And now for something completely different...

[Simon Barden]

The glue holding the board down is probably that bit stronger than the glue/resin holding the fibres together. If the fibres can be pulled off with masking tape in places, then that seems quite likely. The board is certainly weaker than the mahogany neck beneath it, orcsome of that would have pulled away as well, which doesn’t appear to be the case.

[JimC]

I suspect they are trying to minimise the amount of resin in the matrix. I suppose the two extremes are to have enough resin to fully encapsulate the fibres, which would give a solid block with no texture or grain effect, and at the other extreme to have so little resin that the fibres are barely bonded at all. Clearly some of the boards we've seen, mine for instance, have gone too far in the less resin direction. It feels like an awfully narrow window between too much and too little resin. Have you come across anything about how the stuff is made?

[Simon Barden]

There are quite a few engineered board materials, and Martin, Gibson and Fender (to name just a few) have all used the higher quality boards. Engineered doesn’t necessarily mean cheaper, but on a relatively expensive instrument, that’s rarely an issue. The higher-end composite boards are more like ebony in texture and smoothness, whereas the Kit boards are a lot coarser.

Which is all to say that I really don’t have a clue. How one type is made could be very different to another.

[JimC]

Ok folks, which body shape would you pick. The big black lump is the control box for the midi pickup, which has a major impact on the options...

I've decided I want a symmetrical body and not real cutaways. My current favourites are the first two. To review the rest it's a radically short scale instrument with a very short body. It's getting a through neck, and it's job in life will be playing bass parts and high fret access is not important.

[impala59]

Number 2 gets my vote

[fender3x]

I like 1 and 5.

[JimC]

And today's lesson is that measuring twice before cutting once isn't that satisfactory if you calculated once and got it wrong...

[fender3x]

Man, if I had a nickel for every time I've done that I could pay shipping from AUS forever ;-)

[dave.king1]

And today's lesson is that measuring twice before cutting once isn't that satisfactory if you calculated once and got it wrong...

One of our car club mob owns a water cutting business and another got him to make a flex plate ( flywheel for an auto gearbox ) and gave him the measurement in Cm and the guy read it in inches.

It was bloody huge, looked like a wagon wheel

[JimC]

Assuming I finish this thing I think I may have to have a competition in which entrants have to look at the finished article and decide which laminations on the through neck were originally planned, which ones are the result of a change of mind and which ones are purely there to work around errors...