curtisa

Funny you should mention that. The wife reckons I should build a jelly bean travel guitar similar to the Fernandes Nomad..

Only if the second guitar has a scale length of about 11 inches.

Cheers, Scott. I was torn between moving body template further down the top to capture more of the flame pattern and having that little "eye" of sapwood between the pickups. I guess there'll always be a next time

The person with the most clamps wins.

Boom boom.

Moved to General Topics -> Public Classifieds subforum for better housekeeping.

That's a right kick in the proverbials. How far back is too far back? What kind of bridge were you going to use?

One of these days I'll learn to take some more work-in-progress shots, but I get carried away too easily and before I realise it I've jumped miles ahead and failed to take pictures along the way. Belly cut roughed out with the Turbo Plane (damn quick!): Edges rounded over and first coats of oil going on. No top carve on this one, just a flat slab which speeds things up a lot:

Bigger cap = more treble loss (strictly speaking, the point at which the treble loss commences as you wind the tone pot down becomes lower in frequency). Smaller value tone pot = duller sound at maximum setting (the tone pot becomes less effective at "opening up" the original sound of the guitar when at maximum). Nah. Just stoopit enough to convince other people that we know what we're talking about.

Of course, you could go all out and really stagger the differences between the two pots. The pot with the lower value will cross-load the higher value pot, darkening the sound with everything flat out. Say 500k volume and 100k tone. With tone at 0 you'd still end up with the same amount of treble loss as it would be with a 500k tone at zero, but with tone at 10 it would be like the tone pot was only partway up... ...maybe not so useful?

Probably not much discernible difference with everything at full tilt compared to vol = 500k, tone = 250k. The feel of the tone pot may change slightly. My gut feel is that mixing of values isn't done because then manufacturers would need to stock two sets of pots. It's cheaper to buy 1 million pots of a single value than it is to buy 500000 of two values. You can always slug a bigger pot to behave as a smaller pot. A 500K fixed resistor strapped across the middle lug and ground of a 500k volume pot will limit its maximum resistance to 250k (and make the taper slightly more logarithmic, which may be advantageous).

Overall sound will be a bit brighter and a tad hotter than it would have been with a 250k volume pot installed.

I'd be a bit concerned with the strength of the headstock if you were able to split it just by pushing in the tuner. It may amount to nothing, as the string tension is crossways with the grain where the split occurred, but definitely something to keep an eye on.

You appear to have been photo-bombed. Sounds like the volume pot is kaput, probably the resistive element inside the pot is damaged in the last few degrees of rotation. Maybe it got a bit cooked while it was being soldered. Maybe it was a dud out of the packet. Happens sometimes. You could try rotating it up and down off the '0' position a few times to see if it comes good, but the better solution is probably to replace it outright.

Why not just take the excess off the back of the headstock extension on the bandsaw and glue the limba to the face that's already jointed? The nut line will shift forward a little bit, but you could always bring the truss rod forward a bit to compensate (pop a little wooden plug in the back of the channel to fill up the void created by bringing the truss rod forward). Once the headplate has dried, just run the whole lot across the jointer to square off the headplate and create a new nut line.

I think it's called 'Air Guitar'.

If it were any more shiny it'd be invisible. Even the light would slide off it.

[Shawn Of The Dead] You've got red on you... [/Shawn of The Dead] Looks pretty spectastical, Andy

Adds more 'air', 'body' and '3D-ness' to the tone when compared to traditional blue masking tape. Sheesh. Call yourself a guitar builder? I thought everyone knew that!

Templates make the world go round.

You can afford to be a bit more lenient with your fret overhangs when rough-cutting them to hammer in. I reckon you'll save 6-8 frets per neck, easily.

Very well. Here's mine looking fairly neat and uncluttered (no, I didn't clean it especially for the shot). Amongst my office colleages, the manoeuvre I'm currently demonstrating is called FODDING (Feet On Desk, Discussing Internet and Network Gaming): I claim +2 pts for feet, +1 pt for beer.

I assume you're talking about Strat's and similar, where the rear of the pickguard is shielded but the cavity usually isn't. Thicker shielding offers better noise immunity than thinner, but has the obvious trade-offs of being more bulky, harder to machine and heavier. Copper foil, aluminium foils and tapes and shielding paints offer a good compromise It may provide some shielding, but I personally wouldn't rely on it solely as a substitute for dedicated shielding. The metallic coating is provided for looks, not for shielding, and there's no guarantee that the metallic coating is uniform or in good contact with ground at any point. Non-conductive pickguards should be shielded to the same degree that the original pickguard was in order to expect the same performance. You could avoid the shielding if you choose, but the risk is that it will be more prone to picking up all sorts of electrical garbage than it was with the stock pickguard fitted. It's also possible that if the original wiring was taking advantage of the pickguard's foil to maintain ground connections to various parts of the guitar, the guitar may not work properly if fitted with an unshielded pickguard.

Same fault on both pickups? Guitar works OK otherwise? Have a look at these, the third one down could be something to try:

So, that should probably be: In build threads, no one can hear other people scream.