It is currently Mon Mar 16, 2020 11:26 pm

All times are UTC - 7 hours



Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 1508 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 ... 101  Next
Go to page Previous  1 ... 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 ... 101  Next
Author Message
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 12:40 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 1:10 pm
Posts: 13467
Location: Palm Beach County FL
nihil timendum est:
Seems to me he's been running that road all along. I would expect nothing less in future. :wink:

_________________
"Another day in paradise!"


Top
Profile
Fender Play Winter Sale 2020
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 12:41 pm
Offline
Hobbyist
Hobbyist
User avatar

Joined: Sun Mar 07, 2010 3:37 am
Posts: 53
Location: Tampere Rock City
Ceri, please, paint the headstock!!!:D

_________________
Fender American DLX Hss Strat RWOP->
Biyang OD-8->
Marshall JCM800 4211 -combo->
THE sound;)


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 12:46 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2008 10:47 am
Posts: 15336
Location: In a galaxy far far away
And whilst your about it get a load of queens park rangers to sign the body. :lol:

Nah on 2nd thoughts dont bother.

_________________
No no and no


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 1:00 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2008 10:47 am
Posts: 15336
Location: In a galaxy far far away
On further thought (this thinking can be addictive when you finally start it).

Hows about painting the neck, headstock and putting a very light board on it with binding.

Imagine it all in that beautiful wine burst.

_________________
No no and no


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 1:01 pm
Offline
Hobbyist
Hobbyist
User avatar

Joined: Sun Mar 07, 2010 3:37 am
Posts: 53
Location: Tampere Rock City
Nikininja, youre a wise man :lol:

_________________
Fender American DLX Hss Strat RWOP->
Biyang OD-8->
Marshall JCM800 4211 -combo->
THE sound;)


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 1:10 pm
Offline
Rock Star
Rock Star
User avatar

Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2009 12:01 pm
Posts: 3261
Location: Halls of ikea
zzdoc wrote:
nihil timendum est:
Seems to me he's been running that road all along. I would expect nothing less in future. :wink:

are you sure he's not just slurring his words, sloely,bit of dutch maybe


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 3:00 pm
Offline
Professional Musician
Professional Musician
User avatar

Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 3:31 pm
Posts: 2638
Location: Pacific North West, USA
Ceri wrote:
Xhefri wrote:
No way! You are going to make a neck????? You have totally surprised me on this one. I thought for sure you were going to put a Fender Strat neck on this Pryrocaster.....wow! :shock:


Yes! (C'mon: you knew it was headed that way really, didn't you?)

:D - C


REALLY TOTAL SURPRISE! :roll:

_________________
Xhefri's Guitars
www.xhefriguitars.com
Image


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 3:06 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:57 am
Posts: 13164
Location: Peckham: where the snow leopards roam
Trauma wrote:
nihil timendum est

Latin, huh? Well that's nothing to, ahem, fear...

nikininja wrote:
And whilst your about it get a load of queens park rangers to sign the body. :lol:

Can't think what you're referring to, Ninja. :wink: But I was planning on getting everyone down the Walmer Castle pub near my street to sign the guitar - I thought that might make for a nice paint job. You know what's ironic? The Walmer Castle burned down in a case of arson. Truly.

SO. Guitar necks. Can't remember if one of mine has been seen on the Forum before, but to start from the ground up, here's my original blueprint. You can see from the yellowing of the paper and the torn edges how long ago I did this. Been meaning ever since to do a master copy on good quality paper. Still waiting to get round to it...:
Image

You also see there a couple of templates, top and side, and some trussrods. The blue rods are from WD Music; the red one is Stew-Mac's version. Both are double action rods. (That means you can make the neck back-bow or front-bow, for those as are unfamiliar with this stuff. Personally, I've never encountered a situation where you need to force front-bow, but it's nice to know we could if we wanted. I guess...)

Now then. If we place a trussrod in position over the plan everything looks fine:
Image

However. Take a look at the side elevation, along with the template of same:
Image

What we notice is that if we use the blue WD rod it sits within the neck at a certain depth beneath the fingerboard (on the drawing):
Image

There is a crucial difference if we swap in the red Stew-Mac rod. The nut sits significantly lower down, so that access to it will be blocked by the timber of the headstock:
Image

Not impossible, but I did enquire of Stew-Mac whether this rod would be appropriate for a Fender style neck with adjustment at the nut rather than heel and they told me it would. Bound to say: it wouldn't.

I'm saving that red trussrod for a more tilted back three-on-a-side headstock. For this Strat style neck we'll be using a WD Music rod.

A salient feature of a Ceri neck is that it has a slightly tilted back headstock, as you can perhaps make out. That is for no other reason than to obviate the need for stringtrees. We've discussed before why Leo Fender's team ended up with a design that needed stringtrees to create downward pressure on the high strings. In short, it is to do with economical cuts of wood that were commercially available in the post-WWII period. Springing from those constraints everything else about Fender necks is extremely clever, neat and altogether a fine piece of industrial design that intelligently use readily available materials.

But those stringtrees always just quietly bothered me. They don't matter much, but they are an imperfect solution to a niggling problem. Staggered height machine heads are one way of avoiding them; a tilted back headstock is another.

The likes of Ibanez and Jackson also do tilted back six-in-line headstocks, but they start the face of the peghead right from the nut, like a three-on-a-side one, and that involves a completely different kind of construction. Personally, I like that curve on a Fender headstock from the nut down to the face and when I made my design I wanted to keep that. In the end I calculated that I only had to tilt the peghead back by a mere two degrees to get rid of the stringtrees, regardless what tuners we use. So if we like tuners without staggered poles we can have 'em.

BUT. That simple little two degree tilt back causes all kinds of manufacturing problems, which is why no commercial maker does it that way. As we shall see...

The last noteworthy feature of the Ceri neck is the shaping of the headstock. Completely cosmetic - but you have no idea how long it took me to arrive at some lines I found pleasing to the eye. In the end it is nothing very radical at all - sort of Peavey Omniac meets Blade.

But I like it, and vitally it doesn't infringe Fender's TradeMark. So everyone's happy. Oh, also it has significantly less volume of wood, so we can make a lighter body if we want without the guitar becoming nose-heavy. But that's another project thread... :wink:

Here are my templates beside a neck blank. I've pencilled the important lines onto the blank, though it's a bit hard to see:
Image

A close-up helps. The most important thing to remember all the way through the neck construction is that EVERYTHING works off the center line and the front edge of the nut. If we establish those two lines perfectly at a right-angle to one another and derive everything from them our neck will work. For reasons that will become clear (to do with fitting the trussrod) I've marked the blank out so that we will be working from the back of the neck:
Image

If I tilt the blank you can see how the back face relates to the side elevation. It's all so ruthlessly logical!
Image

You can see how I've extended the line of the front edge of the nut round the side of the blank. As I say, everything works from that line.

Though I am not shy of hand tools even I sometimes get lazy and use electric ones. Here, having decided where to position the neck within the blank we are taking off some surplus timber from the ends:
Image

Here is another shot of some marked up blanks, this time seen from the front, in case it makes things clearer:
Image

And from above, with the template in position on one of them:
Image

Now then. I could explain my procedure at length, but it would be very wordy and it is better to just show you through it. But you may have to just bear with me for a day or two to see why certain things are being done, and why in this particular order.

So. First, we need to route a channel on the front of the blank running the length of the headstock and leading into the trussrod nut adjuster hole. From this moment on we are already diverging from Fender's method of neck building (and most others, too). A small round-nosed router bit is the fella for this job, and the measurements I've carefully marked onto each blank tell us how deep the channel needs to be:
Image

To steer the channel in a straight line down the blank we could build a complicated jig (as many elsewhere on the net can be seen doing), or we could just use the fencing system that comes with most routers. In a fit of laziness that is what I do:
Image

Bad idea to just try and route the channel to the full depth straight off. Instead we will use the depth control feature of the router to drop the cutter gradually in a series of passes:
Image

When that depth stop is near the top of the circular rotating ziggurat the blade can only protrude a little way through the router base:
Image

As the depth stop descends, so does the blade:
Image

(For those that know all this and are finding it tiresome I do happen to know that this is being read by a couple of people who are new to routers and might be finding it helpful. So please be patient...)

The router sits on the blank and the fence system at the side is set to guide the whole unit along the timber in a straight line following the center line of the neck that we established at the start. This looks methodical: in fact, these machines are a little more challenging to handle than you might think and this can easily go wrong;
Image

But it didn't.

We route in gradually descending passes till the channel is exactly the right depth. The depth guide has a fine-tuning control to make this easier to achieve:
Image

And after all that, this is what I've accomplished so far:
Image

Doesn't look much for an afternoon's work, does it? To be fair you can multiply that because I'm in fact making several necks at the same time. Still, it's dark now so we have to wait for tomorrow to see the next bit: routing the trussrod channel from the back. Yes, indeed: we're going to insert our rods from the rear and then cap them with skunk stripes. Exciting, huh?

Will I be able to get my channels at the back exactly in line with those at the front? How will I join the two? ...This is the suspense element of the story, folks. :roll:

Toon in tomorrow.

Cheers - C


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 3:27 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Tue Mar 11, 2008 10:08 am
Posts: 9034
Location: Louisiana
Ahhhh!!! You don't know how much the forum and myself needed that post Ceri!!! :D Great work and explanations with your pictures as usual!! Thank you my friend!! :) :wink:


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 3:29 pm
Offline
Rock Star
Rock Star
User avatar

Joined: Sat Jul 26, 2008 9:56 pm
Posts: 3941
Location: Great White North, EH!
OK Ceri, that was better, though I am a bit upset that I didn't get a bevvy of my own :cry:

that said much nicer presentation, after all even in the workshop there is no reason to live like a savage!


On to the meat of this post, I await your progress on this neck with rapt attention. I need to find a shop and some tools, I have an idea, but sadly i think i will have to buy the body and neck to make it come to life, as i have no where i can do any real building. i barely have space to paint. :cry: :cry:

_________________
I'm not an expert, but I play one on the internet.

Image


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 3:32 pm
Offline
Professional Musician
Professional Musician
User avatar

Joined: Tue Dec 01, 2009 9:22 am
Posts: 2175
Hello Ceri!

Dude! This build is.....Epic! I'm loving the Headstock shape! Award yourself 50 points! I thoughly enjoy these build threads. I've learn't so much, and am really looking forward to how this progresses.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us

Andy (very excited!)

_________________
Pending Greatness


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 3:33 pm
Offline
Professional Musician
Professional Musician
User avatar

Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 3:31 pm
Posts: 2638
Location: Pacific North West, USA
Ich kann Latein nicht sprechen, aber wie über einen wenig Deutschen? Wow C, dieses wird groß sein!

_________________
Xhefri's Guitars
www.xhefriguitars.com
Image


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:08 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:57 am
Posts: 13164
Location: Peckham: where the snow leopards roam
Twelvebar wrote:
OK Ceri, that was better, though I am a bit upset that I didn't get a bevvy of my own :cry:

Oh Twelvebar, I just feel awful now!

To make amends I just ran downstairs to the, um, Mixology Department and ran this one up for you.

Last night it was the English Blackthorn: this one is the Irish Blackthorn. I have no idea why it has that name; there isn't a sloe within a mile of this recipe. Oh well:

* 1 1/2 measures of Irish whiskey
* 1 1/2 measures of Italian vermouth (hey, a different one from before if you notice. My drinks collection makes Alain's guitar collection look miniature...)
* 3 dashes of Pernod
* 3 dashes of Angostura bitters
* Serve over ice in a tall glass:

Image

Try it. Honestly, if you like it your tastebuds need to go in for a re-tread. What a waste of good ingredients!!! :lol:

BTW: is there something really SERIOUSLY weird about mixing cocktails over the internet for someone you've never met who is five thousand miles away?

No, I thought not...

Chin-chin - C


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:09 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:57 am
Posts: 13164
Location: Peckham: where the snow leopards roam
Xhefri wrote:
Ich kann Latein nicht sprechen, aber wie über einen wenig Deutschen? Wow C, dieses wird groß sein!


Für Sie ist der Krieg vorbei, tommy.

That's the only German I know...

:lol: - C


Top
Profile
Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:15 pm
Offline
Rock Icon
Rock Icon
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:57 am
Posts: 13164
Location: Peckham: where the snow leopards roam
Oops - and how rude of me...

To Andy and Hop; gentlemen, thank you!

As always.

'Night all - C


Top
Profile
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 1508 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 ... 101  Next
Go to page Previous  1 ... 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 ... 101  Next

All times are UTC - 7 hours

Fender Play Winter Sale 2020

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum

Search for:
Jump to: