# Headless 8-string multiscale build



## silent_k (Feb 24, 2012)

I have to issue a caveat right at the outset that this is going to be one of those infrequently updated build threads -- I tend to work slowly, and things are very busy these days outside of the lutherie part of my life, but I thought starting a thread here would be a good way to keep me motivated to do at least part of the build every week and post the progress.

I've had this in various states of planning for a few months, making a bunch of drawings and experimenting with various scaling options. This will be my first 8 string, first multiscale, and first headless build. I've only played one 8 string very briefly, but I've been inspired by Tosin Abasi and a lot of what I've seen going on here. I'm no shredder, but I like the idea of having those killer bass tones, and I'm curious about 8 string applications in jazz. Here's where things have landed specs-wise:

27-25" scale
Headless configuration using .strandberg* hardware
Dimarzio D-Activator 8 pickups (mounted perpendicular to centerline)
5-way blade switch, if I can manage it: neck, neck coils in parallel, neck & bridge, neck & bridge out of phase, bridge (this is my favorite electronics combo right now and I'm hoping I can achieve this with a single blade "superswitch" and no push/pull pots)
Tuning will be EAEADGBE

And now, to pics!












What you see here is a body blank of alder with a strip of padauk running down the center, and a bookmatched black korina/limba top that is currently being glued together in my basement as I write this. 






The neck blank is padauk and flamed maple. As you can see, one strip of maple is more highly figured than the other. Long, frustrating-as-hell story there, but it is what it is and should look good regardless. The middle strip of padauk is sized almost exactly the same as the strip in the body blank, so although this will be a bolt-on scenario, the neck and body strips should match up almost exactly, kind of pseudo neck-through. The fingerboard will be bolivian rosewood/pau ferro:






And a couple shots of the templates:











My hope is this will be relatively light and comfortable in various playing positions -- as much as you can tell from MDF templates, it feels pretty good. The next step is to make 3/4 plywood copies of these to use for the actual flush trimming.

A couple other experimental aspects will be the use of one of Rick Toone's neck cores in place of a traditional truss rod, and also his intersecting plane neck profile (I'm in the midst of a six string semi-hollow build where the neck is getting the trapezoidal profile). I still need to figure out the length for the neck core, but it should be light weight and stable. In the end this will get a Danish oil finish. In the meantime, I have a lot of practicing to do for fret slot cutting.






One mistake I've already made: black korina tends to have little holes randomly throughout, which I believe are caused by a bug called a pinhole borer. They're no big deal to fill, but it hadn't occurred to me when I went to glue the top that I should have done the filling first. The holes are most definitely filled now... with glue! Yea! I guess that's a good sign that I have adequate pressure on the surface. Depending on how things look I may carefully drill the glue out of the tops of the holes and fill them with sawdust and CA glue, which was my original plan.

Anyway, here's hoping I can keep up with regular progress.


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## sk3ks1s (Feb 24, 2012)

silent_k said:


> I have to issue a caveat right at the outset that this is going to be one of those infrequently updated build threads -- I tend to work slowly



Fuck that!
Update daily or get banned.
This thread is relative to my interests.
I am impatient.


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## Konfyouzd (Feb 24, 2012)

I like that completely-out-of-the-way lower horn. 

This should be very interesting.


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## silent_k (Feb 25, 2012)

Konfyouzd said:


> I like that completely-out-of-the-way lower horn.
> 
> This should be very interesting.



Upper fret access was one of my design parameters, so glad you noticed (and liked) that part! Kind of like Ola Strandberg's guitars for Danny Thrasher and John Mason, the fretboard will be squared off at the end of the neck so there will be 24 full frets for the top two strings but 23 (or 22 -- need to look over my drawings again) for the 8th string.



sk3ks1s said:


> Fuck that!
> Update daily or get banned.
> This thread is relative to my interests.
> I am impatient.



I'll do my best.


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## Hollowway (Feb 25, 2012)

I thought the Strandberg hardware was unavailable. Did you already buy it?


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## mountainjam (Feb 25, 2012)

Hollowway said:


> I thought the Strandberg hardware was unavailable. Did you already buy it?



I was going to ask the same thing


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## Winspear (Feb 25, 2012)

Fucking killer body shape!!


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## vampiregenocide (Feb 25, 2012)

Design looks promising, reminds me of a Vik Duality. I'm looking forward to seeing this finished.


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## silent_k (Feb 25, 2012)

Hollowway said:


> I thought the Strandberg hardware was unavailable. Did you already buy it?





mountainjam said:


> I was going to ask the same thing



Yes, I think I was one of the last people to get some before he had to stop selling them. Probably helped that I wanted black, too.



EtherealEntity said:


> Fucking killer body shape!!



Thanks!!



vampiregenocide said:


> Design looks promising, reminds me of a Vik Duality. I'm looking forward to seeing this finished.



Thanks a lot -- the flat edges of the horns were definitely inspired by the Vik and a few other designs I've seen that use that element. The design is also a more angular/pointy take on an offset fretless bass I built last year:


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## jarnozz (Feb 25, 2012)

that wood... that shape... this is gonna be great!


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## jeremyb (Feb 25, 2012)

So much win!!


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## ejendres (Feb 25, 2012)

I dig the shape man, looking forward to how it unfolds.

That bass looks nasty too.


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## Durero (Feb 25, 2012)

jarnozz said:


> that wood... that shape... this is gonna be great!



Exactly 

Looking forward to seeing more.


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## silent_k (Feb 28, 2012)

A bit of progress today:
















I was able to cut out the template copies on the bandsaw, as well as rough cut the body. I spent a little time working over both on the belt sander as well, the idea being to leave as little material for the router to deal with as possible when it's time to flush trim. That will give me smoother results, and fewer chances of having the router grab and loosing control of the workpiece on the router table.






This is one of those aforementioned pinhole borer holes, but it shows the brilliant orange bursts you often see in black korina. Yum.






Overall the glue-up of the top went well. There are a few spots where the glue line is too visible, which not surprisingly are the same areas where my clamps could only reach so far. I need more cam clamps to do this right.

My totally precise and scientific weighing process (weigh self, then weigh self holding guitar, subtract) shows this body to weigh about 4.4 lbs, which is more than I'd like. I'll loose a bit to the carving and routing for pickups and electronics, but it would have been smart to chamber this one. Next time...


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## silent_k (Mar 20, 2012)

A brief update -- some progress, some set-backs:






I flush trimmed the body blank -- the chalk outlines show my preliminary thoughts on carving the top. The flush trimming process, unfortunately, also featured a couple of bad experiences:











Believe it or not, these are the "post-repair" photos -- I didn't take any of the damage as it looked right after it happened. Despite using a brand-new, big-ass spiral flush trimming bit, I ended up with a couple of major gouges when the bit grabbed the body and literally tossed it right out of my hands. There were two major flaws in my approach: one is that despite the band sawing and sanding prior to flush trimming, there was still too much material in a few places for the router to easily trim away. Second, I was trying to do this on my makeshift router table, which is too small and too unsteady to do full bodies (for necks it has been OK). The gouge on the back was deep enough that I had to drill it out and fill it with an alder plug -- technically two plugs glued together -- then try and fill the other, less deep gouges with sawdust and super glue (the white fill in the korina was put in to give the router something to track when I trimmed away the exposed parts of the plug -- that's getting carved out later). As you can see, things got messy. I should have taped off the edges of the gouges, although the glue may have found it's way under the tape regardless. That's the trouble doing this on light wood -- those stains really show. The next move is to apply a little glue to a test piece of alder, then oil it to see how much these areas are likely to stand out when all is said and done. Although the oil won't penetrate over the glue, when the whole thing gets oiled it may (I hope) not be quite as visible. This is also obviously pre-sanding and carving, so it isn't going to be quite the sore thumb it is now. Same for the little gouge in the lower bout.

This all could have been a lot worse, but it's a disappointment nonetheless. Still, I keep telling myself this is a prototype, the damage is on the back and won't affect anything about the rest of the instrument, and one must forge ahead regardless.











The other recent twist is that Rick Toone is no longer offering the aluminum neck core I was planning to use for this build, so I had to go back to a regular truss rod with some CF reinforcement. Lucky for me, I had a bass truss rod that is pretty much the perfect length for this neck and will allow me to have the adjustment barrel in the head end. I'm hoping to carve the channels for all three rods this weekend, and start practicing cutting angled fret slots. 

In the meantime I have to finish up this guy, too:


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## Goatchrist (Mar 20, 2012)

Exciting build! Feel free to build me one too.. 

Gonna keep watching this thread!


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## scherzo1928 (Mar 20, 2012)

why didn't I know of this thread???

I really like where this is going.


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## Saber_777 (Mar 20, 2012)

When I saw the post of wood work on this tread, I had dejavu and caught a wiff of that aroma that you get when working... Love it. haha. Usually.


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## silent_k (Apr 15, 2012)

A bit of progress:






Last weekend I cut the truss rod and carbon fiber rod slots in the neck blank, then discovered that my Stew Mac epoxy, which was going to be used to glue some veneer strips to the CF, and ultimately the CF in the the slots, had turned into a kind of paste. I wrote to them to see if it could still be used, and they said nope... then sent me a new batch free of charge! I know there are often complaints about the prices of some of their tools, but their customer service is fantastic.






Before trimming the neck I drilled an access hole for the truss adjuster. After looking this over (since having a truss rod wasn't my original plan) it occurred to me that I'm going to have to be extra careful attaching the string locks now that there's going to be a slab of metal in that area.

Today was flush trimming day:











I started drilling out the recesses for the t-nuts but stopped when it became obvious that my drill press wasn't up to the task (the drill itself is fine, but the table is a piece of shit, and has so much give to it that I couldn't get a straight, shallow cut with my forstner bit). I'll have to finish up that task elsewhere. I'm hoping to epoxy the CF rods in place this week, then install the nuts and figure out how best to glue up the fingerboard. At this point I'm planning to put the fingerboard on then cut the fret slots, but may end up doing that the other way around.


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## Rojne (Apr 15, 2012)

Dayum, looks fun! MOAR UPDATES!


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## Hollowway (Apr 16, 2012)

silent_k said:


> In the meantime I have to finish up this guy, too:



(In my best dad-finds-beer-in-teenager's-closet) What the hell is this?! Did you think we wouldn't find out about this? I demand answers! Do you have more like this, or is this the first one?


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## silent_k (Apr 16, 2012)

Hollowway said:


> (In my best dad-finds-beer-in-teenager's-closet) What the hell is this?! Did you think we wouldn't find out about this? I demand answers! Do you have more like this, or is this the first one?



Ha! I know I shouldn't post pix of multiple builds in the same thread, but these are the two projects competing for my time these days (plus a Klein replica that's only in the template making stage at this point). This is my take on the old Fender Starcaster design. This is my first semi-hollow build, but I have another weirdsville neck-through that isn't quite ready for display just yet. I'll make an NGD thread for this guy when it's finished -- it's currently curing but the neck is complete (which got Rick Toone's trapezoidal profile -- sort of a test case for the profile for this 8-string, which I think is going to be some variation of the intersecting plane profile).


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## silent_k (Jun 11, 2012)

I've only been able to spend a little time here and there on this project for the last couple of months, but am finally back at it, and have a few updates:
















It makes for kind of a weird angle on the photos, but I had things clamped together just to test how the shape feels in different playing positions (verdict at this early stage: excellent!). I feel like the photos actually make the body look a little bigger than it is, but there you go.

I've spent a lot of time working out the fret slotting situation as well. As you may recall, I'd originally planned to use Rick Toone's neck core on this, but he took it off the market before I could purchase one, and I had to go with a traditional truss rod, which has had a number of reverberant effects on the overall construction (some of which will become obvious as the neck construction moves along). Among them has been moving the frets further down toward the bridge so I could accomodate a nut in the space before the neck flares out a bit at the top, so only the e, B, and G strings will have a 24th fret. I think this is OK but a slight departure from the original plan. Here's the fingerboard roughed out:











It took some thinking to figure out how to draw the fret lines, but I've gone over everything multiple times with a calipers and it all seems to be working out. Now for the slotting:











This is a test neck I made with some extra maple and an exotic MDF fingerboard, mostly for testing the neck profile (this will have Rick Toone's IPNP) and doing the radius, which will be cut on a massive jig I have finally managed to complete after about a year of not working on it. The slotting involves a smaller tool:






I got this idea from some folks on TalkBass -- this is a piece of flat oak with a little poplar shelf for clamping on the back. On the face are five rare earth magnets embedded just deep enough that they hold the saw against the face of the oak, but still allow it to move. Seems to work OK:






The main issue now is that I can tell, looking at my saw, that the teeth in the middle are quite worn down, so I may get a new one before slotting this board. I wish I'd noticed that before putting in my latest order with Stew Mac...

Anyway, I'm hoping to have the board slotted, glued, and trimmed by the end of this week. More pix will follow!


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## silent_k (Jul 16, 2012)

A very quick update: finally got the fingerboard slotted for this damn thing -- the *second* fingerboard, that is, seeing as how I totally screwed up cutting the slots on the first one. To those cutting their own angled fret slots by hand, I salute you. So yea, bit of a delay there, but it got glued up and trimmed, and I drilled the bolt holes in the neck pocket, so thought it was time for another mock-up:











Sorry the pictures are a bit blurry -- it was late and low light when they were taken. Anyway, I've otherwise been testing a jig for cutting the rounded slots for the bridge pieces, but I need to make the actual thing itself elsewhere because my drill press is refusing to drill straight holes these days. This week I should also be receiving a direct mount template for the Dimarzio pickups that I had fabricated -- more details on that to follow (if it works!).


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## NUTSguitarchannel (Jul 16, 2012)




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## celticelk (Jul 16, 2012)

The optical illusion on that fretboard is astonishing - it looks like the whole neck is bent, even though the rear shot shows that clearly is not the case.


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## Konfyouzd (Jul 16, 2012)

^ Didn't notice that. Looks like something out of Nightmare Before Christmas. I approve.


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## silent_k (Jul 16, 2012)

celticelk said:


> The optical illusion on that fretboard is astonishing - it looks like the whole neck is bent, even though the rear shot shows that clearly is not the case.



Of all the things I've screwed up on this build, I'm happy to say that having the neck bend that way is not one of them.


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## animalwithin (Jul 16, 2012)

This is going to be a beastly guitar, you're quite the master at your craft silent!


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## silent_k (Sep 3, 2012)

I was hoping to cut the slots for the bridges last weekend, but my jig (the second attempt) was giving me poor results on scrap, so I decided to have something properly and precisely fabricated (thank you, Ponoko), and in the meantime have spent some time on the neck:
















It's a bit hard to tell in the pictures but this is a Rick Toone-style IPNP. There are clearly some missing process pictures here -- I did not take any shots of the process of cutting the profiling slots into the back of the neck. I tend to forget about taking pictures, especially if it's a particularly tricky operation that requires, among other things, a lot of measuring and remeasuring and drawing and redrawing, etc. Planning out the cuts took a little work but it's turned out OK. I'm going to be spending a lot of time with a cabinet scraper getting the surfaces properly flat.
















I made a little jig for use with my Bosch Colt router for making a shelf in the headstock for the string retainers. I set it up so it can be used straight or at an angle, so I used it also for making the shelf for the locking nut on my Floyd build. I may have to move the shelf a bit closer to the nut slot but I'll wait until the mock-up stage for that. In the meantime will be radiusing and fretting until my bridge slot template shows up.


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## MetalBuddah (Sep 3, 2012)

Very cool body shape!! Cannot wait to see the finished product


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## Levi79 (Sep 3, 2012)

Not sure how I missed this one. Beautiful work man!


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## Sirppi (Sep 3, 2012)

This is so relevant to my interests. Please please finish this beauty already!


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## silent_k (Oct 3, 2012)

OK, finally some progress on this motherfucker... I mean, this wonderful project:





















I managed to get a lot done with the body this last weekend. At this point, all the cavities are cut, the sides are beveled, and the carves are roughed in. The big recess in the back is for access to the tuners, which I cut with a bowl carving bit to give the bottom edges a nice round profile. Everything needs to be cleaned up but I've beaten the shit out of my scrapers on this and my current 6-string build so I need to tune them up before I continue.

I finally got my template made for slotting the bridge recesses, but had some trouble. First, the template was just about .5mm too short, so I had to attach it, slot, then reattach it slightly further back. I had this laser cut from a drawing I made and I'm still dialing in how much to compensate for what the laser removes. Also, in order to get an slot cut to the proper size for the Strandberg hardware (8mm wide, 4mm radius on the rounded ends) I had to use a dovetailing bit with a 5/8 bushing on my router. When you add together the metric/standard English measurements combo, the fact that my template was just a tad undersized, and that I was working on very dark, porous wood without (in retrospect) the right marking tools, then add a dash of my overall skill level and lack of CNC, and you get slots that weren't as well aligned as I needed them to be. They were fine relative to the center and intonation lines, but not to each other, so the string spacing was off, especially on the treble side. Very frustrating, but I decided the solution was to just cut a common recess for all the bridge pieces, which is what you see in these photos. It's not as elegant looking as on Ola's guitars, of course, but it gives me the flexibility I need to get the spacing right, and that area will be mostly covered by the bridges anyway. Just one of those situations where you have to get over being pissed off, make do, and keep plowing ahead.





















I spent some time on the neck a couple of weeks ago. There is still a lot to do, but I managed to get the tapering cuts made (an adventure), the shelf cut for the string locks, and carve the basic profile in the back. It's hard to see in the photos, but again this is using Rick Toone's IPNP profile. I need to finish some carving in the heel and head areas, then clean up the profile, get it radiused and fretted, and so on. But it's much closer than it was. The neck is still on the heavy side, but the body is turning out to be pretty light, so overall the weight should be good.


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## Spaceman_Spiff (Oct 4, 2012)

^ 

Damn just found this thread. SUBSCRIBED!


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## ElRay (Oct 14, 2012)

silent_k said:


> ... using Rick Toone's IPNP profile ...



Which of the three profiles (flat back, slant towards the bass strings, slant towards the treble string) did you go with?
Did you keep the sides planar, e.g. the same angle, so that the center plane gets wider as you go towards the body, or did you keep the width of the center plane the same, which means that the sides get flatter as the neck gets wider?
How did you profile the neck?

Ray


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## silent_k (Oct 14, 2012)

ElRay said:


> Which of the three profiles (flat back, slant towards the bass strings, slant towards the treble string) did you go with?
> Did you keep the sides planar, e.g. the same angle, so that the center plane gets wider as you go towards the body, or did you keep the width of the center plane the same, which means that the sides get flatter as the neck gets wider?
> How did you profile the neck?
> 
> Ray




This neck has a slanted profile towards the treble side. I had a chance last year to briefly play a Strandberg guitar with this same profile and found it quite comfortable, and I used an asymmetric (rounded) profile with the peak on the bass side on a 5-string bass I made a couple of years ago and liked that, too. From Rick's description on his website, this seemed like the best option for my playing style, although I've also used the flat, trapezoidal style and that's very comfortable as well. It's all an experiment!
The width of the center plane is the same from the nut to the heel. I felt this was both more feasible for me to make, and on the test neck I made I liked the way the angles on the sides changed as you moved down the neck -- it's subtle but again adds to the overall comfort of the neck.
Whew -- OK, let's see if I can explain this part without writing a book: The first thing I did was make several drawings of the profile in cross section, to scale, to figure out what procedure was going to work to get the final shape (these drawings, which I just threw together this morning, are obviously not to scale and represent only one cross section of the profile -- for the real deal I did drawings of the cross section at both the 1st and 12th frets to determine how the profile would change as the neck got wider).






Since I decided to have a consistently wide center plane, that gave me a place to start and made it relatively simple to figure out the overall process. The net was that I needed four cuts on the router to establish the taper and the peaks for the IPNP. I used the jig I wrote about in this post to do all of these cuts. I marked the neck to establish where the centerlines of each cut were going to be so I could align everything with the centerline on the jig (which, miraculously, worked just as predicted). For the center cuts, I used a 5/8 diameter router bit, and did the cuts incrementally so as to not try and take off too much material at once (I had another neck made from padauk shift slightly in the jig because I was routing too much in one pass and didn't have it held down tightly enough). 






For the sides, because the width increased from the nut to the heel, I used a 3/4 diameter bit, again in increments. 











The end result was a stepped profile where the treble side cut was lower than the center cut, and the bass side cut was just about at the same level as the center cut. I'm sorry I have no photos of this process, but to be honest I was so focused on not screwing it up that I forgot to take any.

Now that I had this stepped profile, it was a matter of removing the wood outside the dashed lines as represented in the drawings above. For this I started with rasps, then smoother flat files, then finally a cabinet scraper. Since the surfaces were flat, the scraper was the best tool to finish it up. I checked for flatness regularly with a 12" straight edge along the horizontal and a 6" straightedge along the vertical (where horizontal and vertical refer to the neck in the playing position -- sorry, I'm starting to confuse myself now ). The center plane was the most awkward to cut given its width combined with the small angle relative to the treble side, but I kept remarking the lines when necessary, checking for flat, and going slowly. I would not say the end result is a CNC-perfect series of flat surfaces, but it's damn close. Now I just have to finish it up so I can play the damn thing.
If this doesn't make sense let me know and I'll try to clarify/fill in any blanks.


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## jeleopard (Oct 14, 2012)

Body looks like a Warwick bass...

Cool  Can't wait to see the finished product.


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## ElRay (Oct 14, 2012)

Thanks for the details. 



silent_k said:


> ... Now that I had this stepped profile, it was a matter of removing the wood outside the dashed lines as represented in the drawings above. For this I started with rasps, then smoother flat files, then finally a cabinet scraper ...



That's what I was afraid of. I'm not a big fan of shaping with rasps, etc. 


I've been wracking my brain trying to come-up with a jig, etc. that would allow me to use a oscillating spindal sander (OSS), or tall straight-cut router bit, but I haven't come-up with anything reliable without keeping the angle the same. I also couldn't picture cutting the shoulders with a bandsaw or OSS.

Ray


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## silent_k (Dec 9, 2012)

Finally some more action on this:











I finally managed to get the bridge piece holes drilled (a major challenge -- MANY lessons already learned on this project, and one of them is to mark and drill the pilot holes for the individual bridges BEFORE cutting any kind of recess in the top). It came out so-so -- the string spacing is going to be a tad wonky, but workable. This project is getting a simple Danish oil finish. In the future I may topcoat it with polyurethane, but for now, this will do. These pix are following the second and possibly last application, which I just did this afternoon. Yesterday I fretted the neck:











I also obviously installed the fret dots since the last photos -- these are wood dots, 5/16 diameter on the bass side and 1/4 on the treble, made from offcuts of the curly maple stringers in the neck. 






Even if it does eventually turn brown, I love the stripes in that padauk.

I'm aiming to have the whole thing assembled by x-mas. Although this is taking forever, a few other things have been getting done -- my Floyd guitar is basically complete (still needs a proper set-up -- will post about that in my other thread shortly), and then there's THIS:











MWAA ha ha!


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## Spaceman_Spiff (Dec 9, 2012)




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## skisgaar (Dec 10, 2012)

Yum.


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## Kroaton (Dec 10, 2012)

God that looks amazing , props to you brotha'.


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## Necromagnon (Dec 10, 2012)

Damn! That padouk is awesome. I trully love that wood (evenif it's some of the most horrible wood to work...  ).
I just find the dots on the fingerboard really too big and too numerous. I would have done something really discrete, with just 1 dot per at a time, and discribing some curve along the fingerboard...

Anyway, it looks awesome!


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## silent_k (Dec 22, 2012)

Boom!















































There are a few additional pictures not included here of getting things from my last pictures to these, but I thought I'd skip over those and go straight for the good stuff. This still needs some set-up work -- namely intonation -- but it's mostly there. It would be difficult to summarize everything I've learned working on this, which I'll try and do later. Suffice it to say for now that the next one is going to be much easier, and will surely turn out better, which as you all know is how this lutherie thing seems to go. 

So far here's what I can say: the neck profile is very comfortable, as is the fan. I've only played a couple of instruments with fanned frets and never for very long periods, but this has been easy to get used to. The body is very comfortable, and the balance with a strap turned out perfect. The pickups sound great -- I have yet to try a Dimarzio pickup that doesn't, although I can certainly appreciate the appeal of Lace pickups. They're very light weight, and without pole pieces you have less to worry about vis-a-vis perfect alignment of the strings, particularly with the neck pickup (I had to rout a little extra from the left side of the neck pickup cavity to get better alignment). The Strandberg hardware is great -- it weighs basically nothing. Installation was a challenge, and part of what I'd do very differently next time. All together the guitar weighs in at 6.6 pounds -- not bad!

And now, a family photo:






Many thanks for the comments and encouragement along the way!


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## scherzo1928 (Dec 22, 2012)

Been wanting to see this one finished.

Congratz maing, it came out awesome!


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## Levi79 (Dec 22, 2012)

Awesome guitars man!


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## ElRay (Dec 23, 2012)

[banana][/banana][banana][/banana][banana][/banana][banana][/banana][banana][/banana]

Ray


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## silent_k (Dec 24, 2012)

Thanks dudes!


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## skeels (Dec 24, 2012)

Holy bad ass! This rules!

I learned a lot from your posts too- very scientific compared to my stone-age approach! 

Also, I know what you mean about setbacks-I've spent more time repairing than building the one I'm on now!

Can i ask for closeups of the necky bolts?


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## Linny (Dec 24, 2012)

Why is the headstock so large?


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## Necromagnon (Dec 27, 2012)

silent_k said:


>


They look like dancing!





Great job, man!


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## silent_k (Dec 28, 2012)

skeels said:


> Holy bad ass! This rules!
> 
> I learned a lot from your posts too- very scientific compared to my stone-age approach!
> 
> ...



Thanks, man! Here are a couple of shots of the neck bolts:











In some of the early posts I have some other pictures of the neck in various states prior to installation of the t-nuts (I hope this is what you were looking for -- if not let me know). These are 10-24 oval head machine screws with complimentary t-nuts installed inside the neck under the fingerboard. The t-nuts of course require a different approach to making the neck than if you're using inserts or just wood screws, but they make for a very tight fit between the neck and body, and also don't have any of the issues that inserts can have vis-a-vis getting them installed perfectly perpendicular to the heel surface. The main issue using them in a narrow neck (like for a 6-string) is that they're big -- these are just under 3/4" in diameter, so you need some space to use them (I may try a smaller size for future builds). I put a 3/4" alder cap on top of each of them to prevent glue from getting in the screw hole during the glue up of the fingerboard. The ferrules came from Stew Mac.



Linny said:


> Why is the headstock so large?








Early in the thread I described how I had originally planned on using a solid neck core rather than a truss rod, but the core I wanted went off the market before I could purchase one. Given the length of the neck, I thought it best to use a bass-length truss rod, and I prefer having the truss rod adjustment accessible through the headstock so I don't have to remove the neck to adjust it. All those things together meant that the rod, as you can hopefully see from the photo, extended beyond the nut. The headstock is just longer than the end of the adjustment barrel (the presence of the truss rod is also why the string retainers are arranged in groups of four on either side of the headstock rather than right down the middle).



Necromagnon said:


> They look like dancing!
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Thank you!


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## MetalBuddah (Dec 28, 2012)

Oh my lord...........

I loved the 6 string but I ADORE this 8 string, it looks even better!


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## ElRay (Dec 31, 2012)

silent_k said:


>


I just noticed the straight pick-ups. How is that affecting your sound? I'd expect semi-Tele-twang on the bridge and the neck with a "22-fret" bass response and a "24-fret" treble response.

A lot of folks say that they can't wouldn't be able to deal with the tonal affects of straight pick-ups on a multi-scaled guitar. I don't know many that have said "I tried it and didn't like it." Nor have I heard slanted vs. straight pick-ups. How's straight working for you?

Ray


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## Necromagnon (Dec 31, 2012)

ElRay said:


> I just noticed the straight pick-ups. How is that affecting your sound? I'd expect semi-Tele-twang on the bridge and the neck with a "22-fret" bass response and a "24-fret" treble response.
> 
> A lot of folks say that they can't wouldn't be able to deal with the tonal affects of straight pick-ups on a multi-scaled guitar. I don't know many that have said "I tried it and didn't like it." Nor have I heard slanted vs. straight pick-ups. How's straight working for you?
> 
> Ray


I dig it: I'd also be very interested in the tonal difference. Imo, I'm always going for slanted pu, to keep a regular response on all strings (same position for all poles in terms of % of the scale), but it implies to have custom pu... :/


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## silent_k (Jan 2, 2013)

MetalBuddah said:


> Oh my lord...........
> 
> I loved the 6 string but I ADORE this 8 string, it looks even better!



Thank you, kind sir!



ElRay said:


> I just noticed the straight pick-ups. How is that affecting your sound? I'd expect semi-Tele-twang on the bridge and the neck with a "22-fret" bass response and a "24-fret" treble response.
> 
> A lot of folks say that they can't wouldn't be able to deal with the tonal affects of straight pick-ups on a multi-scaled guitar. I don't know many that have said "I tried it and didn't like it." Nor have I heard slanted vs. straight pick-ups. How's straight working for you?
> 
> Ray





Necromagnon said:


> I dig it: I'd also be very interested in the tonal difference. Imo, I'm always going for slanted pu, to keep a regular response on all strings (same position for all poles in terms of % of the scale), but it implies to have custom pu... :/



First off, I should say that this is the first, and only, 8-string and/or multiscale instrument I've ever had, so my experience of the sound of such instruments is obviously limited. That said, there is a noticeable difference a la Ray's comment about the twangy-ness on the bridge PU, which does get more pronounced as you move from the 8th to the 1st string. Even discounting the 8th and 7th strings, there is an audible increasing twang from the 6th to the 1st (there's even something subtle to be heard in the neck PU as well). That said, I haven't found it bothersome in the relatively short time I've had the guitar in a playable state. It's true that you don't get the same type of sound you get with a traditional straight bridge/straight pickup arrangement, but the tonal shift is pretty gradual as you move vertically. It actually gives it kind of an interesting sound, different from my other guitars beyond the obvious addition of the two extra strings on the bottom. So it's working out OK for me so far, and per Necromagnon's comment, I was not in a position to buy custom-made slanted pickups for this project. I also figured that since Ola Strandberg's guitars have had straight pickups with multiscale fingerboards, I was probably OK going the straight route. I think the Dimarzio's sound great, just like all of their other pickups I've had.


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## silentrage (Jan 2, 2013)

ElRay said:


> I just noticed the straight pick-ups. How is that affecting your sound? I'd expect semi-Tele-twang on the bridge and the neck with a "22-fret" bass response and a "24-fret" treble response.
> 
> A lot of folks say that they can't wouldn't be able to deal with the tonal affects of straight pick-ups on a multi-scaled guitar. I don't know many that have said "I tried it and didn't like it." Nor have I heard slanted vs. straight pick-ups. How's straight working for you?
> 
> Ray



It seems to work for ppl like tosin and several others who've bought the boden 8, I noticed. I'd be interested in hearing what they have to say about this, but so far I havn't seen anyone complain yet.


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## ElRay (Jan 7, 2013)

silentrage said:


> It seems to work for ppl like tosin and several others who've bought the boden 8, I noticed. I'd be interested in hearing what they have to say about this, but so far I havn't seen anyone complain yet.



That's the thing. There have been plenty of folks that have said they'd never get a multi-scaled guitar with straight pick-ups, but I've never heard anybody say, "I tried it and I didn't like it."

My motivation is that I'm (still) planning a home-built multi-scaled six-string, and I've "settled" on using dual-rail Tele bridge pick-ups (one slightly under wound (for the neck) & one slightly overwound (for the bridge)) so that I can slant the pick-ups on a budget. If there isn't much of an issue mixing straight pick-ups with fanned frets, then that opens-up my "inexpensive w/o being cheap" pick-up choices.

Ray


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## Walterson (Jan 8, 2013)

ElRay said:


> That's the thing. There have been plenty of folks that have said they'd never get a multi-scaled guitar with straight pick-ups, but I've never heard anybody say, "I tried it and I didn't like it."



You heard the story of Misha Mansoor and his first Strandberg? He got the body rebuild because he couldn't live with the sound of the unslanted PUs....

#23 &#8211; Misha Mansoor | .strandberg* Guitars

My own experience: The sound on the bass strings becomes warmer and less tight. It's ok with a slight fan and 6 Strings. But with more Strings and a larger fan it's to mushy for me... think of a middle PU....


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## Durero (Jan 8, 2013)

ElRay said:


> That's the thing. There have been plenty of folks that have said they'd never get a multi-scaled guitar with straight pick-ups, but I've never heard anybody say, "I tried it and I didn't like it."



A former bandmate of mine had a custom fanned 7 with straight pickups which he ended up selling off because of that issue. All three of us guitarists in the band spent extensive time playing that guitar and all of us loved it except for the pickup placement.

The guitar sounded good for clean & jazz-style neck pickup tones, but we were playing metal and there was basically no bridge pickup sound on the lower strings. Getting a clear distorted tone on the low strings was just not possible.

So I'd say the issue may or may not be a deal breaker depending on the tones you're after & musical styles you play.



Edit: sorry for wandering off topic Silent_K - I love this build! Very cool design and nice woods


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## Necromagnon (Jan 8, 2013)

Thanks for the input, all.


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## ElRay (Jan 8, 2013)

Walterson said:


> You heard the story of Misha Mansoor and his first Strandberg?



That's right. I forgot. 

Ray


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