Troy's New Build (Inspiration Returns)

[troyguitar]

EDIT: OP has been edited to include the specs along with photo and video of the finished product!

Final Video:



Final Specs:

Solid Oak body and neck from a single 48" x 7.25" x 0.75" board
27.5" scale tuned EADGCFBbDG
36 tall skinny frets with completely uninterrupted access
Flat bloodwood fretboard (no radius)
62mm nut width
Uniform profile 1.07" (27mm) THICK! neck
"Custom" top-loaded hardtail bridge
Angled EMG-45DC pickup w/ volume and tone knobs
4+5 headstock w/ "weight relieved" ESP tuners.
Black hardware + natural oil finish over the oak
"Expert Hand-Drawn" Sharpie logo and side dots

Final Expense Report:

EMG 45DC pickup: $110
9 ESP-logoed tuners: ~$75
2 6-string bridges hacked together for a 9-string bridge: $25
bloodwood fretboard: $20
set of strings from juststrings: $20
truss rod: $15
knobs, jackplate, nut blank: $15?
fretwire: $12?
4 feet of 1x8 oak: ~$8

total: ~$300 yeah I spent too much

Final Photos:

---() Below here is the original unedited thread. ()---

So as much as I wanted to finish my fanned RR-8, I just don't have the resources to finish it in a playable manner. For now that project has been shelved.

But late last night I was sitting here staring at all of the parts I'd bought, trying to decide what to do with them and

I can build a kickass 9-string if I buy a new fretboard, a 9th tuner, and 9 hardtail bridge saddles!

Unfortunately I didn't take many pics as I was excited and in a major hurry to get work done, but I started with the 48" x ~8" x 3/4" piece of oak on the bottom here:

I then drew a detailed sketch of my design

Then I actually drew it out in reasonable detail on the wood itself and attacked it with the bandsaw. I also cut the truss rod channel on the mill. Here's the current state of things:

The whole thing came from that single piece of oak. I had to double up the pieces for the body since it's only 3/4" thick. I should have a fretboard here sometime next week, and anticipate having a playable instrument well before the November 30 deadline. (Yes I know that buying a pre-slotted fretboard is not really in the spirit of the competition, but I want an instrument that plays in tune )

 

[ralphy1976]

it is the badest, biggest penis shpaed 9 string mofo i have ever seen!!!!

go for it my son!!!

 

[flo]

Holy s**t man!

That looks like the secound most brutal approach to guitar building I've erver seen (There's an 8-string on wiki you know? )
But fuck this is cool!

I'm so curious what an oak guitar (9!!! string) will sound like!

 

[Arminius]

this is gonna be sweet!

 

[troyguitar]

I forgot the specs:

27.5" scale tuned F#BEADGCEA
36 tall skinny frets with completely uninterrupted access
Flat bloodwood fretboard (no radius)
60mm nut width
Uniform profile 1" thick neck
Custom hardtail bridge w/ strings through body
EMG-45DC pickup w/ volume and tone knobs
4+5 headstock w/ ESP tuners.
Black hardware + natural oil finish over the oak

I started gluing the 3/4" body pieces together to get 1.5" body pieces. Check out my coffee table, err, workbench

A couple shots of the halves drying:

Here's a couple of scale drawings of my bridge and pickup laying on the body. I'm thinking about angling the pickup to get a less piercing tone from the high A string while keeping the F# tight, what do you guys think?

More updates, I didn't have to work today so I spent some more time on it this morning. I should be doing homework, but this is more fun

First up I unclamped the 2 body pieces I glued last night and glued the third piece, here they are:

Then I decided to go ahead and do the angled pickup route. Off to the garage! Here's my "router"

The good part is that it's easy to cut a straight line without a template. The bad thing is you can't use a template anyway This mill is also very old and has a lot of play in all 3 directions, which always makes things interesting. Here's the first pass of the route (1/4" deep) in progress:

Test fit before going any further:

It fits! Actually it's slightly big but that's ok. Now to go down to the final depth of 1/2" so I can mount the EMG directly to the wood without using any foam or springs underneath it...

Yummy!

A nice 1/2" deep route:

But the pickup doesn't sit in it nicely yet:

We need to cut out a channel for the cable and the connector that go underneath the pickup:

Much better!

The pickup happily chilling in its brand new route:

Next on the to do list is to start working on the headstock, maybe I'll have another update later today. Someone bump this post before then so that I won't have an auto-merged quadruple post

 

[Bungle]

That pickup route has turned out quite nicely I think.

Looking forward to see (hear) some vids of this beast in action!

Oh and yeah, it is kinda penis-y... Perhaps you can paint the headstock purple and put some "vein of life" inlays on it.

 

[Arminius]

Damn you for having nice, clean edges with no need for bondo

 

[troyguitar]

Alrighty, the other work I did earlier today was on the headstock as promised... the first step was trimming it down from 0.760" to 0.630" so tuners will fit properly:

There we go, much better.

Now to figure out where to place the tuners. I'm going for a small-as-possible headstock to hopefully keep neck dive to a minimum.

3/16" starter holes drilled at the tuner locations and the headstock sides sanded down pretty close to their final size.

What do you guys think I should do at the end of the headstock? Leave it pointy, round, or flat?

 

[Empryrean]

I think a curvy point would look nice, like one of them Oni's

Looking good!

 

[White Cluster]

\
>
>
/

Dual point

 

[Bungle]

\
>
>
>
/

Triple point, it'll look like a tulip =D

 

[troyguitar]

Haha, those would be some awfully small points

 

[damigu]

hilariously phallic. i like it!

 

[troyguitar]

Here's a better mockup of the bridge and pickup:

Unfortunately I probably won't get to do much more until this time next week because I'm waiting on a bunch of stuff to get shipped here from CA.

 

[Fred]

Looks awesome dude!

 

[flo]

Thank you for posting that many pics!!!

 

[troyguitar]

Well I have good news and bad news. First, the good news is that my bridge stuff and my final tuner got here already. It turns out that my bridge will actually be top-loaded so I don't have to worry about ferrules or anything.

I chopped up two 6-string bridges to make one 9-string bridge. No action shots since I was lazy, but here is the final product sitting on the body:

Now for the bad news. I drilled the tuner holes out to .390" and tried to install the tuners. Guess what? The guy who designed the headstock is a moron and forgot that he needed to allow space for more than just a 10mm hole for each tuner!



Rather than start over or chop off the headstock and do a scarf joint, I decided to modify some of the tuners to reduce the mass at the headstock

Here's the result, see if you can spot the mods

With any luck I'll be cutting the control cavity tomorrow.

 

[Apophis]

being honest it looks really interesting work on body shape and it will be something really nice reminds me a SKY Guitar Uli Jon Roth using, not penis as said above

 

[Customisbetter]

icwhatudidthere...

seems to have worked out ok though. the tuners will keep each other from moving.

 

[damigu]

can the tuners actually go all the way around?
it looks like the knobs would hit each other if two adjacent knobs were set parallel to the neck.