davee5

So I had the little stainless steel gears cut while I had the chance, even if I don't use them I'll have nice reference pieces. The best thing about using these steel parts is they're cut perfectly to shape, far better than I could cut by hand. I laid them out on my Gibson rosewood fretboard. What do you guys think? I haven't decided yet which of the following arrangements would be best, in approximate rank of preference: 1. SS (or silver) gears with abalone or white MOP center dots in "standard" fret marker positions and black MOP in centers on 12th fret meshing gears 2. SS gears with only black MOP centers in all gears (incl meshing gears) 3. White MOP gears w/ black abalone centers in std. marker positions and meshing gears 4. Black MOP gears with white MOP or abalone centers in std. marker positions I'm still thinking the black gears with std. dots in the cneters is the safe way to go, but the custom look of the gears seems more and more like it should be featured, not hidden. -Dave

Well I got back from Germany in time for the holidays and a chance, between family obligations, to bend some rosewood bindings. Holy geez is rosewood easier to bind than bloodwood. At first I was afraid I just didn't have the touch for bending wood and I was doomed to plastic, but no sir, I just made a bad choice for my first attempts. even my first try was right on, and immediately glued in. So the f-holes were bound in rosewood, the top was glued up, routed to fit, scraped flush, and then a slight carve scraped into the top. Tonight I'll rout the body binding ledge. Then I'll need to rout pickup cavities, drill holes for bridge posts and string throughs (need a drill press first, not gonna do those by hand), and shape the back edge of the mahogany a bit. Then it's on to the neck. In any case, here's a few update shots. Also I'm exploring a possibe fretboard inlay/position marker arrangement in this thread, and I would love some feedback. A few quick questions: - I have purfling and plain bindings, but I would love to have purfling "under" the binding on teh body side too, not just around the top. Can I bend the finebwb purfling easily in the "wrong" direction to hold it in place, or should I buy the bindings with bwb accents pre-attached? - Should I wait to route the pickup holes until after I've finished then neck and then routed the neck pocket? More pics as progress rolls on! -Dave

Chris, Myka name-dropped his silver supply company earlier, and I have a jeweler for another (non-guitar) project. However I'm a mote concerned about silver tarnishing over time. Pure silver would be ideal, but sterling will eventually fade. That said, I absolutely love Myka's silver ring outlines on his side dots and was very strongly considering ripping off that design detail. The main reason SS is on the table is I have immediate access to it, can get it cut to micron-level accuracy tomorrow (unlike my routing, and my access to the cheating-machines goes away very shortly), can do it for free, and I know the alloy I have will never tarnish. Plus its already polished! I'll probably get some stainless ones cut regardless, then I can go home and mock up the layout on the real board and see if I like it enough to do silver, or shell, or what have you. The mockup was deliberately done in illustrator, so I can export the DXF file and get it cut, since I don't have cad on my work laptop. Boo, but it gets the job done. -Dave

Ryan, I get what you're saying, why go through all the trouble of making 10-15 little tiny gears and their respective holes in a nice piece of wood if you don't actually want to show it off? Just for you I modified the mockup to the "white MOP" version. Also I currently have access to a bad-arse laser-cutting setup, so I may cut a few of these in stainless steel. I may not be as metal as, say, Metal Matt, and my guitar will in no way be metal, but at least I can have little bit of metal in there. -Dave

Dang, Greg, you whipped that nice example for me fast! I think my primary motivation with using a gear chain on teh 12th is a few things: - It allows me to keep a std. "dot" layout when viewed from a distance - It makes the whole gears motif more obvious than a odd-looking snowflake/star with involute rays. - I want to keep the details pretty small. Already I'm questioning if I want my guitar to be "the gear guitar" "geartar" or anything like that, it's intended to be a little personal touch, not a real deliberate statement. I would be choosing the black MOP pieces with the least amount of color in them, just enough to be noticeable, but pretty dang black. I actually was initially thinking of using std. dots in black MOP just too keep everything real subtle and classy-like, so having mechanisms all over the fretboard is still an idea very much in its infancy. Thanks for the note, Dave

So I've been thinking about trying to do some fretboard inlays which are simple, subtle, and personal for this baby. As a mechanical engineer I'm thinking about making my dots into little gears! I've got a deeeeeep black ebony fretboard and I think I'll do the gears in black mother of pear, something real subtle and hard to see from far away but which pop up close. Then the "rotating" centers of the gears would be done in either paua, abalone, or white MOP for a stark contrast and to make the fretboard look like it's got normal dots from far off. The 12th fret would be a bunch of the black MOP gears fully meshing where only those on the ends would have contrasting centers. Here's a mockup: and the full length version. Any thoughts? -Dave

Yeah I'm thinking rosewood might be the way to go. I'm way out in the Black Forest (far far from the wood in my California garage) on business and can't stop thinking about the binding. I really would like the red border on this guitar, but if I can't do it then I'm hosed. In any case I actually need to get it rather done by March 1st (including it in a design portfolio I'm submitting somewhere) so I can't sit at home and bust binding stick after stick trying to get the horns right. I figure even if I thin out the portions for the f-holes I still want the edges to be full thickness and the horns are as tight as my curvature gets. Maybe time to switch it up. Can't wait to get home and get cranking back on this, I know what my all-too-short winter holiday is gonna look like... Avoid the family and play with the guitar project! (I love my family, but they don't sound nearly as good as I hope this will.) -Dave

Mahogany neck, 25.5" scale, ebony fretboard w/ matching binding to the body (whatever works). I'll be taking extra koa cutoffs and making the headplate (the best flame is actually in the scrap. boo, but it couldn't be avoided). Dots will be black MOP, side dots might be paua for better visibility (I have sets of both, I just need to decide). As a mechanical engineer I'm thinking I might make the dots little gears as a personal touch, but those seem like they'd be hard to get just right, lopsided gears look really bad. Had a nice flatsawn board that twisted on me, I ordered a new honduran mahogany neck from LMI and I'm not sure I like it as it's really light in color and density. I might pick up another. I don't have a jointer or tickness planer/sander so trying to save the other piece might be a bit hard with a jack plane. I'm also winding my own buckers. Yeah, I know, I'm out of control, but I built a winder already and now I'll have built just about everything on the guitar, even have ebony cutoff I've jointed, glued up, and slated for pickup rings. The design planning is in this thread, you can see the headstock/neck layout there: http://projectguitar.ibforums.com/index.ph...hl=devansdesign Thanks for all the nice notes, guys. Unfortunately I'm gonna have to bolt for Germany tomorrow on business, so it's on hold again for a bit. -Dave

Supported.... good call. I'd just been pushing on either side of the bend without supporting the bend point itself, I can see how that woiuld exacerbate a tendency to fracture. I've been wearing my welding gloves while I do this, so I'm handling the wood directly, not with sheeting or anything. I made my bending iron using a roll of thin aluminum sheet, which I bent into an egg shape for versatility, around a BBQ heating iron. I'll take some of the extra Al and make a bend supporting piece, should distribute the load better too. -Dave

Hmmm, well lemme clarify a bit and lemme know if you still forsee some issues: It's a string through design, the curvy island block is the where the string holes will be drilled. The bridge (graphtech TOM) will be sunk into the Scott French tuning forks and should only see close-to-vertical loads, so I forsee no issue there. Additionally it will have a 1/4" thick piece of koa to fully surround it. All horizontal loads from the strings should be borne by the presumably thick-enough koa top, as distributed through the metal top-ferrules, so I figure the size of the block I have for taking up the vertical tension (through the body) string tension should be fine. You can see the overall layout in the laser-cut template here: http://www.devansdesign.com/files/guitarbu...AndTemplate.jpg Clearly these are all my own conjectures from weeks of staring at this wood to properly asses it's strength. So in all cases I say should be strong enough, but it's not like I did wood FEA. Bolt on neck. Basically all the pocketing is designed for 3/8" clearance around all edges, and a little more around the bolt on neck pocket. The extra material at the top edge is to allow for a slightly deeper body cut. -Dave P.S. Anyone got tips on how to bend bloodwood?

Yeah, the goofups are on the inside but it still bums me out. However the drill marks at teh top are unfortunately placed JUST right for me to see them from a playing position through the f-hole. I'm thinking about putting a Gibson-style label over the drill issues in the top hole. Maybe an ebony or other dark-colored veneer to also make the holes look darker in direct light. -Dave

Well I finally started cutting wood on the guitar I've been planning forever. Here's what's gone down. The Overview: Mahogany body hollowed (Scott French style) and overall outline routed. Koa flat-top roughed and f-holes cut, filed to shape, and purfled. Built an electric pipe-style bending iron for the wood bindings. Generally made a huge mess in the garage and worked through 4 meals this weekend. Guitarbuilding will be great for my skill development and waist reduction at this rate! What Went Wrong: 1. When I drilled out most of the wood for the hollowing I use the biggest twist bit I have, about 3,000 times, with tape as a depth reference. A few went a mote deep (internal, cosmetic annoyance, not threatening to punch through) and couple are off-axis (handdrill) and into the wood I want to keep (again, just annoying). 2. When I routed the internals I hadn't planned for the size of my router base and so there are a few areas where I was using only a few millimeters for support and I let it dive a bit in places, again cosmetics since it's not perfectly flat. 3. When routing the outline of the body I have serious tearout along both of the horns, quite luckily it was all on the second pass and all the tearout falls well withing the roundover space. Frightening but no damage. 4. When routing the outline I bobbled the router a bit and have a slight gouge on the outside. Again I got luck in that it's right where I should put the output jack, so I guess the cover plate will just cover the slight divot. 5. I can't bend bloodwood bindings for beans. Before I glue the top on and then rout it to match the sides I want to have the f-holes finished, including binding and purfline. I got all the f-holes purfled no problem (I cheated because there was no way I was going to rout a 0.030"x1/8" channel in those tiny things. Instead I just glued in 4 full layers of purfling and then scraped them down the the right surface. HA!) and even got some nice miters in there. The bloodwood I want to use for binding, though, is not going so well. The wood doesn't bend until it's scorched and scraping off the char leaves a remarkably uneven surface, then once it's the right shape (almost) it's splits. ARRGH! I'm going to soak a strip in water overnight and through the workday tomorrow, but I think bloodwood might not have been the best choice for my first woodbending project. I might try rosewood next, and then if I have no skills at all I'll just use tortise-shell plastic. Notes to other novices: - Cutting the rough outline of a 1-3/4" thick mahogany body with a coping saw works fine, but it takes for ever. Also if you're single you might not be getting any "action" for a while 'cause your forearms will be a bit sore. - BWB style purfling is easy, it's basically paper and you can tie in knots, but wood bindings are friggin hard. - F-holes are awesome and all but they are not easy to get right, you can't really rout 'em and if you dont' have the patience to file for a day or two to get them right, forget it. - Plan your routing carefully ahead of time, including how much support your router base will have if you aren't using a router-table. Also take off as much wood as possible in your roughing-stage. The less wood the router needs to eat the better it will do. Sharp bits kick serious-butt. Lastly, I highly recommend constructing some kind of containment zone for your routing because the chips and dust will be FLYING. I made a little booth out of any old sheet tied a few stools I clamped to my workbench, helped a ton in cleanup an roomie relations. That is all for now, more updates to come as this thing rolls along. Unfortunately it's almost at a standstill until I get the binding thing figured out. I guess I could do some neckwork when I'm freaking out about the latest broken piece of pretty red wood. Well, what do you all think so far? -Dave

No maple? Really? Everytime I've been to home depot I've found at least moderately flamed maple. In fact my usually screw around wood has become flamed maple because it's like a buck more a board than warped fir and the flame doesn't cost more. However, like I said earlier, I have started avoiding Home Depot if possible. Maybe now I'll ditch them because they show favoratism to us Californians! -Dave

I hate Home Depot, they've driven my favorite local lumberyard all but out of business (down from 5 stores to the 1 original, and don't get me started on their typical wood quality. That being said I joined a roomie on a parts finding trip a month ago and scored big on 3 quilted redwood 1"x6" boards (8 foot boards). Unfortunately one is about 1/3 sapwood, but they're all nicely ripple-quilted through and through. I can't bear to make shelves out of 'em and they're too small for tops unless they're resawn 3 times. So now they're just sitting in a corner of the garage with some gorgeous padauk with a slight sapwood edge (I love the contrast between the cream and the now redish purple wood) I bought 4 years ago on impulse. Think I'm gonna make a red-themed coffee table out of 'em. Any other suggestions? Maybe I'll put up my own neener-neener Home Despot pics. -Dave

Jester, http://www.bugmenot.com/ ^^^^ Great site for grabbing passwords that were created for exactly that reason. Though I personally couldn't find the blog in question, but then I typically shun myspace as best I can. -Dave

I'm only going to address your machining question as there are far more qualified people to answer your Ibanez questions (most of which will probably get a "use the search function" response since I know I've seen the answers out there). By the way, even if you want to you won't be able to do from the outside as you described if you want to cut all the way through the material for the guitar outline. I might suggest bolting your workpiece down through the tremelo hole area (if the guitar you're building has one) or somewhere else on the body that you will eventually be cutting all the way through. However, even these options require that you cut teh body in multiple operations since you won't be able to cut the tremelo pocket if that's where your bolts are. So, if you want to avoid bolts, nuts, strap clamps, etc. Then about your only other realistic options are using a vacuum fixture or double-sided stick tape. If you have access to a a very nice spoilboard (vacuum board, as opposed to a vacuum fixture whichi hsa to be custom made for your project, which I don't think from your posts you have the know-how to do and from personal student experiences I know you don't have time to make), then consider using that. Even a spoilboard's partial vacuum at around 10-12psi will be holding your guitar down with a few hundred pounds of force. It's easy, it's clean, it's strong, but most student shops don't have them If you don't have a vacuum fixture available then you might want to use double-stick tape. To the novice this seems like an idiotic proposal, but it's very common practice in the prototyping industry where people are machining metal, rather than nice soft wood. DO NOT, however, use double sided Scotch tape. I'm talking about the stuff from 3M, VHB or the foamy stuff. It's probably gonna gunk up the back of your wood but you can scrape and sand it off and you can just bolt down a peice of scrap metal to the CNC table so your teachers don't make you srub it down afterwards. Make sure you use a lot of it too, like cover the whole backside. That will be overkill, but it beats the hell out of having your workpiece fly off the table or chatter so much it ruins your guitar. In any case, industrial double-sided tape is probably your best bet. As for the 9 deg angle, you're either going to have to refixture the part at 9 degrees, setup your coordinates to machine the pocket just right, and cut a second operation (hard for the novice). You could machine it (mostly) in the same operation as the other moves if your NC machine has good 3-axis capability but you said "router" in your last post which in the machining world means nice accurate 3D work is not in the capabilities of the machine. That would also require you to have modeled the pocket in 3D, which given the learning curve to do that in both AutoCAD and MasterCAM is probbaly not in the cards for you given the approaching end of the quarter/semester. Probably best to do this by hand. -Dave Oh, also for both Stefan and MzI, if you're going to do 3D machining in MasterCAM using imported IGES files, make sure the file you're saving has surfaces and outlines/edges turned on. Many programs like SolidWorks only export the solid surfaces and not the edges, which makes setting up paths for things like simple 2.5D pockets for pickups an absolute pain to program.

I would porbably taper the body a little more towards the tail, otherwise it might be a dead slug-with-a-pointy-head skeleton. Also the tail isn't symmetric and if I, personally, was going to make the tail asymmetrical I would make the top part larger than the bottom part. Anyway, I think it looks pretty cool one way or another, so those are just my nitpicks.

One of the small holes on the StewMac bobbins is a small square with a circle indented around it, making it look like the hole is a "square in a circle." I think it's the hole closest to the edge, not too hard to find.

+1 to not using MasterCAM for modeling. I know they sell it as a package which is capable of being your standalone CAD/CAM program as it does have some CAD functionality, but it is remarkably convoluted and unintuitive. Heck even the CAM parts of MasterCAM is a pain in the rear to use if you haven't been trained (and even then...) If you don't have access to any "real" CAD programs (Pro/E, SolidWorks, UG, Catia, etc.) and need to use the integrated version with MasterCAM, you best hit the manual to figure out how to do accurate placement using driving dimensions. Depending on what version your school has there should be some tutorials on how to do the basic CAD work too. The first 5 tutorials seems super, bordline boring, basic and useless, but if all you're going to do is make the outlines for pickup pockets and so forth, it's not that hard. If you're having serious issues and need to use MasterCAM PM me and I'll dig up my old cheat sheet form training, it has most of the basic 2.5D commands spelled out. -Dave

I just jointed my first top yesterday, for my koa topped semi-hollow body, rather than an acoustic though. I'm not gonna lie, I bought a beautiful, brand spanking new Veritas #5 jack plane and started flattening out my 1/4" thick figured koa and it cut beautifully right out of the box, but it wasn't like my cuts were near perfect on the first try. I ended up taking off far more wood than I wanted to in order to get a truly flat joint and I may now have an issue with some knots that will threaten to tearout when routing off the template I made. I did, however, build myself a shooting board to make sure the plane was orthogonal to the board faces and to stabilize the whole thing. Man did that save my butt. The other thing I learned with hand planes is your blade has to be SHARP to do it well. I took off way way way too much material (was not just evening siades, but taking off a ton of wood in teh process to get it where I wanted it, not smart) and teh blade started to dull. Not knowing this, given I have no real experience with hand planes, I just pushed harder and harder until I switched it up and shimmed beneath the wood and it suddenly cut like butter again, dead straight, super flat, perfect joint. It took me 4 hours to take off my material, even out my mistakes, and generally figure out how jointing with a shooting board works, but my first jointed top is a super clean joint with no light passing through between faces. Best of all, to me, the tool fits right back into its little box and onto the shelf and I can use it forever if I take care of it. It felt real real nice to do some "real" woodworking by hand. I've jointed with power jointers many a time and had excellent results, but this was a much more pleasing and visceral experience. My $0.02 is to try making a shooting board, sharpen your blade, and try again. I've seen your work and I know mine, so I'm convinced you could pull it off. -Dave

If you want to route the strings internally so that they are exclusively in tension between the nut and the tailblock, by way of whatever means you like, but so that the strings still pass over a nut and through a bridge like a "normal" acoustic would, I think you will have some issues. 1. How on earth do you plan to get the ball ends into the tailpeice if it's all way inside the body? Do you want to reach into the sound hole and set them in carefully? Make 6 holes in the tailblock like an electric to make it a string-through designthat feeds up to the bridge? Is the tailpeice going to be fixed in place? Physcially connected by tubes to the bridge to facilitate stringing? 2. What about the length of stringds as they are currently sold? Adding an extra foot os so of length to reach the tailblock will probably not allow you to use off-the-shelf strings in your new guitar since they wont be long enouth to take up the full length from tailblock to tuning machines. There's probably more to deal with, but as far as internal routing I think these two probably kill the reasonable feasibility of the design. -Dave

Memory wire is not titanium, generally it's Nitinol, which uses titanium as one of the alloying metals, but it's not the primary. Also carbon fiber tuners would be tough to make since it would be dang hard to form worm gears out of fiber weave. I suppose you could use monofilament or chopped strands, maybe throw in some nanotubes for filler strength, but CF probably isn't the best material for tuning machines. Now Ti on the other hand.... light headstock, cool wank factor, galling and seizing in the gears rending them inoperable, plenty of great stuff. Oh and just to repeat what has already been mentioned, invesment casting of ti in vacuum furnaces is becoming fairly comon place, and a trem block is a very easy shape to cast. I haven't looked up ti casting pebble cost in a while, but I would guess somewhere in the ballpark of probably $15 material cost (high), $2 labor and investment (I mean casting shell plaster, not financial), some overhead, some shipping and a whole lot of $$$ for marketing BS. Oh and a little nitpick I have... Damascus steel probably no longer exists, it is truly a lost art. The stuff we call Damascus Steel is really "pattern welded" steel where, like in mokume, differing alloys have been folded and beaten over and over each other to creat eh layers that impart the woodgrain look. I agree it would look amazing on a wooden guitar, though. It would be tough to mass manufacture for anything other than covers or maybe the post and buttons, but that's all you'd need anyhow. The machine internals could be made of the same old same old. Aw man, now you got me thinking about making mokume tuning buttons.

Most of Seagull's acoustic guitars have (had) cherry necks, many even have cherry sides, and while they're not the best acoustics in the world I'm sure that it has a bigger effect on tone for them than it will for a solid-body electric. Go for it! Oh, and for my 2 cents, leave it outside in UV light so it can naturally acquire it's cherry color rather than staining it. I never understood why people stain cherry "cherry" color, isn't that the point of using a nice piece of wood with its own signature appearance in the first place (other than it's in your pile of available wood)? -Dave

I'd like to add to GarageRocker's comments about accuracy of the tool. Genuine, benchmark Mitutoyo digital calipers (and Starrets, and Browne & Sharpe) are almost all rated to an accuracy of +/-0.001" even though they readout to 0.0005". This may be misleading, that the resolution is higher than the accuracy of the tool, but it is absolutely critical to keep in mind if you're going to make measurements at that level. Nearly all the cheapo digital calipers have the same case and button layout as the OLD Mitutoyos, because in China (where I work in mfg. a lot) you copy what sells. As a restul Mitytoyo has changed their case design in the last few years to step away from the rabble. The knockoffs are usually flimsy, leading to bad readings form a lack of stiffness. They have poorly ground jaws so they don't give great readings across the whole measuring face. The materials are inferior, the electronics might be close to teh same but they aren't graded or guaranteed. As with any tools you get what you pay for. Now for my caliper rant as copied and pasted from a post a few days ago in a different area: Regarding calipers, digital vs. dial. Digital calipers are really handy for 2 things: converting between metric and english units (mm & in) with the push of a button, and easily checking "relative" distances (setting a zero point arbitrarily, rather than in dial calipers where zero is always the closed position). Let's say you have a neck you really like the taper of (not the fretboard, the neck for illustrative purposes) but you think it's too thick for your next project. You could take the thickness at the nut, set that dimension as zero, and then take measurements up the neck at various points to quantify exactly how the taper changes. Then you could make the neck next a thinner starting thickness at the nut and use your new, no subtration necessary, dimensions to recreate the feel you like. Maybe a lousy example, but the zero set can be very useful. Since dials are analog and only in one unit you will also have to do math to convert, but most digital calipers have a button that you can push to see that 1.267" is 32.18 mm. However digital calipers have their own issues. Excessive dust or almost any amount of liquid on the sliding surface can cause errors in reading. While I don't expect anyone in this forum to be checking tolerance on parts flooded with CNC coolant, it's worth noting. When dial calipers get junk in the gear track it's pretty obvious, whereas when digitals skip a beat it's impossible to detect. Digitals also need batteries, which last forever, but still... My personal biggest issue with digital calipers is the dastardly combination of flex and the use of discrete units. With dial calipers you can pretty easily tell when you are between lines, closer to 1.267" than to 1.266", but with digital you only get the number on the display to work with, it's quantum measurement. Likewise all calipers, or any precision measurement devices, can easiliy be used with excessive force which distorts the accuracy of the measurement. With dial calipers I find it much easier to watch the dial to determine when I'm pushing too hard and causing the needle to move because the caliper is flexing, not taking up a gap. With digital much less visual feedback is given, so many people get readings that can be off by as much as 0.005" (big is engineering terms). It seems like you're just taking up slack and getting a more accurate reading as the number on the readout seem to refine, but you're just botching the measurement. Lastly a good dial indiciator or dial calipers is a finely-tuned mechanical device, like a fince watch, or maybe a good acoustic guitar. We all know there's something visceral about using a finely crafted and carefully tuned mechanical instrument, and it's a satisfaction I never get using digital calipers. But watching that needle spin and hearing the whir of zero-backlash gears inside that little dial housing is a wonderful thing. I actually have both: for general day to day engineering work the versatility of a digital caliper can't be beat and would be my go-to for most things (it's all I travel with). But for the nice feel of an accurate and old-school, true mechancial tool I go to the dial. My $0.05. -Dave

The wood should not tear out if you use good machining practices: take shallow passes with some breathing room at first to take out most of the material, follow with a finishing pass of ~0.008" Set your feeds and speeds well and you can cut anything on a CNC machine, but this is where experience comes in. Frankly if you know what you're doing you could make the walls as thin as you please, to thousands of an inch if you fixture your parts well, use incredibly sharp tools, run insanely fast cutting speeds, and push a nice and slow feed rate. I'm not sure I would recommend leaving the walls 0.020" thick for structural reasons, but you certainly could fabricate it if you were careful. Also one thing to note: on your model the center block goes into hard corners at the equivalent of the neck block and tailblock, which while aethetically pleasing is impossible to machine. Any internal corners need to be radiused to be slightly larger than wahtever cutter you're going to use. Using at 3/8" end mill or router? Make the internal radii in the corners about .400" (NOT 0.375" ). A nit pick at this stage, but somthing you will need to drill into your head over time is to model only manufacturable things. The bane of the machinist is the designer who does not understand processes or design for manufacturability (DFM in the industry). Learn how it all works and both of your lives will run smoother when it's time to make chips. Oh, and just to clarify, I don't know jack about what wall thickness to actually use in a solidbody, the one I'm building will have 3/8" walls at the thinnest. I'm merely noting that it's phsyically possible to do whatever you want if you really really want to. Listen to the guitar gurus for guitar advice, I'll stick to non-specific DFM work. -Dave