Did you freehand that rout Van? Pretty gutsy for first time out if you did!
Did you freehand that rout Van? Pretty gutsy for first time out if you did!
FrankenLab
Hand crafting guitars, because Death Rays are expensive.
I did some lines with a pencil so I had a rough idea where to stop. It was an angled single coil route so it was not that hard using a small router.
Oh yes and I did a slight belly cut on the TL as I think it's more comfortable and looks a lot more pleasing.
Additional photos
And of the other guitar
I just recognized I haven't told about the intonation issues I had/have.
I want to do that now so anyone who might want to do something similar and knows it.
The Tele is about 4-5mm short and the jazzmaster even a little more.
I don't really know why. I saw it coming on the jazzmaster but thought it would be okay with the telecaster.
Unfortunately I had measured the string holes on the telecaster instead of the bridge saddles which obviously can't go back all the way on a string through bridge.
I decided to try to guitars as they are and the telecaster is off by about a quarter on the 12th fret, so will probably just enlarge the string holes in the bridge to achieve another 3-4mm as I can't move the bridge without a risk of the routing showing.
The jazzmaster is all over the place which might force me to give it a hardtail that covers the routing but sits further back. Ideal would be a 2 point trem that allows a little more offset (which might be hard to impossible)
Ideas are still welcome.
Hey Van,
I've been lurking this thread (and every other Baritone thread) for a couple of weeks wondering if this situation might be the case. I've been worried it would be, but hoping I was wrong.
When you say "I don't really know why" I'm a bit unsure of how uncertain you are since you say you saw it coming with the Jazzmaster too haha. I've got a pretty good idea of the why, but I'll omit it for now and if you want me to drop the ramblings, then let me know and I'll pop that in.
But to try and be actually useful now:
I reckon you're absolutely right with the Tele bridge, if you can get the bridge holes to line up a bit further back that would work (as much as it would hurt to put a drill through a Babicz, they're such nice bridges). Tele bridges should be forgiving enough with the intonation range they have, so hopefully that does the trick.
The Jazzmaster, I'm not sure there's really any standard Trems out there with deep enough intonation ranges. And yea, if you were to get a hardtail or something on there it could work but it'd be a struggle to get the routing covered, maybe unless you made a new pickguard for it.
But, the other thought I had is Fanned Fret capable Tremolos.
There's not a lot of choices for these available, but they do exist, they should be able to handle setting the intonation back, and I would suspect without doing any extra routing at all, maybe worst case scenario would be plug and re-drill the trem posts. Downsides though, you probably wouldn't have a ton of room to get upward whammy action (though dives would still be normal) and, man they ain't cheap.
These ones are by Apollo Music Parts, and T4M (Technology for Musicians) respectively.
Nonetheless, I reckon these are both possible to save!! Which is good cos the stains on the body look good! Big ups on that!! And I hope they come together for ya!!
Last edited by B'Lark; 01-09-2019 at 12:35 AM.
Saying I don't know why I meant that I don't know why the neck does not fit the length/routings of the body.
I mean how will you make them fit on anything but a blank body? Maybe you could compensate it by using a non-string through hardtail but it would still be maxed out without any room for adjustments.
Drilling through the Babicz is indeed a shame but I guess it is the easiest fix for the Tele.
Going hardtail on the Jazzmaster isn't perfect but as I blocked the trem anyway as I don't want to max out the springs just for them to handle the string gauge.
Fanfret Tremolos are a good idea. But the cheapest I found are 90 Euros from China and a quality one would cost more than the rest of the guitar.
I will give myself a little time to evaluate all options and a look out for better solutions.
Thanks for the hint and compliment!
Ahh right, yea fair call. Yea itd all be down to bridge adjustments of some form.
Ohh, I hadn't thought of the "cheap" ones like that, 90's not toooooo bad but yea the quality ones are insanely pricey.
Yup take the time with it! Im sure there's other people on here who'd have better ideas than myself too haha
No worries! And hope it goes well!
I did some research and found that even the fan fret tremolos would be too short to fix the Jazzmaster.
For this reason I think I will put in a telecaster bridge (Wilkinson WTB) as it will cover the pole holes and routing and allow an ashtray cover. Let's be honest a monstrous jazzmaster/jaguar with four pickups and a tele bridge will probably look pretty rad ... but probably could use something to tone it down.
I will reroute the tremolo routing so it takes a tele single coil and add another Warman dual blade pickup (T-Raill Blazer). As the guitar has an awful lot of switching options anyway I will stick to that path. I haven't quite settled on which options to add because I am not sure whether it is more useful to do some parallel/serial/single coil stuff with the lower pickups or rethink the whole switching concept.
A quick and dirty idea of what it could look like without the cover.
Nothing new on the Tele as soon as I have enough time to spend a weekend in the workshop I will drill string through holes that are further back into the babicz and see if it is still restringable or breaks the string due to the back and forth angle going on. If the later should be the case I would switch to a hardtail bridge and a pickup mounting frame.
Really dig the new plan!! The 4 pickups gives me vibes of goofy vintage electrics, which I'm all about. No clue what to do about switching options, I'd be intimidated as heck by Series/Split/Parallel x4 plus anything else, but that does seem an obvious route.
Good luck with it! Smash it!!