curtisa

Drop a humbucker in the bridge position and see how it looks. My preference would be to see how it looks in practice and work out if shifting the template the other way is going to be visually acceptable. My gut feel is that it will be fine, but your eye looking at the guitar is going to be better than ours looking at computer screens. If it doesn't look like it will work out, I'd be fitting some pickup rings as a second alternative. Re-routing the entire cavity as one solid block and inlaying some contasting faux pickup rings of timber is not something for the faint hearted. If it were me I'd avoid this option unless I was at the point of 'one last shot, otherwise it's firewood'. As a first or second build I reckon you'll be happier if you have a finished guitar in your hands with some pickup rings on it, than a pile of very expensive sawdust.

Now, that's pretty nifty. I wonder how well it works in practice? Although it looks like it's primarily intended for traditional wooden-bodied high angle planes, so I guess I won't be fitting one any time soon to my Stanley 5 1/2

Happiness is a freshly sharpened handplane 'Cause they'd be a ridiculously expensive, low quantity item that pandered to a completely niche market, and they'd be a right bugger to sharpen and keep the exact radius on the blade A radius sanding block and a bit of sandpaper would achieve the same result without anywhere near the headaches involved with maintenance.

I'm not sure an acoustic or thru-body bridge is analogous to a wraparound tailpiece in terms of transfering string vibrations into the body. In the former the string ball end is anchored to the body at right angles to the strings' path, exerting a force that simultaneously pulls upward and towards the nut, which also creates downfoce on the saddle, pressing it back against the top of the guitar. The wraparound tailpiece only allows the tension of the string to pull towards the nut. All the levering action is at the point at which the wraparound studs enter the body. There is minimal downforce on the saddles. If anything I'd expect the wraparound to transfer the least amount of string energy into the body of the two. There is string behind the saddle to flex; just less of it. It wraps around the outside of the bridge with the ball end facing 180 degrees to the string. I reckon you'd be hard pressed to detect any differences in intonation. Feel might change a little. Less string behind the saddle to flex suggests that it should feel 'stiffer' to bend. But I'm not sure I could personally detect the difference in bendy-ness between a LP Tune-o-matic and a wraparound given exactly the same guitar. It'd be an interesting experiment to conduct if you could arrange it

Through-holes in the body. You only want the screws to bite into the neck when tightening them up.

Just shift the template back the other way by 1/16" and re-route it. I'm sure a 1/16" oversize humbucker route won't be too noticeable once a pickup is in there.

Make your own plug cutter out of a piece of brass tubing?

What I meant was that the subtle burst and colouring gives it the effect of some kind of french polished 17th century European fine dining table. Although I may have just made things worse by comparing your guitar to a table

You'll have to call this finish "Antiques Roadshow Burst", Scott

You'll lose a little more weight when you add the body carves and pickup routes. Your control cavity is actually pretty petite and you could afford to expand it a bit more towards the lower edge of the body if you're looking to shed as much as possible without/before resorting to dedicated weight-relief chambers. A bigger control cavity will also help when you're trying to get a bunch of fingers and a soldering iron into the guitar to finalise the wiring. Correct.

Don't get too hung up on the negatives on a build. Everyone makes dud ones. Just set it aside for a bit and treat it as the next project for a rainy day. You've always got the option of using it as a training ground for correcting past mistakes - learn how to recut a neck pocket by filling and re-routing, learn how to remove frets, learn how to steam off a fretboard to get the trussrod out, take notes on what the correct depth the locking nut shelf should be for next time, work out what the correct neck angle should be for a flush-mounted Floyd etc.

Careful. Talk like that is gonna get you in trouble

Don't see why not. As long as you don't mind having a 23-fret fretboard, if you snip off the 1st fret from the 34" scale table on the left and offset every fret-to-fret measurement by one you get 32" (plus a bit) scale length on the right:

'Boing' said Zebedee...

Yes, it does take longer. They're harder to cut, harder to shape, harder to crown, harder to level. I've done it a few times, but it is hard work. Although if it is done well, it'll last forever. The frets need to be pre-curved to match the radius of the fret board, but not over-radiused as you would normally do for nickel silver frets. Stainless steel will spring back out of the slot if it's over-radiused, rather than wedge itself in place when hammered/pressed in. You'll destroy most hand cutters if you try to cut stainless the normal way. Use a diamond cutoff wheel for a Dremel instead. If you're intending to undercut the fret tangs (eg for a bound fretboard) you won't do it with a regular pair of tang cutters, so you'll have to use the diamond cutoff wheel and/or files, which is more fiddly. Leveling and crowning will be easier with diamond coated tools too. Regular files work OK, but will take a lot longer and wear quicker. The process of fretting with stainless is largely the same as nickel silver, just takes longer and is more effort.

Could be all sorts of ways. Apply the blue-green paint and use paint stripper/sandpaper to distress the finish. Squirt a couple of shots of orange spray paint at strategic locations. Bury under clear. The top may have already had that effect on it. Maybe it was reclaimed from an old warehouse? Protect it while you're building the guitar. Bury under clear The pattern may be a print of some sort, perhaps a vinyl wrap. Bury under clear. The 'framing' that goes around the perimeter of the body is the more interesting bit to my eye. Very neat alternate take on traditional binding.

Regular PVA (eg, Titebond Original, Elmers Yellow) in a syringe should squeeze into that gap fairly freely. I wouldn't try separating the two parts unless there is evidence that the split extends much further up the neck than your photo shows. Nut also looks like it's loose and may need re-seating. I'm guessing if you remove the strings it will fall straight off. A couple of dots of PVA under the nut and string pressure should be all that's needed to get it to stay put.

The main reasons I can think of is that the tooling and installation is more difficult, and the additional time it takes to complete the job makes it more expensive. Stainless being harder is less forgiving on the tools, so you either need to replace them more frequently or invest in better quality ones to begin with. Some people might get all voodoo about the tone differences between stainless and nickel silver, but I suspect you'd be hard pressed to hear any difference in a normal playing situation.

Still watchin'. Still enjoyin' the show. Keep calm and carry on, sir.

Just as well you're not stringing them up with double ball ends. Oh, the komedy...

Too complicated. All you need is a couple of straight edges and a few clamps. Check out the article in Sustain Magazine on page 24 about creating a universal neck pocket jig.

Something doesn't quite add up. I may have given you a bum steer. Ah. Bridge angle is 180deg - 158deg = 22deg. You can confirm this by entering 26" as the scale length for both treble and bass sides and seeing what happens to the Bridge angle value in the table. Increasing one scale legth to 26.5 swings the bridge angle around by 8 degrees or so (ie, 180-172).

You haven't said what this number is. The pic I provided is just an example of what FretFind2D spits out using the default values. You need to re-enter your design values into FretFind2D, see what values it returns and do the calc to determine the bridge angle closest to the Hipshot variants.

FretFind2D gives you the tables of key data on the web page. The angle you're after is the 'Bridge angle': This is given in degrees from vertical (note that the 'Midline angle' is 90 degrees, which would be your perpendicular fret). So to determine your ideal bridge angle, just subtract your Midline angle from the Bridge angle. In the above example it's 144.78 - 90 = 54.78 degrees.

I think it was @psikoT who used to use short offcuts of MDF to make little 'fences' that he'd use as templates to build up the master template. When you think about what you're trying to create with the single coil pickup route just about every edge is a straight line. If you use a pattern router bit that has the same diameter as the two ends of the pickup cavity (eg, a 3/4" dia one would probably do it), you only need five straight edges to create that template of yours - one for the long edge, two for the diagonals and two little stubby ones to limit the left and right edges. Some MDF offcuts and a few strips of double sided tape and you'd have a better looking template than you could hope to achieve freehand using hand tools only. A humbucker cavity is nothing more than a few rectangles.