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Acousticraft

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Everything posted by Acousticraft

  1. Cool a good find. Do a test cut in some scrap and see how the fret wire fits. I modified a tenon saw years ago to cut frets by narrowing the set of the saw with an oil stone down to the correct size. The beauty is you cant cut a slot too deep as it jams at about the perfect depth of cut. I use this with my home made mitre box which I set up to suit the blade width so it very snug and keeps the saw square in both planes. I was buying preslotted radiused fret boards until recently when I thought I would cut costs and make my own especially when I have several fingerboard blanks of Purpleheart I have machined up that cost me nothing. I also turned up a fretboard radius tool on a lathe at the school I work at, to which I glue sandpaper to. I put it on slow in a drill press and set up a 90 degree guide and feed the finger board thru and it sands a radius on after several passes. Works great.
  2. I bought a 1/2" x 1/4" shank router bit with the top bearing that can be adjusted up and down to suit the depth of cut/ template thickness. I used it for the neck pocket of my Tele P bass with a simple jig I made and the result was excellent. A perfect tight joint. I will look at a quality bottom bearing bit as the cheapo set I have, has poor quality bearings that fly to bits in short order when doing heavy work.
  3. No the copper tape is not grounded but it would be easy to insert a earth wire between the wraps of shielding tape so it could be grounded. Very easy thing to try to see if that cures the problem. My amp is a Vox Valvetronix which is not a full tube amp so I guess a full blown tube amp is more susceptible to pickup noise.
  4. Are you using single coil pickups? Mine has Kent Armstrong STV1 single coils and I lined the pickup/control cavities with aluminium foil tape, wrapped the pickup windings with copper tape as well as the wiring loom. I also grounded everything to the cavity foil and it is one dead quiet strat. I love it and is my favourite guitar that I play 99% of the time. My acoustic , LP and 335 hardly get used.
  5. My strat switch played up in position one and two and kept cutting out, cracking etc when I played for church worship last weekend so I used positions 3, 4 and 5. I tried spraying switch cleaner down the slot to no avail. I pulled off the strings and pickguard and flipped it over and dribbled a little bit of brass cleaner (Brasso) on the contacts and worked it back and forth a little. I then flushed out all the brasso with switch cleaner, as well as the pots and put it back together with a new set of strings. It seems to be working perfectly now. Those new strings sound fantastic, have to not go so long before changing them next time.
  6. I have a guitar that has a single acting truss rod and with 10-46 strings it had no relief even with the nut loose so I went up in gauge to 11's and with the heavier tension they certainly pulled some relief into the neck.
  7. You should be able to make an adjustment to your truss rod nut. Sight down the fingerboard from the headstock end and it should have a slight dip in the middle of the neck away from the strings, to allow for the major part of the string vibration. If its flat or forward bowed towards the strings then you will need to back off the adjusting nut to let it have some string relief. Dont turn it more than 1/4 turn at a time. Bring it to correct tuning pitch and let it sit for an hour or two before checking the relief and retune if flat. Once you have some string relief and still have buzzing then the action will need raising slightly.
  8. You haven't said what stage you are at? Im nearly finished a Tel bass. Ash body, 34" Maple neck, purple heart fingerboard, Allparts tuners and bridge and custom stainless steel switch plate. I just finished spraying it with clear lacquer today, so will have to wait a week before I can sand and buff it.
  9. Ive done 3 body contours now and use my belt sander with 60 grit on it. I mark guidelines with a pencil on both edges and can rough out the belly and arm contours in about 10 mins. When its close I change to 80 grit, then I then use a sanding block to finish them off.
  10. Ive got a few couple of boys at my high school building Explorers. I drilled a hole from the front pickup cavity to the selector cavity hole so it only needs a small cavity cover at the back as does the pot cavity. You need a long drill bit and mark out the angle with a pencil line so you can line up the drill bit. A little tricky but not too bad.
  11. I would have two mono jacks so the circuits are completely separate from each other. A simple cure I think.
  12. I am well on the way to finishing my first bass guitar which is a standard size Telecaster body made of Ash with a 34" scale Maple neck with a slightly modified P bass headstock. The neck is glued in to the neck pocket as all my guitars are. I have roughly cut the string slots on my brass nut Ive made, and will do the final setup after the bass is lacquered. All the previous guitars I have built, I use the string fretted at the 3rd fret and just clearing the 1st fret by 10-15 thou to set the nut slot depth and find this gives a nice low action. With a bass how much more clearance does one need? I am using D'Addario 45-100 strings. Thanks in advance.
  13. The first guitar I built, a dreadnought acoustic, I made the neck 22mm thick as the book said, but didn't realise that was with the fingerboard included. After I built my second cutaway acoustic with a nice thickness neck, I realised the first neck badly needing thinning down. The neck had my homemade single acting truss rod fitted and I wasn't sure how much wood was left in the middle at the back, so I drilled a 1.5mm hole in the back of the neck so I could measure how much wood I could remove. I clamped the guitar face down on my bench put a rail either side and routed off 5mm as far as I could go before hitting the heel and headstock then shaped the rest with a spokeshave. It ended up with a nice neck instead of the 2x4 size neck before that. I ended up selling it to help finance a new amplifier.
  14. Having the frets slightly over radiused makes sure the ends seat home well without glue. I used glue for the first time when I built my 335 (guitar 4) that has a 3mm wide maple bound fingerboard. Then I only used superglue on the ends with no tang where they overlap the binding to hold them tight down. I had to superglue in one fret on my Bass Im building at present as somehow the saw jumped out of the slot and made one edge too wide and the fret wouldn't seat on one side. The others all seated nice and snug so I haven't glued them. I like to mask the face of the fingerboard and then spray the edges of the fingerboard and neck with lacquer so the fret ends are sealed and locked in place. I only give it a couple of light coats directly to the edge.
  15. Is this a guitar neck or bass? I would fill it with epoxy and sand it back and use it. Heck it has plenty of reinforcement with the carbon fibre rods so I dont think strength would be an issue.
  16. Try Stew Mac http://www.stewmac.com/FretCalculator Put in your scale length and number of frets and it will tell you the bridge placement measurent you need.
  17. I bought a .010 and .013 fret file from Stew mac but not overly impressed with them and find if you use a .010 with that gauge string it is too tight in the slot and binds. Strings need about .003-005 clearance so they dont bind. I use welding torch cleaners and they do the job fine though a bit slow. I am using brass nuts for my electrics now and it is hard work filing them. I have a jewellers saw that has very thin blades which i use to cut most of the slot then finish with a file or tip cleaner.
  18. Try http://www.stewmac.com/ They have violin parts and kits etc.
  19. Is the fingerboard glued on? If not, rout right thru and glue in a strip of wood a different colour and then you can re-rout another slot and make it look like a feature.
  20. Without pics I am guessing here. The top and back shouldnt be flat but be radiused as this gives strength to the sound box. Maybe post some close up pics so we can see the extent of the problem.
  21. I have semi disguised chips like that by mixing some black stain with laquer then using a toothpick to drip it it in place. If I did that I would gently scrape back the flaking finish then coat it a couple of times.
  22. Put a suitable thickness scrap of wood on top of your body and use a small crowbar to lever it out.
  23. Install the frets, level and re-crown them with a fret file first. You need the bridge fitted so you can tension your strings. I like to file the nut so it is the correct width and remove the excess height by laying a thin steel ruler over the frets along the neck so it sits up against the nut. I then move it across the radius of the frets and mark with a sharp pencil on the back of the nut. File off but stop about 1 mm away from your pencil line. Next I mark out my string centres and start a shallow cut with a thin bladed saw. I then glue the nut in place with a little super glue although with the strat you wont need to do that. I fit the strings and tighten them enough to take out the slack and file grooves with a nut file until when fretted at the 3rd fret the strings just clear the first fret by about 15 thou" over the wound strings and about 10 thou over the treble. I find this gives a nice low action at the nut. You can go lower but you risk getting fret buzz. Once the strings are sitting nicely I file the top of the nut down so there is about half a string depth on the wound strings and a full string depth on the plain. Then the corners can be nicely radiused off.
  24. What you need is a hole drilled from your control cavity into one tail piece hole. Your bridge is non conducting by the look of it other wise you could have gone to that. Anyway you pull out one tail piece bush poke the wire with the end stripped back into the hole and drive in the bush again and earth the wire to the back of the pot and that should cure the problem. Your taipiece is a long way back so you will need a long drill to get to the cavity. It may be easier to mark a line from the post hole to the cavity and drill it from the bottom of the body and glue a dowel in to fill the hole later. You may get an easier angle to drill it that way. Food for thought.
  25. Hi Jody, I'm about to do the same soon on my Tele body. I did the body contours on the last guitar I built which was a Strat. I have an old Strat body, so I took measurements off it and drew out the contour shape and depth onto the body with pencil and when they looked about right I used my belt sander with 60 then 80 grit to rip it off. Make sure it is well clamped to the edge of a bench otherwise it will go flying. Use the front of the sander to cut out the belly contour and the middle to carve down the top. I did the final belt sanding with 120 grit. It was pretty quick doing it that way too. Once I was close, I used a large half round, double cut file to do the final shaping then sanded it well to blend in the edges and curves. It would take ages to remove that amount of wood with a spokeshave but not impossible.
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