Mind Riot

Nuts. Oh well, it's far from my first mistake and I'm sure it will be far from my last. I don't think I'm going to bother steaming it off, I'm already making another order to LMI within the next day or two and I'll just order another one. Thanks for the input everyone.

So, I'm working on this build, and I'm at the point where it's time to glue the fretboard on. I use the method where I hammer in and then nip off two small finishing nails and press the dry fretboard onto them for alignment, then spread the glue and move it around until it slips onto the pins before I clamp. Done it twice before, worked great. I don't know what I did wrong, but for whatever reason THIS time the fretboard slipped slightly off center at the body end and I didn't catch it until it was dry. So now the fretboard is slightly skewed from the nut to the body end, and if I cut a

Thanks fellas. It turns out I won't be needing these for this neck. I thought I was using cherry for the neck laminates because the owner of the shop who gave me the wood said this whole pile was cherry. Turns out the whole pile was jatoba (Brazilian cherry). I wasn't familiar with either regular cherry or jatoba before this project so I didn't know the difference though I did notice the "cherry" I was working with was much harder than I thought it would be. Now I get to look forward to carving this neck out of one of the hardest woods in the world. It's a four piece laminate of jatoba

LMI had a clearance on some carbon fiber when I was ordering some parts, so I snagged two rods with my order. The site listed them as 5/8" x 3/8" x 17 5/8", and so did the confirmation e-mail. When I got them, they were 5/32" instead of 5/8", the other dimensions matched. So I got these skinny little carbon fiber rods I'm not sure what to do with. I'm new to the whole neck reinforcement thing, I get the idea and the principles but I have yet to do it myself. I see a lot of discussion about whether or not to use it, but not much about dimensions (or at least I haven't found it yet).

Yeah, novelty factor aside it seems simpler to go with graphite, it's what I usually use. Thanks for the thoughts everybody!

Ehh, I don't wanna do that. Guess I'll use some graphite instead.

I noticed in my searching that there was a GOTM wherein someone made a bass with a jatoba nut. I'd never heard about someone using wood for a nut before, just bone and graphite and such, but now that I think about it it really makes sense. Particularly for something like this jatoba I've got, which is pretty dang high up there on the hardness scales I've seen. It's dense, heavy, hard, seems like a perfectly usable nut material. What say ye all? Think it would work? If so, I won't need to buy any nut blanks for a long time.

Sweet, I guess I'll go ahead with it. Thanks guys! Unless it just eats all my tools. The piece is sitting here on my desk and I feel like it's staring me down.

I'm making this Tele here and I've got a pao ferro fretboard on the way. The neck is a laminate of cherry (domestic stuff). I'm going to be scarf jointing a separate headstock piece onto the neck. In the shop, there's this gorgeous long board of Jatoba that the owner tells me I can cut a bit off of to use for a headstock. I think fine, it's a hardwood and it's beautiful and free, win win. So I trace out my headstock design and cut off a tad and put the board back (trying not to hurt myself, it was two feet wide, ten feet long and 3/4" thick). I go back and pick up the piece I cut off. H

I'm working on an experimental Tele design that will include a tailpiece behind the bridge. One of the concepts I'm looking to try out is adding as much overall string length as possible while keeping friction low to see how much of a difference in feel it creates due to the greater elasticity inherent in the longer string. But I was wondering if I would get problems with sympathetic tones in the part of the string between the saddles and the tailpiece if they were too far apart, and I was wondering if anyone else had made a guitar with a tailpiece really far back and what your experiences

Quite right, after I made the original post I realized that I had enough other mahogany and black walnut to do a sexy laminate body without having to cut into the old growth. I'm not even sure what I'll do with it in the end. It's a pretty big chunk, 15"x20"x3". I wonder if that would be worth a chunk of change instead of using it myself?

I recently got my hands on some decades old Honduran mahogany that is just incredible. I'm planning on building a guitar with a few experimental features, using the good pickups and hardware from one of my upgraded cheap guitars. One of these is that I'm going to try out a flat radius board and an asymmetrical neck carve. SS frets. But the other idea I had involves the overall string length. We all know that pitch is determined by mass, tension, and speaking length of the string. Two 25 1/2" scale guitars with the same strings on them will have the same tension at concert pitch, wh

Yikes, fellas. I'm not looking to start a business with this, I'm just a fellow working from home. I've done a lot of work for myself and some friends, and now some people want me to do some fretwork for them. No overhead, no employees, I already have all the tools, my only expenses will be stuff like sandpaper, the fret wire itself, naphtha, that sort of thing. I guess I should have been more specific, I'm not starting up as a luthier, I'm just doing some work on the side and I wanted to be fair with what I ask from people. Meaning fair to them and fair to me. Thanks for the responses

I may be doing some refretting work for some folks, and to be honest the prices I see online vary wildly. I'm just curious what some of the folks around here who do that sort of thing generally charge. Say, for a level and dress, a rosewood board refret, a maple board refret with refinish, whether you charge more or the same for SS frets, that sort of thing. Any thoughts are welcome, thanks everyone.

Thank you both for your information. I'm happy to say that my first SS refret is done and it went very well, with no real problems. I documented the whole thing with pictures and text explaining what I did and my impressions on working with the wire and each step in the process in this thread on Harmony Central: http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums...d.php?t=1862514 Thanks again for contributing, and also a more general thanks to everyone who posted their experiences on working with SS wire in other threads; I did a lot of searching and reading and learned a lot from those post