GregP

I thought Damn Good was by David Lee Roth? (featuring Steve Vai on guitar, but if you're searching a P2P...) Greg

I was wondering the same thing. ;-) On a related note, the ones from StewMac that are flush-mounted will be less "invasive" in your design than the others. Greg

Fantastic work, and great thread! Greg

To my eyes, it's about 2-3mm too fat on either side at the widest part. But only after you mentioned it, otherwise I woudln't have thought twice. I only mention that first because the rest of the post goes something like this: Dude, that's some seriously kick-ass display of vector-drawing skill. I sure wish I could pull that kind of stuff off, but I think right now my 'to do' list of things to learn is so long that adding another thing to it would be folly! If I'm not mistaken, Corel still offers educational discounts, though, so it might be really cheap for me to get into CorelDraw. Moreover, the actual design of the guitar is sweet. The combination of the 2 styles is seamless and inspired. Looking forward to a build if you get around to it one of these fine days! Take care, Greg

Basswood is sounding like the ideal wood for a workhorse guitar project... It's cheapish... It's easily routed... It dents easily (yippee! Faster authentic battle scars!!)... It sounds good with a maple cap (all part of the plan anyhow)... I'm sold! Greg

I think you'll have more luck with the Yellow pages and some phone calls than with the forum. I can't think of one regular that's from Montreal (not that I know all the regulars or anything). If you call a place like Lee Valley tools, a carpenter, or some other related business, you'll likely be able to dig up one or two leads, and when you follow up on those leads, you might get a few more. Sooner than later, you'll have found your wood source. I found mine right down the road...called... er... "The Wood Source"! But ultimately I ended up buying my wood from A & M because at least prices and shipping were within Canada. Greg

I'm still trying to visualize the thickness and coverage of the paints. If you want full coverage with the blue, the black basecoat would be redundant, as any old primer will set your blue up. I guess the advantage of the black basecoat would be if you have a difficult time getting even and full coverage with the blue, at least it would be black (the target effect) poking through rather than gray or white. Again... all theory and artistic painting, no actual guitar finishing experience speaks in the content of this post.

I'll gracefully eat my words and file this thread in the 'cool ideas for a future project' slot instead. Already thinking about that aluminum. ;-) Greg

I'm pretty sure that's Jem's wife in his avatar, hence he is a he. If I'm wrong, feel free to brand me with a 45W soldering iron. This thread is great. I've done my share of soldering in the past, but I've never been sure if I've been using proper technique, etc., and I botch the job as often as I'm successful. Any more links and tips would be well appreciated by many on here, I'm sure! Greg

Looks are deceiving. I'm 30. Greg

Oh, and since 'carving' will be coming in the near future: Any suggestions on how to clamp my 5/8" thick piece of maple so that the clamps don't get in the way of the router when I try to do something similar to what Jon Tirone does with his Les Paul in THIS tutorial? My idea is to use the existing holes, screw it onto another piece of wood or MDF, which is in turn clamped onto the table. I see no reason that wouldn't work, but if anyone has any ideas I'm always open to them! [Edit: I think I've answered my own question, but I'll leave the rest of the post up there for posterity-- it'd likely be best to laminate the top to the guitar first, so that I'm getting proper thickness and flat surfaces, etc. for the glueing and clamping! That's something I already thought about but I forgot that's the conclusion I reached. <laff>] 2 more questions instead, then: 1. How do I clamp the whole guitar down? 2. How thick/thin should the maple top be, at the edge of the guitar? Keeping in mind that I'll be adding 1/4" binding as well. Greg

At some point in time, I went a bit off axle, so a small ding resulted: It's so minor that I'm not sure whether I'm going to sand 'er out or fill'er in. Also, it'll be on the bottom, so it won't be a constant visual reminder of the lack of perfection, if I can't sort it out. The rest of the routing went without incident... I had a picture to post, but it looks a whole lot like the other pictures of my unformed guitar... a hunk of wood with the same shape as all the other hunks. Things will be more interesting when I start routing out the chambers and doing the neck. The chambers will probably be this weekend, and I still haven't sorted out how to tackle the neck yet... I'm so convinced that I'm going to do something drastically 'out of order' that I've been holding off. Cheers, Greg

Before long, I encountered another error... I hadn't double-checked the depth of the router! I had the bit as exposed as it could go (while fully lodged into the... er... bit-holder-thingy) so I figured I was safe. As it turns out, I was about 1 mm or less (it was near paper-thin!) shy of being 'safe': I unplugged the router (better safe than sorry!) and moved the bit out by about 2 mm, clamped her TIGHT and went back at 'er. Having done the first bit (I only exposed a portion at a time so that I could have firm clamping), I slid the body around a bit so that I could continue with a new portion. Thankfully I had written a message on the board which was only meant as a reminder for the initial rout... not for the middle of the job! Anyhow, my eye caught the message in time: so I unclamped it, slid it around to expose the part I was SUPPOSED to be working on, and continued. That's when I ran into another problem! It should have been obvious, but... well... you know how it is. I hadn't countersunk the wood screws, so the edge of the router plate was stopping at the screw's head. At first I couldn't figure out why the router wouldn't continue where I wanted it to! Powered down, and proceeded to countersink the screws (one completed one not, in the following picture):

Today's work involved using the flush-trim router bit on the maple. I decided to start with the maple because it was more cheaply replaced if I screwed it up. What follows is a comedy of errors-- follow closely and see how many screw-ups you can count, children! First thing was deciding how to secure the template to the wood. Having watched the Wayne Guitars video, I realized that screwing would be the way to go. I'm not sure where he screws his, but I know something's further back... the trem cavity maybe? In any case, the only thing I knew for sure is that I could screw into the humbucker cavities with no worries. I hadn't really drawn a proper centre line for the template yet, so I did so, and using the paper mock-up of the guitar figured out where the 'bucker cavities would be and marked them with an 'x' on the line. Now, although *I* had already realized one of my mistakes by this time, what you forum members haven't been told yet is that when I cut my rough out with the bandsaw, I hadn't measured accurate centre lines. I planned to... I meant to... but when I finally got bandsaw access, I had forgotten to mark the wood in advance. Hence, neither my limba nor my maple have their join line as the centre-line, which is a minor hassle, but an annoying one. I hoped that with the excess I had left, I could 'shift' it around a bit to reclaim my join as the centre, but it was no use, so I elected to give up on that and just attach the template in a way that would provide the most amount of excess wood around all edges. I drilled the template first, used those holes to mark the maple, then pre-drilled the maple with a bit the size of the screw's shaft (not the threads... obvious to most, but not to all!). Slapped'er together and you get what you see above. At the same time, I decided that instead of just routing around the entire template (which was imperfect due to my imperfect methods as seen previously in this thread) I would rout half, then flip the template over, then rout the other half so that both sides would have symmetrical errors. Before getting into the routing, I wanted to even out a few of the worse bits of bandsaw work, because I suspected they'd potentially cause some ripping out when the router bit contacted them. Check out the other flaws, too!: And then smoothed: That sorted, I practiced a bit on some test wood. I had NO idea what it felt like to use a router, and all this recent talk of torque and free-hand routing made me a bit worried that my router would fling itself across the room, bouncing off walls and eventually lodging itself in my nether regions. If you don't tell anyone else (shhhhh....) I'll admit that I shoved a hunk of wood down the front of my pants as a makeshift jockstrap the very first time I flicked the "on" switch and made a practice cut. Gratuitous shot of me starting-- don't look for the wood block 'cause it ain't there:

OK, here we go again. I'll post in multiples so that the page'll break to the next more quickly for the dial-up people. First of all, some of the menial stuff is taken care of-- Using my handy spreadsheet that I made, I tracked down what I had left to buy, and bought it. The bad news is that I had to spread my purchases around after all. I used Universal Jems, StewMac, LMI, local retailers, and A & M woods. I still need to hit Wal-Mart for a plastic garbage bin from which to construct my control cavity. <grin> I also bought (hopefully) the last of my tools-- a pair of Freud router bits, as per Litchfield's recommendation. I got a 1/2" flush trim bit for the template routing and a 3/16" dual-flanged straight bit for the truss rod channel. This is less than half as wide as it needs to be, but the other option was to go bigger, so I figured I'd go smaller and route the channel in multiple passes. Next up-- the maple problem has solved itself. I dry-clamped it between 2 flat pieces of MDF and let it sit around for several days. Not that I figured the more time the better, but I wasn't doing anything else with it anyhow. When I unclamped'er there was only about a 1mm cupping going on still. I let'er sit for a few days to see if she sprang back to the way she was, but it's still only 1 mm. Minimal hand-pressure flattens it, so I'm sure wood glue will sort me out without having to go to anything fancier. Finally, I had a chance to hit a bandsaw at one of the schools I teach for. As it turns out, I might as well have just hacked at'er with my scroll saw at home and paid a few bucks for the inevitable replacement blades. Why? Either I completely suck with a bandsaw, or the bandsaw wasn't set up well. I already realized that really tight curves wouldn't work, which is fine. But what I didn't count on is that shallow-angle entry would nudge and bend the blade a bit sideways, making it tricky to get the blade to 'grab' at certain points in time. I elected to stay WAY wide of my lines because of my lack of ability. Sorry for the weak-eyed, you'll have to squint to see the pencil marks for the outline: Still, ultimately I felt that a bandsaw made life a bit easier, and the only thing I had to do was wait for a day that I was going to be teaching at that school. No worries!

Nice work, and thanks for the pics of the process! Welcome to the forum.

I had the same thought, but the problem is that once the light passes through the blue to the black and reflects back, it still won't be reflecting any of the blue spectrum. Myka's way (I'm assuming the coats aren't thick-- and it's dye, not lacquer) there is always at least a little blue present at all levels that some will be reflected back.

I only tried using a router for the first time today, but my immediate reaction is: Bad idea. Any number of horrible things could happen, regardless of whether it's a table or plunge router (you don't specify). The slightest tilt of either the template or the router, and you've got high-speed metal meets metal which at minimum will trash your bit, and at worst could cause serious (and permanent) physical injury to you. Using power tools is a dangerous enough proposition in itself (I'm not paranoid, I just mean -relatively- speaking, compared with most people's day-to-day activity) without adding this highly risky extra factor. You may want it to be as exact as possible, but even with a router and template, you're probably going to give yourself 1 or 2 mm of 'play' at minimum, in which case you'll STILL be bringing it to exact shape using hand tools and/or a sanding stick (or equivalent) of some sort. A router is still a great way to go, but I just used a piece of MDF and it worked fine... I've seen templates made from plywood, too. I'd suggest that if you REALLY want to use a 'near perfect' template, you might as well just buy one. Otherwise, there are other options to consider before using metal. Greg

Fabulous work. Makes my router hijinx of today look like the work of a child by comparison. Cheers, Greg

"Hole Hearted" by Extreme.

Well in that case forget about it, you no-talent. Just kidding! BIG 'just kidding'. It takes an eye to do what you've done-- and it takes an honest and stand-up kind of guy to make sure we're all clear on who gets credit for which work. Many people wouldn't have bothered. Good on ya! Greg

It can definitely be done. I've seen a video of a very skilled fretless guitar player burning it up. Good luck trying to do anything more than 2-note chords, but the soloing should be neat! I'd be wary of what wood is used, though... the guitarist I speak of had an aluminum fingerboard... you'll want something dense like ebony, at least. Greg

Be sure to let us know what you think. They seem a bargain. Greg

Super-slick!!! Two words for you, hyphenated: "Bickity-BAM!" Greg

Half and half. It doesn't have ferrules, but it DOES have a metal tube going through the body. Since the tube opening isn't flush with the wood, the strings bite into the wood just a little bit, but won't go any further due to the tube. Looks killer, though. I love that Godin... it's a true workhorse guitar and the P-90s are inspiring. (Mine's the LG, not sure what Sam's is) Greg