EX-1 with alder body build

[Simon Barden]

And some bloody rebels would come and blow it up in no time!

[FrankenWashie]

And some bloody rebels would come and blow it up in no time!

Not to tell you your business, but you should maybe investigate repurposing the output from your thermal exhaust port in a cogen type situation internally within the station? Means the rebels will have to stage a massive frontal assault and they'll be cut to pieces by your star destroyers and turbo laser batteries. Just saying.

[Simon Barden]

Ha!

[Simon Barden]

I saw that YouTube vid as well.

[Ghaynas]

That star wars stuff sounds good, it must be great a guitar with that kind of theme.

[wazkelly]

Bit late catching up with this thread.

I tend to like the look of the grain in the timber and feel it may be wasted under a solid colour. Maybe a white limewash could keep some of the grain and still give a bit of white translucent finish?

With 2 stained timber explorer's in the house plus my eldest son having a genuine White one with an ebony fret board I can understand why you are considering white. Yes there is a lot of real estate that can be used as a blank canvas for some artwork on that rear upper wing but don't forget that is where you arm rests when playing one of these things.

Personally I am not a fan of the traditional scratch plate design but it does help with having the PUP selector switch located in a more useable position on that lower front horn.

Plenty of time to contemplate during your winter over there before it warms up enough to start applying any finish.

[Simon Barden]

I've decided on the pickups, and will be fitting two SD P-rails in there, for a whole variety of tones. I'll move one out of my RG-08 neck position, where it's being under utilised and fit a simpler humbucker there. So just got to buy one more P-Rails for the bridge position.

If the body wood had been cut in the traditional Gibson style, then I might have thought about going translucent. The wood's not heavily grained, but I might have been able to make it pop a bit more. But with the body planks being joined at an angle (presumably to minimise wood wastage at the factory), I'd really prefer to cover them up.

Still undecided about a scratchplate. If the end graphic doesn't take up the majority of the body but needs something in the scratchplate area, then I could make a clear one, then paint a design on the underside and finish the rest of the back in white so that it would still obscure the wiring channel I'd need to rout. What would be hard would be trying to continue a design that runs from the body and onto the scratchplate area.

Looking at pictures of people playing Explorers, most of the upper wing does stay exposed, so if I avoid painting anything important r on the top 2" or so of that wing, then that should be fine.

[wazkelly]

Nice choice of PUP's. Just checked them out on the SD site and the sound demos were sweet as.

Have to agree with you on the plank joints and if they are in all the wrong places or throw conflicting straight lines that would tend to force your hand with going solid colour.

[Simon Barden]

It would either need to be a solid colour or a very dark stain that helps disguise the joins, like on Frankenwashies near-black EX.

[Rev]

The larger print/copy/fax shops often offer prints with adhesive backing. You could always find, say, an old black & white photo you like, get a good matte print of it from a photo place for pence, then rescan and halftone it on your PC for high contrast, then have it printed on adhesive at the copy shop at a large size. Then you just carefully apply it over the front and clearcoat. I did that once with an ugly old rear routed strat-type I had lying around.