Ah yes. Thanks FW.
That's great info! Thanks for sharing so candidly and comprehensively.
I'm not sure I'm ready to take this task on, but it certainly give me some insight and takes away some of the mystery.
Good on ya & thanks again!
Making the world a better place; one guitar at a time...
So there are two or three other bits of fettling that need doing before I am ready to begin sanding and colouring.
One is the rear control cavity cover. The cavity is routed straight in, but there is no recess for the plastic cover.
I though of a number of ways of doing this with a router, but none of them struck me as being particularly easy to achieve, nor wholly safe. So I ended up using the cover to create a negative cardboard template and used that to mark out the cover shape evenly across the cavity.
I then laid the cover over that marking out and marked the screw holes, which I then drilled for the screw size.
By screwing the cover in place, it gave me a hard edge to run my marking out knife around.
This then allowed me to deeply engrave the cover profile, remove the plate and then set to work with sharp chisels to edge cut it and then start paring the ledge down to the required depth.
Unfortunately I had a brain fade and didn’t think to actually take any photos of this until it was nearly complete!
The next area to tackle is going to be the mounting for the output jack. It has the same issue as the control cover, but due to its position in the edge of the body it’s going to take some very careful work and some very detailed planning. More on that later
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FrankenLab
Hand crafting guitars, because Death Rays are expensive.
Great thinking workaround to get that sitting right. And love the extra little access area too, will make it heaps easier to get off when you need too. So frustrating trying to get covers off when there is nothing to grab on to.
Thanks mate!
i agree, not being able to grab the cover is a constant frustration with factory finished guitars and one of my pet hates, along with not recessing the covers. Why spend all that time making the body look good to leave the plastic cover sitting up proud?
FrankenLab
Hand crafting guitars, because Death Rays are expensive.
Hah! I thought that was a boo-boo with the chisel until I saw the pic with the cover in there! Good thinking 99!Great thinking workaround to get that sitting right. And love the extra little access area too, will make it heaps easier to get off when you need too. So frustrating trying to get covers off when there is nothing to grab on to.
Making the world a better place; one guitar at a time...
The original plan was to have the thumbnail cutout halfway up the straight side, but a sizeable pullout in the radius of that corner meant it moved. I think I like it better in the corner but it still need some refining.
I really need a spoon gouge or similar to get in there properly.
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FrankenLab
Hand crafting guitars, because Death Rays are expensive.
So some additional work got done to recess the jack point.
I set t up in my drill press with a 19mm router cutter and it did a serviceable enough job. I only wanted to get the jack itself flush with the curve of the body rather than protruding so the cut depth was only about 5 mm. I ended up with this.
There was a little bit of smoothing off to do but the final sand will take care of most of the finish detail.
with the Jack in place it looks like this:
There was an existing issue with the pot placement, even with the mini pots provided, I think i can get around this by taking another 3mm in depth into the pot cut outs, but at this point there is direct contact from the jack barrel to the pot casing. at worst I could insulate one from the other but i will see what els could be done.
The next job will be to get the board slotted and attached to the existing neck. I had a couple of crazy ideas for using some brass anchors and cap head screws for the neck attachment, but I also want to pare the end of the fretboard and neck level with the face of the body which would expose the two rear mounting points. I feel it needs to be one or the other, as i don't think both ideas will work aesthetically together.
Still we can review this for a different build idea brewing in the background. Never any shortage of experiments in the Lab!
FrankenLab
Hand crafting guitars, because Death Rays are expensive.
Looks clean Frankie. Nice technique