curtisa

jvillavicencio - Like the simplicity of the build, reminds me of the no-frills immediacy of guitars like LP Juniors. mefgames - Something about this tickles my fancy, if only for the quirkiness of the build. I'd love to hear what a hot-rodded mandolin sounds like at full tilt. Menapia - Another straight-forward build that presents itself well overall. As much as I like visual decadence, I find I still always end up playing guitars that are functional over flashy. Nice work on this one. Diffidentia - Obviously a lot of work has gone into such a left-of-field build. No doubt working with carbon/kevlar throws up a whole new set of challenges that many of us would have no idea how to work through. The final result looks super-smooth. Osorio - Beautiful quality work as usual. No doubt your client will be thrilled to own such a unique and versatile instrument. A close 2nd for me. orgmorg - Got my vote. Love the top, love the colour, love the steampunk influences scattered here and there throughout the build. Yum.

I tried a Schecter C8 Hellraiser at a local music store about a month back. I think it had EMG808's. I'm more of a 7-er kind of guy, and while I had a lot of fun noodling on the low F# it wasn't really my cup of tea in the end. My gut feel (with my limited experience of 8's) is you'll want as much clarity out of the pickups as you can get. Low F# with high gain gets mushy really fast. Maybe steer towards medium output pickups and let the amp do the work? That said, I've been really surprised by how clean the Seymour Duncan Blackouts sound in my last 7 string build. Maybe actives are worth a shot for a change? I'd actually be curious to try an 8 string with the extra range added above the high-E instead, ie B-E-A-D-G-B-E-A tuned low to high.

Baby steps this weekend. Had to put on my Bob the Builder helmet and recast a new concrete step on the garden path to replace a busted one. Fitting the blackwood headplate. Just used an offcut from the blackwood body top and thinned it down on the router sled to 3mm. Doesn't look pretty at the moment but it'll get sliced and diced further down the track. Also had to glue a couple of wings on the headstock so that I didn't run out of wood at the extremities of the headstock pattern: Finally got the headstock drawing sized properly and printed off, and made up some templates from some 10mm plexiglass. The big one does the overall shape and the smaller one is used to get the "step-down" on the blackwood headplate: And the sheoak has been thinned down to 6mm and slotted:

Yeah, I was really surprised when I unwrapped it. The original photo of it from the seller didn't do the figuring justice. Only side dots going on this one, don't want to put any visual distractions over the fretboard. Not so much progess this weekend. I printed off the headstock drawing at work to make up a template from it, and foolishly didn't check the nut width before I got home. At least I didn't route the headstock with a dud template! Neck taper roughed out and then trimmed: Used the downtime to make up a couple of jigs. This is the Tunerhole-omatic getting a test run. You position the top edge of the headstock against the rear fence and drill the first hole. Then insert the indexing pin in the base of the jig, slot the previously-drilled hole over the pin and drill the next hole. Rinse and repeat. It'll do as many inline holes as you can fit on the base, left or right handed. Hole spacing can be adjusted by rotating the drill table closer or further away from the centre of the drill bit. The next trick will be working out how I can incorporate drilling the hole for the little anti-rotating pin in the back of the Sperzels into the jig:

Thanks Muzz. Wilkinson/Gotoh VS100 two-point trem, as per 1st post.

Routing the neck pocket and pickup cavities. The neck pocket template I'm using has a matching "sister" neck profile template, so having the neck cut to shape at this stage isn't so critical. Maybe I'm tempting fate a bit here, but I'm willing to give it a shot, and the practice run I did on scrap gave me a good square fit. Pickup route template looks oversized, but I'm using the pattern ring in my router with a 1/4" bit, so the resultant route is smaller than the plexiglass template. I've made a little sub-template that allows me to sink the pickup legs deeper into the body than the rest of the pickup route. It just sits inside the template and limits the router's movement to the pickup leg sections only: Pretty good fit: All done for now: PS, sorry about some of these image sizes. Photobucket is completely screwing up my pic sizes for some reason when I'm uploading.

Neck action. The scarfe jig is cut to give me a 13 degree headstock angle. I just make the initial cut by hand with a tennon saw, clamp each piece in the jig and run the router over the cut faces to square up the scarfe. Then clamp time: Everything glued and out of the clamps:

Control cavity routed. Not easy to see in this shot but I've covered the pickup cable channels with clear sticky tape to prevent glue filling up the channels when the top is fitted: Aligning the top to the body. Two nails prevent the two halves sliding around while gluing up. The forward one sits where the neck pocket route and the rear one is in the tremolo route. Once the glue is dry the nails are removed and the two nail holes are "erased" when routes are done. Clamped:

Routing to the body template. The 4 fixing screw holes are located in convenient locations such that they get buried under the blackwood top: Thicknessing the body and top. The jig is just a variation on designs I've seen floating around on PG and elsewhere. Nylon rollers and alumininium rails/angles are the go here. The planing bit is a monster. I run the router at around 80% speed so that I don't exceed the max RPM of the bit and take the barest nibble in each pass. To prevent the massive kickback I'd get starting such a large bit in my router I ramp the speed up using a variac:

Now that I'm starting to find my feet with builds I think I'm ready to begin journal-ising the construction process. This one is going to be a 30th birthday gift, a 6-string companion to my SY7 (see GOTM submission elsewhere). The birthday isn't until December, so I have plenty of time to screw it up! Target specs: Body - Queensland maple with Tasmanian blackwood carved top Neck - Queensland maple with West Australian sheoak fingerboard Scale length - 25.5" Radius - 16" Trussrod - Allparts Tuners - Sperzel Trim-lok Nut - Graphtech black Tusq Frets - Jumbo nickel silver Pickups - Seymmour Duncan '59 neck, JB bridge Bridge - Wilkinson VS100 trem Electronics - 1x vol, 1 x 3-way toggle The story so far. The borer hole in the blackwood top sits just outside the edge of the body template, so no need to fill it. Flame pattern in the sheoak is interesting, almost looks like camouflage stripes: Gluing up the body and top blanks: Body and top roughed out:

SY7 7-string Prototype - "Copperhead" My second build. First neck (yikes!). Took what I liked about the Ibanez RG bodyshape and tweaked it to suit my tastes - bridge-end curve of the body is slightly more oval-shaped and raked forward at the top, the middle curves between the pickups are narrower giving it bigger "hips", and the upper and lower horns are thinned out a bit. Specs: Body - Mahogany with carved flame maple top, faux maple binding Neck - Maple with birdseye maple fingerboard, flame maple headstock plate with two-tiered design Scale length - 25.5" Radius - 16" Truss rod - Allparts Tuners - Schaller locking, chrome Nut - Graphtech black Tusq Frets - 24, stainless steel 6100 super-jumbo Inlays - Acrylic amber swirl Bridge - Hipshot 7 fixed, chrome Pickups - Seymour Duncan Blackout matched set Electronics - 1 x volume, 1 x 3-way toggle

Interesting idea. Not sure I'd agree that Maton overslot and glue, the frets on my EMC525 definitely look like they've been seated using more traditional methods - I can see a couple of spots on the edge of the fretboard where the fret barb has visibly "bitten" into the timber. Curious to see how your experiment turns out.

Probably not the variety of ironwood you're used to, but down here Australian Tonewoods sell Cooktown Ironwood fingerboard blanks.

I do something similar to Ripthorn. Find a bolt with the same thread as the insert, a large washer and a piece of wood. Drill a hole in the wood big larger than the insert you want to remove. Position the wood over the insert and put the washer on top. Pass the bolt through and into the insert and start screwing it in. As the bolt head presses against the washer/wood it starts drawing up the insert. If the insert is still halfway in the body by the time the bolt meets the end of the thread just back it out, shim the block of wood up and start again.

Bukoffsky for the win-sky.

Thanks for the input, guys. I was considering doing the build with all Australian native timbers, maybe Queensland Maple body with Tasmanian Blackwood top, neither of which I've worked with before. I've heard mention the QLD Maple is similar to Mahogany in terms of workability, so I assume it's of similar strength. Blackwood appears to have a higher Janka hardness rating than maple, so I assume using it as a top wood would add strength to that area where the leverage forces would be higher, and therefore I can have a smaller gap between stud and pickup?

Greetings chaps, For an upcoming build I was considering using the Gotoh Wilkinson VS100 trem, but wanted to find out if anyone had any experience installing the unit. I was specifically wondering about the minimum amount of timber I should keep between the trem posts and the bridge pickup route. I've done an install on a Floyd trem in the past, and in that case the trem posts were spaced wider than the bridge pickup route, so there was more "meat" for the trem posts to be drilled into. In the case of the VS100 the studs sit inline with the outside strings and up against the bridge pickup route. I assume I would have to move the bridge pickup further towards the neck in order to have enough timber supporting the studs, and ensure the combined pull of strings and tremolo springs doesn't cause the studs to collapse forward. Does anyone have any recommendations as to how close I can safely position the bridge pickup route to the trem posts? Ta very muchly.

+1 on the T-Rex, a modern take on a traditional shape. I'm not a Tele person, but that makes me want to convert. Really liked the 1969 for the hepcat retro vibe, and Sunset for the combination of woods. Excellent work by everyone.

Do you leave thr scotch tape over the trussrod when the whole shebang goes together, or do you lift the tape after the glue has been spread (just to mask it off)?

I think I based my measurements on the Bogner Oversize 2x12 (25 3/4" height x 29 3/4" width x 11 7/8" depth), slightly larger than those plans. I used a manufactured pine panel as the basis for the build. I can't remember what it was called exactly, but it was a kind of laminated thing made up of long strips of smaller timber fingerjointed together to make one large board, kinda like a kitchen benchtop. The fingerjointed construction also prevented warping of the board. They come in a width of 300mm, so all I had to do was cut the sheets to the appropriate lengths to make the sides, top and bottom. Front baffle was 12mm ply.

I built a 2x12 cab about two years ago. This is what I based my build on: http://www.novacron.com/uploads/dc30_212_cabinet_plans.pdf Only major difference was that I replaced the rear opening on page 2 with a removable panel to make it a closed back cab (preferred the sound of it when I compared it with and without). The dovetail joints shown in those drawings are probably overkill. I used lap joints reinforced with 42x19 rectangular-section braces inside each edge. Once the front baffle and rear panels are installed the whole thing becomes rigid. Based on what I've seen there's nothing particularly special about guitar cab construction. Whatever works to make a box large enough and strong enough to hold a bunch of speakers is pretty much it. Your only major decisions are likely to be open vs closed back, what type of speakers you want to install, the number of speakers, material (plywood will be the weapon of choice nine times out of ten), and how you want to pretty it up.

P&W got my vote. While the swirled paint job isn't really my cup of tea, it has the Vai mojo which I can't resist, and a reverse 7 headstock is a whole world of cool in my book. Honorable mentions must go to Osorio's Blue Burst and Verhovenc's Air in Fall. And of course to all entrants, beautiful work by everyone.

Build Numero Uno - RG7 Facelift. First attempt at applying my novice instrument-based woodworking skills by replacing the body of my battlescarred, and frankly meh-looking Ibby RG7620-VK with a new carved-top mahogany body, plus taking the opportunity to invest in some new goodies...and have a bit of fun learning about this guitar-building malarkey. Body: Carved-top mahogany with hand-rubbed oil finish and Jem-style jack socket placement. Neck: Transplanted original RG7620 neck. Trem: Transplanted original Lo-pro Edge 7. Pickups: Bareknuckle Aftermath 7 calibrated set. Electronics: 1x volume, 3-way Switchcraft toggle.

Thanks for all the input guys. I reckon once I flatten the existing radius, slot it on the reverse side (offset slightly from the existing slots to avoid going all the way through the board), and re-radius it I'll end up with a very thin, bendy fretboard. Ha! I did think of that. Sadly the slant on my fret board is the opposite direction. And at least the Ricky looks like it was designed to be slanted. I think I'm leaning towards option 3 myself, with the centreline of the board raised slightly to allow the "D" string to pass slightly above the centre of the 19th fret dot and slightly below the 3rd fret dot. At least that way I can build the neck with the dots only slightly deviating from straight to start with, and not waste too much timber trying to make overly-tall ovals to cover up the drift. Next question - anyone got some good pointers/tutorials for doing oval inlays? Or even the best way to remove the existing dots?

Yep, that's what I meant - front dots, no sides. Existing dots are 1/4" diameter, with the exception of the 24th fret markers which are 3/8". Bigger dots may look a bit odd, especially up on the higher frets, which was why I thought of ovals.