't exactly make it a "pedal" per-se, but it is not a retro-fit your amp project. (That's what I'm personally doing but only because I already built the amp and I like combo units without too many externals. That unit you've posted probably drives the springs just like the old standalone units do, but likely uses op amps instead of tubes to do so. (He notes that he uses "analog devices" op amps at that...) It's probably not "primitive" at all, and it's more than likely almost exactly the same thing as the first link you posted (i.e. the schematic here: http://www.solorb.com/elect/musiccirc/reverb2/) As I understand it a spring reverb unit works as follows (note this is NOT an authoritative account): - One amplifier (tube half, op amp) takes your dry signal (from an effects loop or a divider in your amp) and boosts it down the line to your tank. This typically involves a transformer taking the signal and sending the tank-ready version to the actual unit. - A transducer (voice-coil) in the tank starts vibrating your dry signal down a set of springs at various tensions and/or lengths (i.e. decays). - Another transducer at the other end of the springs collects/reads the bouncing, reflecting, vibrating, and otherwise spring-reverb wet version of that sound on the other side of the tank and sends a weak signal of the wet sounds up the line. - A second amplifier boosts the weak, wet signal to a usable level and sends it through a mix pot/divider where you control wet/dry signal levels. - Out comes that lush, surf-ready tone you've been looking for. Using op amps vs tubes for that amplification is up to you, though the anlalog version will be much more space hungry if not the preference of tube-loving tone-o-philes. I personally lack the electrical engineering skills to convert a tube schematic into a solid-state one, so you've about maxed my knowledge on this front. I expect the schematics above are as close as you're going to get with the solid-state version. This is often why I just build from the schematics I can find or parse together, and why I actually find big, physical things like tubes easier to work with. For your own edification, consider the simplest layout I've ever seen: the "Single Tube Reverb" you can find on the Amp garage forums. This is what I'll be dropping into my amp, because it's all I have space for, but it also keeps the schematic very very simple and you can probably see what's actually happening along the signal path for yourself. <a href="http://ampgarage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=569" target="_blank">http://ampgarage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=569</a> (<- will require registration, but there's a fount of knowledge in here, so do it anyhow.) This should be a good way to wrap your head around this stuff, and the discussion helps as well. Keep at it!

I don't know of any full walk-throughs off hand, but there are a few models that get DIY'd more than others: Fender 6G15 and Fender 5G15 stand out in this regard, and copies of the original Fender layouts can be found to supplement the schematics (which helps a TON). These guys have kits that include the kitchen sink if you want to make your life easier (but slightly pricier). I dunno about their documentation but you can find both schematics and layouts on the site for free, presumably to supplement the box of parts you receive in the mail. http://taweber.powweb.com/store/kits_50a.htm I'll bet someone out there has blogged their experience in building one, but I only did research to try and add a one-tiube layout to my homebrew amp so I haven't dug in that deep. Best of luck, Dave

Tuuuuuubes! Seriously, though, my take is if you're going to go through the hassle of wiring up a big ol' analog spring tank, go the full distance and copy a fender unit. There are a bunch of schematics, tweaks, and useful posts over here: http://ampgarage.com/forum/ (Think project guitar forum, but for amps) Another useful site for reverb stuff: http://roymal.tripod.com/ Enjoy! Dave

A couple pictures to whet the appetite for you all. The walnut back and the sinker redwood soundboards before thinning: The walnut being planed to thickness: Enjoy! Dave