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Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2010 2:17 pm
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Brilliant is all I can say Ceri. :wink:

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Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2010 3:23 pm
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That contoured heel is something that just never occured to me. Despite it being a much desired feature.

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Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2010 4:19 pm
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:shock: I don't want to carry the knocker thing too far Ceri but did you have to put the little poster of Raquel Welch "1,000,000 BC" under the guitar while you were working on the routing cover? :wink:

Nice to see you back at work :lol:

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Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2010 4:35 pm
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tdanb2003 wrote:
:shock: I don't want to carry the knocker thing too far Ceri but did you have to put the little poster of Raquel Welch "1,000,000 BC" under the guitar while you were working on the routing cover? :wink:

See, this is what I mean by "eagle-eyes". :D

I didn't even notice I had Raquel on my worktop (as you might say) till I uploaded the pics to the computer. Then I secretly asked myself; "I wonder who will be first to comment on that...?" :lol:

See y'all tomorrow.

G'night - C


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Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2010 8:44 pm
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Ceri wrote:
tdanb2003 wrote:
:shock: I don't want to carry the knocker thing too far Ceri but did you have to put the little poster of Raquel Welch "1,000,000 BC" under the guitar while you were working on the routing cover? :wink:

See, this is what I mean by "eagle-eyes". :D

I didn't even notice I had Raquel on my worktop (as you might say) till I uploaded the pics to the computer. Then I secretly asked myself; "I wonder who will be first to comment on that...?" :lol:

See y'all tomorrow.

G'night - C


I didn't miss it!!! Ummmm, great to see this coming along. looks forward to your pickup selection as they are not the standard cut you were mentioning...

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Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2010 8:53 pm
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Patterned for a vintage control cavity routing I note. Eight hole as opposed to 11. No shoulder. Is that by coincidence or intent??

By the way.....you can trash Raquel....my cudos go to the Mrs. on the photos. She get's directors credits in my book. Definitedly Oscar and Golden Globe nominee potential there. Maybe even a Pulitzer Prize. 8)

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Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2010 9:09 pm
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Very impressive Ceri. I can't wait to see the proceeding work. If you ever come to Atlanta Georgia, USA let me know. I would love to buy you a pint my friend.

Russ


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Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2010 11:19 pm
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Lookin good Ceri! 8)


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Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 8:08 am
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Lookin' good Ceri!!!!!!!!!!!1 8)


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Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 11:22 am
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DeadAhead wrote:
Very impressive Ceri. I can't wait to see the proceeding work. If you ever come to Atlanta Georgia, USA let me know. I would love to buy you a pint my friend.

Hi Russ: that's mighty friendly of you, thank you! Georgia is a part of your country I've not seen yet and I'd like to. I'd love to have a pint with you - so long as I can buy you one in return! Cheers man. :)

zzdoc wrote:
...my cudos go to the Mrs. on the photos. She get's directors credits in my book...

As the door knocker photos proceeded she got a very tired air about her. "Not another one, Ceri, surely? How funny do you think this joke actually is?"

Wives. They suffer us heroically - if not always stoically... :D

Cheers - C


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Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 11:36 am
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OK. There's been some suggestions as to the innards for this guitar, for which thank you. Now I'm going to ignore them all and go a different way. :roll:

Here's some hardware I have ordered up to stick on this thing:
Image

You see there a Wilkinson VS100 bridge, which is a model I've used quite a bit and like. The rest comes out of the EMG box and comprises their active SA pickup set. Essentially, this is the DG20 loaded pickguard... without the pickguard.

I've never owned a set of SAs before because I don't like the usual solutions to housing the 9V battery. But since we've sorted that on this body I'm hot to give 'em a try.

...They'd better be good! :lol:

However, anyone who's used SAs knows that while they look the same poking through a pickguard they are different beneath the waterline. They don't have the sticky out bit on most single coils where the hook-up wires attach to the eyelets. Of course, that needn't matter: they'd go into regular front routed pickup cavities perfectly happily. But that seems a bit sloppy to me: since there is to be no pickguard on this guitar I want cavities that fit the pups snugly without spare gaps.

Therefore, I can't use my regular single coil routing jig and must make a new one. In this next photo you see that "traditional" style S/C template clamped on top of a new piece of thick ply:
Image

I took a lot of trouble over that template and it's cavities are good. Therefore, I am copy-routing the neck, trem and jack cavities from the existing one onto the new template just as if routing them into a body blank.

In that last photo I had already routed out the neck pocket shape. Here's another pic just after adding the trem cavity:
Image

And here is the new template with those three cavities done:
Image

This is an analog copy process, and that always means that inaccuracies can arrive cumulatively - like making a photocopy of a photocopy. Therefore, whenever we do this we should take the opportunity to challenge the shaping of each part, in this case particularly the neck pocket. It is a chance to make the new template even better than the last one, if there is room for that. The exact curves of the heel end are the sort of thing I'm looking at closely.

Above, you can see I've marked the positions of the pickup cavities onto that new template. In fact I took those not from the other jig but from a spare pickguard - having triple checked that it is a good and true one. That gives me the correct location for the new cavities, but not their shape. To accomplish that I am going to make a jig to make a jig, if you see what I mean.

Here's a piece of MDF. I wouldn't normally use that for routing templates because it's sides can be too soft for the router to follow with pinpoint accuracy. However, for a one-off job like this it'll be OK:
Image

In theory, I should simply be able to use that fat router cutter to do a simple slot to create the cavity. The router is fractionally wider than the width of the pickup. However, in real life I don't think that will create a cavity quite wide enough - especially once the guitar has been finished. No matter how thinly the lacquer is applied it still takes up an appreciable space, and I don't want to finish the bod and then find I can't quite get the pickups in.

So annoyingly I need to make the slot a bit wider than the cutter, and that in turn makes the whole process much more complicated. Here is what the marking up looks like after I've added 1.5 mm all round:
Image

Now I'm going to route out the width of the cavity by using spare bits of MDF as fencing to make a temporary routing jig (so I'm making a jig to make a jig to make a jig...). Like this:
Image

...and then this:
Image

I suppose I could cut a fourth piece to go into that gap and route the full width of the channel at one go, but in fact I worked by simply doing one side and then reversing that arrangement to do the other. I also took some of the material out first on the drill press, as you see above. For some reason router cutters seem to particularly dislike MDF - and drill bits are far cheaper to replace when they get blunt than router cutters. Here is the slot with both sides done:
Image

The air gets particularly full of dust when you route MDF so both eye and breathing protection are necessary. I have an idea there is something toxic in MDF - formaldehyde, is it? Don't want that entering the lungs.

Next, I can't form a perfect curve by simply fencing the router, because the channel is wider than the cutter. So instead I carefully shaped the ends of the slot with a small sanding drum on the pillar drill:
Image

And here's the finished jig:
Image

Now it should be just a matter of positioning that over the "master" jig and creating the final cavities. Again, I drilled out some of the material first and this time used this short round-nosed cutter, simply because it is the shallowest one I have and so I can do the job in several passes, which is sometimes better for accuracy:
Image

However. At this point I made a mistake. Though I took plenty of trouble positioning the one jig on top of the other still when I'd done the diagonal bridge pickup slot it turned out to be about a millimetre too far to the treble side. Perhaps not enough to matter - yet I'm sure I'd never be able to look at anything else on the finished guitar 'cept a marginally misaligned bridge pickup cavity.

I contemplated throwing the master template in the fire and starting again, but then I decided fixing problems is kind of the spirit of this whole thread. So I got out some Milliput putty. This is a two part epoxy designed originally for sculptors and modellers, but it turns out to have multiple uses. It dries amazingly hard and unlike conventional wood filler you really can drill into it and it will take and hold a screw thread. It is excellent stuff, not expensive and highly recommended for all kinds of situations. It'll even set underwater - but that is thankfully beyond our requirements here:
Image

You cut off equal lengths of each sausage, mix them extremely thoroughly with your fingers till you have a putty with the texture of Plasticine and then use it as needed. It has less than one percent shrinkage, so you can be as precise as you want with it's placement. Here I've built up the treble end of my misplaced cavity:
Image

I let that set and then re-routed the slot, this time in exactly the right place. You can see against the pencil mark at the bass end of the slot how far I shifted it over - it really was less than a mil out:
Image

(Incidentally, that white Milliput is the "superfine" grade. You can also see the green "regular" grade earlier on this thread used as a filler in the control cavity. And I also used the white one to fill the backplate cover screw holes before capping them with veneer. Advert over - I am in no way affiliated... etc etc.)

Finally, here is the finished template, ready for action:
Image

Now, as you might have noticed in yesterday's episode I have already done some of the routing into the guitar body. However, I still haven't finished it and it is now dark where I live. Also, there will be a lot to show so I want to devote a whole episode just to the routing. Therefore, that will have to wait till tomorrow!

Same time same place...

Cheers - C


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Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 11:47 am
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Another great episode of my favorite thread!! :) Cool Mr. Ceri!!! 8)


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Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 12:35 pm
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fhopkins wrote:
Another great episode of my favorite thread!! :) Cool Mr. Ceri!!! 8)


Mine too, can't wait for the next installment.

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Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 12:39 pm
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fhopkins wrote:
Another great episode of my favorite thread!! :) Cool Mr. Ceri!!! 8)


+1

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Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 2:12 pm
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Glad you got home safely, and can now resume on the forum's best project. Nice job!


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