Something a bit lighter...

I know, I know, 3 posts in one day... This will be the last, I promise. The archtop blog doesn't count though, because I took it from my other more general blog, and I figured I should move it here so this would be more complete and have a good start so I'd have some momentum to keep this thing going and not only that, but keep it interesting as well. What can I say, I'm in a writing mood today...

So last night was a long night... I finally finished planning everything out for the acoustic guitar I am going to build next semester. It is going to be sweet. The basic specs are Bearclaw Sitka Top, Australian Blackwood aka Black Acacia (same family and similar characteristics to Koa) back and sides, Cocobolo fingerboard, bridge, headplate and bindings, Sapele Mahogany neck, Gotoh tuners, Green Abalone rosette with some purfling around it, and it's going to be a slope shoulder dreadnought with a 25.4" scale length, Martin X-bracing, and a neck width of 1.75" at the nut and 2.25" at the 12th fret. I'm excited. It definitely took me a while to get the bridge and headstock design to actually look good, but I'm pretty happy with them although they may need just a bit more tweaking. I'll make scans of them and post them once I get them back from my instructor.

This is the Australian Blackwood that I go from the Australian Tonewoods store on ebay:

It was a lot cheaper than LMI and it looks really nice. My only complaint is a small pin knot that is on both ribs, but fortunately will likely be cut off when making the taper, but if not the binding channel routing will get rid of it.

It is going to be sweeeet.

And a shot of how the figure on the back will look when finished:

And the bearclaw Sitka top:


Yes, I am getting quite excited to build this dreadnought next semester...

Classes are going well, except for the fact that we only have a week and a half of class to get 4.5 more fret jobs done. I like fretwork, well most of it anyways. It's kind of a pain in the ass when you pull the frets out to do another fret job and a good portion of the fret slot comes with it. If bigs chips come out, you have to save em and put em back in. If you loose the chips, then you have to put super glue in the holes and pack rosewood dust in to fill it. It's fun stuff. Takes some time to fix a fingerboard. Once that's done, it's on to radiusing, cutting the frets, installing the frets, trimming the frets, beveling the frets, leveling, crowning, sanding, polishing, and dressing the ends. Those steps actually go fairly quickly, so I'm hopeful that I can get stuff done. I'm pretty much done with electric setup except for the mockup neck pocket routing, but I don't expect that to be too bad.

Speaking of electrics, I need to figure out what to do for the electric I'm building next semester. I want ideas for body designs, pickup configuration, headstocks, woods, finishes, etc... I've decided that I am going to do a strat style tremolo bridge with piezo saddles but that's about all I can make up my mind about. I do want to have at least one single coil on the guitar too, but everything else is up in the air. Let me know what you think! Comment! NOW!!