The FrankenWashie is dead....

[FrankenWashie]

cool build Franken, must have taken balls to chop up the old (guitar) body !

sure you have the skills and patience to make this build come up a treat bro !

I won't lie, It was a serious "WTFAYD?" moment when I first put the saw to it. It could have easily gone pear shaped with the cuts, but I'd allowed for errors in cutting (then made them for good measure) so it turned out okay.

Doing test routs with a pine blank to see if my templates are any good. The neck pocket rout has been tested, trimmed and retested and it's a good tight (and centered!) fit with the neck so that's one hurdle down, the trem cavity is the next one.

[wokkaboy]

sounds good Franken, well if you don't dive into the deep end of a pool you will never take the plunge, so might as well go for it.
I still get the shakes when I had to cut a neck in half for DB's tele clock we made him. Lucky I had a few cleansers before made the job easier hahha

[FrankenWashie]

Lucky I had a few cleansers before made the job easier hahha

But how straight was the cut?

[wokkaboy]

haha it wasn't too bad Franken, the clock is mounted pretty high on DB's wall so you can't really see the cut that clearly.
The hardest part was hacksawing through the truss rod.
Here's a pic of each half of the neck before the clock was delivered to DB's

[FrankenWashie]

Cool! I have a stainless steel scratchplate that replaced the original plastic one on the FrankenWashie's original Washburn body which I was contemplating doing something with. Could become a clock!

[wokkaboy]

yeah Franken never bin a guitar body, you can make heaps of things out of them.

I found DB's tele clock body in his bin, think the laminated pieces were coming apart, for once I sent DB to the naughty warehouse for binning a guitar body hahah

where does the Washie part of your username come from Franken, is that from your love of Washburn guitars ?

[FrankenWashie]

yeah Franken never bin a guitar body, you can make heaps of things out of them.

I found DB's tele clock body in his bin, think the laminated pieces were coming apart, for once I sent DB to the naughty warehouse for binning a guitar body hahah

where does the Washie part of your username come from Franken, is that from your love of Washburn guitars ?

Nah, I just used FrankenWashie when I signed up on my EXA-1 build, as the FrankenWashie was my first ever Guitar build. I hadn't thought of rebuilding it at that stage, I was more interested in the EXA Build, but given what I ended up doing with that one, it gave me a push to fix up the FW.

[wokkaboy]

no worries Franken, glad you are revisting your first build. If I have a spare decade or two I will revisit some of my builds !

[FrankenWashie]

m'kay.. so i am satisfied that the templates are okay for what I need to do and i have begun test routing the whole thing on a pine blank.
Not really wanting to screw up the Ash/Merbau combo just yet, plus i need t make sure that i can make the cavities i want for the upgrades without breaking through.


The key testers are the Neck pocket tightness and whether or not the Trem is a good idea, given the relatively thin cross section of the body. I know I can get short blocks for the FFR style gear, worse comes to worse if I need to I shall use my engineering shop at work to shorten the block some more.


The actual cross section of the original body was 36mm, i have attempted to replicate that with the pine blank, which is a fairly close match to the new body centre. if it all works out then all good if it doesn't then we may have to look at hard tailing it. First preference is the Trem though.

I splurged on a new plunge router, given that the little 400w trim router i had been using really struggled with the pick up rout, even after hogging a lot of wood out of it, so for the heavy work it has been superseded by this guy.



Its not top notch, but for the $99.00 it cost me i can deal with that,. Compared to doing the tail block rout and neck pocket with the Trim router it is almost zero effort and absolutely no stress about whether it can handle the cuts or not. I should have upgraded sooner.

[SIMpleONe89]

Great! If you find the neck pocket template too loose, just stick some masking tape and that will make it tight. As for the trem block, you can always set the neck at an angle and raise the tremolo higher, but not sure how high the limit should be.