#takosader's ramblings... six

[the-takosader]

Well, it's done!

It took most of the month, but it's done!

Please note: it is not finished. Projects have 1 rule: they're never done, they've merely escaped the first development stage. Same goes for this: it's escaped dev phase 1, but it's not finished, not by a long shot. To be finished requires more work than I can get done right now.

So anyway, how did we get here? After 6 months, several finger injuries and lots of swearing later, how is this the specific result?

Well, let me take you back to December last year, where I got the body and kit as a semi-late Crimble present.

Look at it. No modifications to the body, the kit's barely touched, and I'm taking the photo at almost 9pm.

Anyway, Jan 5th, I took the body, kit and a nut blank (a surprise tool that will help us for another project) up to my aunt's house, and we measured up the body to make it compatible with the neck from the kit.

There, we found a problem: the neck heel was too wide for the neck pocket in the body, by all of 3mm. I know, doesn't sound big, does it? Well, 3mm can mean a hell of a lot when it comes to woodwork and lutherie, because it can be the difference between a snug fit, and too big to fit in.

So how do we fix the problem? We decided to rout out the neck pocket, in order to make the heel fit in. However, doing that freehand is what we in the business call a Bad Idea. So we made a jig to guide the router. That just so happened to be on February 9th of this year, the 60th anniversary of the first Ed Sullivan broadcast which struck Beatlemania in the States.

Yeah, that's a side tangent all to itself. Now, returning readers with remember that I've mentioned February 9th before. Yeah, that incident where I got 3 new cuts on my index finger. To quote me from February: "Ouch."

Following a 3 week break to heal, I made up for lost time well. How, you may ask? By modding the body to fit most of the parts from the kit (I'd placed the pencil there to hide the nut):

I was very busy during the month of March, as these 3 photos can prove:

Yes, all 3 show effectively the same thing, but they mark a good point of progression in the completeness of the thing: not only had we designed, cut out and fitted a scratchplate to the body (well, test fitted. We didn't have the neck on yet, and we hadn't actually drilled any of the holes in either).

Apparently I just... didn't take any photos during April, so I have no record of when the headstock was carved out to make the cresting wave. It was either the 12th or the 26th, because I had a 2 week system for this thing, but when it got carved, I can't recall.

Anyway, I have a photo for May:

This is literally the only photo I took of it during May. As you can quite visibly see, we stained the top of the guitar. I did owe peoples another photo, though, so I got a couple more photos of it the time after:

Photos not only of it having been stained front and back (it was either that or try and get any dyes that got past the binding out - with sandpaper.), but also it in the final stages of assembly and setup.

However, I got it from my aunt today. So, you may be wondering, why did it take another week to finish?

The short version? Miscalculations.

So what about the long version?

Back when I got the body, it had a neck pocket size and depth meant for a standard Telecaster guitar neck, meaning that it had to be routed out to 59mm to fit the stupid thing in.

Notice how I mentioned both size and depth. That meant that not only was the neck heel too wide to fit it in, but it also sat too proud of the surface of the guitar. What that meant was that it created a neck angle that should not have existed whatsoever - the back of the fretboard was too far up in comparison to the headstock.

I took a photo of it on Monday, when I learned about all this:

Notice how it's missing a string. That's because the saddle for the A octave was sharp, meaning when the string was put under a little tension (seriously), it snapped off at the saddle, and pinged off.

So for this entire week, I've been wondering if it's going to be ready soon or not. Obviously, though, the answer turned out to be yes. On Wednesday, I received this photo:

If you're confused at what it's showing, it's the neck pocket's old depth (marked by it still being that depth), in comparison to the depth which it should be (marked by a chinagraph pencil). That got carved away, and now the strings sit much lower and actually ring out.

I got another photo yesterday too.

This one is the nut slots being cleaned up so the strings don't go sharp when fretted near the nut. You'd be surprised how common a problem that is.

And, of course, I got the guitar today. To end off this post, have a couple photos taken with natural light: