curtisa

Done

Wow. Two curses for two. Guess you're never touching SG builds again then?

Given the price and lead time of a genuine Chapman stick, I'm surprised you don't see more people building their own versions of it. Great to see another self-built oddity emerging from the depths of the forum. You're not an expat Australian, are you? My understanding was that most Americans didn't really 'get' AFL and thought it was a bit silly

I normally route the wiring channels into the main blank before attaching the top, but it does require some planning to make sure you put them in the right spot first. You appear to be designing everything in CAD though, so you should be able to plan ahead to get them located in the right spots. A 6-8mm straight channel between all three pickups and another channel at the lower-left corner of the bridge humbucker location leading to the control cavity would suffice. Or three individual 6mm channels between each pickup and the control cavity if you prefer. PS - if you'd like to turn this into a build thread, let one of us mods know and we can move it into the 'In Progress' section for you

Do you ever intend on removing them? If it were me I'd just permanently glue them in place with a couple of dots of CA. You mean the missing pickup screw holes? I reckon you'd be able to drill and countersink them and just touch up the freshly exposed timber with a bit more black dye and Tru-oil finish. Once the screws are in you'd never know they were there.

For a non-fanned bridge layout, that seems overly complicated. There's mountains of intonation adjustment range on the T4M baseplates; there's no need to pre-stagger them for a normal, perpendicular bridge pattern. To do individual saddles will take a lot of careful planning and cutting. I could see it being done with a brad point or forstener bit of the same diameter as the curved section of each base plate. Drill each end of the body where the saddles are going to be installed to accommodate the baseplate and join the two drilled sections by hogging out with a chisel. At the bare minimum you'd want a drill press to get it looking clean and consistent. The first time I installed a set of T4Ms I made up a template with an indexable baseplate that matched the spacing and position of the saddles, but I've also got access to a CNC which makes doing this kind of template work fairly trivial. It'd be pretty tough to replicate it freehand, but maybe it will spark siome ideas for you: @Pariahrob was working on a T4M installation for a while. His build uses a square, common recess for all six tuners which looks quite neat. I assume he used a router and some kind of template, which would be easy to replicate using a piece of 1/4" MDF:

All the more reason to have the boards made up for you. I found that provided you spent the time during the board design stage, you'd iron out 95% of the bugs in the circuit before committing to the fab house. Even if there still a couple of errors, they were nothing that couldn't be fixed with some minor PCB surgery and wire jumpers, and you still ended up with a better looking and better made product than you could achieve doing self-etching and drilling at home. Good riddance to Press 'n Peel, I say. The number of sheets I wasted trying to find the right laser printer, printer settings, iron settings, pressure required, time of transfer, and then dealing with the etching and chemicals, drilling...

It's been a looooong time since I did any self-etching of PCBs. The Chinese PCB fab houses just made it far too easy and cheap to have professional boards made up - multi-layer boards, silkscreened component layouts, solder masks, odd shapes - there just wasn't any reason to continue with the hassle of etching PCBs at home.

Brudda! I'm not alone anymore! What Scott said. Maybe your people should call my people and we should do lunch?

I reckon I'm going to give myself RSI trying to play this thing once it's done. The fretboard is nearly 2.5" at the nut and 3.75" at the 24th.

Well, your current rate of builds was making me feel like I was dragging my feet. I'm only throwing this bass together to steal back some of your thunder!

As long as that statement doesn't include, 'fun to watch this build crash and burn in a most amusing fashion' I'll be happy

I say. Steady on, dear boy. I haven't built anything yet. There's plenty of scope for it to be an unmitigated disaster.

PRS headstock angle is pretty shallow. Some sources suggest between 7 and 10 degrees. I've used 14 deg for all my builds without issue. I can't imagine you'll have any problems with 11 deg.

Been a while since I've done a build thread. I had actually come to the point where I had more guitars than I had room for and managed to sell a bunch off to free up space and reduce the collection to something more managable. I've still got a couple more I'd like to move on. However, extra space on the wall can only mean one thing - time to fill it up again! I've actually had the parts for this build for some time now, but as mentioned above I didn't want to start it until I'd made some room for it. And it will need some room when it's finished... In true curtisa fashion, this build will once again be a new thing for me and completely outlandish to boot. So... Target specs: 7 string fretless bass (you read that right, 7 strings!) Blackwood body with figured brushbox top 5-piece blackwood/sassafras neck with gidgee fretboard, 34" scale Hipshot A-type bridge in black Gotoh compact tuners, 4x3 configuration in black 2x Bartolini slim soapbar pickups Bartolini active preamp with 3-band EQ. Added risk/complexity - the body will be largely cut on the CNC (what could possibly go wrong? ) The blackwood body blank actually has a little bit of fiddleback figure and some sapwood which will remain when the outline has been cut, which will be a nice touch when it's all assembled and finished: The rough locations of the cutaways has been removed from the brushbox top, which will help minimise the number of clamps required to glue it to the body blank. The offcut will then be re-used as the headplate when the time comes: A couple of brads to help locate the top to the body while it glues up: And then clamp forest (plus curved clamping caul through the middle and a couple of breeze blocks for good measure). The reason I'm gluing the top early is because I want to mill the entire body in one go on the CNC, rather than mill the top and body separately and try and line them up afterwards. Could be a recipe for disaster, but I'm willing to take a punt:

Nah. I don't believe it. This thing'll never be finished. It'll just sit in the shop and laugh at you every time you walk past and whisper, 'pssst...C'mon Mike, just one more modification, just one more adjustment. You know you want to...' Just kidding. Bet you're itching to finally mill something proper with it by now.

That NK actually looks pretty good. Dare I say it, but it's refreshing to see the low-end Chinese market trying something other than just Strandberg knock-offs. How does it play and sound out of the box? So, what mods are you planning for it?

Dunno about playability, but I personally wouldn't add neck angle unless the height of the bridge demanded it. What you're showing in the drawings is what I'd call 'pseudo' neck angle, where you're tapering the back of the guitar upwards to meet a heel with reduced thickness. The front of the guitar and the neck are on the same plane. It could be achived either way - by tapering the front of the body.and cutting the neck pocket to the same angle, or by leaving the front/neck pocket flat and tapering the back. If looks are important, consider how your maple cap and body will look in profile when undertaking either variant. If you were to introduce true neck angle the neck would be angled backwards relative to the plane of the front of the guitar. Judging by your choice of bridge in the mockups, I'd suggest in this case a true neck angle isn't required.

I've had 3 humbuckers that have gone open circuit and on every one of them it's always been the start lead where the wire comes out from underneath the winding.

Differences in downward pressure on the saddle?

A 0.047uF cap will also work. The only real difference is that it will remove more highs as you roll the tone control down than a 0.022uF cap would.

Glue a sliver of matching timber to the bass side of the pocket and re-route it to the correct shape. It should be possible to get a reasonably good match to what is there already with some patience. Sounds like you're only after an extra 1/16" wall thickness on the bass side to compensate for the 1/16" lost on the treble. The only area that may need a bit more help is where the binding runs down to the bass side of the neck pocket. You may have to hand cut the channel and graft a small piece of binding into the extended piece of neck pocket wall. If you're fitting a neck plate as per a normal Tele, I wouldn't worry about plugging the neck screw holes and redrilling them. Either oval the screw holes in the body so that they line up with the neck screw holes once it's correctly realigned in the pocket, or drill the holes in the body larger so they line up well enough. The neck plate will cover up the resulting sloppier body screw holes.

Wow, those instructions are a bit 'special'. You're after a capacitor (it's mislabeled as both a 'transistor' and a 'transformer' in separate locations in the instructions). A 0.022uF capacitor appears to be commonly used with the LP Junior.

You mean, seal the end where the nut is accessed from? I'm not sure I can see a reason to add a waterproof/airtight seal at the end, other than make more work for yourself. The usual practice is to add a few dots of silicone in the channel to prevent the rod from rattling, but not completely seal it up. The other thing you want to be careful with creating a seal using some kind of rubbery/silicone material, is that the silicone can contaminate the timber and prevent the glue taking hold properly. The neck/fretboard glue joint would be at the most stress at the nut under the counteracting tensions of the trussrod vs the strings. The last thing you'd want to do is inadvertently make this joint weaker.

Almost as wonderful as dropping an entire casette of 0.6mm edmills on the floor and breaking 3 in one go