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the-takosader · 13 days ago

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It's Guitar Update Time!

So, last I talked about this thing properly was March, when I thought it was gonna be made of iroko rather than mahogany. Crazy how I thought that for a solid 2 weeks, but couldn't be arsed changing the spec sheet to reflect that thought. At the same time, I'm glad I didn't, because that would be a waste of a spec sheet iteration, and we're only just getting to Version 9.

I fully expect to have 34 .txt files named some variant of "The Crusader (Guitar Specs)" by the time this thing is finished, even if the only difference is a couple lines added or removed and an extra thing crossed off the price list (even though there's... 5 things left to go before I'm clear of buying parts).

Anyway, back on topic, progress is progressing. Me and my aunt actually built a body blank in the past 3 months. Here it was about... a month and a half ago, on April 25th.

Just now do I realise that this update has been long overdue, but fuck it, we ball.

So, as said, this is where it was a month and a half ago. A body blank, ready to be glued, and waiting on other parts. About a week and a bit later, because I want a full thickness maple top on this bastard, even if it's a PRS carve, and not the full arch, I got this massive lump of wood.

I know, you're probably wondering why it's still wrapped up if I'd just received it. Well, due to my policy of 1 visit every 2 weeks (worked out back in January of last year, because I felt me being up there every week, like I was when building the Fretless, was a bit too much), I received this the Tuesday of the week I was back up there. I mainly kept it in the packaging to make sure that a) it was kept safe from any scarring, denting or similar, and b) I wanted to see it in person for the first time when I was up there, where the natural light would most efficiently bring out the figure and dance of the wood.

Plus, figured wood doesn't like being in really different conditions. It tends to warp, quite easily. So anyway, I took it up that Friday, and we ended up nattering about stuff. Like, for example, the fact that caffeine is an irritant to your nervous system. That's why someone can get used to it, and even require it to function, and why it wakes you up so efficiently... as long as you're not too tired. How tired is "too tired"? My answer is when, after 2 mugs of coffee, I was still yawning and needed a guitar in my hands just to stimulate my brain to avoid falling asleep.

It... didn't work. Was nice having a snooze out in the sun, but also annoying, because I fell asleep in the first place. As much as my sleep schedule may as well not exist to begin with, doesn't mean I can't hate sleeping outside of "normal hours". Maybe it also has something to do with secondary school, but that is a kinda private story, and definitely not something I'm comfortable sharing to the 25 people that will actually see this on their dash (even if I talk to about half of them on the regular).

Anyway, that day, while it resulted in me falling asleep in the sunshine (something both rare and annoying, because how did I let it get that far), it also resulted in me and my aunt discussing stuff relating to the build. For one, we determined that the inlays of the guitar would be made of bocote. I know, wood names sound like they're all made up of random letters in a random order, like we're playing Countdown. "Iroko", "bocote", "panga panga", "cocobolo", "zelkova", they all sound like we're fucking with everyone who isn't slightly clued into anything related to wood and trees, but no, they're all real names for woods. You can look them up, I'm not joking.

Anyway, bocote. It's also known sometimes as Mexican rosewood, and is not to be confused with Madagascar rosewood, also known as palisander (side note: if you search up "palisander wood", you'll see a Merriam-Webster definition saying that palisander is Brazilian rosewood - this is false, it is most definitely not Brazilian rosewood, as you can still buy palisander without a CITES certificate being present at quantities and weights above 10kg). How do we qualify what rosewoods are? Well, there's a few ways.

The key one, really, is to look at the genus. True, genuine rosewoods with the fame and wonder are of the genus dalbergia. I've mentioned 2 already: Madagascar rosewood, and Brazilian rosewood, which each come from the genus of dalbergia, the former commonly being d. baronii or d. greveana, while the latter is of one specific species: dalbergia nigra. If you hear about a massive seizure of illegally-traded woods, it's likely to be this, due to its immense rarity and being the tonewood to end all tonewoods.

In case you've stumbled across this post with no knowledge of why Brazilian rosewood is the most sought-after tonewood in the world, on par with old-growth swietenia mahagoni, it's because they got used in Bursts. If you're new to the history of the electric solid body guitar, or don't really read about this stuff, a Burst (yes, the capital B is required, we're talking about big shit here) is a Gibson Les Paul guitar from between 1958 to 1960, subject to a common joke of "Of 1,500 made, only 2,000 are present and accounted for," making fun of the fact that "Bursts" keep appearing despite there being no way that some of them could have been made in that 3 year period.

Common characteristics of a Burst include a 1-piece mahogany neck with Brazilian rosewood fretboard, a mahogany body with 2-piece flame maple top, mounted with 2 PAF humbuckers, 500k Chicago Telephone Supply potentiometers, a post-mounted ABR-1 Tune-o-Matic bridge with stopbar tailpiece, and the "open book" headstock pitched at a 17° angle from the flat of the neck, a 2-screw "bell" truss rod cover, with a wide bevelled edge, with "Standard" never written on it, unless the truss rod cover has been replaced (though with how that would severely devalue the guitar, that basically never happens).

In short, Bursts are highly valued pieces of history (it often costs a buyer £500,000 to have it in their hands) which have also influenced woods. Now, where was I...

Oh yeah, bocote. Fuck, how did I get to Bursts from bocote? I don't know, I'm just going with it. Anyway, Bursts aside, and back to the build, the inlays, designed after a favourite of mine, the Rickenbacker 4003, will be made of bocote, and made to also act as the side markers using something similar to Gretsch's thumbnail inlays on their "neo-classical" fretboards, which are placed right at the edge to act as both the fret marker and side marker. Mind you, this design decision is only possible because the fretboard will be unbound. The main reason is that it makes refretting it far easier down the line, because I envision that I'll most likely play it that much, but the other reason is that I don't really like the vibes of a bound fretboard.

On acoustics, sure, I'm fine with those, especially if the binding is indistinct from the wood of the fretboard. But it doesn't really serve a purpose outside of that, from what I see, especially with Gibson's stupid fret ends that get removed 9 times out of 10 when you refret the things.

And that's putting aside the fact that this is my guitar and I get to decide what I do with it. But that's the be-all and end-all, isn't it? My shit, I get to decide what I do with and to it, up to and including custom graphics or silly little easter eggs that only I and my aunt will know about, usually because it ends up under the finish.

But that's neither here nor there. Importantly, what is here or there is that this is taking from some old Les Paul Customs known as "Blonde Beauties", which are kinda a counterpoint to the age-old Black Beauty LPC that has a completely black finish with ebony fretboard and (sometimes) 3 pickups. Blonde Beauties are known as such because they are natural finishes with maple fretboards, like a Fender neck. More specifically, this build is taking from the Blonde Beauties of last decade, when people were saying stuff along the lines of, "Why does it have to be richlite? Why can't we have real wood fretboards?", which was then swiftly followed by a sudden influx of dealers ordering Customs with maple fretboards for the first time since the 1970s (when the feature was first even a thing). The only massive differences between Henry J maple fretboards and Norlin maple fretboards is that the former were on mahogany necks and unlacquered, while the latter were on 3-piece maple necks and lacquered, which prevented them from becoming dirty worn to the bare wood and naturally stained too quickly.

As a point of contention, though, we went to talking about whether I wanted to make my guitar's maple fretboard out of the remainder of a plank she got in or around 1992 for her second build, or wanted a flame maple fretboard to go along with the top. I chose the latter, because flame maple is nice to use, even if it's a bitch to work with sometimes. Plus it meant that I could get a pre-sized fingerboard rather than having to cut it off that 30-something year old which has a split in it.

So that left me with an entirely new question - what fingerboard to get (fingerboard and fretboard are interchangeable, I don't care which one I use). I had six options when I first looked, and ended up doing a poll in the Curated Tumblr Discord Server just to see what others actually felt in terms of opinions.

While I think on, here's what the flame maple actually looked like beneath the packaging, if you were curious:

And to return to what I was talking about, with the flame maple fingerboards (I've now decided on using "fingerboard" to refer to the unfretted piece, and "fretboard" to refer to the "final" product), in making the poll, I had to obviously provide images of the 6 options I had available to me. Being that all six were the same price (£21.95 + P&P, which ended up being £28.90), it was mostly a hope for decisions based on figuring and grain.

Now, as you can probably guess, this stuff is about as variable as anything, on par with the weather here (I have a term for this, nabbed from a friend a bit further south - ADHD weather. Fits, doesn't it?). The main reason that it's so variable is because how figured woods grow, and how they get harvested. You can't just randomly find figuring in a rock maple tree. It just doesn't grow like that. Trees will want to instinctively grow upwards to maximise the amount of sunlight that they get. The thing is, they can sometimes start off sprouting at a somewhat extreme angle, or the land under them can slip and end up tilting the tree off the vertical, which the tree will naturally correct to continue growing vaguely upwards and out. These corrections are how you get flame figuring in wood. They are caused by the fibers becoming stressed. Other times, it can be caused by a fungus, or a bacteria eating at the wood, which will cause spalting. Spalting is most common in the white and black limba woods, the former also being known as korina.

Side note, korina isn't the actual name, that's just what Gibson called it. If you see someone selling limba wood, and it looks like spalted korina, it's the same thing, it's just someone not using what effectively amounts to a brand name, like how Vauxhall cars are named Opel in Europe. It's just a special name, they're the exact same thing.

So anyway, back to the fingerboards, the poll ended up resulting in a win for Option 6, which was numbered 711, so I wonder why that ended up winning (just kidding I know exactly why). I wasn't complaining, though, that's a really nicely figured piece, so it really felt like a win-win situation, if that makes sense.

After nabbing that off of eBay, and it getting delivered to my house from Staffordshire (which is just a couple counties down from Greater Manchester), that got taken up on the 23rd of May, and ofc while I was up there on that day, we got to nattering about all sorts of bollocks, including, quite obviously, the guitar, which is where the next spec update came in: chambering.

Now, I know what you're thinking - I said this wouldn't be chambered in every spec sheet variant I've made up until recently. I know I have, and the reason I did is because I was expecting that, with the amount of mass I'd need to remove to make this an actually functional guitar (cavities for the controls and the trem spring, plus the drop through for the trem itself, and then the pickup cavities and the neck pocket), I wouldn't need to chamber it out.

How wrong I was. See, it turns out that a 5-piece body made of solid mahogany and ash weighs quite a bit - about 4.46kg, including the two pieces of the top. For my readers over the pond, that's 9lbs, 13.32oz to 2sf. In short, despite wanting to avoid it as much as possible, I somehow made a boat anchor rather than something reasonable in weight. Needless to say, as soon as I found that out, I relented, and agreed that we might, just might, want some chambering in this bugger.

If you're confused where I got the term "boat anchor" from, I got it from watching Trogly, who uses it to refer to Norlin Les Pauls, as does just about everyone in the guitar sphere. Not that you'd actually want to use a '70s LP as a boat anchor, they're just coming up to the side of vintage that makes them appealing. That, and the water'd just ruin the wood. Sure, Henry J era Gibson made a few "sunken treasure" Les Pauls (no seriously, the run was literally called that), but you can't exactly get solid lumps of 50 year old mahogany anymore.

So anyway, the upside to learning all of this is that we got a plan of action for how everything's going to be implemented. Due to me getting some small yet necessary components early on (truss rod, pots, pickguard material for the backplates), we don't need to worry about those bits, and can get them sorted quickly and easily, with this plan of chambering also allowing us far more flexibility with the allocation of space for everything, considering what I want to put in and how I want to put it in.

Let me lay out how I want it to work: 4 pickups (one of which is a saddle-based piezo, so that's going to be interesting to install and wire up), all connected to separate switches that turn on or off the pickup, like the Red Special, all connected to and running through a stacked concentric 1MΩ pot with audio taper, acting as the volume control, with one being used for the piezo and the other for the magnetic pickups. These pots are then connected to 2 individual linear taper 1MΩ pots to act as the tone controls. These then meet up at the output jack where they would hopefully, hopefully, function as intended, and allow me both classic-style magnetic tones and more crisp and manipulable acoustic tones.

That's just the electronics side, though, and something that will only get done when I have all the prerequisite components. Speaking of components, the thing I figured that I'd need to get around this time is the bridge. Don't ask me why I've gotten the bridge but still not the tuners or neck pickup, I'm not rightly sure myself, but that's currently how it is. The neat thing with it, though, is that it's a real and genuine PRS part, even if it's most likely intended for use on the SE guitars rather than CE or higher.

Now, when I brought the bridge system with me last time I went up, as usual, nattering happened (putting the world to rights, and similar), but we figured out what specific style of chambering, if any, I wanted for the guitar: a modified version of the Telecaster Thinline's chambering.

In case you didn't see it when I posted it, I talked about the Telecaster Thinline in my post cataloguing what can basically be called the Life and Times of Leo Fender through the lens of someone with both too much and not enough time on their hands, an internet connection and a hyperfixation on guitars so massive, it took me three weeks to write the post because I wanted it to be accurate (and I still missed shit and fucked up the proofreading, so hey, what a surprise). I mentioned how it's a Telecaster with a thin-ish sheet of body material removed from the back, routed through the top, with the F-hole added, then they return a thin sheet of the material the body's made of to the back, so it looks basically untouched (as long as you don't know where to look). What I didn't get to show in that post, however, is this:

This is someone's recreation of the internal chambering of a Telecaster Thinline. More often than not, nowadays, it appears that people route from the top, rather than the bottom, to allow for figured tops (which I understand). As you can see, it's 2 large separated chambers, with a third behind the bridge, with interior walls of about 1/4" (just by eyeball, could be wrong) and the usual 1¾" deep body.

Now, I said that I chose a modified version of the Thinline chambering, so you may be wondering what I meant by that. Well, what I meant by that was just getting rid of the third chamber by smushing the two interior walls together, the logic being that by removing that third chamber, it makes it generally easier to chamber the entire thing, while keeping the main mass of wood in a block where the pickups and bridge will go. Also, I mostly made the decision over deliberation that lasted the better part of 2 or 3 hours while we sat and talked shop and our usual brand of natter; really just what I'd call putting the world to rights, but with less politics and more music.

That now leads us to today, really. Most of the massive things with the build happened 6-8 weeks ago, what I need now, more than anything, is the last few bits and bobs to properly assemble the bugger. As I'm writing this, the next bit I've ordered is that RWRP Tri Sonic that I've been talking about for literal months, reason being that I don't know what the direction is for the winds or the way the magnet's facing. No shade to Armstrong Music, apparently these are the best replicas if you don't want to get Adeson pickups (which, let's be honest, fuck that), but they could have done a solid and listed the wind direction and magnet facing, because that'd mean I'd know if we have to flip the magnets, swap the leads, do both or do neither, considering I'm looking at a CSU construction on the bridge pickup, so I'm hoping against hope that it's an ANU construction, to save us some work, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's anything like CNU or ASU, or if it's another CSU pickup. Sod's law can be like that, y'know?

Anyway, that's it, post is over, go home. I'll try to be more forthcoming with updates, and if I don't remember, well, c'est la vie. Who knows, maybe I'll manage to get the build done before New Year's Day 2026 (which may actually be difficult). That, of course, remains to be seen, though, and in the meantime, I'll leave you with this update.

#takosader's ramblings 17(000000)#okay so aside from guitar talk #why do we always use 17 as the qualifier for a massive number #why is 17 the most common “random” number #what's so special about it #gibson guitars #fender #warning: may contain woods #obligatory “fuck gibson” because £10k for a guitar is ridiculous #tw swearing

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