Prostheta

I would say no. A joint shouldn't be so tight that you can hold the body with it. That's just a false idea that people throw around to show off how good their joinery is. In reality, it should fit a little tighter than you have it there, but that should be good enough. You can shim it if you want, but cutting a shim less than typical 0,5-0,7mm veneer thickness is difficult to do well. That and you should only glue it in whilst glueing the whole thing together. PVAc glue will seep through wood that thin and seal it up from sticking, so don't pad out the sides of the tenon! Wetting wood with water will swell up compressed grain, but in this case it will just swell and shrink back once the water leaves. I would just go with it as it is. It's a bit looser than I would like it, but not so loose that it's hugely problematic. Do you have a hand plane that you can use to produce a medium thickness shaving? That would work.

The whole tone thing is silly. Unless the frets are held in only by the glue, they are fine. Too many people like to feel as though things that don't confirm their personal ideas are just wrong. If the frets don't need it, don't use it. It makes repairs more difficult. That's the practical answer. I prefer to hammer in frets after glueing the fingerboard, however there are reasons people use either method. I find it easier to align and apply clamping pressure to a fingerboard that doesn't have frets in it. Also, a fingerboard tends to bow/bend when frets are inserted because of the pressure of the teeth pushing the fret slots apart slightly.

Talking of botany and bastards, this is one of my favourite channels on YouTube.

My own take on the process of design is to see it as exactly that; a process. I can't claim to have a hugely artistic mind, and I'm quite happy to wallow in the derivative. My satisfaction comes from analysing and understanding methods to designing process solutions that are efficient, repeatable and consistent. I even end up doing this during simple repetitive tasks with large quantities of the same component in basic manual sanding or routing operations. Mental optimisation. Neurodiversity has its uses when applied productively.

"Shoulders" is a term carried over from carpentry-style joinery and is meant to define the areas around the joint that provide stability and define the outware cosmetic appearance. The faces of the tenon are "cheeks". The corresponding surfaces within the mortise are simply "walls". These can be further defined as "edge" or "face". Some variation exists in these terms as you'd expect, especially when different styles of joinery are in play. In an instrument, the shoulders are the end of the neck around the tenon that butt up to the guitar body. A dictionary would be useful, I agree. The problem I've found is that people prefer to disagree or simply not work within the vagaries that just-exist. Look at how poorly-used the term "fan fret" is when in fact it refers to something much more specific, which in general the instruments just aren't. Like calling an Electrolux vacuum cleaner a "hoover".

Flossing is where a strip of sandpaper (240+) is trapped between the shoulder and mounting face, shoulder outwards. The joint is pushed closed manually to identify which edges close first, stopping others from closing. By trapping sandpaper in these and carefully pulling it out of the joint, these high spots are gradually reduced so that the entire perimeter closes up. I hope that makes sense. edit: Agh, I didn't refresh the page! Yes, that's exactly it.

Easing the shoulders also allows for "flossing" of the glueing joint with sandpaper for a razor-tight join. I can't speak to Gibson's reasoning for the gap at the back of the mortise, however many builders that use tapered tenons into a matching mortise fit the neck at the back and use a clamp configured as a spreader to push the neck into place and tighter into the taper. Aria Pro II/Matsumoku went one further with this and drove a couple of screws through pre-drilled holes in the mortise once positioned, which applies additional clamping pressure. A nice touch.

This is yet enough classic PG déraillement.

I'm not certain of Voltaire's meaning as I don't have a wider context to work from, and I'm sure that the original French carries subtle meaning or implication of itself. I would imagine a number of possible interpretations would be valid, such as action vs. process mindedess; hence my mentioning of "hifistellä". Chasing unnecessary perfection whilst losing sight of any practical endpoint? That perfection - when seen as a gold standard - devalues that which is readily acceptable or good enough?

Interpreting an author's specific meaning, or being inspired to derive your own thoughts and rationalisations are two very different practices. A meta-interpretation of this would be, "how to think vs. inspired to think". University taught me very little outside of the rote subject material, however it did teach me to teach myself.

"If it isn't broken, fix it until it is." Those are some very sage viewpoints, and I applaud the introduction of Voltaire to this esteemed company. The Shakespeare sonnet excerpt is especially excellent, however I think it is one of those things that works differently outside of original intended context, yet possess their own internal consistency? Here in Finland there is the lovely verb, "hifistellä" and hence the descriptor of a person as a "hifistelijä". This is loosely describes the action of, or a person that continues to modify and change something beyond absolute requirement to the point of wasting time, money and resources. A lily gilder. I believe Shakespeare was almost making a sly oxymoron by describing that which defies and is even damaged through the act of description. Nonetheless, these unexpected and unintended conjunctions take on an inspiring life of their own. Again out of full context, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here" also works beautifully out of its specific context within The Tempest.

The main thing is that you build. Every project you work through will improve everything you do after that point, so in most cases it's irrelevant whether the project is completed fully or not. The difficult part is deciding whether you want to be on an ongoing journey-of-many-builds or simply want to complete one or two, and that's it. All looking good though. Keep moving!

It should not be difficult. Keep the fret slots clean, add a small bevel across the top edges and practice on scrap material

The well-known quotation of Albert Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" applies here even though this was a quotation-friendly reduction of how Einstein originally said it: "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience" "less is more" - I would contend that the stated "more" is not intended as being comparative to "less", simply that "less" is superior to the unstated "more". I agree about the snappy memorableness, even though it sort of undermines the meaning to a degree. Less is objectively not better than more in all cases. Fewer votes are certainly not going to win one a fair election for example. "Simpler is better" carries the same base meaning, however this does not necessarily mean "stupider is better". This just will not hold water, no sir.

10" into a 12" board is perfectly acceptable for hammering as illustrated by @Bizman62. For pressing, it's better to have a radius closer to that of the fingerboard. And yes, your English is fine.

The best I can figure is that electrical problems and injuries are not common in spite of this unintuitive electrical circuitry. Perhaps Finland is where we breed Mehdi's (Electroboom).

Sapele has a higher tendency to move, both because of the nature of the wood not being as straight as most and also by it having a higher incidence of internal tension. The internal tensions will release as you work the material, a lack of straightness will show itself as odd movement such as twist or other warping. Unfortunately, there is no good way of predicting this other than knowing how likely it might be with the materials you choose to work with. Sapele can remain dead as an arrow straight (a good arrow, anyway) and clear Maple can twist. The less you "know" the material from source to finished product, the less chance you get of having a read on what it might do. Example; I was ripping a 52mm board of Sapele a couple of years back on the table saw, and the material was parting like a Y which pushed the cut material from against the fence into the side of the blade a fair bit. The piece even made big deep cracking noises that sounded like booming sea ice in the wood. "Reaction wood". Sapele seems to have a lot of this. A little bit like this, but imagine booms as thick sea (not lake) ice flexes and fractures. I was out here on the frozen sea at Santalahdensalmi just off the coast of Laitakari. https://goo.gl/maps/qxAWaFc26GCLS7MWA

Its been a problem for a long time. So much so, that using a neon electrical test screwdriver on the radiator of a previous property showed enough leakage current to illuminate the neon and make you skin tingle.

For me, I think active pickups or at least having differential buffering preamps is a necessary evil. We don't seem to get true earthing in apartments here (neutral is tied to ground in most circuits) which freaks my logic right out. It also results in annoying noise that requires ground lifting, wireless or forgetting that staccato is even a thing because even noise gates don't crush that pollution. Even passive humbuckers fall prey to this ubiquitary miasma.

I learnt a lot of this hands-on from my degree work. We regularly took in trucks of wet wood into the steam kiln, plus did practical experiments of weighing and quantifying wood by volume, drying it in an oven to pretty much zero moisture and examining the changes in geometry, dimension, volume and weight. The came in especially useful when making slab-top furniture, because too high a turnaround from taking in wood at transport moisture (typ. 12-15%) to putting it into production leads to big trouble in the product. Equally, having large amounts of wood on stock drying is dead money and dead space if it isn't turning around quickly enough. I turned that into a motherfunkin' artfully tuned machine. Knowing how the wood works and what is optimal translated to having enough reliably-dry wood to satisfy demands of throughput whilst not having shitloads choking up all the space and gathering dust. Funny, because that was with the least professional, most dumbass employer; just myself and him. I guess you have the ability to reconfigure methods quickly at that size, and to his credit he took on the important points and made them happen. Subsequent bigger "professional" companies mostly order wood in at transport moisture and put it straight into production in the order of a couple of weeks thanks to terrible misguided implementation of zero-stock JIT manufacturing. Putting together a white Oak desk and having to cover it in plastic with a tub of water isn't a solution....it's offsetting the problem. Wood will do what it will. It's a relentless creeping doom that you need to work with, not against

Useful reference: https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/dimensional-shrinkage/ ....whilst this helps illustrate how orienting growth rings affects cosmetic presentation of structure on the show faces... https://sherwoodlumber.com/moisture-content-in-lumber/

Remember the three shrinkage directions. Tangential > Radial > Logitudinal (TRL) Tangential is along the rings or "around the tree". Radial is "outside into the tree centre" Longitudinal is "top to bottom of the tree" In terms of looking at arranging wood for your profile, bear in mind that woods shrink and expand more tangentially than radially. Not a magnitude, but several times more. Longitudinal is usually a couple more magnitudes than either of these to the point of being negligible. This would make the uncut piece of wood in the above illustration convex on the top surface if it dries; the longer length of the growth rings can shrink more by percentage, pulling the edges in and back. The opposite is true if it becomes more moist. This is why I think quartersawn and wide-ringed flatsawn are great to work with. Movement does not distort the profile, it changes it more or less proportionally. When arranging pieces, I try and keep shorter sections of growth rings where possible, and place wood nearer to the centre of the tree as being removed by preference as they have smaller radii growth ring structure. If I were to choose from one of those four, I would choose B or D. For B you are removing more smaller "more distortion prone" radii rings. With D you are reducing the length of the longest source of radial movement. Beyond that it becomes an aesthetic consideration on whether you want the show face to present with growth rings mostly perpendicular to the finished surface or more parallel. One will have more flake structure (Maple for example) whilst the other will be more of a "cathedral grain". Figured woods absolutely benefit from this consideration. Another argument for QS vs. FS is that movement is along axes rather than being a weird 2D distortion. A neck can become thinner (QS) or narrower (FS) which do not cause problems with geometry as much. There are a few schools of thought on this, but generally the bottom line has always been "good clear straight grain".

Cool, I don't think mine did. Using a 22mm spanner on the end nut and the 13mm on the spindle is much better than stressing the router's casting with that red spindle lock button. Mine started to wear before I shifted to two spanners, and I've read of people cracking the router housing more than once. I'd prefer for that not to happen! Funny that you seem to have gotten yours with an offset base. I didn't know that those were even available for that model, which is why I made my own. Did that come as part of the kit?

I must be a mutant for preferring the sound of buffered pickups' low impedance, and then dialling off what I don't want later. I suppose that it makes far more of a difference for players who crank the amp and play off the volume/tone pots. Good luck with your next deep dive! I'm sure some sort of film reference would help here. Bigger boat maybe?

I bet @Crusader loves how we derailed this lovely ES into a discussion on how we swear. He is in Perth of course, so it's like we're discussing the weather, or breathing. He probably hasn't noticed yet, the beautiful baastard.