Logical Guitars and Musical Equipment

Epiphone Valve Junior and the BitMo Trio Mod

2008-07-27T19:38:00.004-05:00

My first Epiphone Valve Junior was one of the combos. Sounded OK but a little sloppy and very noisy. Sold it and never looked back. Since then, however, they've made a ton of improvements and now they are great little amps at any price.

Here's mine in original stock condition:

I got mine in like new condition for about a hundred dollars shipped from an online auction site. They go for that much give or take ten bucks all the time. It's a good deal. Buy one if you're considering it. Totally worth it. The sound to me is sort of Marshall-esque-good midrange bite and that crunchy AC/DC type of distortion. Doesn't get too terribly loud when you crank it either, which is a good thing. I can comfortably play it dimed for a while in the afternoon or evenings but not at night. It's a few degrees louder than a stereo at what I think of as normal listening volume if that helps you put it in perspective.

As I said, I like it a lot but I'm not one to leave well enough alone. It's a little dark sounding for my tastes sometimes (my cabs have kind of a dark sound to them, if you have some brighter Celestions or something this'd probably be great) and could deal w/ a little more names. After looking into mods for some time, I decided on the BitMo Trio mod, which you can get on the internets for about fifty bucks. It adds a tone knob, gain boost and three different gain voicings.

All of this looks like a few parts in a bag once you get it in the mail:

Now to install these mods, first thing you have to do is get in the amp. Valve Juniors have self-discharging power supply capacitors so they are relatively safe to work on. Don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves and get to work on this as a first amp project. The voltages that can build up in tube amps and knock you on your ugly ass should be rendered harmless. However, you can never be to sure so the standard advice still stands: don't be a retard.

To open it up, first you have to take off the back:

It's held on by screws. Turn them counter-clockwise to remove them. There are then some larger screws on top you need to remove. They're hidden under little plastic things, which I always thought were a bit tacky but, you know, if don't want little cost cutting measures like this, buy a more expensive amp:

The cab is designed such that the amp-part doesn't just fall down when you remove these screws. You have to slide it out. And it looks like this:

Note: I am not drinking whiskey but I do keep it on my workbench/kitchen table for emergency purposes. You never know when things are going to get too complicated to handle properly sober.

Next step is to drill the holes for the new controls. Don't rush this and wear safety glasses. The BitMo kit comes w/ a template to place the hole:

I just poked a hole and made a little mark w/ a sharpie. That one's for the tone knob/gain boost. The one for the three-way switch you just gotta guess on.

To drill these suckers, you need to be patient. Buy some good quality drill bits for drilling metal. You probably won't be able to get away w/ just buying a quarter inch and three-eighth inch bits. They're too big for one pass. You need to start w/ a smaller bit and work your way up. Go in about eighth inch increments maximum. Be careful and let the drill do the work. Don't try to push it though any faster than it wants to go. I put some tape over the marks to keep the drill from scratching up the faceplate if it slipped (and it did).

Here's the finished holes:

Now, from here, you have to actually install the mod. This is the frustrating part so I didn't end up getting all too many pictures. You're in luck though since GearScore has an excellent page on it. Between this and the very good instructions that BitMo sent w/ the mod, it was fairly simple to get it all up and running. I soldered everything to the pot and too the switch, installed them and then soldered them to the top of the circuit board. Easy.

The one trick, which I stole from that GearScore page I linked to, is to use a pair of vice grips to hold things while soldering them:

Holy crap! That makes life so much easier I'm embarrassed I didn't do it until now. Anyway, that up there is the gain voicing switch w/ all parts attached. The tone knob/gain boost looks about the same but I forgot to get a photo.

Here it is all installed:

I had a bit of trouble on the three-way gain voicing switch but other than that it was easy. It's easy to get turned around by the schematics BitMo includes so be careful. It's not necessarily the best way to do things but I just soldered the leads to the top of the board. Works but it is a little sloppy.

Here she is all put back together:

I didn't do the water slide decals because I screwed up all the practiced ones I tried. I guess it would look a little cooler w/ them.

As far as how it sounds, it's a big improvement over an already good tone. The gain voicing switch just gives you three levels of gain, really. The higher gain settings seem to get a bit more oomph in the high midrange as well. The tone knob is nice too. It's not the most versatile thing in the world and seems to work something like a high end filter though it does add a bunch more high end than is available stock just by being there. The gain boost, adds some lows back in and is what can really take you over the top when you got the thing cranked.

Overall, not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I used to use an OD pedal to really crank the Valve Junior into rocking distortion territory but now it's totally unnecessary and sounds better besides. I'd recommend this to anyone as an easy first mod or a way to get a killer small tube amp for the price of a decent distortion pedal.

Making Neck Pockets, Screwing Up, Making new Plans

2008-07-22T19:13:00.009-05:00

I took advantage of the nice weather a couple weekends ago and had a crack at routing out the neck pocket on the cheapo guitar. Rather than use normaly router bits and a template following kit, I decided to use a template following bit. It has a little bearing on it that rests against the edge of the template which you can see here:

Here is how it follows along the template. You can see that the bearing keeps the router bit from cutting into the template:

After my first crack at, I found that for some reason it didn't cut it completely and there was a little bit of wood still sticking up on the side:

I solved this problem by moving the template over a bit and routing it off. Bad idea. It turns out that it wasn't that the pocket on my template was wrong but that the little stem for the neck was a little too wide. Now my neck pocket is a little too wide for the neck. I am getting kind of ticked about not having my baritone neck, which was what was destined for this neck pocket on anything and this is yet another guitar that won't turn out to be up to snuff so I think I'm just gonna buy a decent Squier Tele and put the baritone neck on that and use the Squier neck for this guy. It kinda sucks that on my second try, I can't make a guitar better than a Squier but there it is. Squier has CNC machines and millions of dollars. If I had that, I'm sure I could make a damned fine guitar.

Anyway, w/ that done w/, I used a template and the same bit to carve a little recess for the control cavity cover. Ended up having to free-hand it a bit and it's not perfect but pretty good. You can see it's a little rough around the edges:

The wood on this guy is a little thicker than a standard tele body so I wanted to make a little recess for the neck plate too. Note to self: make sure that router bit is deep enough that it doesn't destroy your template:

Lots of work down the tubes there. At least it doesn't look so bad I won't be able to fix it up a bit w/ a sander:

After these two mistakes, I decided to call it a day. Sometimes you just gotta leave well enough along. On the brightside, at least I'm not this dumbass fly who got stuck in the carpet tape I use to hold my templates in place. He's dead dow:

Fly: 0
Frank: 1
Luthiery: 2

Second place isn't bad, I guess.

The Linux/Ardour Recording Rig

2008-07-09T20:36:00.003-05:00

So about a half year ago, I got a wild hair and decided to build myself a computer recording rig for the purposes of creating demos for my band Sun Splitter and for whatever else I so chose. Given that it's one of my projects, I put it in it's natural place: the back burner. That is, I did until a certain North American government decided to give me six hundred dollars to save me from the terrorists. Not only do I appreciate the sentiment, I also appreciate having enough cash to spend on yet more musical equipment that I don't really need.

I bought myself a decent (or so I thought) motherboard case combo from an online retailer and four gigs of ram to which I added four two gigs I had sitting around. (This is absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary, I only bought this much ram to be a jackass. Also, I have six gigs of ram. Up yours!) I got a decent but lower-end AMD dual-core microprocessor, a used and slightly damaged flat screen monitor of eBay for fifty bucks and w/ an old mouse and keyboard I had laying around, I was in business.

The recording software I chose is called Ardour. I love it. It's open source and finicky and pisses off my whole band every time I record on it so it's just about perfect for me. I use it and subscribe to it monthly w/ a small donation. You should too. The thing about Ardour though is it's only for Linux and MacOSX. Having enough self-respect to avoid OSX, I opted for Linux. You should too.

I've tried a few Linux distros in my day and ultimately my favorite proved to be Ubuntu. Some nerds will bag on it for not being 1337 enough but, honestly, if they care so much about their Linux distro being hard to install, they are probably pretty boring to talk to anyway. Ubuntu is easy to install on most systems and they have a great forum if you get stuck. There's enough people on there that there's someone bored enough to help you w/ the dumbest n00b question. Don't be shy. The other nice thing about Ubuntu is there's a package called Ubuntu Studio that includes everything you need to get your audio workstation up and running. It's a bit bloated though as it contains all kinds of vidoe and picture editing. The best way, I decided, was simply to install vanilla Ubuntu and then install only the audio package of Ubuntu studio from there.

W/ that taken care of, I needed two more things, the most important being an audio interface for my computer. Normal computer soundcards simply don't cut it for serious recording. Thankfully, the other guitarist in Sun Splitter happened to have a Lexicon Omega USB interface laying around so that got us started. USB interfaces really aren't the best, better to have firewire or PCI (even though PCI is old there is good support in Linux), but we get by OK w/ this. The Sun Splitter tracks we have on the current page as of now were recorded using the Lexicon and a Windows laptop. He also provided the other thing we needed, "studio monitors." I put that in scare quotes because we're actually monitoring w/ an old stereo reciever and some nice stereo speakers he just had laying around.

Here it is:

You can't see the computer because it's under the desk and I'm not getting down on that floor for any reason. It's filthy.

A Change in Scope - Luthiery, Gear Reviews and More

2008-06-03T20:23:00.002-05:00

Between my numerous hobbies, my band Sun Splitter and my desire to remain absolutely motionless seventeen hours a day, I am not spending as much time on my guitar projects as I would like and am thusly running out of stuff to write about here. However, I do like to keep my wonderful readers engaged in and informed of the latest goings on at the Logical Compound so I have no choice but to broaden the scope of this internet. Basically, I am just gonna post whatever I want and you're going to have to read it because you have a Logical monkey on your back and you just can't help but to return time and time again. I am gonna keep it gear and project related though so you will still get your fix of pure sonical Logic. I have a recording rig set up finally--which I will explain in a later post--so I'm going to hopefully compliment the tales of my haphazard adventures w/ dangerous power tools and guitar shaped objects w/ general gear reviews and sound samples.

Fun W/ a Fender Champ

2008-05-18T14:55:00.005-05:00

I bought a Fender Champ three years ago. It's from 1975 and has been modded so that it supposedly sounds more like a tweed Champ. Don't know what they did exactly but it sounds great and looks sweet.

I have had the same tubes in it for a year and it's going strong but I wanted to try something different. Tubes are really easy to change in a Champ. It is a cathode bias amp so you can just pop the power tubes in and out w/o adjusting anything. Supposedly, you can make adjustments in the bias of the amp and get it sounding better but I've never tried it and it seems to be working fine how I've been doing it. One of these days, curiosity will get the best of me and I'll go poking around in there.

Step one. Remove back plate w/ screwdriver:

They are Phillips head screws. You turn them counter clockwise to remove them. This exposes the tubes. You could probably just work around the cover but it'd be a pain. The Champ has three tubes in it:

From left to right, the first is the rectifier tube which is a 5Y3GT, the second is the 6V6 in the power section and the last is the 12AX7 preamp tube. Good stuff. So basically to get these guys out, you just grab hold and pull:

Be careful putting themin. You need to get the pins lined up. Power amp tubes have a little key that prevents you from putting them in the wrong way but preamp tubes you just have to be careful w/. Here is me putting a power tube in:

The one thing to be careful of is the tubes get hot if you've been playing. The rectifier tube swaps out the same way. I replaced it w/ the same kind, Sovtek, so it wasn't interesting enough to me to take a picture of it.

The particular tubes I tried were a reissue Tung-Sol 12AX7 and a JJ 6V6. I forget what kind of preamp tube I had in there but it was Chinese and sounded pretty good. I love the Tung-Sol though. Very tight sounding and clear but still very warm. It added a lot to my tone and I'm very pleased w/ it. The JJ power tube I wasn't so happy w/. It was slightly warmer sounding but in a muddy way that I didn't care for. To be fair, though, I am using a vintage Jan 6V6 that I got as NOS so the cards are kind of stacked against the JJ. NOS preamp tubes are way to damn expensive for me so I just go w/ new ones and have been fairly happy.

The other cool thing I did for my Fender Champ is build an adapter so I could plug it into a speaker cab:

It is very easy to build. You just need an RCA plug and a normal quarter-inch mono jack. To put it simply, you solder wires between them and you're done. I wrapped some of that shrink wrap tubing for wiring over the RCA to protect it. Couldn't really do much on the quarter-inch jack but it's held up for a couple years now.

The best part about this five-minute project is it allows me to do this:

I use a Weber Z-Matcher to match the impedances of the cabs to the amp. It is a wonderful device and very well built. Buy one. You'll find a use for it.

The two cabs I have going are a Traynor 4x10, which is a strange beast. It came w/ an old Traynor solid state head. The head and cab sound great together. But the head doesn't sound good w/ anything else and the cab is only so-so w/ other amps. I only keep it in my rig for the machismo factor. Say what you will but I like having a full stack in my living room and keep it as a matter of principle. The bottom cab is a Kern 4x12. It was made in the 70s in Chicago and is freaking awesome. It's my favorite 4x12 in the world. Kern still makes some bass gear now but their old stuff is super rare as far as I can tell. I actually sent them an email about this cab to see if I couldn't learn some more about it. Whoever I talked to was like, "Yeah, we used to make those," and that's about all I know about it. The speakers are some square-backed Eminence models and are beat to hell but still sounding good.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say about my Fender Champ at the minute. The silverface ones like I have are still pretty cheap and hands down better than the cheap little tube amps people are putting out now in terms of build quality. Tone is a matter of personal preference but I think this thing sounds better too.

Sunn Concert Bass

2008-05-13T13:25:00.010-05:00

Recently, through of inquiries over the internets and train rides to and from the south suburbs, I acquired a Sunn Concert Bass free of charge from a gentleman named Tariq who plays in the excellent south of Chicago metal band Couldron, who are looking for a new drummer at the minute should you happen to be one. The only caveat was that it was in non-working order. Some asshole had apparently decided it would be a good idea to let the magic smoke that typically resides in capacitors, transistors, diodes and other such enigmatic electronical elements into the outside world where we all know it should not be. My task was to put it back in there.

I live my life car-free so it is often a trial to get out to the 'burbs. I knew it was worth it though as soon as I set this magnificent bastard on my speaker cab at home:

Looks pretty sweet, don't you think? How'd it sound? Well, at this point, it was still broken so it sounded like crap. I was hopping that the magic smoke may have found it's way back in there on its own but, sadly, that was not the case. Guitar sound would come out of the amp but not much and a ton of buzz came w/ it. Obviously not the best situation.

I opened it up to see what was up. Bear in mind, I followed the proper safety procedure of not being a retard before I started probing around. If you are a retard, I recommend you not open any amps up.

These are the amp guts:

At this point, I realized that somebody had actually tried to put some kind of magic smoke back in there. I can't say what kind but, seriously, this thing utterly reeked of nag champa incense, leading me to suspect that it'd been tampered w/ by a hippy at some point.

Closer inspection lead me to my first clue, two burned out resistors:

Even though I knew it wouldn't work, I tried swapping out those two resistors. The only good thing to report here is that only one of the resistors burned up this time. Apparently, the other one had just been taken out by the first one. I was one resistor down now but at least I had something to show for it. I replaced the one that burned up again and set off about the internets to find the real source of my problem. After some research, guided by several fine gentleman on the Unofficial Sunn Musical Equipment Web Site, I managed to narrow down the source of my problems to a few transistors in the power section. I am not sure if this is normal but they are stuck to the back of this amp and covered w/ little plastic pieces:

You just have to unscrew the screws and they pop right in and out, no soldering required. I tested them using a multimeter and the method described on this page. Three of them were bad out of five. Good thing I ordered four. Once replaced, it fired up just fine. It's loud as balls and your mom keeps calling me to ask about it. I've had it down at my band Sun Splitter's practice space for a couple weeks now and it's still going strong. Sounds pretty good for guitar or bass but I use it w/ my drum machine, Sober Bill. Here's the full rig:

As I said it's been going strong for a while now and I'm happy w/ it but I posted some pics of the board on the Sunn forum and someone noticed that a couple electrolytic capacitors had leaked out some of the crazy capacitor juice that's inside of them. I am OK w/ this since it works anyway but they're telling me that those caps could short at anytime--leading possibly to total protonic reversal--so I'm gonna replace them pretty soon. There's also some old resistors in there that I want to replace as some have drifted pretty significantly over the years. I will, of course, keep you posted.

The Un-Baritone Guitar

2008-05-12T14:19:00.004-05:00

So I had to come to terms w/ something about my baritone guitar: It was cool, it sounded and played OK but I just needed to accept the fact that it is simply not that great. It's a nice first try but that is all I can say about it. I've decided that it is not worthy of my beautiful Warmoth neck so I've replaced it w/ a dirt cheap no-name neck from eBay. It's a load off my mind saying that out loud.

And I'm not kidding when I say no-name. It literally doesn't have a brand name at all on it's vaguely Telecaster-ish headstock:

I have no problem w/ the lack of name-brand and, in fact, I appreciate not having to shill for whatever company imported this son-of-a-bitch from French Indochina. What I do have a problem w/ is the fact that the holes were drilled in the wrong damn place. Not only that, they are too big for a normal neck screw. I filled them in w/dowels and re-drilled them, no problem. It actually fit in the neck pocket better than the Warmoth neck because it was too big.

Of course, that could not possibly be the end of my problems w/ this thing. The fact that it fit better, meant I got it on there straighter which made it a apparent that the bridge was in the wrong place so I had to move it again using this same procedure. And if that was the end of things, I'd have been pleased but it wasn't. Now that the neck was straight and the bridge was in the right spot, the pickups were no longer in line w/ the strings. Blast! There's really not much I can do about it w/o redoing the whole damn thing so I'm leaving it like that for now. I also rewired it so it didn't have all that goofy stereo crap going on, which was always weird and problematical and I never used for anything other than screwing around. I also unhooked the push-pull pots I was using for pickup selection and threw a Gibson-style toggle sort of awkwardly into the mix. Works but it's kind of cramped.

I also had to level and crown the frets to get it playing w/o a hideous amount of buzz. The neck really was a trainwreck. In hindsight I wish I hadn't cheaped out and got something decent. Here is the guitar w/ it attached:

Now that is one fine fiddle! Seriously, it's not that bad. If I ever get around to it, I'll re-rout the pickup slots so I can move them where they need to go and then make a pickguard to cover all the mistakes up. If I really wanna get into it, I can fill the wood and refinish in a solid color. Might be worth it as I can fix some other crap too while I'm at it. It's still pretty fun to play and having the pickups out of whack doesn't seem to affect the tone much at all. The neck is a big fat vintage baseball bat so it's good to practice on. Makes my other guitars feel tiny and insignificant, thusly allowing me to better bend them to my will.

The Warmoth neck is now going to go on the cheapo guitar project. Somewhat ironical but there you go.

Master Templates

2007-11-06T19:08:00.000-06:00

Well, if you're anything like me, every now and again you just gotta get your best scratchy cough out and call into work so you can take the day off to build guitars in your back yard. I did that yesterday and, let me tell you, it's a hell of a good feeling. Not gonna let the man hold me down. (Who's w/ me!?) My task for the day was to get a couple templates done for a couple elements of my next guitar. Last time, I made the mistake of building all of these things into the template for the guitar. This is very convenient for one project but makes it a little more troublesome when you move onto the next shape and have to do everything all over again. This time, I'm made each element on a different piece of mdf for greater versatility.

The two pieces I made were for a humbucker rout and for a tele-style neck pocket. These will be common elements on guitars I make in the future so this will equal a lot of time saved. I made these on quarter inch mdf this time. Last time, I used three quarter inch and it was a beast to shape and very frustrating to get accurate.

The first step is to draw everything out very carefully w/ a straight edge and a carpeneters square. I got the measurements I needed from various places online. This took me about an hour and half. For the last project I didn't have this kind of patience but now that I know I can pull it off, it's easier to reach down into the depths of my psyche to find another five minutes of attention span to erase a line and redraw more accurately.

This is the neck pocket:

I made the top of it extend an inch longer than it had to be. Hopefully, this will give the router something better to rest on when I use it so I can better control it. There's lines drawn so I can get it in the right place.

Same deal w/ the humbucker routt:

Ultimately, it was a mistake to cut it out so small, at least before I had the middle cut out. It made it really hard to clamp down as I worked on it:

It was too small for me to use a jigsaw so I had to use a coping saw. As seen in the picture above, I drilled out the corners w/ a handbill so I could turn the blade. The initial cut was none to accurate:

But some time w/ a file got it in good shape pretty quickly (I actually filed it a bit more from this point and it looks very clean now):

Same deal w/ the neck pocket only this time I could use the jigsaw to save time (and I'm actually more accurate w/ that than a coping saw). It is nearly perfect:

This all came together a lot quicker and better than previous efforts so I'm pretty pleased. The only problem w/ using the quarter inch thick mdf is it's really too thin to use directly on a guitar so I will need this to make some thicker templates. It's worth the extra effort for the added accuracy.

Shaping and Scraping

2007-10-29T19:54:00.000-05:00

Ok... My camera is giving me shit so if you're just here for the pics, this is all you get:

So there you have it. That's the body of the cheapo guitar cut to shape and routed. I used pretty much the same method as I did on the baritone body. The only difference is this time I frakked up the glue joint between the two pieces of wood so the top of the thing wasn't quite level so before I started I put some eighty grit paper on my random orbital sander and whirred it across the top and back a few times. Worked like a charm. I used the same template as I used for the baritone body. I like it and just can't think of anything better.

First thing I did was trace the outline on the body and do a rough cut w/ my jigsaw. Last time I tried to use a smooth cutting blade and get as close as possible, which worked OK. This time, I just went ahead and used a fast cutting blade and stayed about a half inch outside of the line. If anything, this method left me w/ less wood to cut away during routing--and it must have saved me fifteen minutes or a half hour w/ the jigsaw. Of course, it could have just been the fact that I have greater and more substantial jigsaw skill now but I really do think this was the better method of doing the rough cut and will continue to use it in the future.

After that, it was a simple matter of routing. I set up my template follower to cut a sixteenth of an inch outside the line and am glad I did. There was a little bit of tear out but, unlike last time, I left some extra wood. Once I was done routing, I just took my trusty random orbital sander and sanded down to the line.

So far, I must say this is head and shoulders above the first one and I think I'm gonna buy a nicer neck than I originally planned. I like the kinda weird streaks on the cheapo alder I'm using and I think this one will be nice enough just to finish w/ a couple or five clear coats. I'm thinking I will get a tele-style neck w/ a maple fingerboard and it will look really simple and classy. Probably go w/ chrome hardware and chrome-covered humbuckers. The only weird thing is it's gonna have about six knobs because of the electronics I'm gonna cram in there.

Gluing Up a Blank

2007-10-25T17:53:00.000-05:00

For some reason, I never seem to get around to working on my new project, the cheapo guitar. It is mostly laziness combined w/ the fact that I have a new band started up which takes a great deal of my time. Also, it's fall now so by the time I've relaxed for an hour after work, it's already getting dark and I'm not keen on using power tools w/o proper illumination. However, I did finally get around to gluing up the body blank, which is a relatively simple process.

First thing, the two pieces of alder I bought off the world's most famous auction website had roughly sawed edges that needed to be straightened to be jointed so I could glue them. Originally, I had planned on using a router table for this but, alas, the one I got off that same auction site is the right kind for my router--thought I had a great bargain on it too. Instead, I used a hand plane, which is a fun tool that makes fun, long shavings:

Having never used one of these bad boys in the past, I spent about twenty minutes fixing the mistakes during the first five minutes. Nevertheless, I managed to get it pretty well straight. I checked my progress continually throughout this process w/ a straight edge to make sure I was keeping it real.

Then I put a generous amount of wood glue on there. The brand I chose was Titebond but only because Elmer's (which should work just fine) seemed to commonplace for use in luthiery. Plus, I was pretty damn certain that I wanted it bonded tite-ly.

For some reason, I always think wood glue looks delicious, like a vanilla milkshake:

After I got the two pieces together, it was just a matter of clamping things up and wiping off the excess glue:

Unfortunately, I wiped too much excess glue off and actually manage to suck some out of the joint w/ a paper towel. Just a little but once it was dry, I squeezed some more glue in there to fill up the crack:

Now it is right as rain and feels completely sturdy, like it's a solid piece of wood. Unfortunately, I didn't quite get the two pieces of wood completely even. That is something I'm going to be able to hopefully deal w/ this weekend.

A New Engine for the Hollowbody

2007-10-16T19:18:00.000-05:00

A while back I found a really cool Ibanez Artcore hollowbody guitar on clearance at my local guitar warehouse of super proportions. It only cost two hundred bucks so I bought it on the spot and have regretted the descision exactly never. It is a fine looking, great playing and decent sounding guitar. The only problem was the stock pickups were about as flat as your back. Of course, I will not let such things stand in my house so I set about changing them. Ultimately, I chose to use some GFS Retrotrons I had laying about. I originally had them in the SGeezus but found them a bit to chimey for the inherantly dark sound of that guitar but they seemed a perfect fit for the hollowbody. At the very least, I figured, they wouldn't be so dull sounding. I also wanted to try out a super fancy RS Guitarworks wiring harness so I figured I'd give that a go too. Let me tell you, replacing the pickups in a hollowbody is as harrowing an adventure as you could imagine.

First, I took the thing apart:
And already my first surprise! The bridge isn't attached to the body in anyway aside from the pressure from the strings. OK. I guess I will just have to put it back on. These are the original electronics:

As you can see, the pickup selecter switch is weird and cheap looking and the pots are teeny tiny. They weren't problematical but I felt there was a very high chance of failure. I will give Ibanez this: they were at least the correct values. A lot of times in cheap guitars they'll just use whatever's cheap. No 100K volume pots here.

The next step was wiring up the harness. I had a bit of frustration w/ this and didn't end up taking any pictures. Sorry. It turns out my trouble was the tip of my soldering iron was just old so I replaced it. No big deal. It also helped to use a little extra flux. I got some that was safe for electronics work in a little tin from a giant electronics chain.

Next was the hard part: getting the harness in there. Lord. This experience was so harrowing I don't even want to think about it. You gotta work through the pickup slots and the F-holes the whole time. I have big lardo mega fingers so this was not easy. You pull the pots and other components through w/ string (I used thread, doubled up) and it is even more difficult than you'd expect. The whole thing was a mess:

Eventually, I got 'em in though and it was honestly thrilling to finally be done w/ it. It took me over a week whereas it takes me maybe two hours to wire up a regular electric guitar. I must say the new pickups are really sharp:

As mentioned, they are GFS Retrotrons. Specifically, the bridge is a Hot Liverpool and the neck is a regular Liverpool. They are modeled after the old FilterTron pickups like you might see in a Gretsch. It's at least a distinctive look where people can tell it's customized right away. The sound of them is exactly as hoped--very clear, bright but still smooth. It's brought new life to the guitar. The RS Guitarworks harness works well too. The volume knobs especially are much more usefull. The guitar doesn't get all kinds of dull sounding when you turn them down.

And here she is in her entirety, not bad for $200 and some pickups I had lying around:

SGeezuz is Risen!

2007-09-02T21:50:00.000-05:00

For some time now my SG Special Faded (2002-ish w/ the half moon inlays, too cool for words) has been in some sorry shape. It just sounded dull. Imagine you have the deadest strings you've ever had in your life only worse. Even brand new strings would sound bright but there'd be this weird undercurrent of mud. I couldn't figure it out. I swapped in two different sets of pickups and dropped in a replacement bridge and it sounded different, maybe better, but there was still a general problem w/ the overall sound. Eventually, I narrowed it down to the bridge posts. This had been my one workhorse guitar for many, many years and over time my sweat had actually weakened the wood around the original posts. As you can see here, especially on the bottom, it is pretty gross:

(Also, you can see the GFS Crusader pickup I have in the bridge there. Great sounding pickup. Judging by the appearance it is meant to be a Duncan Invader clone and I guess it is pretty close in terms of output but maybe it's not quite a snarly and a little warmer sounding.)

Now since the wood surrounding the posts was the problem, I was either going to have to drill them out and dowel them or find a bridge w/ larger posts. I opted for the later. The bridge I used is a Gotoh tune-o-matic:

As you can see, they mount on big bushings almost like a wraparound bridge. Some people don't like Gotoh hardware but I think they're nuts. I have some Gotoh mini tuners on my baritone and I think they're as good as anything. I think they get a bad name because they're more of a budget brand but, honestly, they're made in Japan and I doubt many humans on this planet could tell the difference between their stuff and, say, Schaller in a practical setting (not to say that the Schaller aren't made better--I don't know one way or the other).

The installation of this is simple (though it took a good deal of web searching for me to be satisfied that I knew what I was doing). You just drill holes and tap 'em in w/ a mallet. It's that simple. I wanted to use an 11 mm bit but my local orange warehouse of overpriced tools didn't have metric bits. I settled for 7/16 inch. Since my drill press isn't large enough to drill tune-o-matic posts, I made a little guide out of some scrap MDF. To judge my depth I used a piece of masking tape, which always works like a charm.

As you can see, there' s not much marine of error between he depth I needed for the bushings and the thin SG body:

I very carefully drilled through a piece of masking tape. (The tape keeps the finish from chipping--not a big deal on this guitar.) It worked well enough:

I pressed in the bushings w/ my fingers and then gave 'em a few good whacks w/ a rubber mallet for good measure. I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about things but it feel sturdy to me. The holes in the pick guard weren't big enough for the bushings so I routed it out to fit them. Kinda got a little wild w/ it so it's not pretty:

Fortunately, this is mostly covered by the bridge posts once it's fully installed. It also so happens that the tops of the bushings are just about flush w/ the pickguard.

W/ that taken care of, I decided I might as well change out the tuners while I was at it. I had some Planet Waves auto-trimmers on there for a couple years and while I like 'em OK, I could never really get used to them. Also, I lost a piece of one of them so I had to put on of the original Gibson tuners on there, which looked kinda cool in a used and abused kinda way:

I liked the look of the stock Gibsons but I thought I might try something else just because so I got some Grover keystone style ones that looked the same but hopefully are a bit higher quality. These are a cinch to swap out. Unscrew the nut on top w/ a wrench and and take out the screws on the back. Do the reverse to get the new ones on. Voila!

And there she is, the SGeezus. I need to give it a couple days to be sure but as of now it's looking like the new bridge fixed her right up. Since I detune two and a half steps down, the intonation is a little off (always the case w/ tune-o-matic bridges) but the sound is much, much clearer now.

No Hot Luthiery Action

2007-08-30T19:47:00.000-05:00

Sorry folks. I've been sidetracked. Took a wonderful vacation w/ my wonderful girlfriend, rented a practice space and took another wonderful vacation w/ my wonderful friends. During the minimal amount of time I've spent working on the three piece neck project, I've realized a) it needed to be expanded to a five piece neck to be wide enough and b) I have no clue how to go about building a guitar neck and am not quite good enough to wing it.

So....

New project! The cheapo guitar.

I have an alder body blank I purchased off eBay for twenty bucks so that's in. Next I'm gonna get a cheapo neck from wherever the hell I can. I have some pickups that I'm taking out of my SG pretty soon that can go in there, some cheap hardware and then I think I'm shove the guts of an old Big Muff or some such thing in there. I will use this guitar to slay peasants.

Baritone Body - Project Overview

2007-07-03T12:42:00.001-05:00

This is my first project. My task was to build a new body to use w/ a Warmoth baritone neck that I originally had on a MiM Fender Telecaster. The pickups are Mighty Mite p90s, which I can turn on and off w/ push/pull pots. Another push/pull pot allows me to switch the guitar into stereo.

Here are the posts, in chronological order:

Baritone Body
The Most Unsmoothest Cut
Rough Cuts on the Templates
Some Sanding
Neck Pocketing
The Pickups
Further Neck Pocketing
Routing--Stage One
Routing--Stage Two
Routing--Stage Three
Finishing the Templates (Finally)
Routing--Stage Four
Four Holes in the Neck
Neck Holes, Bridge Holes and Jack Holes Too
The Hall of Shame
Stained and Confused
A Less Painful Stain
Staining Update
Stained, Not Cleared.
Harnessing Up - Part One
Force Shields
Harnessing Up - Part Two
I'd Be Finished If I Didn't Screw Everything Up
The Flood and the Fixes
The Un-Baritone Body

Overall, I count the project as a success. Definitely a first attempt but none of the errors I made make it any less fun to play and I'm assuming they have at most a minimum impact on the sound. Nevertheless, here is what I will do differently next time:

Make a better template for the neck pocket. Just gotta be a little more patient. I spent plenty of time on this one but I rushed it.
Make templates for individual parts--one for the neck pocket, one for the pickup, one for the control cavity, etc.. Goes right along w/ the first one. These things take a long time to build so it will be nice to have ones for, say, p90s that aren't part of the guitar template so I don't have to be ever remaking them.
Not use the one step stain and finish. I will spend more time finding the right color of stain. The combo stain/finish was really hard to deal w/ on a guitar while the wipe-on finish applied like a dream.
Be more careful w/ the control cavity spacing. Seriously. This one was so tight it makes working on it miserable. I will also probably use thinner hookup wire. The stuff I was using was overkill and made my life even harder. The stuff didn't want to bend into place at all.

And here is what I intend to improve in the future as I find time to make the changes (and since I'm happy w/ how it turned out and thus am willing to sink a little more money in it):

Redo wiring to include a pickup selector switch. I will tell you what, those push/pull pots seemed like a nice clean design but they are pretty much impossible to switch on the fly.
New pickups. These Tonerider p90s look freakin' rad. I'm pretty excited to get these ones in, actually.
Probably shim the edges of the neck pocket just to get a little better stability. (It's not a problem really but it never hurts to try an improvement.)

I will, of course, keep you all updated of my progress.

Update:

As you may have seen in the Un-Baritone Body post, I have changed the neck to a cheaper one simply because I thought I could do better. I still may fix it up but as of now, I'm not wasting any money w/ new pickups even though I still really want to try those Toneriders.

The Flood and the Fixes

2007-07-02T20:55:00.000-05:00

Excuse my lack of posts lately. I got sidetracked due to flooding in my apartment. Some say it was an act of God. I don't know about all that but I can say whoever flooded my appartment can go fuck themselves. Here's a look at some of my tools to give you an idea of what I've been dealing w/:

Oh yeah--good times. I got it all squared away down here to the point where it's actually cleaner than when I started (which wasn't all that clean, admittedly) so I'm finally getting to finishing this project up.

The first step to moving the bridge over is filling the old holes, which is pretty simple. I first drilled them out a bit w/ a hand drill and then I glued some dowels in there w/ wood glue (I just used Titebond; I'm not sure it's the best but that's what I used):

I trimmed of the excess w/ a pair of end cutters:

I then used a grinder bit w/ my dremel to get them down as close to flush as possible. Placing the bridge in approximately the same place as it would be going, I saw that this whole repair would be covered by the bridge so I didn't bother touching up the finish. Maybe I should have but I didn't:

At this point, I redrilled the holes using the same method I drilled them w/ the first time (piece of tape as a depth guide on a hand drill). The "careful measurement" method failed me the first time so this time I used the "eyeballin' it" method to place the bridge. Worked a lot better in this case but I'm gonna figure out how to do it the right way in the future.

Before I put the bridge on, I took the chance to replace the screws I had the p90s in w/ ones of the proper length. It looks much better now:

Then it was just a matter of screwing the bridge on, stringing it up and making some slight adjustments to saddle height and intonation to get it playing well. Looks better than ever:

Getting the bridge pickups at the right height made a huge difference in tone. This thing sounds pretty great even w/ the cheapo twenty dollar pickups so I must've done something right. In the next couple days, I'm gonna take this out in the yard and get some nicer pictures of it and also try to do some sort of summary of the whole project. Until then, I think I'm just gonna enjoy it.

I'd Be Finished If I Didn't Screw Everything Up

2007-06-25T18:24:00.000-05:00

Well--it's about time I start wrapping this up. I've had a good half dozen layers of poly finish on there for over a week and it seems to have been about as hard and dry as it can get for a good couple of days so it's time I start putting the thing together. At this point in the process, I'm so excited that every minor set back sends me off on screaming rampages throughout my apartment and the surrounding neighborhood. However, it is all working out slowly but surely despite various troubles.

The first thing I had to take care of was the strap buttons. It just slipped my mind entirely to drill them before I started finishing. It was an easy enough situation to rectify. I just put some green masking tape over where I wanted to be (to minimize chipping of the finish) and drilled the holes w/ my hand drill like so:

I did get a tiny amount of tear-out but it was easily covered by the strap buttons and hardly noticeable anyway. I also had to redrill some of the holes for mounting the bridge and mounting the neck as they'd gotten a little gunked up w/ finish--no big deal.

The controls in this were rather close together and it really caused me a hell of a lot of trouble trying to stuff it all into the control cavity. I had to resolder a couple things here in there to fit it all in. The end result works but it's ugly. I'm almost embarrassed to post a picture of it but I will because it's funny:

OK. Not that funny but you have to admit that's about as ugly as it gets as far as guitar wiring goes. Anyway, once I had that taken care of, it was a snap to put the rest of it put together, aside from a few things I noticed that I'll get to in a second.

She looks real nice though:

Once I finish fixing the problems I describe below, I will take her outside and take some pictures in the yard where the sunlight is nice. Then me an my homemade guitar will sit together drinking beer and grilling burgers all afternoon--heaven on earth if you ask me.

The first and most agrivating problem is I lost the screws to install the p90s. This is what made me have a fit. I know they're around somewhere but whether that's in my toolbox or some landfill I will never know. I gave up after an hour of looking and went to my local super depot of orange colored home tools and duct tape to buy something to stand in. Not to my surprise, they didn't have p90 mounting screws. The closed thing I could get were some number four screws but they were only an inch long and need to be more like an inch and a half. This left me w/ not much room for adjustment. Indeed, practically none. Here are the pickups at their maximum height:

There's also a nice shot of the goods for those who are interested what my crotch looks like. It's only a little bit too low but I really spend a lot of time adjusting pickup height and getting it just so (doing this makes a bigger difference in your overall tone than buying more expensive pickups, in my opinion) so it's a bummer not to be able to adjust them, especially since the volumes between the two aren't really well balanced at all. Plus, it just looks funny and I can't have that.

Worse than that but somehow less aggravating is I didn't get the bridge on there quite straight. If you'll notice, there's a lot more room between the edge of the fretboard and the string on the bass side of the fretboard (left in this picture) than the treble. It disgusts me to the very core of my being (you can also see the brass Phillips head screws I used instead of the p90 screws):

Actually, it plays just fine aside from the highest string feeling a little weird but it really irritates me to look at it so I'm going to remount the bridge so it's all straight. The setup right now is somewhat cursory but it really does sound pretty darn good--especially the neck pickup--and feels nice to play overall. In fact, I like it so much that I've changed my mind and decided to keep the baritone neck on this one and build a new body once I've finished my neck (or more likely right along side it).

The Three Piece Neck

2007-06-21T17:35:00.000-05:00

Edit: This project is no more. It has morphed into a five piece neck and put on hold until I know what in the hell I'm doing.

W/ my first body almost finished, I decided to embark upon a new project. While the first body looks pretty nice, it is definitely a first effort and really about ten or fifteen steps below the Warmoth baritone neck I'm putting on it so I decided to make a new neck to put on it. This was my first, messed up body will find a good companion w/ my first messed up neck. It's almost poetic in a way. I'm going to build a new body for the baritone neck later.

This is gonna be a little ambitious for a first go but hopefully that just means I will learn a lot more and not that I will make a ton of mistakes and ruin perfectly good wood. I'm going for a three piece neck w/ an angled headstock. It's extra work but it will be fun. The fingerboard will probably be ebony and I think I'm gonna end up buying one pre-made for this one. It might be more interesting to try to do it myself but I'm on a budget here and I'd rather not splurge for the new tools all at once.

So far, all of I've done is the easy part, which is spend money on wood. I went w/ padoauk and maple. The contrast between the reddish brown of the padoauk and the near white color of the maple is quite striking and I think it will make for a very handsome neck in the end. Here it is:

From here, I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do. I figure I gotta glue it together and then do some other stuff and more stuff after that until the thing is a guitar neck.

Harnessing Up - Part Two

2007-06-16T19:24:00.000-05:00

The multimeter is more powerful than the very hand of God when it comes to trying to figure out what in the hell is wrong w/ the wiring harness for your baritone guitar. In all other things, the very hand of God is more powerful but in this one isolated case, the multimeter wins out. Here is mine in action (or right before or right after action, I forget):

Basically, all I use it for is a continuity tester to figure out what circuits are being formed when the switches are in various places and for this it works quite well (I also use it to double check that I haven't burned out any pots or switches by overheating them w/ the soldering iron). It turns out the mistakes I made were pretty minor and one mistake was actually the right thing to do in disguise. I temporarily soldered some the pickups on there so I could plug it into an amp and test it. Actually plugging the thing into an amp can be a big help. Sometimes, the multimeter will just pick it up as a break in the circuit but when you have it plugged in, you will hear the sound cutting in an out so you know it's just a cold solder joint or an otherwise weak connection. I ended up fixing some of the grounding and moving some stuff around to avoid short circuits and crossed wires. It is not the prettiest wiring job I've ever done but it works and it should be small enough to fit right in:

I think this is the first time I've ever wired up a guitar w/o getting at least one burn that blisters, which is pretty amazing as absent minded as I can be when I'm frustrated. The only thing that I'm not pleased w/ is that I couldn't get the solder to stick well to the back of the pot I'm grounding everything to so I ended up just grounding all the wires together and then grounding the back of the pot to that. The rest of the stuff will hopefully be grounded by the foil shielding in the control cavity. If not, I've got some more work to do later but I will worry about that when the time comes.

Force Shields

2007-06-14T19:26:00.000-05:00

Oh man, it was funny as hell when I went to RadioShack to see if they had copper shielding tape. The guy was like, "Uhhhhh... Here's some electrical tape. We have copper wire." Brilliant!

I just went to the great orange land of home supplies and got some aluminum foil tape like you might use for taping together duct work. The way I see it, it's metal and therefor it must be good. I doubt I will be able to solder anything to it so we'll have to wait and see if it actually works in the end.

The tape on the front is just regular:

But the back glows like an orb due to the radiation treatment I gave it in my secret lab:

I used the cheapest stuff they had which was really thin so there's a couple layers. I'm probably gonna try to finagle some sort of way to attach wires to them so the stuff in the pickup cavities especially might actually do something other than look pretty. I'm also gonna poke some holes in it so I can, you know, assemble the guitar and stuff.

Harnessing Up - Part One

2007-06-12T14:50:00.001-05:00

The wait in between coats gets me a good chance to wire up the harness for all the electronics in there. I'm not sure what everything does but I can tell you I've figured out one or two effective ways of directing small electrical pulses from the guitar pickup, through some controls and into a cable which I've hopefully managed to connect to an amplifier (not always the case though). Of course, this time I decided to do something strange to ensure I'd have a host of problems w/ this simple task. For starters, I'm making this a stereo guitar, which means that you can send each pickup to a separate amp. Some people do this using a stereo jack but I, being a crazy fellow, decided to put to go w/ two mono-jacks so I wouldn't have to worry about having stereo cables and a way to split the signal from them. Stereo mode is switchable so I can run it like a normal guitar and flip a switch to split the pickups between the two outputs. Also, instead of having an ordinary pickup selector, I'm making this so I can turn either pickup on or off w/ a switch. Each pickup has it's own volume and tone control and the switching is all done by push/pull pots, keeping the control layout clean and simple despite the advanced and amazing technology behind it all.

The first step of wiring all this stuff up is labeling all the pieces and laying it out in something like the order it's gonna be in when I'm done:

This is one of those things that people tell you to do and but you don't at first because you think it's a load of crap but it really does make things go a bit smoother. I label all the pots w/ a marker so I know what does what and put a little piece of tape on the back of the control cavity cover that tells me what color of wire is for what so I can remember if I ever have to open the guitar up to fix it or change the pickups (and I will). I also try to strip enough pieces of wire so I don't have to stop soldering every four seconds to strip another piece of wire. Of course, even if I spent several hours beforehand stripping wires, I'd still be about ten pieces short as the need for more wires tends to increase as you strip more of them. (This is actually explained by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but I don't have time to be getting into Schroedinger's Cat and so forth and it doesn't make any sense anyway.) It's also a good idea to clean all contacts w/ some steel wool even though steel wool feels really weird on the fingers and you hate it.

While I was doing all this, I found time to make some pizza, which I then ate:

Fully delicious. There's nothing that gets me more in the soldering mindset than pizza so I got ready and had at it. Remember folks, hot solder can splatter and cause severe bodily harm, especially to the eyeballs so, as always, safety first!

W/o eye protection it would have been really stupid to be waving the soldering iron like this and there's no way I would have lost less than one eyeball. Instead, I survived to solder for a half hour or so before I realized I messed up my design big time. And I think the reason why is obvious from this picture:

OK. Well--I doubt you can tell a single thing from that mess. Basically, I wired it in such a way that if I had both pickups turned off, the amp would hum as if the cable's not plugged into anything, which is no good in high-volume situations. Anyway, I've had enough for now. I'm gonna have at this son of a bitch w/ a multi-meter and a keen sense of logic in the next couple days. Until then, I will just have to be satisfied w/ nothing since it doesn't work.

Stained, Not Cleared.

2007-06-12T11:04:00.001-05:00

I have finally reached the combination of sick and tired of applying more coats of stain and pleased enough w/ how it looks finally that I'm going to start clear coating this sorry son of a bitch. As it is now, it needs a little work w/ some fine steel wool and maybe some sandpaper but it's good enough for me. The pictures look a little more purple here than in real life but I think this gives you a pretty good feel for the final color.

The front:

The back:

And that's all there is too it. I'm gonna put three or a half dozen coats of clear on it to get it nice and shiny, let it cure for a while and slap the thing together as soon as I can. The clear is mostly just to protect to wood but there's been enough scratches and other errors produced by my poor handling of the finishing process that it's really more to practice applying it than anything. It makes it look nice and shiny too, which makes my food taste better when I eat off of it.

Staining Update

2007-06-09T16:05:00.000-05:00

It's all been coming along quite well but there's really no new pictures or techniques being used to merit a full post. I've just been repeating the sand, clean and stain process and it's gradually getting to the point where I can live w/ it. The color is quite nice but I think getting it completely even is a pipe dream. I'm not worried. I kinda like it that way.

A Less Painful Stain

2007-06-07T11:13:00.000-05:00

I cleaned up the streaky mess I made on my guitar a couple days ago using 100 grit sandpaper and then worked my way back up to sanding it w/ 400 grit. I wiped off the dust w/ mineral spirits and it's looking quite a lot better now:

The hanging thing obviously wasn't working for me so I'm just setting it down and doing one side at a time. Oddly enough, the back looks better this time around:

The front doesn't look half bad though:

My strategy at this point is to keep adding layers until most of my mistakes aren't too noticable. For now, in between layers, I am evening things out w/ 4oo grit sandpaper on a block but I'm going to switch to 0000 steel wool once I get things a little better. Once that's done w/, I'm gonna give it a couple or a half-dozen coats of the wipe on poly to get it nice and shiny and then I'm thinking I might go w/ a wax coat on top of it.

Next time, I am going to use a regular stain and then just finish it w/ the wipe on poly if I don't spray it. The combination stain/finish has really proven to be a pain. Regular stain and the wipe on finish are both easy to get on in thin and even coats but the combination seems to like to glop up a little. If I were finishing a railing, I wouldn't worry about it but hopefully, this will be a bit more musical in the end. Oh well--I suppose that's how you learn.

Stained and Confused

2007-06-05T18:26:00.000-05:00

Finishing guitars is an artform in and of itself and a task to master on its own w/o having to worry about all the other aspects of guitar building. As w/ the rest of this project thus far, I'm pretty much jumping in head first and seeing what happens. In an uncharacteristic burst of forethought though, I did test several finishes out on scrap before hand to see what looked best:

The one I went w/ is in the very upper right. It is a MinwaxPolyshade finish coated w/ another couple of coats of a Minwax wipe-on gloss poly finish. The color is called Bombay mahogany and it really does look fantastic. It's not a perfectly smooth, mirror-like finish like you normally see on guitars because I did nothing to fill the grain but it has a beautiful hand-rubbed luster that gives it a real quality but still homemade kind of look.

The rig I'm using here (which is at the home of one of the most famous artists in Chicago) is just a bunch of coat hangers through the neck holes on a wooden bar I put across a couple odds and ends:

I had it hanging because every picture I've seen of people finishing guitars has it hanging. Unfortunately, the difference between when they did and what I'm trying to do is they're spraying and I'm brushing. Consequently, the body kind of swung around as I tried to put the finish on and I'd have to steady it as best I could by holding onto the coat hangers up top w/ my free hand (which didn't work very well):

This stuff is a combo stain/finish and before I applied it, I sanded it down to 400 grit, cleaned it w/ mineral spirits to get all the dust off and applied some pre-stain conditioner which is supposed to help the stain absorb more evenly. It worked OK on the front (and I do still really like the color):

But the back is streaky as a all get out:

I ended up deciding to sand it down and I'm going to have to redo it:

I think that ultimately, I'm just gonna end up making the back and the sides somewhat darker than the front. I think it will look pretty good regardless. I'm going to try to blend it into sort of a ghetto sunburst w/ the front. I'm sure there will be worse looking guitars in the world.

The Hall of Shame

2007-06-02T17:11:00.000-05:00

Yeah. The rumors are true. This is the first guitar body I've built and the first real woodworking I've done in my life so I fucked a thing or two up. Nobody's perfect. What can you do? Well--I'm gonna outline the mistakes I've made in the hopes that doing so will pound them into my head to such an extent that I do not make them again.

The thing that pisses me off the most is I did a round over along the edges of the little nub that sticks out for the neck pocket. I wish I had taken a picture but what happens is that the edges of the metal plate that goes on the back stuck over the edges of the round over just a little bit. I suppose the issue is mostly cosmetic since the joint still seemed sturdy but irritates me just because it wasn't caused by my lack of skill but simply from lack of thought. I probably didn't need to do anything but just for the sake of learning how, I filled it in w/ putty. The stuff I used is called Plastic Wood and fit the bill nicely in my case because it's both drillable and stainable (though it's pretty much impossible to get any kind of filler to match the wood). First I had to build it up w/ a putty knife (in layers so it dried right):

Then I sanded and shaped it with my random orbital sander and just sanding by hand (you can also see another little fill in the lower right):

I redrilled the hole in the upper left after this picture was taken. There were also some minor tear outs from the router that I filled in while I was at it. In the picture below, you can also see the filled-in gouge I made by carelessly lifting the router off the template before the bit stopped spinning. A moment of distraction can really cause a lot of grief in the end.

I didn't get the control cavity quite right so I ended up having to build up some little nubs w/ the Plastic Wood so I could drill little holes for the screws that hold the cover on. I'm not really worried abut these being too strong. Basically, I just want them to hold the screws in for the sake of appearance. I figure the two screws that can go into the actual wood will be plenty to hold the cover on.

These ones are small but they still tick me off because they were caused by carelessness. You can barely see them in the picture but there are a couple small fills there. One is by the pickup cavity and was cause by me marring it w/ the chuck of the drill when I was drilling the hole to the control cavity (which reminds me, I still haven't drilled a hole for the bridge ground). There are also two little crescent shaped ones on the bottom of the guitar which were caused by me not putting anything in between the guitar body and a clamp at some point in the building process.

There's also a couple tearouts just caused by my inexperience w/ the router. I'm not too mad about these--you gotta learn somehow--but they are still ugly no matter how you count it:

I'm using a dark stain on this and so far it looks like the fills are going to be fairly well covered up (though the finishing processes is proving to be problematical in its own right--more on that soon). Still, I have a lot of work to do if I want to start doing more natural finishes and I don't want it to look like crap.

Neck Holes, Bridge Holes and Jack Holes Too

2007-06-02T11:24:00.000-05:00

I wanted to try one more thing w/ the neck pocket before going out back and re-leveling it w/ a router. The neck holes, as I originally drilled them, were a bit too small. I drilled them so that the screws bit into them a little bit, thinking this would add some stability to the neck joint. What it really did was make it so that the screws couldn't draw the neck to a snug fit because they couldn't turn freely. I redrilled them w/ a bit one size larger and now I'm satisfied w/ how snug the neck screw in:

W/ that taken care of, it was time to install the bridge--a task which I had been feeling considerable anxiety over. None of my pictures of the process of lining up the bridge didn't come out (the pencil lines I drew didn't stand out enough to make them worth posting) but basically, I measured and remeasured, squared and resquared until I was satisfied I had the sucker in the right place. Then I drilled the holes carefully w/ my hand drill. As far as I can tell, it is nice and straight:

The bridge is a top-loading strat-style fixed bridge. I went w/ it for a few reasons, not the least of which was I wasn't confident in my ability to drill the string-through ferrules (now I realize that it would be no problem). I also just plain think it's a pain in the ass to have to thread strings through the back of the guitar. (So I took the easy rout? Sue me.) I bought the cheapest one I could find off eBay and later found out the reason it's so cheap is it didn't come w/ the mounting screws. I went ahead and got some good wood screws from my local but not locally owned mega warehouse of supplies for the home and garden. I put some strings on it and it all lines up and seems sturdy so I will leave it at that for now.

For the jacks, I followed a pretty straightforward process. First, I found where I wanted them to go and drilled a pilot hole for each:

Then I used a wood boring bit to drill the holes.The bit is either an improved version of a spade bit or a half-ass auger bit depending on how you count. One way or the other, it's a rather vicious looking implement:

Of course, my crappy little drill did not like pushing that three-quarter inch bit through an inch of mahogany and it bound up:

Eventually, I managed to yank it out and drill the holes the rest of the way through. Naturally, there was no possible way they could've ended up straight and they didn't:

So I put a drum sander into my cheesy Dremel knock-off:

I had at it for about five minutes and eventually got things looking pretty straight (unfortunately, they are not so straight now that I've screwed them in):

Since I had the Dremel out anyway, I also cleaned up that ugly mistake I made in the control cavity:

Compared to the third picture in this post, it's much, much better even if it's not perfect. I think I've gotten it to where I can live w/ it--not that I have much of a choice. Anyway, that's pretty much it except for the body aside from cleaning up some mistakes, sanding and finishing.

Four Holes in the Neck

2007-05-30T21:02:00.001-05:00

Drilling the holes for the neck was surprisingly easy. I'll walk you through it but I won't hold your hand.

I put some double stick tape on a thick piece of paper and stuck it to the base of the neck. I cut it to the shape of the neck heel and punch holes in it where the screws go w/ a ballpoint pen:

Then I stuck it in the neck pocket and used that same pen to mark where the holes needed to be drilled:

It looks really sloppy because of all the scribbles but those were just to help me find where the holes were. It's actually square. I double checked before I drilled the holes w/ my drill press, which I've been keeping in the kitchen for maximum humorous effect:

Ha! Funniest drill press you've ever seen, I bet. It didn't come out half bad:

Not half bad at all:

The neck pocket isn't perfect though so I'm going to have either re-level the pocket or add some shims, neither of which will be too hard:

See? There's some space in there, which sucks. Big time. Feels sturdy but I'm not gonna risk leaving it like that.

Routing--Stage Four

2007-05-27T19:09:00.001-05:00

It's perfect guitar-making weather here in Chicago and I took the opportunity to get some real work done and rout the pickup and control cavities. I was also hoping that I'd annoy the neighbors enough that they'd leave their backyard barbecues to come yell an me to knock it off, thusly giving me an excuse to rip their faces off w/ a router, but no such luck. I don't have anything against them but I just have a thing w/ routing faces. What can I say?

For the pickups, I taped the template to the mahogany and cleaned out the spots for the rout w/ a Forstner bit. Unfortunately, my drill press isn't big enough to do this sort of thing so I did it really carefully w/ a hand drill. I wrapped a bit of tape around the bit to use as a depth guide:

This trick works well enough for drilling ordinary holes but not so great w/ the Forstner bit unless you want to spend all day wrapping tape around the bit until its actually thicker than the head. I ended up pretty much just eyeballing it. It worked fine but it did make me nervous. For whatever reason, I decided to do this part inside and I have a feeling that I'm going to wallowing the strange sawdust a Forstner bit produces which looks for all the world like a big pile of pencil shavings:

There was quite a bit of cleanup to do w/ the router once I was done. As I've mentioned, the holes in the templates are jut barely big enough to squeeze the pickups in so I set up my router w/ a bit that was slightly larger diameter than the bearing that follows the template:

This actually ended up taking out a little bit of the underside of the template too, which isn't a big deal aside from the fact that MDF is hard as a rock and you really gotta hang on to keep the router from flying out of your hands:

The pickups fit in there really well. I didn't get it absolutely perfect but you really gotta look at it to see anything wrong:

The pickup in the picture is a tilted because it's sitting on top of its lead wire, which brings us to the next step: drilling the hole to connect the pickup cavities. I did this using a drill bit so long it's almost comical:

Seriously, it's about a foot longer than I need but my local mega mall of mega home supplies only has normal length bits and super long ones so I was forced to go w/ this. Drilling the hole was easy, you just start at the neck pocket and drill right on through. I forgot to take a picture while I was doing this but this should give you the idea:

The end result looked pretty good. I didn't get the hole quite straight so a bit of the bottom of the bridge pickup cavity was gouged out by the drill bit. I'm not gonna worry about it but next time I think I will try to drill a guide hole first:

W/ that taken care of, it was time to get onto the more difficult task of routing the control cavity. You would think this would be less critical--and maybe it is--but I wanted to set it up so that the control cavity cover would be recessed to be flush w/ the back of the guitar, which added a lot more work. First, in order to get the router so that it didn't cut too much away, I had to shim it up w/ scrap pieces of MDF. I'm gladI bought those extra clamps now:

I took off about an eight or sixteenth of an inch of wood for the area that's gonna be the rim of the control cavity:

I had started to remove the wood in the middle but realized that it was just gonna be removed anyway when I drilled out the excess wood w/ a Forstner bit. Thankfully, this time I could use my drill press and it came out much nicer:

I should note that I drilled the holes for the controls before hand so I could test the thickness of the top by putting the knobs in there. I also figured I could use them to get the template centered well, which didn't really work but whatever. So that I didn't rout out the wood that was to be the rim, I use the reverse of what I did for the pickups and made the template bearing larger than the bit so it left a little bit of wood untouched . In the end, I didn't do that bad of a job of it:

It's really close but even though that one hole is so close to the edge the pot still fits in there, albeit just barely. It's good luck rather than good planning but I'll take it. I ended up having to repeat the first step to get it so the plastic cavity cover to fit but I got it in the end:

The one last thing I wanted to do was drill a hole from the pickup cavities to the control cavity. This is where my lack of planning came back and bit me in the ass. Basically, my plan was to use a hand drill and just drill right in:

This would have worked great but the relative locations of the pickup cavity and the control cavity were such that it was pretty well impossible to get the angle right. I said a Hail Mary and just went for it. The drill bit came out of the rim of the control cavity:

It will be covered up by the plate so no big deal but I'm still sort of cheesed at myself for not seeing it coming. I drilled it out a bit and will clean it up w/ a Dremel or something at a later time.

And here is my little lady so far (looks nicer here than in person):

Finishing the Templates (Finally)

2007-05-22T20:44:00.000-05:00

Well, I figure it's a bout time I get it over w/ and finish up these templates, given that there's not much else to do until I'm done w/ them. All I have left is to make the holes to rout out the pickup and control cavities. The process is super simple. Do the rough cut w/ a jigsaw (drilling holes first so you can get started and turn the blade at corners) and file away until you are really, really, really bored of filing/

Cut w/ the jigsaw (notice the corner holes):

And you wind up w/ something like this and a lot of filing to do:

These files are actually pretty cool. They used to be my grandfather's so I guess you can call them heirlooms. Either way, they work rather well but slowly especially on my thick sheet of MDF:

It took me a hell of a long time to get them reasonably square. It sucked but it beats the hell out of not building your own guitars so there you go. Here's how it ended up:

The pickup slots are about exactly the size of the pickups. Of course, they need to be a bit wider than that so I'm going to set up my router in such a way that it adds an extra sixteenth or an eighth of an inch around the edges. Hopefully, that will do the trick. I will be damned if I do any more filing on this template.

Routing--Stage Three

2007-05-22T20:40:00.000-05:00

I turns out I should have been more careful drilling the holes for the screws to attach the template to the body; they were two small and one of the screws broke off when I tried to extract it. I had to bend the thing and unscrew it w/ a pair of pliers:

For the rest of this project I'm sticking the template to the body w/ carpet tape. It's almost too strong for the job. I was worried the tape would pull chunks of mahogany out of the body when I pulled the template off of it.

I finished up the neck pocket today. The first thing I did clear away as much wood as I could using a Forstner bit in my drill press to save wear and tear on my router and bits. I don't have a proper table built yet so I ended up clamping the template I wasn't using to it and supporting the body w/ that as I worked on it. It turns out that there is indeed a very fine line before clever and stupid:

Worked like a charm (somewhat to my surprise). A Forstner bit, by the way, is sort of an improved version of spade bit. It drills wide holes w/ a relatively flat bottom. It looks almost like a router bit:

I set the depth and drilled away until I had most of the wood cleared. The depth gauge on my drill press isn't too accurate so I did a few practice holes on scrap and double checked w/ a small ruler to make sure I didn't drill too much. When I was done, it ended up like this:

From here it was a simple job to clean it out w/ a three-eighth inch straight router bit and the template following guide. I worked very slowly and carefully and only ended up w/ a few minor mistakes that are (hopefully) mostly cosmetic and will covered up when the neck is attached anyway:

Ultimately, the neck fit in a little less tightly than I'd hoped but it does take a nice picture. Not too shabby for a first go at it, I say:

I realized another mistake I made which was not making sure the edges of the template were completely square w/ its top. There was a bulge along the in the middle of the template's edge that held the neck tightly but the template follower followed the top of the template rather than the middle so I routed out more than expected. It's close enough for rock and roll though. I'd imagine it's only marginally less stable than a standard tele neck pocket (which doesn't have support on both sides) and once I get some finish on there, it should fit in even better. If worse comest to worse, I will just insert shims on either side of the neck to keep it from going back and forth. The depth of the pocket and the very end of the heel are right on so there's no reason it shouldn't be stable in the direction the strings pull on it, provided I get the holes drilled properly.

Routing--Stage Two

2007-05-21T21:50:00.001-05:00

Here is a better picture to illustrate how I'm using the router:

You can see the cutting bit and how there's a little metal ring at the top that rests up against the template so that it follows it rather than just cutting all get-out out of everything, which it will do when given a chance. If the router was a member of the animal kingdom, it would most likely be part of the weasel family. Safety first:

Seriously, this thing spits out sawdust and wood chips like nobody's business--somewhat near the bottom of the list of things you'd want to get in your lungs and eyes. I really need to get some safety gear that looks more bad-assed. I just look like another geek in a flannel shirt in that picture.

At this point, it is just more of the same from the last time I routed. You take multiple passes around the template shaving off more and more each time. I did a little too much this time and it cased some problems, not the least of which was that it made the router harder to control. Next time, I will stick to taking of a quarter of an inch at once, maybe even less until I get a better hang of it. My router bit wasn't long enough to get the whole thing, so eventually I had to take the template off to get the last quarter inch or so. (I used the part of the body I'd already cut out as a template for the rest of it.) It made me a bit nervous not to have the template on but I came through OK. Once I had the whole thing shaped I used a roundover bit in my router to smooth the harsh edges:

As you can see, there's a curved cutting edge and then a little bearing on the end. The bearing guides it along the edge of the wood. I just got it lined up and let it rip around the edges. It wanted to jump around but through strength and vigilance I kept it under control. This part was significantly easier than the rest of the routing, let me tell you.

Ultimately, I don't think I did half bad:

Definitely some tear-outs but nothing that bad. Next time, I will leave an extra sixteenth of any inch to work w/ like someone who's not a dumbass. This time, unfortunately, I'm gonna have to use some wood filler to fix the tear-outs. I'll probably darken the stain I'm using to hide it a bit. Besides, I think I'll kinda like it that way.

The Cost of Building

2007-05-20T20:30:00.000-05:00

When I tell people I'm trying to build guitars, the first thing they ask is how; then they want to know how much it costs. I will tell you this: don't get into building guitars to save money. Over time, yes, I suppose I will but the initial investment has proven substantial and quite frustrating at times. I think that even a well-stocked hobbyist carpenter or even a professional would find himself needing to make a pretty a substantial investment in tools. I'd estimate that I've spent about six hundred dollars in tools so far and that is pretty conservative. Of course, I have bought some things that have proven unnecessary but at the same time not a day of work goes by where I didn't wish I had something else to make the job go by more smoothly. It's very expensive to say the least.

Beyond even the initial costs of buying the tools, there's the expense of the consumable parts. A good router bit will cost you between ten and thirty dollars and you need several of them. Quality sandpaper costs more than you would think and you need lots of that. I've bought at least two drill bits that have cost me over ten dollars thus far and will have to buy more still. Then there's things like dusk masks, tape (I spent fifteen dollars on tape today), paint brushes and the gloves I've been wearing to test out finishes and so forth. Around every corner there's another dollar to spend--and he's hanging out w/ ninety-nine of his good buddies.

Of course, there's the price of the actual material of the guitar. The slab of mahogany only cost me fifty bucks--rather cheap for what it is mind you--but that's not the half of it. Even the cheapest pickups cost thirty-five bucks for the set (and that's bottom end) and high-end ones are going to cost you around seventy to a hundred-fifty and more a piece. You have to buy a couple or four knobs at three to ten bucks a pop. Then there's the wire, output jacks, strap buttons, the bridge, control cavity covers, the screws for the bridge, the screws for the control cavity covers, shielding for the control cavity, the pickup selector and more than I can even think of. These things cost money and it adds up pretty quick. My neck cost me around three hundred on top of that but if you were to make that yourself there'd be the cost of the wood, the nut mater, frets and the tuners--not to mention the additional tools you would need to make it. Again, this stuff is not cheap.

And then the labor! If I made minimum wage for the research and actual build time I put into this, I could feed all of the many starving people0 of French Indochina and have enough money left over to buy a Mexican Fender and a new Champion 600 which I could rock to kingdom come. You think about the time you spend actually doing the work but you don't realize the time you spend doing design, scouring eBay for deals or doing Google searches to figure out if the difference in spacing between a telecaster bridge and a p90 pickup will cause problems. (I would like to thank the fellows at Guitar Fetish for clearing this up for me. It's fine. Don't worry.) This might not be something you want to get into if you have a newborn baby or or one of the girlfriends who's constantly bitching, bitching, bitching that you don't spend enough time w/ her (mine does not, otherwise she could not stand to be around me).

So... W/ all this said you might think I'd want to discourage you from building--and I do, if you are in it to try to get guitars on the cheap. I firmly believe that any clown w/ half an idea of what they want to sound like can go out and find a guitar that's absolutely perfect for them for under five-hundred bucks--and if that's all you want, do that. However, if you love guitars, love doing things w/ you hands and love not relying on someone else's craftsmanship, then go buy some damn wood and get building already!

Routing--Stage One

2007-05-17T18:17:00.000-05:00

Even though I don't have all the bits to finish the job, I figured I'd get a head start on routing out the shape of the baritone body. I had to do a few things first before I got started though. First, I used my jigsaw to modify the rough-cut body to compensate for the design changes I made in this post (the little block of wood is what I cut off):

I know, real exciting, right? Well--it only gets better. The next thing I did was take my hand drill to drill holes through both templates and the body so that I could attach the template to the body w/ wood screws to keep it from moving around while I used the router (the screws go where the pickups will be so there won't be any screw holes in the top of my guitar):

Woooo! And w/ that done, I am ready to rout.

I will take a second here to discuss routers since, honestly, I didn't know what one was before I started researching guitar building. Basically, it's a powerful electrical motor which spins a cutting bit at an incredible rate of speed. Mine is probably almost as sweet as a Buick Grand National--and I don't say that about a lot of things. What makes it so sweet? Have you ever found yourself w/ a block of wood that you knew would be a great guitar if it weren't for the fact that there's just way too much extra wood? Well--a router takes that wood and turns it sawdust:

Most people who make guitars use a template following bit, which has a little bearing on it so that it follows a template and only cuts the wood you intend to cut. My router came w/ a little template following kit that that allows you to use a regular straight cutting bit for the same purpose. I think this picture best illustrates what it does:

The light wood on top is the template and the reddish stuff below is the future guitar. The template following kit basically serves as a guard so that the cutting bit doesn't cut the template. The cutting bit itself cuts a narrow bottomed groove around the edge. (You can see that there is a little bit of mahogany sticking up in the middle that I missed.) You can only cut a little bit of the entire depth at a time or you run a greater risk of tear-outs and other woodworking screw-ups.

As I mentioned, the router bit spins really fast and can severely fuck shit up if you're not careful:

That took about one tenth of one second to happen. These really are one of the most dangerous tools you'll come across and utmost caution should be used w/ them at all times. Seriously, you can slack w/ some things but a router is really a beast to be reckoned w/. Fortunately, that slip up and a little tear-out were the only problems I had and it all came out pretty well:

As you can see, I'm only a third of the way though. I need some longer bits to finish up. Hopefully, I will get to that in not too long. For now, I am just pleased that I finally got to have at the mahogany after working on the template for so long.

Further Neck Pocketing

2007-05-15T19:47:00.000-05:00

It rained here today so I figure I'd get some work done on my templates w/ a coping saw. I had intended to cut the neck pocket part of the template that way anyway, figuring I'd get greater accuracy w/ that than I did w/ the jigsaw. Turns out I was buck nuts. Behold! the inaccuracy of my coping saw cut:

I drilled holes of the same radius as the corners of a telecaster neck pocket so that I could get those pretty exact. I also needed them so I could turn the saw. The cut ended up pretty rough to say the least. Still, it only took an hour or so w/ a file to get it just about perfect. I continually used the butt of the neck to check its size. You can see here when it's pretty close:

It took quite a while but I'm pretty confident everything is correctly shaped. Once I was done, I clamped the templates together and, using the file again, shaped the template for the overall shape of the guitar to match the neck perfectly. It's at the point where it's not quite force fit but in there good and snug, which I understand is what you want. It's tight enough that the neck will stay in there w/ no support (not that I would want to set a pint of beer on it or anything):

The file was really awesome to work w/. In hindsight, it would have been the right tool for shaping the MDF rather than the power sanders I used. It worked both faster and more accurately. I used it a bit more on the template to iron out some of the asymmetries and have a feeling it will see heavy use fine tuning the actual body as well once I get it routed.

The Pickups

2007-05-13T19:50:00.000-05:00

I chose Mighty Mite p90's for the baritone:

I'll admit it, the reason I went w/ p90s is because I like the way they look as much as anything. I think the nice cream color will go well w/ the dark stain I am planning on putting on the mahogany. And, yeah, I really do like the way they sound. Some people say they sound halfway between humbuckers and sigle-coils but, frankly, I just think that's on account of how they look. To me, they sound most definitely like single-coils, albeit a though a bit fatter and warmer than standard strat and tele pickus. My hope is that they will keep definition well in the lower baritone tunings. They seem to be notorious for noisiness so I'm going to have to take special care shielding my guitar. I decided on Mighty Mite because they were some of the cheapest available and they have a good reputation. Frankly, I just didn't want to pay for high-end pickups in the event that the guitar doesn't work out. However, I think if this does end up being as nice as I hope, I will reward myself by buying a nice set of Fralins to put in there.

Neck Pocketing

2007-05-10T18:40:00.000-05:00

One last picture of the baritone before I take it apart:

I figured I might as well pull the trigger now since I had to do it anyway. I wanted the neck so I could use it to help get the neck pocket just so. More importantly, I want to sell the body on eBay so I can use the money to buy more tools. It provides me an opportunity for a glimpse into the future of this guitar and how it will look w/ the neck on anyway:

Not too exciting but hopefully that will change. The body came out a little asymmetrical but rather than mess it up any more, I said what any good great guitar maker says when he makes a mistake, "I dunno... I kinda like it that way." Ultimately, I decided it looked better to have it reversed from how it is in the picture. The slight asymmetry and the fact that all my sanding narrowed the waist a little makes it looks a little more strat-like that I had planned. I dunno... I kinda like it that way.

Since I was doing some work anyway, I drew the outline of the neck pocket by using my carpenters square to draw some lines on there as a guide to keep it true and tracing the heel of the neck on there where it seemed like it should go:

Of course, I measured when I was done to make sure it was the proper dimensions. It just so happens I was dead on. I guess you do get lucky every now and again. When I get a chance I will take it out back use my jigsaw to cut it out. Probably at that point I will have the bridge placement and pickup routs figured out too but for now I'm still waiting for all of that too be delivered. I really don't need them to line it all up on the template since I have it all worked out on paper already but it gives me a little more confidence to be able to trace some things and to be working w/ them and the template correctly.

I should mention that I finished up shaping w/ a drum sander on my hand drill. Worked like a charm and hogged out the wood surprisingly fast. I didn't take any pictures because that part of the process is a secret.

Some Sanding

2007-05-07T18:45:00.000-05:00

We had some nice weather today and the best way to celebrate such good fortune is to go out in the back yard w/ a hunk of medium density fiberboard and a random orbital sander. I can always find some work to do on my fiddles when I have a little time and the opportunity.

I ran into my landlord while I was working and was pleased to find he was totally cool w/ me using powerful implements of electric destruction in the back yard. I didn't ask before I started because I was afraid he might say no and then I wouldn't be able to build guitars. (Besides, nobody tells me what to do.) His wife hates me for some reason though, probably on account of my hair being so much more stylish.

My task for today was to shape the two templates a bit so they matched better. In hindsight, I should have just shaped one template how I wanted it and then used that template to make the other but that really makes too much sense for me to figure it out the first time around. Instead, I just cut them as close as I could w/ a jigsaw and now I'm going to have to spend a couple hours making them match.

One thing that's cool about the Workmate is that you can flip up part of the surface so you can clamp stuff to it sideways (this thing is really proving quite versatile):

You can see from the picture that I had quite a lot of work to do though it went surprisingly fast w/ the power sander. I just had at it for a couple minutes at a time until I had the edges reasonably well matched:

I realize now that I made some mistakes when I was cutting out the templates w/ the jigsaw, the worst one being I tried on one to line up the pattern really close to the edge of the board so I wouldn't have to cut out quite as much. This lead to one of the templates having some flat spots around the edges that made it a real bitch to match to the other one. Ultimately, they ended up slightly smaller than I had originally intended.

I also could have saved some time had I had the forethought to get another sanding disk for my sander. By the end, it was really too worn out to do much of anything:

I should have replaced it before it was half this bad. Had it been the actual body I was working on, I would have stopped but since this was just the template and I didn't mind if it got a little scratched up, I pressed on, figuring the time saved by replacing it w/ a fresh one would be less than the time it would take to walk to get another.

Now, all I have left is around the neck pocket and inside the horns, which are still looking pretty gnarly:

For this, I need to take a trip to the my local home garden warehouse to get a drum sander, unless I want to do it by hand (and I don't want to do it by hand, I assure you). It should take all of fifteen minutes and then I will be able to do a little more work on the body. I do still need to get the control cavity, pickup routs and neck pocket done on the templates as well. It will all be done in time one way or the other.

Knowing is Half the Battle

2007-05-05T16:48:00.000-05:00

I'm not doing any building today but I thought I'd take a moment and let you know of some of the resources I've been using to learn how to do these things.

Project Guitar--There's a lot of good info here but really it's the forums that are invaluable. Whatever problem you run across, you can find someone who's been through it and get good advice.

Melvyn Hiscock's Make Your Own Electric Guitar--You can get this from any of the big online stores that sell books. It's pretty much the electric guitar builder's Bible. Ask anyone. W/ this and the wonderful folks on Project Guitar, you can pretty much do anything--if by "anything" you mean "build electric guitars."

Guitar Ed--This is my favorite guitar building site. Honestly, it's not the best for learning things but it is w/o a doubt the most fun to read. So many building sites are made by luthiers with a great deal of experience who make wonderful thing but what's great about Guitar Ed is a lot of times he actually makes mistakes, sometimes really big ones, just like the rest of us. The Beatcaster story always makes me laugh.

Those are just some favorites and there's been many other resources that have proven essential to me as a musician and a guitar player. Sometime, I will find the time to highlight my favorites of these as well as post some links to my favorite places to buy tools and parts.

By the way, you can comment on any of my posts w/ the links directly below. I will answer any questions you have to the best of my ability. I know that when I talk to people in person about guitar building they have all kinds of things they want to learn more about and I like nothing better than answering questions. Advice is very appreciated as well.

Rough Cuts on the Templates

2007-05-04T19:11:00.000-05:00

As I understand it--and I might not understand it well--the best way to cut out the outline of a guitar is w/ a template following router bit. Now, to do this, of course, you need a template for the router bit to follow. My baritone body is a non-standard shape so I need to make my own rather than just buy one. Oh well--I didn't get into this to save time.

The material I chose for my template was 3/4" medium density fiberboard (MDF). It's cheap and it gets the job done. I got enough for two guitars for about seven bucks at my local mega home supply super dome. To get the templates to shape, I simply traced the pattern onto the board and used a scrolling blade in a jigsaw to cut it out.

I should mention a small design change at this point which is to take off the little bit indicated by the line:

The reason for this is the double cutaway tele design would leave the neck pocket w/o wood on either side. As far as I know, the only production guitars that are made like that are really cheap SG copies and who wants to be like that? So I just decided to move everything in three quarters of an inch so that there's at least that much of the neck w/ a little bit of wood on either side. I'm not sacrificing much in terms of playability since the only frets that will be deeper in the body than normal are the 23rd and 24th which I don't use anyway. (The whiskey in the picture is Wild Turkey Rye. It's good; you should try it.)

The piece of MDF I got is much bigger than my Workmate:

I was worried this would cause problems but I managed to get each of the two templates cut out on smaller pieces that I could work w/ more easily:

I just did this w/ the same blade as I did the rough cut on the body. For the rest of it I switched to a scrolling blade which is narrower so that you can turn it to cut curves. I first tried the jigsaw in scrolling mode, which allows you to turn the blade any which way w/o turning the body of the jigsaw. This seems like it would be a good idea to try, so I tried it. It turns out that a jigsaw in scrolling mode is way smarter than me and I cut inside the lines yet again:

Fortunately, I was just able to retrace the pattern onto that same piece of MDF so I didn't waste it. No harm, no foul. I cut the rest of the thing in normal jigsaw mode on low speed. It took me a while to get a hang of it and I broke no less than three blades today:

The two that are relatively shiny are nice Bosch ones. The other one is the Skil one that came w/ the jigsaw which met its match quickly but gloriously. I broke all three of those cutting the first template. What I was doing wrong was basically not being careful enough to hold the jigsaw flat to the surface so when I tried to turn the blade it was putting all kinds of stress on it. I corrected this problem simply by standing up straighter and relaxing, which gave me a lot better control. I did the last quarter of the first and the whole second one w/o breaking a blade--which is a damn good things since it was my last one.

And here they are, like two peas in a pod:

The cut is pretty accurate but still rougher than in needs to be. I am going to have to sand them into the proper shapes. I'm probably going to stick them together w/ double-stick tape when doing the outside curves to make sure they come out exactly the same. The reason I made two is that there needs to be one for the front and one for the back. I haven't done so yet, but the one for the back will have a space cut out to rout the control cavity and the one on the back will have the patterns for the neck pocket, pickups and controls as well as the holes for the bridge.

Hopefully, I will get to all that later this weekend. I got my router today and am looking forward to busting it out on that sweet, sweet mahogany.

Polishing Frets

2007-05-03T08:59:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in an earlier post about having a StewMac fretting toolkit of which I only used a few pieces. What I've done w/ this so far is crown and level the frets on two of my guitars. One of the things that was appealing about the toolkit was that it came w/ this book, Fret Work Step By Step by Dan Erlewine. Now you would think that since the book was included w/ the kit, that the examples in the book would be easy to follow using the tools in the kit. However, this is strictly not the case and because of that I am still somewhat irked at StewMac and have since tried to avoid doing business w/ them. Their stuff tends to be too expensive for a hobbyist anyway, in my opinion, even though it is of the highest quality.

What I use to do this out of the kit is the six inch fret leveling file and the double edge fret file. My procedure for leveling the frets is to color in the top of the frets w/ a felt tip pen and then run the fret leveling file parallel to the center of the fretboard (it goes over the edges a little bit near the nut since fretboards are tapered) until the marker is gone from all the frets. Then I re-marker the frets and crown them using the double edge fret file.

I've done this on two guitars and it has made them both play much better. I've gotten the action lower w/o any string buzz. The only problem is that the process leaves a bunch of chatter on the top of the frets which the strings scratch against when bending. On the second guitar I did, I was aware of this and polished the frets w/ 0000 steel wool, which helped a lot. The first one is all kinds of messed up though and I decided I would have a go at those frets again to see if I couldn't get them cleaned up. (I would assume this is what some of the other tools in the kit are for but I've been unable to ascertain their proper usage. Maybe I'm just dumb, I don't know.)

I decided to bust out my cheapo Dremel knock-off on them. Safety first:

I'm wearing the goggles so that I don't suffer cruel paper-cuts to the eyeball from the green tape when I mask the fretboard:

A lot of people like to mask the frets one at a time but I figure it's easier just to do the whole thing all at once to get the boring stuff over w/. I just use masking tape for this and it's never been a problem. Some people recommend not using tape on maple fret boards. I don't know how important this is but I thought I'd pass that along for those who might want to try this at home. Once that was done I went after them w/ the steel wire brush attachment for my Dremel:

I just took it along the length of each fret until it looked like I got most of the scratches out, keeping it moving constantly. I reckon this got it at least as smooth as polishing w/ the steel wool. I then took it and, using a polishing tip I got at my local home mega home supply warehouse and lumberyard, I polished each one further w/ some Dremel rubbing compound:

Dip the tip:

And rub it down:

This, I think got it a little bit better. The improvement is noticeable but unfortunately this whole process still hasn't completely removed all the scratches. It's at the point where it doesn't bother me in the least when I play it but, honestly, I would be embarrassed to show it to a real luthier (unless asking for advice) and certainly I wouldn't want to sell it w/o warning the buyer of the scratches. Next time I change strings, I think I'll try some sandpaper or something or maybe just go at them w/ this process again. Perhaps I will even figure out how to use the rest of the tools in that toolkit. There is a learning curve to all of this and I am advancing along it slowly but surely.

Anyway, here is the guitar I did this all on. Introducing the Detonator:

It's a Peavey that I got when I was about fourteen and still a fine guitar despite having to put up w/ me for these last eleven years. The model name is Detonator and I couldn't resist replacing the bridge pickup w/ a Duncan Designed pickup by the same name. (What Squire is to Fender, Duncan Designed is to Seymour Duncan.) This is actually the first "good" guitar I got and it fell into sad disrepair after many years of abuse at my young hands. Eventually, I got sick of it sitting in its case and decided to bring it back to life, which is actually what got me into working on my own guitars (that and the high expense of taking it to the pros). I took it apart, sanded off the finish, prepped it and had my friend spray it w/ jet black automotive paint (does not negatively affect tone, don't listen to the naysayers). The pickguard was originally white but I just sprayed it w/ matte black spay paint (along w/ the pickup covers), which has held up much better than I expected. I janked up the holes for the controls pretty bad so each one has a great big washer underneath it to cover that up. It's hard to see in the picture but in between the two knobs is a coil splitter for the humbucker which gives me bona fide strat-type bridge tones in addition to the humbucker sound. Very versatile and the neck plays like a dream, very slender w/ a wide, flat fretboard.

The Most Unsmoothest Cut

2007-04-29T14:30:00.000-05:00

I took advantage of the beautiful Chicago weather today and roughed out the body for the baritone. First I made a template from poster board which I had around the house for some long ago abandoned art project:

I did this by tracing the cutaway half of my ASAT and carefully scoring a center line w/ a pen and my carpenter's square, folding it in half and cutting it out. I've been doing this stuff since preschool and never was really good at it but I took my time and used the square so it came out pretty true. I then used my square again to get aligned on the mahogany [impossible to spell!] and I traced it w/ a Bic engineering pencil.

The line doesn't come out too well in the picture but it's easy enough to see in person. In the next week I'm going to use the poster board stencil to trace a proper template to use w/ my router. It would probably have made sense to make the template before anything else but, what can I say, I'm a rebel. I took the blank outside and clamped it to my Workmate:

The cheaper alligator-clip style clamps actually worked better than the other ones. I ended up using five of those and only using the other ones where I had too. I was worried the Workmate wouldn't be sturdy enough but it held up great though some moments I did have to put my foot on it to keep it from toppling. I need to be more careful about placement and I think I will be fine.

The cutting went surprisingly easily. The Bosch blades were really great and cut quite smoothly. If this had been less thick wood and had I only needed to cut straight lines, there would be very little work to me done to get the wood ready for finish. I only had two problems.

Exhibit 1: Trying to cut too close to the line and not making enough relief cuts.

This is along the bottom of the guitar. I think I will just proceed as planned and maybe plane off a little of the bottom (and I doubt I will even have to do that once it's sanded).

Exhibit 2: Trying to turn the blade like a retard.

It's bent as if it were malleable and ductile material placed under high stress due to misuse. I'm just glad I had three of them. The next one I was more careful w/, which not only worked better but was safer.

It came out pretty well in the end:

Obviously a rough cut but I got rid of most of the excess wood. (I kept the scraps to test out finishes.) The horns were tough so I was cautious and left some extra wood there. Overall, I call the day a success and think I really earned this:

Baritone Body

2007-04-28T16:41:00.000-05:00

My first project is a new body for my baritone guitar. There's really nothing special about it that will make it a baritone body as the neck, which I got from Warmoth, is designed to fit into a regular 25-1/2" scale length guitar and turn it into a 28-5/8" baritone. Currently, I have attached to a body from a Fender Standard Telecaster, which are very fine guitars that Fender makes in their Mexican factory (on left, next to my Tribute ASAT for scale length comparison):

It is a very fine sounding and playing guitar indeed and very different from a standard guitar detuned to the same pitch. The tone is more woody and the low-end is solid and piano-like, sort of a cross between a tele and a P-bass. I'd prefer slightly higher output pickups but other than that there's really no problem. However, I need a neck for my body and really don't want the guitars stacking up too high around here so this body goes in favor of my new one once it's build. I look forward to you bidding on the eBay auction.

Now, I really like the tele body style and I think it fits the twangy tone of the baritone perfectly but I wanted to do something a little different. I'm calling it a double-cut tele and rather than describe it I did a quick mock-up of the shape w/ GIMP:

I will probably shorten the horns a bit from this but this is what I'm starting w/. Also, I didn't bother to change the pickup routs but two p90s are going into this one and the bridge will be changed to one similar to what's used on a hardtail strat. I haven't quite decided on the control layout but I am doing something unusual in that regard. I'm going to set it up somewhat like a Les Paul w/ two volumes and two tones per pickup but I'm adding another toggle switch and another jack which, when engaged, will tie each pickup to it's own jack. This will allow me to plug the neck pickup into one amp and the bridge pickup into another. Or, I will plug them both into an A/B/Y switcher and then I can switch pickups w/ a footswitch. This is the way I will actually use it most times. I hate having to hit the pickup switch in the middle of the song.

For wood, I decided on mahogany (a word which is nearly impossible to spell correctly; try it):

I leave it on the couch next to me so I have company to watch the White Sox games w/--pleasant enough to be around but yells at the TV very infrequently so I believe it to be a female block of wood. Originally, I had wanted walnut because I really like the way it looks and wanted a brighter, crisper tone but I couldn't find any. After seeing a beautiful natural refinish on a mahogany Les Paul online, I decided I would go w/ that over the alder or swamp ash you normally see teles built of. When I'm done, this should be a much warmer sounding guitar than my current baritone.

Let's see if I can actually pull this off.

2007-04-27T21:20:00.000-05:00

I live in a moderate sized single bedroom apartment in Chicago. My goal in life is to begin building guitars in this place. So far, all I have done is amassed some tools and done some research.

Big Pile of Tools:

This is where my nearly obsessive compulsive organization urge becomes apparent. I know and I'm not ashamed.

What I have so far:

Black and Decker Workman--This is the little bench. I just carried it home from Home Depot today. (Did I mention I was doing all this without the aid of a personally owned and operated automobile?) Let me tell you, it's only moderately heavy at the store but it's heavy as a motherfuck once you've carried it a mile on your shoulder. Putting it together was great fun too. I'm probably gonna take it apart tomorrow and put it back together just for the hell of it.
Free Drill--Black and Decker also. I got it for free w/ the Workman. (Take that, capitalism!) I have drill I paid for too but, you know, fuck paying for things.
Cheap-Ass Dremel Tool--I got this sucker to polish frets, which I think it will do just fine. It's not really Dremel but made by Chicago Electric so I know it was built in my hometown, Chicago, China. I got it for ten bucks from Harbor Freight, my favorite purveyors of cheap and shitty tools. All I've used it for so far is to tear the crap out of a hunk of Styrofoam which was fun as hell so as far as I'm concerned, it kicks major ass.
Ratchet Set--This one was made in Pittsburgh, China. I used it to put the Workman together rather than the bizarre and twisted wrenching devices included and that's probably the last I will see of it for a while.
Random Orbital Sander--This kind is the best for some reason. Ask anyone. Another score from Harbor Freight, also made in Chicago, China.
Straight Edge--Well, it's actually a straight-level tool but straight enough for me, especially after a few beers. I also have a carpenter's square when I need to see if larger things are straight. Yeah... You guys can take that and run w/ it if you want.
Skil Jigsaw--I left in the little case for the picture because I don't like you lookin' at it. It has scrolling action if I need it and I will once I make the templates. I got this originally because I wanted to get a metal-cutting blade for it and use it to remove a U-lock that had a key broken off in it. I can't begin to tell you how well that worked. Anyway, I got some nice Bosch blades for it and it will serve a purpose now.
Clamps, clamps, clamps--I've been told I need a lot of these so I am amassing a collection. Luthiers often collect at large conventions in order to train clamps, that's how much they like them. I like the ones that look like giant alligator clips best because they're cheapest. Let's hope the work. I got others just in case.
Assorted Safety Gear--I am too old to worry about looking like a dork. I wear my helmet when I ride and when I use power tools, I suit up like Robocop. Them shits are dangerous.

Not shown:

I got a really expensive fret-working set from Stewart Macdonald which came w/ a semi-worthwhile book on fretting. I use three things out of it but I can crown and level my own frets now so that's OK. Next time, I will just get what I need and throw the rest of my money in the garbage.
Soldering Iron--I love soldering! I'd do it all day if I could. I have changed pickups in my guitars just because I was bored on more than one occasion.

What I need:

Router--Probably gonna get this Hitachi one I've been seing on eBay for cheap (though refurbished). I need this to make the electronic cavaties and for the neck pocket. Once I build necks, it will be use to rout the channel for the truss rod amongst other things, I think. I haven't gotten that far ahead yet.
Finishing supplies--I'm not even gonna think about this.
Good Old Fashioned American Know-How--I don't know shit. My goal, at least to start, is to keep at least eighty percent of my fingers.
Probably a lot of other stuff but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

So that's that for tools. I will tell you some more about my first project, the baritone guitar body, once I get a chance.