Roland is pleased to announce the birth of Number Two, weighing in at 7lb 10oz, and a sibling for the HB challenge Telecaster.
Of course it's all
@TTony 's fault in turning me on to the delights of guitar building. There are a few others, name checked below, who contributed ideas and materials. For my second build I wanted to u
se a router to make the body, rather than buy a ready made one. The neck I thought would be a step too far, so I bought one from @GSPBasses. Of course this means that I needed to use cheapish wood to practice with the router, rather than waste a nice block of ash or mahogany. Enter the cheapest of the cheap, a sheet of B&Q Furniture Board, which is made of glued spruce strips. Even glueing two sheets of board together only makes it 36mm thick, so I opted for a ferrule block rather than separate ferrules to add strength.There were also a number of design ideas I wanted to try out: cutaway neck joint, perspex neck pickup mount, severe forearm and rib contours, and a tapped Tele bridge pickup. So thanks @TheGuitarWeasel for the Wapping Wharf and Californian. This allows six way switching: untapped bridge, tapped bridge, bridge and neck in parallel, neck, neck and bridge in series, both untapped and tapped. The only six way I could get, without buying a very expensive superswitch, was a rotary which I've had lurking in the parts box for ages.
I also wanted to try out a few manufacturing techniques. First of which was to resurrect the interest metalwork which I picked up at school, and make as many parts as tools and skills allow. Hence the brass neck plate, bridge, ferrule block, control plate and oversize knobs.
Having read so much written about Tru-Oil, particularly @WezV 's thread, I wanted to try it out for myself, and see whether it could be made to work over wood stain. @impmann suggested recessing the neck plate, which I will do when I next dismantle the guitar.
What now? Fine tune the set-up, try it at rehearsal on Monday, gig it at the end of the month. Then think about shaving the neck a bit thinner when I take it apart to inset the neck plate. Thank you all for your encouragement.
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Reading this thread has got me thinking. Hmm