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Post by Tinkerer on Mar 5, 2020 22:54:09 GMT -5
That is absolutely gorgeous and just too cool!! What are the dimensions?
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Post by Riff Twang on Mar 6, 2020 1:06:20 GMT -5
Well done Peegoo, the guitar looks great.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 6, 2020 7:02:11 GMT -5
Thanks! The body measures 9" x 17" and is 1.5" thick through the middle. Overall length is 33.5" from the string anchor to the long end on the bass side. To the short end on the treble side it's 30.5". Total weight is 4.4 lbs. It didn't fold itself in half like a taco overnight, which is good I'll do final tweaking on the nut now that the guitar has sat overnight under string tension. I'm also going to stick a better pickup in there for now. The current one is dark and woolly sounding, like a jazzbox guitar on the neck pickup with the tone rolled halfway back. It does have a nice acoustic ring to it, and that is half materials/assembly and half luck.
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DrKev
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It's just a guitar, it's not rocket science.
Posts: 418
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Post by DrKev on Mar 6, 2020 9:48:41 GMT -5
That's just wonderful. Great job!
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 6, 2020 13:08:33 GMT -5
Merci pour les aimables commentaires, mon ami!
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Post by LM on Mar 7, 2020 13:22:18 GMT -5
That's very unique, Geno, and a work of art! There's not another one like it.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 7, 2020 13:48:40 GMT -5
Thanks LeftyMeister. It's a work in progress. I de-wound ("unwindeded?") the pickup to 10K, and it brightened it up a bit, but it has a mid-peaky thing going on like a "kocked wah" tone. Still not ideal. I also did some experimentin' on where to stick the strap buttons, and oddly enough (this is an odd guitar anyway) the best place for the recessed Straplock was on the front of the guitar. It hangs perfectly this way. If I had attached the button behind the neck area on the back of the guitar, it would tip forward because even with a forearm resting on the body, it is really narrow and the guitar bounces around when playing it. A strap attachment on the back would also get in the way of the thumb when playing up the neck on the 'no money' frets.
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Post by chronicinsomnia on Mar 8, 2020 1:01:13 GMT -5
I am completely blown away by this. Absolutely outstanding and way cool.
Wish I had the talent, patience and creativity that you have.
Excellent job.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 8, 2020 16:08:55 GMT -5
Thanks chronicinsomnia. I know this sounds cliche', but anybody can do this stuff--really. There's a saying in the custom furniture business that goes something like this: A good furniture maker builds good furniture. A great one knows how to hide their mistakes.
And I make lots of mistakes. I'm getting better at hiding them.
Time to cook up the next project. I'm thinking a headless Telecaster, or maybe one that's completely wacky with three tuners on the headstock and three behind the bridge. This idea is the result of having all six tuners on this project bunched up behind the bridge.
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gbfun
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Post by gbfun on Mar 9, 2020 14:08:23 GMT -5
Super good job ! Fun to watch you build too. I was pondering whether a penny or a dime was best : the dime matches the hardware but there is already too much chrome. An antiqued 2020 penny might match the wood better. It's a coin toss...
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Wrnchbndr
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Post by Wrnchbndr on Mar 9, 2020 14:34:54 GMT -5
Looks cool as hell. You never fail to disappoint with your composition. Wonderful little nuances. Is mojo happening?
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Post by Leftee on Mar 9, 2020 14:55:25 GMT -5
You should stick some little petal-sticky-uppies on it and call it the Corona-Caster.
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woody
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Post by woody on Mar 9, 2020 16:30:21 GMT -5
What a cool guitar! You do good work in that garage of yours. How's the tuning stability?
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 9, 2020 19:41:03 GMT -5
gbfun, I could not find a 2020 dime. I may use a penny instead.
wrnchbndr, thanks brother. The guitar seems to have mojo now. I stuck one of Seymour's STK1N's in it; it's a stacked humbucker Tele neck pickup designed to be lower power than a typical HB. I have one of these in the Stingray/Shamu guitar in the middle position, and it sounds bright and sweet there, so I figured it was worth a try in the bridge position. It does work well. Sounds like a 'rounder' Strat bridge pickup but without the hum. This guitar is a joy to play sitting down because of how you shaped the rear scoop; it rests against the leg and makes it easy to hold in position.
Lefty, I refuse to honor/commemorate mass hysteria!
Woody, thanks! It stays in tune really well despite pushing and bending the strings; despite my hamfisted technique it refuses to give in. I have 9's on it because I've got a persistent case of flexor tendinitis on my fretting hand and I need to ease up on it.
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gbfun
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Post by gbfun on Mar 10, 2020 18:39:50 GMT -5
A penny would be my pick... AND... it saves 9 cents !
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Post by Blacksunshine on Mar 17, 2020 19:55:02 GMT -5
Amazing work.
Just when I think I've see you do it all, you do something else.
I'm really impressed!
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 17, 2020 23:02:39 GMT -5
Thanks brother, I do appreciate the kind words.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 23, 2020 13:11:41 GMT -5
It's raining and I can't spray finishes, so I'm staying inside today. I decided to try a dual-rail humbucker on this guitar to see if it changed the tone, compared to the stacked Duncan pickup that was in it. It's larger than a Tele neck pickup and needs a cutout identical to a Strat pickup. So instead of cutting the existing plate larger (in case this experiment failed), I made a new plate from translucent tort and popped it into the guitar. This pickup is an improvement. It sounds bigger and 'juicier' (if that makes any sense), probably because the Duncan I had in there was designed for the neck position on a guitar. This pickup is not particularly high power or bright sounding. The really interesting thing is this pickup is a no-name cheap import I had in the parts bin from a pickup swap I did for a customer several months back. It looks like any other $10 no-name ceramic pickup you can get today. But it sounds fantastic through the Princeton, clean and dirty.
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Post by Riff Twang on Mar 23, 2020 13:24:28 GMT -5
I think that tort guard looks great on it too, but I am partial to tortoise shell so I may be biased.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 23, 2020 14:05:08 GMT -5
I agree with you; I like this look better than the pearl white MOTO.
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Post by Leftee on Mar 23, 2020 14:42:50 GMT -5
It does look better.
I’ve been a fan of the dual rail GFS pickups for years. Cheap and tonefull.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 23, 2020 15:20:31 GMT -5
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Wrnchbndr
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Post by Wrnchbndr on Mar 23, 2020 18:07:37 GMT -5
I love tortoise and especially against mahogany but not sure in this application considering the contemporary nature of the beast. I'm thinking stainless steel or aluminium -- etched diagonal lines or concentric circles. I've got 3 or 4 of those pickups somewhere but I can't find them.
Are there any negative playability issues that hint of resulting from no headstock mass? I got those when I did my harpoon basses. No way to prove it was due to the missing headstock but it felt like it. I've been shy about headless instruments ever since. However, The owner of my shop has a Steinburgerbrenner Bass with no such issues and is dripping with mojo.
Tell me about your tortoise and where you got it. Is is celluloid? I need .090 tortoise celluloid always.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 23, 2020 20:40:24 GMT -5
The guitar rings really well...I notice no loss of mojo due to the lack of a headstock. I have a headless Ibanez that has a wee hint of a headstock, so I wonder if their engineers were concerned about this: The tort material is called Tortoloid, from "tortoise" + "celluloid," but it's a modern plastic, not nitro/acetate which is misleading. I got it from Stooge Mac years ago. I like this because unlike all other tort materials, this is transparent. Looks like the price has gone up. The material I have is .090" thick and really stiff. It's also brittle, so drill carefully. Here's the thin stuff:
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Wrnchbndr
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Post by Wrnchbndr on Mar 24, 2020 15:28:02 GMT -5
This is my source. I sent them an email just a few months ago to see if they were still in business and yes they are. Its a lot more expensive than ABS but I'll pay to get that look that only real celluloid yields. You just need to be careful with it and not burn down your house. www.axinc.net/
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 24, 2020 16:06:27 GMT -5
The big drawback of cellulose acetate (for me) is that it shrinks. And yeah, I have caught it on fire cutting it with a Dremel. You barely have enough time to jump back, because it burns as fast as flash powder. And if you ever wondered why flash powder burns so fast, it's because it's made of powdered cellulose acetate [cue the danger music]. This modern Tortoloid stuff is stable over time, and it won't cook your eyebrows off
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Wrnchbndr
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Post by Wrnchbndr on Mar 24, 2020 20:40:11 GMT -5
Not sure if modern manufactured celluloid shrinks as much as some of the old stuff does. Yes, it's gonna shrink some cuz it vents forever. But... Its clear to me from observations that the manufacturing process has a lot to do with just how much its gonna shrink. I have a '64 Gibson LGO with a screwed on pickguard that is just as good as the day it was made while many of us have encountered those uber-expensive to replace bound Gibson pickguards that have degraded into ick and chips - half missing. I'll even see an old '30s mandolin with an original pickguard. How its made makes a huge difference. There are plenty of early Fenders with the pickguard screw holes tugging at the screws - old tuner buttons either dissolved into bits of booger and others looking fine. I like the real original fake tortoise shell. Nothing else gets that depth and gloss. I still use lacquer as my primary finish and I apply it so it will age gracefully just like a vintage guitar. I recently encountered a guitar I made 15 years ago and its doing exactly the right thing -- little bit of luck involved but my intent was there from the beginning. I believe all of this new celluloid comes from either Italy or China and who knows if they give this shrinkage issue any thought but I like the stuff.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Jul 13, 2020 10:14:18 GMT -5
I've had three diferent pickups in this guitar so far (a homebrew, a Duncan with a chrome cover, a rails humbucker), and although it sounds good, it's just not floating my boat. So time to try something else. I love the sound of the Filtertron; they do twangy and snappy, and they can also get nice and snarly when dialed up. So here we go. I'll have to rout for the larger pickup, so I took the guitar to bits, made some marks, and I'll make some mahogany chips with the router today. I'll also make a modification to the back of the body that allows easier tuning. When I originally did the back rout for the tuner knobs, it put the knob for the high E string a bit too close to two edges of the rout and prevented getting the thumb and finger fully on the knob. I couldn't completely enlarge the rout because of its close proximity to the bridge and the threaded sleeves that are pressed into the body from the front. Enlarging the rout would cause the cutter to hit the threaded sleeves and that would ruin my week in a big way. I considered several alternatives and decided to use a cove cutter to put a recess on the front corner of the rout. That will open it up a bit for the fingertips. I'm also slightly enlarging the recessed plastic plate (pickup surround) and changing its shape because I was not satisfied with the original size/shape; it seemed a bit off balance in relation to the size and shape of the body. Visually, it appeared too rotated to the right... The new shape (bottom outline in pic below) will fix that. Being a work in progress, this is usually how these things go for me. The really nice thing about this guitar (beyond its super light weight) is how it stays in perfect tune.
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Post by Tinkerer on Jul 13, 2020 10:37:01 GMT -5
Geno, changes in my TV watching habits have now impacted the way that I experience your project updates. Like my current favorite TV shows, I want to be able to binge read your updates. It is so hard to be patient and wait to find out how the hero some how makes it all good and right in the end. I have absolute confidence that in my favorite shows and in your project updates, the hero will make everything turn out fabulously, but the waiting on the edge of my seat is excruciating!! And now I have two of your topic threads that I am following with bated breath!!!!!
I am very curious to know your thoughts about what it is about this guitar that the sound hasn't yet been what you want? I've seen on these forums many times that sometimes "tone just happens," and that it is impossible to reduce guitar building to a formula that always works, but what is your sense about why this guitar with the pickups you have tried so far, has not yet gotten you to the sound that you imagine for this?
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Jul 13, 2020 11:48:46 GMT -5
You're crackin' me up, Tinkerer! I did not imagine or predict a sound from this guitar as part of the build process. I've never done that when it comes to one-off builds because tone really does "just happen," and shooting for a specific voice will almost always lead to disappointment. The process is different with guitar conventions, e.g., an ash Tele body, a maple/maple neck, and specific pickups known for their tonal characteristics: you stand a far better chance of hitting the tone target because the recipe is tried and true. It's not a 100% guarantee, however, because small variations in the build can all add up to something different. One-off guitars are most often "all-bets-are-off" guitars, which is why I find them so much fun because I *love* working on guitars...perhaps more than I do playing them, and I really love playing too. So these sorts of guitars not only allow me to be creative and succeed or fail, they also allow me to tweak to my heart's content until I think it's done. It may never be done. And sometimes I put something together, and it is just so 'right' that even removing the neck later on gives me pause because I might knock off that invisible mojo and never get it back. Building guitars is a lot like raising kids. One minute you're a proud parent, and the very next minute you're tempted to sell them on Black Web eBay In the case of this guitar, the pickups I've tried just are not working well with the volume-only control. It may be the headless aspect, or it may be the light weight. It may be all that airspace under the bridge. The tone lacks a "ballzy" component (for lack of a better term). It can get loud, it plays in tune, and it sounds like what most folks think an electric guitar should sound like. But playing it, the sound is sort of anemic and I think it's a dynamics thing. A really fine guitar, when it's dialed in, is a lot like a high-performance car: tap the accelerator a little too hard and you'll be facing the wrong way on the street; move the steering wheel 1/2" in either direction and you can wind up in the ditch. And in its current configuration, this guitar is not that. It plays great and it feels great. It just is lacking in the reponsiveness department, so I'm trying something different. I often wonder if Da Vinci finished the Mona Lisa portrait and it sat on the easel for several weeks in his studio, smiling broadly as Leonardo went about his other tasks. One evening after another failed attempt at building a model helicopter and drinking a jug of wine, he took up his brush and palette and changed her expression from a toothy grin or perhaps a duckface to one of detached bemusement.
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