ToddW

Fantastic. The fingerboard is .27-.28" thick right now, so no problem to make it flat. Thanks for the help. Todd

I have a SUPER stiff neck that's very close to shaped, and I'm wondering how much relief would be good before I fret it. I still need to sand the fingerboard a bit more, and right now there's .015" of relief at the 10th and 11th fret slots with the truss rod loose. If ~.01 is what I want fretted and strung, is this too much pre fretting? I guess basically I'm asking if the frets will back bow it more, or if the strings will add more relief? It'd be easy to take off .005 by sanding it after all. Thanks, Todd

Hey Mattia, Thanks for clearing up why the bridges on my electrics are adjustable. I want an adjustable bridge partly because I don't trust myself to get the guitar intonated and the saddle height set up perfectly without one. I am pretty good with woodworking, and since I haven't found any adjustable bridges in a classical width, I thought that simply making a custom holder for the individual piezo saddles was the best option. The Ghost system seems to get similar reviews to the RMC, and costs less, especially the pre-amp. If I don't need the pre-amp to mix the piezo with a magnetic pickup, then the price difference is not that much, do you know if that is the case? I haven't found any good info on this yet. Thanks again, Todd

You can just get an allegator clip lead, connect it to a 10k resistor and attach one end to ground. Then while holding the insulated part, touch the other end to each cap for a few seconds. Make sure the amp is unplugged! Me, I'd go with Kevin O'Connor's Power Scaling kit before an attenuator, although an attenuator might be easier to add. Built power scaling into my first amp, and it's an amazing addition! Todd

I thought about that, and don't honestly know why solid bodies have adjustable saddles and acoutics don't. My assumption has been because the string tensions change more on an electric and you might want to re-adjust the intonation after changing string guages. Since I was planning to string this like an electric and have a passive neck pickup, I thought adjustable saddles would be a good idea. The ghost pre-amp allows for blending of the two pickup systems if you run them both down one cable, and is designed for a solidbody. And I thought that putting a sensor designed for an acoutic guitar onto what is essentially a solid body guitar wouldn't sound as good because the top vibrates less. Todd

Peace,Rich Yeah, I think we all agree both are good. The front and back laminates are a good point J, although they don't make the line longer unless you use a volute like Rich does. I just wanted to point out that the surface areas of the joint weren't really an issue that was in favor of option 1. I used option 2 on the neck I'm carving right now, but would like to try the other method on a 23" scale guitar my daughter wants to build. The only problem I have with doing it that way is that the blank is shaped for a neck thru and the back was just cut on a bandsaw. It's why I did the neck I'm working on now using option 2. I can't run the back over the jointer to get a perfectly flat joint surface and I'm not sure I want to try and hand plane it. Paduak tears out pretty easily. Heck, she might just go with a fender style headstock Todd

Well then -1 from me on the strength issue. I think you guys are too easy to sway I think that if you really want to compare the joint strength, which seems silly to me, then you need to add the equivalent of 50% of the length of the glue line in option 2. It's not really glue line, but look at it this way. The headstock is about 1/2" thick in option 1 at the glue line. The neck is about 1/2" thick at the glue line in option 2, and it gets carved. That's why Mattia is saying it'll be weaker. But the fingerboard is ~1/4" thick and is reinforcing the joint in option 2. So to figure out the strength of option 2's joint, you'd need to essentially continue the glue line in option 2 through the fingerboard and work out that surface area. But since the wood is as likely to fail as the glue line in both option one and option two, this is sort of silly IMHO. I think two has a trivial advantage in grain orientation, one may have other advantages as mentioned by Mattia, but these should be very close if you do them right. And of course if the glue line is bad, either of them will have issues. . . Ok rebut me Todd

21 views and nobody has any thoughts? Nothing turned up in my searches here either, so maybe this will be new ground. Gonna start sketching it out and see how it goes.

I'm only 60% done with the project I'm working on, but am already thinking about the next one, and had a couple of questions. I wanted to try to build a very wide neck semi hollow body for classical style playing. I plan to use a zero fret, but am not sure how I'd do the bridge to allow the saddles to move for intonation. One thought was to build a wide fixed tailpiece style bridge from bubinga, since it's very hard, and put graphtec ghost saddles on it? I thought it might require some spacers between the saddles, but couldn't see any problems other than that. If that's possible, I figured I'd mount one rail style PUP inside the body from the back, and be able to mix the ghost system with the passive PUP. The bridge is the only part that worries me. Are there any problems you would anticipate? Thanks, Todd

Hey, that's cool. My microplanes are a little different than that but I'm sure they cut the same. I like them a lot for cutting across very hard woods, but switch to files later for a smoother finish. LeeValley&Veritas has a lot of very nice files on their site at pretty good prices: http://www.leevalley.com/wood/page.aspx?c=...t=1&p=42524 Nice spokeshaves and planes too. Regards, Todd

That looks like it may be one of their cooking ones, but the woodworking ones are by the same company. Mine has a handle that lets me switch from flat to round "blades". You're right, they don't take off much, but on a super hard wood like bubinga, I find they are MUCH faster than any of my rasps, including the ones with sharp teeth instead of serrations. That's only true, btw, cutting across the grain or at a diagonal. They are no faster than my course rasps cutting along the grain. Hey, try the file. Maybe it'll work better than mine do, and if it's too frustratingly slow, splurge and try out a $12 course microplane. Either way, good luck. -Todd

Files work, but I'd get a microplane. It'll save you a few hours. On the plus side, it's hard to accidentally take off too much bubinga with my rasp because it cuts only a little faster than 80 grit sandpaper cuts hard maple Hope to see how it looks when you finish! Todd

I have it as the center laminate on the neck I'm currently carving. It's very strong and stiff, which is good. However, it's also very hard so shaping will be a chore. It does shape nicely with microplanes. It's also a very heavy wood. Depending on your guitar's body, a completely bubinga neck might throw off the balance. And just as an FYI, when I used bubinga lamanates on a mini guitar for my son, two of the tuner screws had to go into Bubinga. The other 4 tuner's screws were in maple. Even though I pre drilled it, I snapped one screw in the bubinga because my pilot hole was too small. Hard stuff! -Todd

Good discussion over there. What they don't mention, is that of all the common finishes, shellac is one of the best water vapor seals. Flexner's finishing book is great for details like that. So shellac will slow down the woods adjustment to humidity changes better than most other finishes at a given thickness, even though it isn't the most water resistant. When I finally get around to building an acoustic, I plan to finish the inside with shellac. I even shellac'd the inside of the sound chambers on the solid body I'm working on now. I put too much time into these things to ever want to see them split/warp/crack because I figured humidity protection wasn't worth it. Course I'm also in NC, so the humidity difference between inside with AC and outside can get pretty huge, and winters get pretty dry despite a home humidifier. My piano has its own humidifier/dehumidifier system so I don't have to worry about it, but my guitars don't. Todd

Hey Rich, I hadn't taken your response to mean that, sorry if it sounded like I had. I agree with you that highly unequal tension might have an adverse effect on the neck, especially over years of use. That makes intuitive sense even if I've never seen it. And that site you pointed us to is great info. I'm probably too lazy to ever experiment with equal tension sets enough to find what I like best, but it's nice to know that I can check to see how off kilter the tension might be on a stock set, and it's probably a good idea to avoid the worst offenders. Regards, Todd

Rich, I looked at that page too, but realistically, why bother trying to balance better than a 10# difference. The 10# difference is mostly compressive. The component of it that would actually induce a twist in the neck is so minimal that it's probably not worth considering unless the neck is very thin, or a very flexible wood. In that case, you'd have other issues to worry about, like my friends mahogany tele neck that we had to add carbon rods to, to give the guitar some tuning stability during bends. Todd

If he's not happy with the match up, what about using it for a neck through? It's beautiful figure. Todd

Good point Rich, If you ignore the G and the D as they're so close to midline, then per that site, the two top strings are around 37.4# total on a medium set, and the two bottom strings add to about 47.6# tension. So only around a 25% increase. And as the neck isn't very wide, and the vectors aren't 10# difference at 90 degrees, I doubt that 10# higher tension on the bass side is going to twist the neck. The numbers are here: http://www.daddario.com/DADProdDetail.aspx...&Class=AACA But I can still pretend my 1/32" oops will help offset that 7-10# difference in tension, can't I? ;-) Todd

I think if you are really **** about uneven string tension resulting in neck warping, you would use string gauges that resulted in more even tension across the different strings. I believe a lot of people do make up their own sets from singles to get more consistent tension. Found this thread on a search because I'm still working on my first full sized build, realized my truss rod is off center to the bass side by about 1/32" at the headstock, and the thought that it might actually be helpful did occur to me. So I did a search and found this. Clearly it's not off by a lot, and there are 4 carbon rods in there so I doubt it'll twist, but it also wasn't intentional. If I'd were worried about the bass string tension I'd shape the neck a touch thicker on the bass side Todd

I actually spent another 30 to 40 minutes with a small sanding block and some 100 grit. Now it's almost gone. I was mostly worried about having varying fret heights later to get them level, but with where it is now, I think I'm pretty safe. OK, very safe until I screw something up later. . . Guess I just needed some reassurance. Thanks, Todd

Easy. I have my .001" straight edge and a lamp, so I can see the light, but if I put a piece of newspaper where the gap is thickes, right in the middle, you can't move the newspaper because it's thicker than the gap. Enough thicker that you can see the difference in the width of the light shining through.

Hi all, I've rough shaped the neck on my neck-through project, but figure I still have a good 1/8" to take off in thickness, and I'm almost set to glue the fingerboard on. But the neck is a few hundreds of an inch off strait, with a slight dip back from say the 5th fret to the 15th. It's much less than the thickness of a piece of news paper, but I don't have my gauges. So I'm wondering if I should glue on the fingerboard, finish shaping, and then flatten/ straighten it to perfect later. Or if I should sand a couple of hundreds off from the 5th fret to the nut area, and expect the string tension to move it that much? ? ? Any thoughts? Thanks, Todd

Hey Hector, No problem, hope I didn't come across as too critical. Todd

Hey Hector, where'd your last post come from??? He is going to be putting in a lot of time building a guitar and wanted to get a few opinions on the wood choices he's considering. It's possible that for him, that compared to the time he's going to invest, the cost of the wood is trivial. If follmann is too pricey, he hasn't lost the option of looking elsewhere. Ed, Jatoba is nice looking and strong, but it's very hard. That might make it difficult for you to keep up the others during neck shaping if you work as a group during the course. I'd also be concerned if you used a solid piece and not a laminate, that it will move/twist, and lastly that the guitar will be neck heavy. If you have some nice straight grained piece, maybe movement will be less of an issue, but I'd still be concerned. I'm using it as a laminate in a neck right now, but I wouldn't want to use it alone. Just my personal opinion. Good luck. Todd

I like the horn/headstock combo. I'd make the control panel part of the pick guard. Why are you using two stacked humbuckers at the bridge? Why not use a single humbucker and wire it to switch between series and parallel? More pups may not = better sound. Just curious. Todd