Prostheta

You would see some numbers. More and more numbers. Twist.

Chrome plating would flake off unless you pre-bend the binding material prior to chroming it, and even then I can't see it working. You'd be better off spraying Alsa Krome on a masked body, or using a different metal and lacquering it after polishing it to a shine. The Alsa option is more likely to give you a result. Difficult task although there may be an easier answer to what popped into my head.

5150 in there too...good work! I will live and die by my 5150 since I rebiased it :-D

If it's 3/4" thick, it sounds too thin to go Fender-style...aren't they usually from 1" thick blanks?

Not always of course. My Ibanez has a rosewood headcap and cream binding ;-D

Awesome Wez - that's what we use anyway :-D Awesome Daniel - that's what I use anyway :-D

Temjin – I had a quick peeperoonie at the Bareknuckle pups, but I’m going to go for a pair of Swineshead APEX 8-string pickups purely on the basis that they are made locally, plus I can get the bobbins in yellow/black to carry the theme through.

Question for UK peeps: Does anyone have any recommendations for good "clean" equivalents to "ivory soap"?

Black on light wood does look very respectable. It even makes P-basses look kinda cool :-D I'm using black on maple for the biohaz 8-string because I like the contrast, although I do have a darker wood for the fingerboard (cocobolo) to even out against the (to be) black body.

Knowing how long it was sat would be good. Kiln-drying isn't the be-all and end all but 9-10% isn't bad by any means. Perhaps leave it a month or two whilst you shop for a central laminate? ;-D Depending on how you rotate one half of the neck 180° (if you do so) you'll get a different look also. If the annular rings are perpendicular to the surface, you'll get rays and straighter, finer grain lines ---> |/////|\\\\\| <--- top bit is your fingerboard. Flatsawn will leave the grain more pronounced. Personally - at 8-10cm wide - I would cut a piece off the (right-hand side in your picture) piece and keep it for a central laminate in a future project, divide the remainder and pop in a nice central piece. Are you putting the rod in from the top, or the bottom with a fillet? I think that for your first build, it's an admirable piece to work with. Exchange it as Erik suggested (if you can) and if you can't flip em, or if you feel saucy, flip and laminate.

I'm considering "using" the idea of sweeping the top curve back over the bass tuner side for my own seven-string builds Jonas. Looks very nice. I have only used the KL style headstock for 8-strings at the moment, and 3 over 4 in this style looks great. Sorry to hear you're experiencing routing burn etc. but you just wait till you get through 120/160 grit and start polishing your maple up! It makes all the work worthwhile. When I scraped the back of the biohaz neck, it just started popping...can't wait to get her oiled :-D Odd that you're having a black body and pale neck. Are you painting any of the maple? Black headstock face?

Well, if it's nice and dry you should be okay. Using quartersawn is a better option, but that board looks fine to use. You could always splice in a stiff centre laminate and flip the bits perhaps. Still - looks good to me. How long has it been dried for?

...and you'd probably end up with something which is less than a tenth of the quality in terms of materials, engineering.... If you can't afford a plane of that quality, buy a Lie-Neilson or Veritas. If you can't afford those, buy a random make :-D Those planes do have their place, but they tend to be with artisans and career woodworkers. Can't perceive one making it to my bench, and even if I could afford it, my bench wouldn't fully benefit from their workmanship and quality.

Yeah, but it's worked in enough production instruments to have proved a worthwhile design, weakness or no! Perhaps emailing LMII might yield results for spoke ends, as I get mine made to a specific size so it's feasible you can perhaps get some made up.... Temjin: I'll do that once I have this, the WZRG, the ash/purpleheart fanned fret and the semi-hollow complete ;-) I'm busy.

Not really, no. You get used to it after ten or so minutes when you dial your brain into having two lower strings or one high and low. The neck definitely does not feel thick either. I prototyped this neck design a couple of times before this build to get a feel for what-is-comfortable and what-is-playable. The original wenge/zebrano prototype was a bit bat-like in profile and i'm going to take the rasp back to that one to flatten it out and take it down another couple of mm, and way out at the sides. If you consider the thickness of the neck at certain points, take into account fretboard radius/thickness and the trussrod depth, there's no reason they can't be Wizard thin unless you're scared of hitting the rod rout (digital calipers are your best friend here) or you've dug that rout too deep by accident in the first place :-D I dropped using Stewmac's Hotrods because they're so damn deep you just end up with baseball bats you can dial relief into. The LMII dual action welded rods are really low profile and do the physical job just as well.

Well that shower was awesome. Having maple-flavoured bogeys isn't, however. Okay! Pictures: Full neck shot Shot down the neck (some scratches visible which will be taken out soon) Contrast raised slightly to emphasis figuring (dampened) Neck dampened to raise the grain (did some scraping after this for the first photo in this post) Note the arrangement of the tuner mounting/locating. I have used a combination of seven tab+screw locating tuners and one "pins under body" style tuner to maintain a compact headstock. I could have used 8x tuners with pins under the body, but I think that the tabs add something to the look of the back of the headstock, pattern or whatever. That's just me I guess :-D It's totally unneccessary, but so are most things when you're building an instrument which is exacting and perhaps left-of-centre!

Shaped the neck today - will post a photo when I get showered. The flame is starting to appear nicely even at 120 grit. :-D Specs: Thin flat, 20.2mm at 1st fret - 23.1mm at 17mm. IIRC, thats slightly thicker than the Ibanez offering in the higher registers, but i'll see how it feels before I set it in stone.

I'm sure both sides of this discussion are saying that buffered and true bypass both suck tone. Probably true in various situations I guess. Mechanically switched bypass (DPDT stomp) wouldn't suck tone if you've buffered the signal prior to a (long) guitar lead run > fx > amp etc. A unity buffer may perhaps colour the sound or add noise, or - help us - may remove the "sucked tone" people may be unwittingly used to with passively driven cable runs, but hey. Anything can happen, and i'm probably just spilling opinion as usual :-D I'm also sure that true bypass means different things to different people as it's obviously been subject to the "marketing terms teams" who've probably taken innocent discrete electronics terminology and bastardised it into sales spiel. Anyway. Enough of that. Back to the issue in hand. Do you run active pickups, or perhaps are able to compare active to passive DJHM? I'm not entirely sure it is worthwhile converting the pedal, or at least that would be my view. Do you know of anyone else that has done this to great effect, or has it been mentioned that the bypass sucks (pun not intended) on this pedals?

Flatness is just one factor that perhaps machines can get you within the ballpark of, but skill and patience refines and re-refines by factors.

Same as any CNC machine piece - it's only as good as the assemblers, quality checkers, finishers etc. You can't take a piece of X and cut it according to Y and expect a £4000 plane to come out of the other side. CNC is only part of the process, and in fact I believe Karl Holtey actually uses CNC for some parts. They won't come out anywhere near finished of course...!

Your finish will always have a thickness, so slacken it for sure. If it's too tight on assembly you can crack the finish, either that or seasonal changes and use might just do that for you anyway :-D Up till now i've not made necks with any finish so I can get away with loosening the joint by reducing the neck part to suit rather than the body. A bolt-on however, has no immediate need to be dead tight in the joint (you're not looking for a tight glueing quality joint) so you can reduce it by 1mm-2mm quite happily and with some patience and practice you can get it snug anyway. If you're finishing your neck, you can always mask the part of the neck that goes into the pocket so you're not building it up. Plenty of options - depends on what suits you and your builds.

I buy it from axminster.co.uk although I am sure there will be a dealer in the Netherlands Arjan! <edit: oh, Mattia knows of somewhere...silly me...>

I'd take the view that adding mass to something stops it resonating to a degree depending on the materials, frequencies and overall mass. Like soundproofing. Leather doesn't have a HUGE mass, so i'm of the opinion that it would be barely perceivable under most human circumstances unless you layered on a half inch of epoxy :-D Even then....it's not like you're coating it in lead! Good luck.

Untrue - plenty of Titebond "going on" over here

But *look* at them :-D