the telecaster kid

On the note of marrying jerry garcia to the es, how does this look?

As a concept, a 335 with pointy horns is just fine. Your sketch, though, is sketchy. The horns are WAY too big for that body! If I remember, your bass had similar geometry issues. You need to look carefully at the guitars you hope to emulate, as shapes rather than concepts-- (eg. draw lines on photocopies, etc... check out the waist-body ratios, etc. rather than, "body with extended horns") then use a vector-drawing program (Inkscape is free!) or CAD if you feel up to it, to make clean lines and a true "plan". Then blow it up to full-scale with pieced-together 8.5"X11 if you must, or a local print shop if you can find one.

The big horns feel fine on my bass, though I'm not finished so you may be quite right.

I just drew this up, and yes, I know, I need a full scale drawing, bu for right now i think this looks cool:

I drew it and scanned it, and it came through way too light, so i had to sharpen it a lot. You get the general idea tho. It's the same shape as my current project, which is a bass.

As the school year is getting closer, and I'll soon have access to woodshop tools, and a professional woodworker for help, I'm obviously going to use this as an oportunity to put another guitar together. In this case, I have a couple ideas. One of them is the V-drop I posted earlier:

Another is a straight copy of the Ibanez 8-string, but the last, and defintely most ambitious, would be an es-335 copy. I really want one, after playing on a couple at guitar center the other day, and I want to know if anyone else has attempted to build one. Any comments are appreciated.

I freehanded it. Wasn't my best judgement, but It's not as bad as it looks.

You know your use of Redwood with a Mahogany neck reminded me of something I used to wonder about. The mass of the headstock area really effects the sound of a guitar. I have often wondered why more people that use scarfed headstocks do not experiment with woods with different charictoristics to modify performance. I mean there is a lot of chat about body woods, and it makes a bit of a difference. However headstock wood is rarely mentioned. It will be interesting to see how the light weight headstock effects your guitars performance.

I've actually been thinking about that, and I thought of this as an oportunity to experiment a little.

As for the crooked truss rod channel, it's a little wobbly, but the dark line slanting off to the right is a grain line in the mahogany. It's not really that bad.

Well, fter taking a day to cool down, I put a new headstock on the bass that was trashed. I do need a new fretboard, but the bass should actually end up being better than if I had stayed with my original headstock, which was way too small. Of course, the new headstock is redwood, cause it's the only thing i had lying around, so it doesn't matcht he mahogany neck perfectly, but whatever. It's clamped and glued now.

Neck and headstock

Body

Yeah, I already have the spalted maple top set, and I think it'd look really cool on that body design. Full scale drawing is coming soon.

Thank you all for the support and advice. My arm'll be fine, and hopefully the bass will too. Thanks.

Here's a little ms paint mockup of a guitar I'm thinking of trying to build for a woodshop class this year. I haven't seen anything like it before, so I think it could be a cool original design. Here's the V-Drop.

Any comments are appreciated. Thanks.

I was working on my bass today, and while trying to drill the tuner holes, I ended up destroying the entire headstock. For some reason, I then found it neccissary to remove the fretboard, with a chisel... Needless to say, I ended up in the ER with a nasty puncture wound... Don't ask me why I did any of this, I really don't know, it was stupid, and now i've got 3 stitches in my arm.

That's what I was thinking. Thanks. I'm going to draw it out full scale tomorow, that should give me an idea of whether it's feasible.

That's kindof what I was afraid of, because i really don't like headlesses. And yea, the frets would be absurdly close together, which is why, what i didnt specifty, that it's going to be baritone scale, is important. But, yeah, it could be cool as a headless.

Well, I'm going to be doing a guitar build for woodshop this year, and I want to do something unique. Has anyone seen a body design like this before? What do you think of it?

Thanks.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing with the bass I'm making. I got a stewmac slotted rosewood fretboard, and I'm going to put maple veneers in the slots. I think it'll look good.

Does anyone know anything about these? I've been planning my new project, and I want to do something interesting, and I think a supershort slim fast shred guitar would be cool. I found a section of pre-slotted fretboards with 22.5" scale here. http://stores.ebay.com/California-Guitar-B...224025QQfrsrcZ1 I dont know if it's a good idea though, would it mess up the proportions and be ahrd to play? I noticed that Michael Batio's metal guitar here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hb5QaCfm7bg, has frets really close together. Is that a 22.5 inch scale guitar? If so, building something like that could be cool. Anyway, if anyone has any input that's great. Thanks.

Here's my rough sketch of my idea.

on a neck thru guitar with duel hums, how do you drill the holes for the wires to connect from the neck to the bridge hum? i guess you can drill a hole at an angle but i cant get it done on my guitar. thanks guys!

Get a long ass drill bit, and drill straight thru from the bottom. I'm having the exact same problem with my bass project, and I think that's what it's gonna come to.

OK, that was a stupid question. I was jsut thinking red after I saw a bloodwood fretboard on ebay, and I have a 1/4" maple top set, so i figured it wohuld look cool if it were all red, with the red fretboard. Either a neck thru or set construction, (neck thru if i can get the proper piece of wood for it), and a humbucker setup, It's gonna be RG style, but, as my name suggests, telecasterized. Or an RGized telecaster deluxe, u can look at it either way. As i'm almost done with my poorly planned first attempt, I'm going to start drawing this out, PAINSTAKINGLY, to avoid the hideous complications of my first attempt, a bass. Other than that, the only real question I have is a taste issue. I'm going to use Dimarzio pups on this thing, and I know they come in red. Would that be dorky looking? Again, input is appreciated.

Indeed! This comes to mind when I think of Red.

I'm thinking darker, but light enough to see the grain. Good eye though, it's good someone's getting the picture.

School's coming back, and I'm building a guitar for a woodshop class. I've got a tentative concept drawing already, but I want to see what some other people think about this concept. One word, "Red". Any of you artistic people getting any ideas? Any input would be appreciated.

Well, if anyone remembers, im the complete noob who started building a guitar with no plans, and when it turned out to be too big, i shifted my intentions into making it into a bass. Yeah... Well, I put it down for about a month, and now I've just started working on it again. This is it right now.

And here's the neck and headstock, yes I know, really tiny. Well that's what not planning does to you...

It now consists of 5 types of wood. Maple, ash mahogany redwood and rosewood. I think that's fairly cool, but I'm not too hopeful as to how it's going to turn out. However, I bought the parts a while ago, so I"m going to put it together and see if it's playable, if not, than I'll know what to do, and what not to do, next time.

Thanks, that's wat I was looking for.

Here are some pics of my first build. Surprisingly all is going pretty smooth so far(knocks on wood). I dont know how to post pics in with this post.

http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w79/mikep911/DSCN2609.jpg

http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w79/mikep911/DSCN2607.jpg

http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w79/mikep911/DSCN2589.jpg

Dude, that thing looks awesome, but I have to ask you where u got the flame maple for the carved top, I mean, where did you get maple thick enough for that? I'm looking to do a craved top guitar. Thanks.

My ebay bookmatched blackline maple set just came.

It was 26 bucks, so i couldnt let it get away, so now im thinking about my next project. My idea is an sg style guitar with one humbucker, and one knob, and a kill switch. Pretty metal. I'm not sure about tremolo though. Does anyone know how thick a guitar needs to be to have a floyd rose munted on it? Thanks.