Prostheta

Between you, Mike and Scott it's a real minefield!

Totally! The number of difficult aspects in this build alone make it stand out. I second @Andyjr1515's words of "well-deserved". So, how many more have you got tabled right now?

I've noticed that the piece of Pine I used as the "bed" on my radiusing router jig's base has bent slightly out of flat. Either I replace that, flatten it or just don't run too close to finished sizes. Let's see how lazy I get over this.

I don't want to derail this thread too much, however I'm guessing that your forays into acoustics has intersected with the use of Oak?

Ugh, I hate cutting pearl. I think I'll break out the pantograph and make the blocks that way.

Very nice! I'm also interested in the weight....that is definitely a lot of woods on the super-heavy end of the spectrum. To put that into some sort of perspective, Maple is the lightest wood of any of those! I love that you've incorporated Oak though. It's a criminally-underused wood for instruments. Heavy, but has a character of its own to impart. Plus, not that difficult to find domestically.

Last fret slot going in (second clamp removed for the photo). I've explained previously how I do my fret slotting without using templates. In short, I manually place 0,5mm mechanical pencil marks and use the eye's ability to divide things into two to get placements within a fraction of a mm and create a more precise mark within that pencil mark using a marking knife. When placing the board under the saw, I judge manually based on whether the knife mark is in the centre or off to one side slightly in the pencil mark. The blade sites nicely so that it's easy to see whether the pencil mark is peeking out either side or centred under it. Having done this many many times now, I have a good feel for how much to adjust either direction but in general my pencil marks are spot on 8-9/10.

In principle, the idea is comprehensive and should work fine. Like many complex circuits such as this you end up with redundant or unusable combinations, so on a practical level it might be a good exercise to experiment with as many of these tones as possible and maybe weed out one or two that aren't valid or useful. Immediately I can see that you could lose one of the phase switches, however that would be the difference between flipping up to four switches to reverse the phase against what would otherwise be flipping one. I'm not too au fait with lipstick pickups, however if they are configured similarly to Tele neck pickups, they may need modifying the same as how one would do so for Tele 4-way switching. No big deal, but a consideration. Have a look on YouTube for Breja Toneworks 4-way Tele switching for that one. Looks fun!

I'm going to dig out my old ESP LTD Explorer at some point and put on a set of those locking tuners. See what you've gone and done?

So, how did I derive the correct thickness of the fingerboard to match the locking nut in the Invaders neck? This is a combination of a few things. Gotoh provide a PDF version of their schematic for the locking nuts which is possible to import into Rhino. Most schematics like this (for example, Hipshot) are exported directly from their own CAD production drawings meaning that if the scale is correct (things can also be rescaled) many dimensions not explicitly stated can be measured from the drawing. <edit: if it can't be derived from explicitly-provided dimensions> The gold standard is to measure directly from the hardware itself. A manufacturer's drawing cannot be relied upon 100%, but to be fair, Gotoh are damn good at this. Their drawing shows a 400mm radius (~15-3/4") with the lowest points of the outermost strings dimensioned. Comparing this to the locking nut itself, the low E measured at a blonde one under 5,8mm whilst the high E measured larger. This was due to the tips of my caliper's jaws being unable to seat into the lowest part of the string slot. This is still adequate. Working backwards from this I derived what the height would be at the absolute centre. There's always going to be a little bit of tolerance here, especially given that the strings don't appear to spaced symmetrically with respect to the centreline. That's fine as long as the extent of that tolerance is kept in mind and quantified. The CAD extract from the PDF shows about half a mm difference from the centreline. Drawing this out in CAD, half a mm of movement in a 400mm radius circle over those points shows about 0,003mm of height difference. Almost nothing! So in that respect we can safely simplify this by drawing out a 400mm radius circle over a 36,5mm string spread with the heights given and measure the coincident point where the circle intersects with the centreline. The result of this is a height of 6,1mm (to the nearest tenth of a mm). The strings need to pass over the first fret by a fraction of a mm, and a lot of this comes down to personal preference. For the low E, aiming for around half a mm is good whilst the high E can be a little lower. The locking nut itself seems to have this offset conveniently built-in, whether that be by design or coincidence. Subtracting the smallest of these values (the low E) from the central height gives us a reasonable approximation of where the fret crown should lay in the middle; 6,1mm minus 0,4mm gives us 5,7mm. From this the crown height of the fretwire can be subtracted, which in the case of pearly will be Jescar 57110 wire. 5,7mm minus 1,45mm leaves 4,25mm. Yikes. That's crazy thin! The Invaders neck has been fretted with Dunlop 6150 which has a height of 1,12mm allowing for a much more reasonable 4,58mm which (surprise surprise) CNC is very good at dialling in. The choices here are to either leave a shelf in the Maple for the nut, or to use the (0,1mm 0,25mm and 0,5mm?) brass shims that Gotoh provide with their locking nuts. There's sufficient meat on the fingerboard blank to allow for either of these options. Since shims are intended to dial in that initial bit of action over the first fret, I think I'll go the route of leaving a 1mm shelf. So, aiming for a centre fingerboard thickness of 5,25mm is my target. Off the router I want to get about 5,5mm. Anything more and the risk of sanding going assymmetrical is too great.

Well, the relationship between myself and my employer(s) seems to be slowly souring without simple straight talking. I can read between the lines on this, but the result of this is that I know I will have very little good time to do jobs using the CNC from here. I should probably output a bunch of outlines into heavy-ish plywood and put them to one side for reference. Things like the headstock, body and various cavities. So I didn't get chance to advance anything with the multiscale which is a bummer. In some ways that's probably a bit of a fool's errand and will burn the limited valuable time I have available otherwise. The two main bodys (Invaders, Pearly) and necks are g00d to go from here. No more CNC needed I think. The multiscale is far from a priority, however it would have been good to get the neck and fingerboard done, since those would benefit from CNC so much. Templates, definitely. The fingerboard for pearly will be radiused to 16" using my G&W radiusing jig and auxiliary base. That works very nicely, so no need of complicating things with another compound radius off the CNC. This will be done with the board untapered so that I can inlay the blocks prior to cutting and sanding in the taper. I've a bunch of Tahitian black pearl scraps around which - even though they're a little thin - should sit nicely over a 16" radius. The block sizes are 5x5 and 5x10 which is nice and standard; easy to file to size by hand. The pockets can simply be chiselled out after a quick drilling with a 4mm drill to excavate the centre a little. Since CA likes to invade and contaminate Maple, I think these inlays will go in with a little Z-Poxy 30. Which means that I need to buy some...!

The simplest things often make a difference. This one's looking great as usual! The old school Fender type headstock marries well to Tele bodies in the right context like here. I agree about the locking tuners. So much more stable over standards, but heavier. How's the balance? edit: I also noted that the headstock looks like it has been brought backwards slightly which reduces the excess apparent bulk that Fenders appear to have. That looks more compact and in proportion with the body....or am I just imagining things?

Ah yeah man. This is right up my current obsession street! Binding was never one of my strong suits, however years spent applying edge banding to weirdly-shaped things like ship radio station desks taught me a fair amount. Guitars are easier I think. A hair dryer doesn't apply enough heat directly enough and it's easy to concentrate it too much via overcompensation, causing one hot spot with cold binding either side. The upshot of that being you overcook the bend area and leave the areas either side cold, causing stress whitening within the material. The simplest way is to use a heat gun which puts out enough heat that you can warm up a larger length rather than risking "dwell" with a hair dryer. Obviously don't overcook one area! I'm going to try experimenting with hot water bending plastic next time. There's a limit on that heat which seems like it should help rattle out the overcooking fun times. I wonder how Gibson et al do this? They're geared for rush manufacture, so I presume they have a secret to tell on how that binding gets worked. On furniture I made a variety of cauls to roll and press banding into and around curves. Heat guns were useful for relaxing the banding before application, taping it in place, then relaxing again before retaping under higher tension. Fiddle farting to the max!

This isn't to say that one way is the only way of course! I think there's a lot that can be done by building up a balance between various elements, and it makes the end product a lot better because of that. My decision making was based entirely off the number of choices made around my old ESP. That is very much the benchmark for a lot of things, and I can't overstate just how much of a loss that was to me.

Bear in mind that I took care to balance off the black and gold around there. Going all-gold all-cream would be monotonous, and I think early ESPs had a lot going on because of this. They looked loaded!

I think I want to go Maple with that one, because I always go Ebony or Rosewood. It's time I got a feel for Maple, especially as it worked so well on my Frankenstrat. Lego is just expensive binding in brick form

Solid acrylic fret file? Wow, cool. Source?

That time of the week again....I should be able to get some work done on the CNC. The Invaders guitar only needs cavity covers off the CNC, the rest is all paint and fretwork, etc. I've been thinking what I need to do with the other two bodies such as the necks and inlays, etc. Rejigging the position of the headstock due to how the locking nut/volute locations sit with repect to that has been on my mind also, however I doubt that I will get time to attend to that. I think I'll put a Maple board onto the pearly guitar, which will need some sort of finishing. ....the multiscale is presenting me with the problem of not having all the hardware to hand. Specifically the BH angled pickup, which doesn't have specific published dimensions that carry reliance enough to take to the CNC. Really, that one needs measuring from the product (which I will make publicly-available). The multiscale will be a longer-term build that will complete when I can afford to do so. The priority as I see it is to get all of my CNC work out of the way whilst I am still able. The Maple board can be inlaid by hand since it's pre-slotted. The multiscale board can have radiusing, inlays and fret slots added with the rest done as and when....except for the pickup! I was idly considering whether I could have done fibre-optic or LED inlays for the multiscale board. If CNC time were freely-available, that would definitely be a thing I could have tabled. Best not to get myself too married to these idle ideas eh?

Great to hear it! It's crazy how many guitars I've owned where the string through holes require excessive string mashing. I mean, this is the 20th century now not the dark ages!

The all-important tone screws? I think this would need epoxying in place, or retention purely from string pressure.

These are the Grainger ferrule blocks I have. I could do with getting one in brass (they don't do gold). I angled this to fit under a Hipshot 11deg multiscale bridge. They're very nice. I maybe drilled the through holes a little too large, as these will likely require a little of that string mashing to pass strings through the bridge....

I'd look at it from the viewpoint of the user. If the 7/32" holes from the bottom have a hard transition between them and the corresponding 7/64" holes, there'll be a lot of string mashing during attempts to thread the end through. Equally, opening both out to 7/32" will cause the same thing to happen at the bridge. I'd take a countersink and make the transition angled internally if it is not already. Without the appropriate size countersink, a twist drill run in reverse is enough to do this. Don't run it forwards, otherwise it'll self feed, plus reverse burnishes the wood inside the drill hole making it smoother for the string to ride into the narrower portion.

Any squeezeout? I don't always see this as a "gold standard" by any means, however faces that are being veneered often have slightly rounded edges that reduce clamping effectiveness at the perimeter. This is one of the few occasions that I think squeezeout is a good thing. I can see that you're right at the same stage as me with shaping around a rising curve! Was it yourself that made a template for the heel to protect it from stray shaping attempts?

Grainger Guitars in the UK make excellent ferrule blocks.