ElysianGuitars

The inlay work and fretwork is bad but you are right that it will give you a lot to learn from. Fixing a messed up guitar is often harder than actually building one. Those Chinese rip offs are a plague on society but if you can take one and make a real player out of it then you will be an accomplished repair person for sure.

One thing I would do is strip the logo off of it and come up with something creative.

how about "Chibanez"?

That's one of the things I offer, especially since the 7 string community has such limited choices, for ibanez you basically only get basswood for the Rg or mahogany for the s7320. No rga, no other body wood choices for the rg, I'm basically trying to fill a void for the extended range ibanez fans.

They's lookin' purdy! I'm digging the extra wood around the neck pocket; it'll definitely make for a stable join.

Now I know why I don't play 7-strings

Ibanez bodies aren't all that hard to do. Are you perhaps thinking of doing a run of replacement bodies?

new update. carved the comfort carve, and got the 7620 in, still have a few templates to make from the 7620, but things are moving along quite nicely on the quilted maple one.

http://www.elysian-online.com/ConcurrentRGA7s/dscf5107.jpg

Those look like "Jon" fretboards. I have several boards that came from Jon...they look very similar. Are you interested in swapping any of those pups for inlaid boards?

yep!! there boards i orderd from jon befor i got my stew mac saw there great boards I would order more but I cant seem to get a hold of him

and send me a pm and we can work something out I would love a look at these inlaid boards

wow matt, I'm just about to start a build VERY similar to yours.

6 string baritone, 27" scale.. And this shape.

ha look at that , nice looking design its more of a strat than mine but still cool. is that your design?

no, thats an agile design. the intrepid i believe.

Nice looking Maple, Ive been haveing a hard time finding nice figerd maples around my neck of the woods and what I do find is over priced and not so nice

and I have days that my shop looks like that

yeah, i need to get a sawdust collection setup, right now the broom isn't working out all that great you should just move to Dallas matt, plenty of great selection for woods here especially my selection of birds eye, you guys are all gonna see some pretty sick birdseye fretboards coming from me in the future.

quilt topped one is cut out and rough shaped

i'm at a stand still now until the RG7620 gets here.

wanted to start up the progress thread on this one, the all mahogany one is a build for Dan DeTora(dtrax on sevenstring.org), and he wants it unfinished, i'm assuming because he wants to finish it himself. basically, he's going to use his RG7321 bridge and neck on this one, should be a pretty cool end result

http://www.elysian-online.com/ConcurrentRGA7s/dscf5100.jpg

and the one with the quilt top and mahogany body is gonna be for whoever ultimately winds up buying it, it will be an RG7620 replacement body. its still being glued up, and i need to buy some more bandsaw blades before i cut it out anyways, so only one pic for now.

http://www.elysian-online.com/ConcurrentRGA7s/dscf5101.jpg

there you have it. the quilt top one is going to get white body binding, but it is going to be finished over with blue tinted clear, part of the black/blue burst, so it should stick out pretty well and look pretty amazing, imo.

nice looking neck! were those inlays hard to deal with on a maple board?

extremely, like i said, i'm gonna be redoing 2 of them methinks.

http://www.elysian-online.com/RGA121/RGA7Project6.jpg

the fretboard is now glued on, binding is filed down smooth, and right now i'm working on sanding it to 320 grit. it should be in the finish booth tomorrow or the next day

man, maple is tough to inlay in... i'm probably gonna work a little bit on a couple of the inlays, maybe even remake them, theres 2 in particular i'm not happy with. i think that'll be tomorrows project and i'll get it in the booth the next day.

not a bad design there, though in the middle of the crotch of the V, looks like a nutsack holder really though, looks very cool.

fretboard isn't glued on, just snapped this pic and figured i'd post it. things are moving right along. i had to go with a thicker binding on the headstock because the channel i routed wound up being 1/32nd wider than what i measured on the stewmac binding router jig, which was weird, but hey, i know for the future. it'll wind up being the same width when i'm done finishing the headstock, its getting a white finish just like the body, and i'll take the finish off to make it just as wide as the fretboard binding, the rest will be under the white. i'm gonna be gluing the fretboard on in just a little bit.

can't say i'm feeling the cream f hole, it looks out of place, and covers up that beautiful wood, but the rest looks great.

this thing is getting flat sanded with 400 grit, i'm actually sanding through the finish on the faux binding to get it down level with yesterdays coats, as well as give it a little more to stick to, almost done flat sanding it, and it'll get 6 coats of clear today, and at the end of the day i'll decide if i want to do 6 more coats. the stewmac finish sticks perfectly fine to the color coat, its so far been a dream compared to the nightmare of KTM9.

also, the stewmac waterbased finish says right on the side of the container that it isn't supposed to go on glossy, if it gets glossy you're spraying too much at once.

oh, ok.

it just looked a bit flat. but im sure in the light it does look better.

its getting a bunch of clear coats since i posted that pic, and i'm gonna do 2 more tonight, in fact, i'm going out to do one more right now.

it kind of made me cringe seeing all of the edges shredded like that, but there was great relief when i saw it primered. i think that your clear diddnt stick to your base because you let it dry and diddnt lightly sand before you sprayed clear. most paints are like that.

thats not primer, thats the color coat, if the lighting were better you'd see its a pretty brilliant white. of course, the same white used on the RGA. but this one is gonna have a very different look and feel.

i personally liked that color of the mahoany better, but im sure it will look cool painted as well.

i dunno, i really like how it looks now

http://www.elysian-online.com/RGA121/RGA7Project4.jpg

faux binding is on, i think it really sets off the guitar, i really love the way it looks, and it'll look sick with the black hardware, bound fretboard, sharkfin inlays(like i did on my 6 string, look like real shark fins, not like jackson's inlays), and bound headstock with color matched paint.

this is a change of direction i really didn't talk about to much of anyone, but its basically going for the Jackson DK2M theme, but with body binding added.

http://www.elysian-online.com/YamahaProjec...haProject28.jpg

this ones coming along nicely. i still need to strip down the finish on the neck, but the body is at least going somewhere.

http://www.elysian-online.com/RGA121/RGA7Project2.JPG

got the color coat on, gonna let it dry a little longer and then do the faux binding(aka pinstriping), then it'll get 4 more coats of clear tonight, and we'll start the clearing all over tomorrow. this stewmac water based finish is insanely better than KTM9, flow control is way better, runs far less prevalent(i've gotten 1, as opposed to many with ktm9).

i've used auto paint before, it turned out great.

no pics of the back? and why's the emg so low? should be much closer to the strings! otherwise, looks killer

its been 2 hours

well, i finally got this thing pore filled today, i'm gonna let that set up overnight(its epoxy based, it says 2 hours, but last time it gummed up my sandpaper pretty fast), and tomorrow i'll sand it to 320 grit and start spraying finish. this thing is gonna be so sick.

see, different schools of thought could discuss this for days, i doubt we'll be changing each others minds

Yep i agree.. direct mount pickups got nothing to do with tone.. its the player finger itself.. if u play great.. any (well tuned,intonated) guitar will sound great..

i just dont want to drill the 4 holes for the PU ring..

actually i'v got an aluminum plate/bar underneath.. and the pickups were bolted to the aluminum plate...

just like this....

and the plate were bolted to the body.. with this setup i CAN easily set my pickup height WITHOUT worrying it will pops out from the wood.. (alot of people having probs like that..)

sort of like this..

GOOD SETUP..

shimming the floyd saddles to match the fret radius.. end up with nice string action feel..

wow, i really like the bar idea, that is really cool!