curtisa

Pounds-force (lbf) maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janka_hardness_test Looks like we're at least talking about similar pines.

Most definitely. Tas oak has a Janka hardness of 6000 Newtons. Radiata pine (as sold here, possibly not the same species of pine you're used to) is 3400N. Photos aren't being helped by the lighting in the workshop, nor by my phone camera. Tends to wash out everything.

The addition of a couple of CF rods may be unwarranted, but I won't be accused of doing things by halves: With the fret board cut to taper it's time for clamp city. Given that these rods are fully encased in heatshrink tape, and the adjuster nut is embedded in the stainless steel cylinder I'm not bothering to protect the truss rod channel from glue seepage with the old sticky tape trick: Out of the clamps and trim off the excess from the blank.. The precut nut that ships with the headless system appears to be 16" radius, so the fretboard gets sanded to match: Side dots in black. May not have been the best choice for visibility, but if it doesn't work in practice I can always drill them out and replace with some slightly large white ones: Fret not: With a little bit of CA wicked into the ends to make sure the frets stay put the 16" aluminium (aluminum?) radius bar gets repurposed as a clamping caul:

Just the nature of the wood I suspect. Tas oak is usually pretty plain and uninteresting to look at. It's engineered to grow straight and fast to get it on the shelves quickly. The end grain stands out like crazy but a lot of that variation isn't as pronounced running with the grain. There's a faint smudge visible on the vertical sides of the neck blank to the right of the drill bit which is about the limit of the grain variation on most pieces of hardware store Tas oak I've come across: Although a couple of the floorboards in the house have a bit more of the ash-like grain pattern you're perhaps familiar with:

Yep, I'm with you regarding the quick string change aspect of locking tuners. Nothing wrong with repurposing a secondary product feature to suit your needs.

Tuner knobs are an interesting choice. Hipshot seem to sneak all these product updates out without much fanfare. I notice that they've got heaps of tuner button options on their website now.

"Mojo stick"

Locking tuners with a double locking trem. Does that make it triple locking?

My guess is that the switch already does the same thing as the Seymour Duncan wiring diagram shows - Bridge, Bridge+Neck, Neck - just in a more roundabout way. If that's the case the only things you'd need to take note of is where the two pickup leads go on the switch and the wire going to the volume pot. Given two inputs and one output there's only so many ways to wire it up.

Are you wanting to keep the original switch or replace it with the one shown in the last image? Is the wiring soldered to the switch your work, or is that how the switch was wired when you pulled apart the guitar? Unless you know what the internals of those PCB-based switches are, they can be difficult to translate across different diagrams. If you have a manufacturer's part number it might help decode how the switch works.

It's not always necessary, but I just get myself into the habit of doing it automatically. For woods of unknown origin, heavily figured stuff or ludicrously skinny necks it makes sense to give the neck as much help as possible to ensure it is stable and remains stable. Rip and flip is just an easy way to achieve this if you don't want to add lots of different timbers and colours into the laminations. One piece maple will be perfectly adequate for a neck. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The rod under test is the rod that ended up in the neck. I bought a batch of eight and they'll all get the tension test before they get used. I did consider just doing some type-tests on a couple of rods from the batch and then setting them aside, but then a failure could still occur in the untested rod. I'd also expect quality issues from these Chinese-made rods, but they appear to be perfectly serviceable. The welds (that are visible) are clean, no spatter or welding dags, no rust, rod is straight and returns straight when the tension is let off, shrink wrapping isn't damaged or torn, the adjusters move freely. I've bought worse looking rods from Allparts for three times the price. The only thing I'm not keen on is the adjuster nut sits inside a stainless steel cylinder, which makes the business end of the rod about 9mm in diameter. Ideally for necks where the adjuster is up at the nut you'd want as much wood there as possible, but the large nut means more wood needs to be removed from the neck. I guess time will tell whether they hold up to the task. In all honesty, where do you think the budget to midrange guitar models from the likes of ESP, Fender, Ibanez, Jackson etc get their rods from? They certainly won't be paying a premium from Allied or LMII...

Slotting begins, 25" scale for this one. Merbau fretboard has an interesting orangey-tan colour: In keeping with the budget-ness of this build I've taken the plunge and bought a bunch of Chinese truss rods off eBay. Now, before you stick the boot in and tell me that no good will come of cheaping out on the truss rod, I am stress-testing these before using them. I'm aware that I could spend $30+ for an Allied Lutherie rod and have the Rolls Royce standard in truss rods for this build, but even they recommend you stress test their rods before installing, and there are plenty of documented failures of the more expensive rods out there. The middle-range Allparts rods I used to use appear no different to the Chinese ones in construction and quality, and are likely also made in China with a western mark-up on price. Three full cranks in each direction to see if they'll hold - all good. That's far more tension than they'll ever see in service: The tricky bit with this kind of construction is making a neat access for the truss rod adjuster. With a bit of careful drilling, routing and measuring (not necessarily in that order) it's possible to get the adjuster nut to sit into the headstock hole like sticking your foot into a sock:

Edges routed: Time to make a start on the neck. Kick things off with a 90x32 plank of Tas Oak, then rip 'n flip to get three laminations with the middle grain direction running reverse to the outside: A bit of Jarrah veneer in between the lams to break things up a little and get a bit of contrasting colours going: To prevent everything sliding around too much while gluing I'm borrowing a technique I saw Allan Searls use. The neck is made over-long and pins are driven through all the various pieces at the extreme ends of the blank so that they don't slip. Once everything is clamped and the glue starts to tack up the pins can be removed, and when it dries properly the ends of the blank where the pins were are cut off and thrown away:

I don't run a business, so take my comments as such. I don't think you can legitimately charge boutique prices without building up a reputation first. People who charge that kind of price for a guitar are (hopefully!) charging a realistic price for their skills, time and materials. A novice who tries charging high-end prices will quickly come unstuck. Every time I consider putting my work on the market I always remind myself about how confident I need to be in my abilities to put good quality work out, or at least be willing to take a poor review of my work and then make sure I go out of my way to put things right. Just do a search on Sevenstring.org for horror stories of builders who bill themselves as boutique custom luthiers and their work isn't on par with their self-appointed title. A waiting list as such doesn't indicate anything. They may only be able to turn around a few guitars each year, so it's not hard to have a waiting list that takes a long time to get through. Or they may be really popular and have a long waiting list. Or they may be just snowed under and unable to deal with the backlog. A waiting list may indicate that they are in hot demand, but conversely it may indicate that they can't cope with the workload. No idea. You see all sorts of things on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $XXXX, but if you can see it on eBay it also means it hasn't sold. Probably not the best source of sales information for guitars. Robbie O'Brien did a good video about marketing for people just starting out in the business:

Apostro-fail:

The string passes through a small hole drilled in the centre of the shaft and then gets wrapped around the pulley as it tunes up. Exactly the same as a regular tuner, just on a smaller scale. If it had been fitted with a worm gear cut with a reverse thread the tuner would turn the correct way in order to increase pitch with the string spooling from the underside.

First foible with this bridge: the lack of downward break angle of the tuners behind each saddle: The centre axle on the tuner is roughly the diameter of the spool that the string has to wrap around when strung up. So it's nearly a straight line from the break point of the saddle to the tangent of the tuner spool, meaning there's nearly zero downward deflection of the string as it passes over the saddle. My only recourse is to under-sling the string and wind it from the bottom of the tuner. This unfortunately means that to tune the string up to pitch I have to turn the tuner in an anticlockwise direction, which is counterintuitive to what you'd think would be the correct way to tune up (lefty-loosey, righty-tighty). In this video it looks like the same bridge has been installed on the guitar, and if you look closely (may need to go full screen and 1080p to see it) it appears that the strings have indeed been wound on so that they spool from the underside of the tuner. Back to making woodchips. Starting to get the chambers and cavities underway. I've left some meat under the approximate location of the belly carve so that as much weight can be removed from the body while (hopefully) preventing the belly carve from punching through the back:

Good to hear you're OK given what could've been much worse. And a timely reminder to all of us playing with high speed cutting tools - safety first, people. Complacency and fatigue are not good bedfellows when it comes to power tools such as these.

Can be done. The simple way to do it is to leave the tone caps in place and fit a resistor to emulate the effect that the tone pot would have when at a fixed position.. For the pot you want to hard-wire as the "0" setting the pot is removed and the lead that once attached to the hot side of the pot gets moved straight to the top of the tone cap. For the pot that gets hard-wired as "10", a fixed resistor gets fitted in place of the pot that is equal to the value of the pot when at full rotation. For a 250K tone pot the nearest standard resistor values to substitute would be either 240K or 270K.

Looks similar in principle. Looks like the Babicz cam assembly has the axle supported through both halves of the saddle, whereas this headless one has the axle offset to one side. Could be a weak spot in the design of my bridge. Won't know till I try it under string tension. I'm willing to bet that this bridge has been inspired (ripped off?) by something else first, but I've never seen it before.

Cheers Tim, hope this turns out somewhere near as good as some of the builds over there.

1. Both methods will work fine. Soldering to both pins has the advantage of being more mechanically strong, as there is an extra point of contact to support the soldered joint. 2. You can do it that way, but you'll need to be absolutely certain that all your copper shielding is securely bonded together and all conductive to ground, as any movement in the shielding tape joints (knocks and bumps, expansion and contraction of foil or timber the foil is attached to) may result in the guitar suddenly not working.

No doubt about it, Scott. She's a beauty.