Prostheta

Of course i'll post you the link: THIS You might find a bad quality version off the same tour I guess.

So yeah....anyway....great info guys - i'm going to go to bed now and discuss the maple top on my wife's LP before, well....

Check out the recent Motley Crue live video...IIRC Vince Neil was playing a custom Gibson LP with a leopard print top which in fact didn't look too obscenely disgusting as it's a very feminine shape and works well....a Viper/SG shape won't....

An electronics-based ruse towards proposal isn't the best of ideas man. You'll probably kick yourself a while down the line for the cornball approach....I proposed to my wife on a spur of the moment thing by stealing my friends ring and offering it to my wife as a temporary engagement ring till further notice :-D Go simple on the design, but be succinct and beautiful with the detailing. Make it an instrument that is a joy to be close to, just like your wife (*I hope*). :-D

My wife says you should cut your fingernails.

It looks like a Viper with a fingerboard that doesn't suit it at the moment. Black fingerboard binding would help if you have a black body theme. How about a snakewood backstrap or headplate inlay? Perhaps snakewood tuners? If you go for a flat top body instead of bevelled, snakewood binding? Ah, just re-read....your wife likes Leopard print, so it's time to look for a new wife as it'll be cheaper than a bunchload of snakewood. Find one that likes flames or silk and talk her into flame or quilt maple :-D

Sounds to me like they screwed up and are trying to find excuses as to why they shouldn't pay and make amends to do it right, trans black back whatever - they still shot the wrong colour!

That'll be a small fire then. What we would consider rejects end up as shelf items....

Good luck, but the effort will be worth it.

Go onto http://www.ebay.co.uk and search for the seller "CHGUITARS". Tell Chris "user_id_and_password" (my eBay username) referred you! Chris has broken sets of ferrules and even tuners for my builds in the past. An overall on the ball guy. Do say please though ;-D

I think I just vomited.

Hear hear Chris. I think people can learn a lot from knowing where that point is and accepting it so they can move on and makes themselves better. By doing so you allow yourself the opportunity to learn and progress, otherwise you lower your future potential by lowering your own targets and accepting the crap shots you make. I personally would donate stuff to other people if they could benefit from it and it didn't reflect on my lack of craftmanship. If I screwed up a headstock shape and gave it away rather than write it off, out there somewhere would be something I accepted as being good enough just by not writing it off. Not good enough. I don't have a shop full of wood to WOD, but the stuff I do use which I cock up needs to be written off for my own progression unless I can make it back into some kind of non-guitar-component-shaped-lumber which someone else can use ;-)

Try http://www.wdmusic.com or http://www.allparts.uk.com.

Excellent! You can farge things up quicker and more efficiently now :-D I can't see a router messing this job up as you're only taking what...1/4 of wood at a time? Reducing it even further to 2x 1/8" cuts means tearout would be negligible at best, maybe a few disturbed fibre bunches from endgrain on the surface....

Occam's Razor! "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one." mk Occam's Razor does by it's nature introduce the assumption of "all things being equal" :-D I personally would agree with chisels, rasp and sandpaper although I do prefer to form shapes by making a template in MDF and using a router. You could always shim one side to get the angle, perhaps even use something similar to David Myka's neck pocket jig....

Oh no....say it's not pink....what's the damage?

yeah - it aint much is it when its just a guitar burning, but imagine we all went out and set fire to our guitars - imagine what that would do for our carbon footprint!!! i am trying to see the other side that paints us people that want to destroy our own substandard guitars as baby eating devils. Burning things is an enviromental concern but burning wood that has its carbon trapped for a few hundred years at most doesnt really compare to burning fossil fuels which are in essence exactly the same thing but heavily compressed for millions of years, and we all tend to rely on thiose in everyday life. Maybe burning finished guitar will release harmfull chemicals into the environment but i am damn sure its less than spraying them in the first place did!! True. You do worse by farting. The carbon released in burning a relatively small mass of wood is small compared to not heaving your foot on the loud pedal in the car, turning a light off when you're not using it, etc. If you can't stand to see an almost-guitar getting burnt, go drink a glass of water or go save some dolphin or whatever. Donate some Titebond to a pauper luthier. Do a hardware drive at your local school and donate the hardware off your junker cheap Ibanez to a kid builder. Hell, stop wasting my time jabbering on about guitar anti-porn. Art is beautiful, but an artist or artisan who knows the fine difference between standard and substandard has veto on all. Unless you would like a partially deformed Mona Lisa in your living room. One eye? Perhaps a cleft lip. But it's the Mona Lisa dude! Perhaps two eyebrows are too many.

A rasp is the first step - the rest is joining the dots and using your fingers to proof the neck....

I think that it's perfectly fine to destroy something you build because it doesn't meet your level of quality. What else? Complete it anyway and leave your mutant deformed child to roam the bars and clubs getting laughed and derided? Hell no!! Axenasia!! Some people can't make that simple decision to write off a build and get on with getting better, instead they dwell on what they did wrong and not what they'll do right in future. It's cathartic therapy to give yourself that closure on a build gone wrong. It helps the mind build experience. I say promote the act. If you don't want to see it, don't look. Like dudes kissing or whatever. (but i bet you'll watch girls kissing)

I don't have the experience or technical knowledge of paint compatibility, but I would have swirled some scrap whilst you were at it and experimented with the clearcoat that way. As for baking - it depends on the temperature, but i'm sure it will be "very warm" and probably a drier heat what with the extraction and all. Can't see it being an issue for the wood as long as it's not an issue for the glues....

Sure thing Doug. I've got a fair amount of work other than just the fingerboard to sort first of all of course :-D

Thanks for the support guys. Larry at Gallery Hardwoods did a great job with the ziricote. A gem of a guy. Well, i'd better update the "spec" both to answer a couple of questions and to bring it up to speed: - Carved flame maple top/zebrano back/wenge pinstripe with three body cavities a la BiliousFrog's singlecut - Swineshead Runaway bridge/Condor neck pickups with Zebrano bobbin tops - Graphtech GHOST Tonepros TOM bridge - Waverley 4067 nickel tuners with 4062 engraved pegs - Zebrawood neck (with two wenge laminates if I can source them) scarfed with a headstock tilt between 13° and 17° (not measured my scarf jig yet....might make a new one to get 17°) - Ziricote fingerboard with custom vine inlay and flame maple binding - Flame maple headstock binding with black purfling line - Ziricote backstrap sappy matched same as the fingerboard (see notes) - Ziricote heel cap - Ziricote topped knobs (see rant below) - Dual action allen truss rod I would love to cut a purfling line around the body, and may consider making a router jig (similar to Setch's carved top jig) to do so. Not sure of the entry point of the cut however....it may have to be started by being plunged and lifted at the end of the cut....risky....alternatively, a purfling cutter would do the job but I would need to practice cutting with one first so the grain doesn't take it's own direction.... Nina decided against the P90s because they look too small and "Gretsch-sized" on a Les Paul. Due to the steam/heat required to bend wood, I think glueing up the backstrap wood to be sappy matched will just come apart so i'll have to think on this one. It's possible I might just use it as a headplate instead, but I prefer the idea of using a light body wood, dark fingerboard and light headstock and hiding the scarf with dark wood. I have some macassar ebony veneer I could backstrap with, but it's adding another grain/colour to the mix which I want to avoid. Alternatively, I could pre-bend the ziricote before glueing as a matched set and match it on the headstock, but this is quite risky I guess. I would like to continue the chrome/nickel theme by using some of these capped dome knobs, heating them up and removing the acrylic to replace it with ziricote instead. Lovely! If I think I can get away with it before I run out of ziricote, a rhythm/treble toggle plate would do the trick also. Using three woods is good for bringing the theme together in my opinion, and the wenge should look so similar to ziricote that nobody will notice the difference between the two ;-) J - i'm going to trace the shape of one of the inner cavities with a template insert so the resulting template will be around 1/2" smaller, then flip the body over and use a v-groove bit to scribe a bevel, then as small a straight cutter as possible to cut through the bevel to the inside of the cavity. Zebrano has a very wild moving grain, so rather than cut around the back plate and saw under it to remove it, this will maintain the grain 100%. I'll glue three overhanging posts with recessed epoxied nail heads around the cavity access when everything is complete otherwise it'll be a pain to rout posts using this method of extracting the cover! The cover will then just need small neodymium magnets epoxying in. Thanks all.

Apologies for the delay in updates on this one. My router decided it wanted to chew open the grain on my first blank so i've had to start from scratch on the second set which I had in backup. All past now, so time to work onwards.... The ziricote fingerboard is all I have for you, ladies and gentlemen. I've been spending a lot of time at Muay Thai training so guitar building has taken a back seat a little. Still - result: The taper is actually the wrong way up....the 22nd fret will be up there at the top, and the nut at the bottom of the red trapezoid....

I think it's a trick of the perspective. The neck angle can't be that huge, else the long tenon would run out a mile or two!

I have to admit that I like the practical qualities of your build so much, i'm using them for my wife's Les Paul build which I will update very soon. I can't wait to see how the top looks when cleared! How did you get the light wood emerging in the truss rod access hole? I can't remember seeing a headplate on there, just a backstrap....