That is some awesome guitar work. Did you make the fret boards, or use premade boards from StewMac or somewhere?
After almost 10 years of night woodworking classes (mostly a supervised shop rental) my skills have progressed from amp chassis made from pine scraps and sheetrock screws to decent but not spectacular oak chassis. I can cut out and route an electric guitar body and bolt on a pre-made neck. I had just begun making necks with pre-made fret boards when my job and the wood shop classes ended.
I spent the first 62 years of my life in south Florida (26 degrees North Latitude) I was at the beach year round. I can't handle the heat (or the 7 million people) any more, so I moved North.
Yesterday it was supposed to be a gloomy winter day, but it was sunny instead. Today I woke to constant rain which is forecasted to continue until this evening when it turns to snow. # to 5 inches are expected to accumulate before it ends tomorrow night.......yeah, no table saw time in the near future.
After almost 10 years of night woodworking classes (mostly a supervised shop rental) my skills have progressed from amp chassis made from pine scraps and sheetrock screws to decent but not spectacular oak chassis. I can cut out and route an electric guitar body and bolt on a pre-made neck. I had just begun making necks with pre-made fret boards when my job and the wood shop classes ended.
I spent the first 62 years of my life in south Florida (26 degrees North Latitude) I was at the beach year round. I can't handle the heat (or the 7 million people) any more, so I moved North.
Yesterday it was supposed to be a gloomy winter day, but it was sunny instead. Today I woke to constant rain which is forecasted to continue until this evening when it turns to snow. # to 5 inches are expected to accumulate before it ends tomorrow night.......yeah, no table saw time in the near future.
Made them myself, not a big deal now that I got a real fret saw. Before I used an exacto blade to scribe the lines, cut slots with a razor saw and then open them up wider with a coping saw. I just made a square miter jig and mark the boards then cut with the fret saw. There is a web page that allows you to enter in your fretboard parameters and gives you pdf files to print them out.
ekips.org - FretFind2D
I just mark where the slot goes with a pencil and start cutting. I did make a bunch of fretboards out of some Brazilian Cherry (Jatoba) flooring that I got cheap. The stuff is hard and making a dozen radiused boards killed a 1/2" router bit. I also made a radiused caul to finish sand the boards.
I am just mucking about on the guitars I am building right now, nothing fancy as far as wood goes or in the designs. Once I get my act together and do some testing I want to do to help me learn what makes these guitars tick I will make them look a little more upscale. It takes another level of care to make guitars that are showroom perfect and I don't see the point unless you have the sound end down. There are some builders that have a great looking guitar and the sound is average. If I am going to put in over 100 hours of work into one then I want it to sound pretty good. Actually the ones I make now take about 100 hours to do but I am still messing around trying different methods of building. Once I work out the kinks in a design they should be easier to make. Probably the hardest part to do and the one thing that can make a good looking guitar look bad is wood binding. Otherwise building a guitar is not really hard, it is just getting a large number of little steps right.
I had a lot of pictures on Photobucket but they washed their hands of us freeloaders. I have a few here though.
Guitars - Album on Imgur
You know the probability of getting "n" steps right reduces drastically with the size of the number "n", right?
So it's pretty impressive that you're able to make it happen, and consistently at that.I made a solid-body electric guitar once, but I had a cracked archtop acoustic to pilfer the neck and trapeze tailpiece from. It worked, but I didn't know how to crown the frets after leveling them, and my DIY pickups were too clean and too low-output. In those pre-Internet days, I couldn't find any information on winding guitar pickups, and I guessed wrong.
If I tried to make a guitar today, it would have a wide neck (1 7/8" or maybe 2" at the nut), a very shallow semi-hollow body, and both magnetic and piezo pickups to make it sound as close to acoustic as possible in piezo mode. Fender 'Strat playing comfort with chords that sounded as good as a real acoustic guitar would be the dream.
I have a couple of real acoustic guitars, but have grown tired of their bulk and delicacy, which make it a chore to play or haul them around. Wrapping your right arm around those thick acoustic bodies can do a lot of damage to posture, neck, and shoulders over time.
-Gnobuddy
George, this was 106 volts to G2 straight from the power supply? No screen grid resistor was used during testing?
Thanks!
-Gnobuddy
You know the probability of getting "n" steps right reduces drastically with the size of the number "n", right?
I made a solid-body electric guitar once, but I had a cracked archtop acoustic to pilfer the neck and trapeze tailpiece from. It worked, but I didn't know how to crown the frets after leveling them, and my DIY pickups were too clean and too low-output. In those pre-Internet days, I couldn't find any information on winding guitar pickups, and I guessed wrong.
If I tried to make a guitar today, it would have a wide neck (1 7/8" or maybe 2" at the nut), a very shallow semi-hollow body, and both magnetic and piezo pickups to make it sound as close to acoustic as possible in piezo mode. Fender 'Strat playing comfort with chords that sounded as good as a real acoustic guitar would be the dream.
I have a couple of real acoustic guitars, but have grown tired of their bulk and delicacy, which make it a chore to play or haul them around. Wrapping your right arm around those thick acoustic bodies can do a lot of damage to posture, neck, and shoulders over time.
-Gnobuddy
You can mess up a lot of parts of the guitar and still get away with it. Now days it is a travesty for the inside of the guitar to not look clean as a whistle and everything in order. But if you look at some of the good sounding Gibsons (not all) that have rough cut braces and glue all over the place you would wonder how they sound good. The guitars of Torres can look a little rough also but it hardly matters to their sound.
Now getting the frets in the right spot and the action right so the guitar is playable is something you want to get right.
I have been focusing on small guitars for similar reasons you mention. There is no reason to play a dreadnought if you are playing for yourself and a few friends at home. I am real surprised that I have taken a liking to my fence board guitar. The neck is a full classical width, I like a little narrower but still what would be wide for a steel string. Mind you you need a little more width for nylon strings anyway. I can't wait to hear the two new ones and see how I can do to make them better. The next one might be maple back and sides though.
I used a 100 ohm 2 watt resistor just out of habit. I think it would be possible to blow the screen grid out of a 50C5 even with the 2 watt resistor. I was using the same parts on a KT88 amp cranking out about 80 watts when the cable to the plate supply came loose. One screen resistor blew saving the tube but the other didn't and a brand new EH KT88 went FLASH....Bang, dead.
Most of my guitar building were experiments in where to put extra features like MIDI pads, faders and knobs and maybe some drum pads so the whole thing could be wired up to a PC running Ableton Live. I had worked on several just to find that they were not playable in a real life situation. This usually resulted in the neck and hardware being removed and the body being tossed into the dumpster and me starting over.
My first one took nearly forever, was made from good poplar, and looked pretty nice. Unfortunately it has no sound, was not very playable, and didn't fit well with my body. NEXT.....after a few iterations, I had resorted to using whatever scrap pine I could get (usually old waterbed frames) and slapping something together in two class times (maybe 5 hours). I remember building one, playing it, stripping it and tossing the body over my head into the dumpster in the corner of the shop.
A friend in the class was making electric ukes. He finished one of his basic (no electronics or paint) instruments on the same night I finished one of mine, so we sat around the classroom until late one night playing old Beatles songs without amplification. It would be my last build in that class (lost my job), and never got finished. He would go on to finished his, and build three more before being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Here are some pictures.
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