GregP

I think it looks very cool. What technique are you going to use to emulate the "transparent layers" and the gradients? I suspect some airbrushing will be involved, but I don't know much at all about guitar painting. Too bad you can't use watercolours.

Skateboard vacuum pump seems too ingenious to be true! lol Great stuff. Have you sourced your MM-style pickups yet? If so, which ones are you going for?

If the tuning was EADGBE before and you took all the strings off, put them back on and retuned to EADGBE (with same gauge strings) you most certainly don't need to put extra springs in there, or in fact, do anything to the springs. The string tension is the same if the tuning pitch is the same. The trem angle should be the same as well. Uh-huh. My post supplemented the ones above that suggested tightening the claw if needed. To summarize: "Greg, if he hasn't changed his tuning, he shouldn't need to adjust his springs. On the other hand, it sounds like he HAS adjusted his tuning, in which case he will need to adjust the springs possibly as part of a complete setup." So, since you're indicating that he might need to adjust his springs... my advice would be... "If that turns out to be the case, and you find that while adjusting the springs, you can't tighten the claw any more, you also have the option of adding additional springs to increase tension on the trem block." Around and around she goes....

And if the claw is tightened as much as it'll go, you might need to throw one or more additional springs in there. It'll also make you work harder to use the trem, but at least you could get the angle under control.

A screw-cap thingy won't add resistance, either. The "cap" part is just a descriptor of the shape... it's not short for "capacitor" in this case.

Why do I find it so easy to picture a Leviathan-influenced guitar with a Dana Scoop?

If you have enough slack, you could also use one of those screw-cap thingies that electricians use. Just get a small enough one that it fits in your cavity.

I got a pair of boards slotted by LMI and they were purrfick.

Winding a pickup isn't rocket-surgery...I doubt Fender could horribly "eff" it up. Though, you could always drop a PAF in there for authenticity anyhow. (going by memory... it WAS a PAF, right?) I think the main reason not to get an EVH Art-series, even the mass-produced ones, is the fact that it's a blatant cash-grab.

Well, it LOOKS like it'll fit, but that's not saying much. . o O ( florentine? )

Looks great over here in Opera. Not sure about the first page, though. Logo-splashes with a simple "Enter Site" are outmoded in favour of getting right to the point; ie., the site that you "enter".

But then the whole thread is pointless. You've already concluded that just throwing some tape on there is fine, and you're clever enough to mask off the area in question, right? G'head and do your cheap fake binding... there's certainly no way to give you anything much by way of a tutorial for the cheap way of doing things. The confusion comes from the false set of premises, and then some helpful people trying to show you that there are options. For example, if you hate the feel of PVC, then you can use wood instead. But... well... it's not like you really needed any advice, right? You could've just applied the bad paint and shared your experiences with us. Greg

Heh! Yeah... the man would be in hell if it was the desert... that's a Canada Goose arctic parka. The dog is just kinda walking a bit ahead... didn't need leashes in a town where there's no place to go. The yellow, well, it sure doesn't LOOK arctic, so I can't blame you there... it was originally just a part of a website design that had a yellow + blue theme, with a yellow header. Grimace will probably make his return. I was just tired of his pixellated low-rez crappiness. He'll be back. Yellow-snow dog-molester will have a very short stay, indeed.

I'm not against it. I reach into upper frets often enough on an acoustic, but so do classical guitarists where the neck joins at the 12th. Where there's a will there's a way.... It's hard to say if it would take away from tone at all. Why would it? If you were a clever person (which I'm not, at least not for this kinda thing) you could probably make wacky arguments for the IMPROVED tone based on parallel refractions and reflections or other made-up voodoo. Guitar consumers eat that kinda crap up. For unconventional acoustic shapes, I'm rather fond of the new Parkers that have appeared in recent Guitar mags. Thinking outside of the box is de bezt.

Cheers for the advice. There's something about the one above (the Kathy Matsushita one) that's far more appealing anyhow. (by comparison to the Lee Valley one, I mean; not by comparison to yours) One thing to keep in mind for the Lee Valley one that I didn't mention is that if you're using a neck blank that's the width of the headstock, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a table-saw with a tall enough blade. Pretty much an "add ears" kinda jig. Not that adequate table-saws don't exist, but even at my local highschool (which has industrial-level power tools) the blade couldn't be raised enough to go through the blank I was working with. The solution was to use a jig in conjunction with a bandsaw instead of the table-saw. But the blade wasn't set-up optimally (and I don't know how to do that myself) so the cut wasn't perfect. Required some "planing" after all.

Doble poste.

Lee Valley has a little doodad you can use, too: http://www.leevalley.com/wood/page.aspx?c=...,51225&ap=1 Obviously you'll have to plan a bit so that you can use it in a way that you don't run the blade up against the metal tubing.

Thanks for sharing, Mike! Lookin' forward to the 8-string build, too.

Looks photoshopped. But I wouldn't put it past him to use a banjo, either.

The saddle never needs to move forward for correct intonation, assuming the bridge has been installed accurately. Some people like to save themselves a couple of millimetres wiggle room to accomodate human error, but strictly speaking a saddle never needs to move forward to compensate.

I don't have the answers to your questions, not having encountered... well... any of that stuff in my travels, but if you want a truly simple first build, you might want to consider a telecaster with no trem at all. I think that if you have patience for planning, you can accomplish your design goals, but I don't have reasonable specific answers to your four questions. I just jumped in because of the thread title-- as soon as I saw it, I thought, "telecaster!"

That's how it's done. Depending on where your electronic cavity is, you might find it more convenient to ground the tailpiece instead. Makes no difference.

So. Freakin. Cool. (and suh-weet!)

For whatever reason, the topics aren't as open to editing as other forums-- Invision might have different options than phpbb for example. Your best bet is to start a new post and look for the spot on that page where you can make a poll... it should be an option, I believe under the text-entry box. Link to the poll from this thread.

It's definitely a matter of personal choice. It's just that monkey grip is the wrong choice.