curtisa

Re, humbucker on positions 3 and 4: My mistake. Top section of switch should be '3' and '4' tied, with red from humbucker on either '3' or '4'. To get coil tap on position 2 you need green and white joined together on the upper '2' lug of the switch. Lower section of the switch remains as is.

From a quick eyeball: Missing a ground connection on the tone cap/tone pot. Tone pot won't work without it.Pretty sure the Bareknuckle humbuckers have a fifth braid connection. Not shown on your drawing, but needs to go to ground.The two points labelled 'C' on the switch need to be tied together, and then connected to the volume pot/tone pot as you have done already.On the upper section of the switch:Remove all ties/jumpers. Re-do the ties as '4' to '2'.Red of humbucker goes to '4' or '2' (doesn't matter which)Green/white of humbucker tied together and wired to '3'On the lower section of the switch:Remove all ties/jumpers. Re-do the ties as '1' to '2' to '3'White of neck goes to '1' or '2' or '3' (doesn't matter which)

Wasn't entirely sure if: ...meant the middle position was bridge humbucker + neck single or tapped humbucker + neck single, so here's both options: The 4-way 2-pole Oak Grigsby switch sold by Stewmac is what to use. You still need to add your own volume and tone controls plus output jack to the diagram.

Pickups and jack good then. Assuming you can also switch the pickups at this point, switch is good. Did the volume pot work at this point? Could you control the output of the pickup? Don't forget that both the third lug on the volume pot and the pickup needs to be connected to ground. No signal (dead silence) or nothing but noise? More detail required. Did the ohmmeter go across the two outer lugs? Should get a steady 500K (or near enough). Across one of the outer lugs and centre? If you go from centre lug to outer and rotate the pot you should see the resistance change from 0 to 500K. Measuring between centre and the other outer lug will give the inverse of the rotational resistance (500K to 0). If you get a problem by this stage, pots are possibly dud. Based on your tests above I'd say the switch and jack are fine, and pots are likely to be OK too. Don't order in new parts yet, I'm thinking it's just a connectivity error when all the components are combined as a whole. Simplest one I can find would be this - just delete the tone control from the drawing and you're good to go

Neat idea. I hadn't considered a pantograph reduction mechanism as something that could be applied to guitar making. I'd be curious to see how well it goes with making inlay cavities for fretboards and the like - will the gearing reduction translate into ultra-fine detail?

Cheers Scott. Definitely faster. Definitely more brutal if you let it get away too. The comfort carve was roughed out in about 3 minutes. Top carve in about 10. Lots of flying woodchips but far less dusty than the flapdisk. Still requires a softer touch for the finer areas of the carve, so it still takes lotsa hours with the scrapers, sandpaper and spokeshave.

I went looking to see what the exchange rate for Finland was, hoping that maybe the Markka was worth $0.02AUD or something, but not surprisingly you're using the Euro, which still clobbers the AUD by 1.5:1. D'oh! Decided to have another go with the Arbortech Turbo plane. This time around the result was much better than my practice run on the offcut eucalyptus burl. Don't know if it was the bigger mass of the body, or just that I'd developed a better technique with the grinder, but the results are much better than my test piece. Comfort carve: After knocking off all the high spots with the rasp: And then polishing up with the scraper: So, decided to man up and hit the top with the Turboplane. Worked out surprisingly well after all my misgivings about the agressivness of the cutting action: Taking shape with the scraper from this point in (didn't want to push my luck with such an agressive tool): Grain- and void- filling with epoxy. Think I might have exorcised the wood demons from the myrtle topped guitar for now. The big opaque-looking epoxy fill in the eucalyptus topped guitar is better than it was, but will probably still require digging out and refilling. Can wait for now:

That's not saying much. A handful of cat fur is a couple of grand in Zimbabwean dollars.

Your chances of finding the exact assembly is pretty slim. You might get lucky with something that looks similar from an old 60s radio or car stereo. Strange-looking switch caps often turn up on those old transistor organs that you see in retirement homes - the ones with the built-in rhythm machine that plays the cheesy bossa nova backbeat. The organs themselves can usually be had for cheap (or free!) from people who just want to get rid of a massive piece of furniture that never gets used. Retrofitting a set of the slide toggle switches that Prostheta suggests would be another option. If you know somebody with a 3D printer they may be able to make up replacement caps that look like the original ones but fit the newer-style toggle switches.

Ziricote fretboard is a stunner in this one. From some angles it almost looks like the dark lines are fissures and splits all through. Very eye-catching. Careful with your wire channels. Looks like the neck pickup wire channel is a right angle under the bridge pickup on its way to the control cavity. Might be difficult to run the wire without it getting snagged on the corner.

I've never done a matched cavity cover myself, but I believe the technique involves starting off with a body blank overly thick, cutting the excess off the back of the blank in the area where the cavity is going, and using the offcut itself as the cavity cover. If your body blank is already down to its intended thickness and you can't slice any more off the back, the only other option is probably to try and find a piece of scrap timber that matches the grain pattern and colour close enough and use that as the cover. Compound radius is going to be tricky unless you have access to a CNC. There are some fancy DIY rocking/swinging router cradles that can be made up, but there's a lot of work involved to make the jigs and they're fairly bulky items to only use once or twice, and you still need to find some way of sanding the fretboard to a smooth finish after the router surfacing stage that won't ruin the radius you've just put on the board.

Beware - one Australian dollar won't buy you as much these days...

You mean our former big, dumb lug prime minister Tony Abbott? Given the number of PMs this country has had in the last few years I reckon if I stand still long enough I'll get voted in as PM!

True enough, but there are definitely items in the Stewmac catalogue that stand out as being stuff that can be reproduced for a fraction of the asking price. The fret end bevelling files can be made for the cost of scrap wood and a cut down fine cut file. You shouldn't even need to contemplate buying their 90 degree end-trimming file when a normal fine cut file will do the same job. Other stuff, I agree it's worth the asking price - the miniature Dremel router base, the straightedges, the fret slotting mitre box, gauged nut files... I think I'd originally seen the nibbler mod done over at the TDPRI.com forums. The one I've modified is really set up for jumbo wire, but it seems to have coped OK with the medium/wide wire I've used for this build with some minor filing where the tang gets nipped off. For the price of these nibblers I could probably buy a few of them and change the dimensions of the channel in each cutting head to accommodate different sized fretwire, and still have change leftover versus buying one fret tang cutter from SM.

Undercutting the tangs on the frets is done by purchasing a super-expensive fret tang nipper from Stewmac. The cheaper alternative is to buy a generic nibbling tool and modify it by cutting a channel in the top face underneath the cutting head: 24 frets later: And then tap the ends into each slot ready to be pressed: To the tune of Roxette's "Dresed for Success" - It's time to press...in some frets... Clean up the ends to get rid of the overhang and add a bevel (yet another homemade alternative to an overpriced Stewmac tool): Carving the neck. I always used to dread this part, but I've now come to really enjoy it. Very satisfying watching the profile take shape, especially when the scarf laminations start appearing: All done for now:

May need pics to diagnose properly. Do you have red and white from the pickup joined together and taped off? There should be an equivalent Les Paul style wiring diagram on the Seymour Duncan website which can be substituted for the diagram above. Wiring colour codes should also be swapped as described in this thread and it should work as expected.

Definitely. I don't have the room to accommodate a machine large enough to cut full bodies and necks, but this little 200 x 300 benchtop unit will work exactly as I need it to for templates and small jobs. With a little imagination I could probably get it to do fret slots in two halves using index pins milled into a sub-baseplate attached to the bed. I haven't tried directly cutting anything tougher/thicker than 6mm MDF with it yet. The cavity cover recess jig shown further up was initially made with 6mm MDF and then attached to 2x 10mm perspex pieces to be trimmed to shape with the handheld router. .

Continuing the usage of the CNC, I made a quick drilling template for the bridge out of of some scrap 2mm perspex from a cheap picture frame: And then over to the drill press to set out the through-body string ferrules. The nice thing about these ABM saddles is that you can string them as through-body or top-loading. I'm leaving my options open at the moment and fitting the bodies out for both alternatives: Counterboring the ferrules with the Stewmac peghead reamer for a flush fit look: Curses continue on the Evil Twin. Forgot to route the wiring channels for the pickups before gluing the top up. Had to drill with a long bit through one of the chambers for the neck pickup, and then fish around with a piece of wire until I could pass it through the two holes at either end. Will leave the wire in place for now so I can use it as a draw wire when fitting the pickup leads: Roughing out the heel comfort carve:

Temperature is definitely starting to warm up down here, so I'll have to start blaming the wood demons or my general ineptitude for any future problems!

I'm a bit concerned that body No. 1 is picking up some bad vibes from No. 2. The big epoxy fill on the top hasn't dried clear. I'm hoping that most of it will be removed during the top carving process, but if not I think I'm going to have to dig out the opaque epoxy and refill it with black-dyed epoxy.

I tried to be clever and used the offcuts from every alternate fretmarker I'd made. Those offcut markers were too shallow to survive being sanded a second time around. Clever = not so clever.

After an extended hiatus due to work and other commitments, I've finally been able to get things restarted on these. With the CNC I can now make covers and cavities that match perfectly. Taking the drawing file for the cover and shrinking the outline by the diameter of the endmill (minus a bit) it's dead easy to make up a routing template to match the cover: Sadly the rest of my progress has been less than impressive. The sister of the first guitar is proving to be an evil twin. Having drilled the side dots in the second neck, I wasn't happy with the alignment, so I decided to remove the binding and re-attach a fresh strip to allow me to start the side dots again. While the binding was off I thought I'd quickly clean out the fret slots and doublecheck the radius of the board. Lo and behold, the radius at the edges where the binding was attached was too small (maybe I rushed the initial radius job?). No problem, says I. I'll just run the radius block up the fretboard again to fix the radius and reset the depth of the fretslots afterwards. The fretboard is plenty thick enough to cope with losing 0.5mm up the middle. Curse no. 1: managed to sand through several of the fretmarkers, so had to drill out about 6 of them and refit new ones. With the radius corrected, fret slots recut to correct depth and a fresh piece of binding applied the neck is ready to be fitted to the body and a neck pocket cut. Time for the pocket jig: Curse no. 2: 1mm gap on the treble side of the pocket after the routing was complete. Neck now slops from side to side in a big way. No idea why I didn't pick up that the neck was loose in the jig while setting it up. Luckily was able to find an offcut of myrtle top to line the pocket with and recut the pocket to the correct size. There's still a slight discrepancy where some of the black flecks get cut off at the glue line, but I should be able to hide them with some careful application of black ink: Curse no. 3: While handling the neck I notice a "papery" sound while touching the new binding strip at certain points along the fretboard. Glue hasn't taken on the new binding. Binding has to come off again and fresh glue applied. Neck binding is now drying for a third time. At least it fits in the neck pocket properly Here's where things stand after battling with it all weekend. I can hear the one on the left laughing at me:

Not commercially that I know of. Some people have pulled apart those little buzzers to get to the piezo plate element and inserted that into the neck pocket. The one time I tried it I decided it wasn't the best sound I'd ever heard - very hollow, distant and muted. You'd also need an external preamp/buffer to make the most out it. If you do decide to try it for yourself don't expect it to sound anything like a traditional piezo saddle pickup. A piezo pickup relies on direct measurement of the physical vibration of an object in order to reproduce it as sound, which is probably why putting it in the neck pocket or under an existing magnetic pickup makes it sound so weak - too far away from direct contact with a vibrating object to make any serious noise. Assuming you could cradle the pickup somehow in free air, putting it near the vibrating strings as you do with a magnetic pickup will result in no sound whatsoever. It needs to be bonded to something that is vibrating in sympathy with the strings - the saddles or the soundboard of an acoustic instrument are the obvious places. The neck pocket experiment works a little (it will vibrate a teeny bit, but it is designed to be strong enough to resist the strings ripping the neck out of the body, so transferred vibration from the strings is slugged a lot). Maybe attach it to the top surface of the body near the area occupied by the bridge? Maybe on the headstock?

Clamped together works better, as any skew that accidentally gets sanded into the face of one piece gets automatically transferred into the second. The result should still be a perfect match when the two are brought together. Looks like you may have found the issue. Another thing that may be happening is that the line of tape up the middle of the sandpaper will be making a tiny ridge along the length of the sandpaper. As you run the timber up and down the sandpaper there may be just enough side-to-side wobble to make the two timber pieces tilt either side of the ridge. Once that starts happening it tends to get worse the longer you sand. What may start out as a 0.1mm dip after the first 5 minutes of sanding turns into a 1mm dip after half an hour. Crimson Guitar's masking tape and super glue trick is a good tip. I've been using it a lot recently too. Keep at it. With 40 grit paper it shouldn't take too much effort to get those two pieces perfectly flat and square enough to glue.

Nice work! The "burnt blue" look goes well with the LP body shape.