Almost Finished...

Almost Finished...

Well the guitar is working. It still doesn't have the control plate on yet. I need to drill a couple of holes, and finish the preamp so I can put it all together. Also, I need to round over, smooth, and polish the frets. But once that is all done, I will be playing this quite a bit -- even in the dark!

Experimental LED Guitar Body

Experimental LED Guitar Body

This is my LED guitar body. It's made of poplar. It's sort of a strange concept; I wanted to make a Stratocaster type guitar, but I wanted to have the Telecaster type control plate. I started playing around with aluminum, and discovered I could make any shape aluminum plate using a bandsaw, and then sand the edges smooth and use a router to do a 45 degree bevel. The result: a nice looking aluminum control plate, or battery cover, but definitely NOT CHROME. (I'll discuss this more later...)

I ended up tilting the control plate diagonal instead of vertical like a real Telecaster. Also, for simplicity's sake I wanted only one pickup. Not quite a bridge pickup, and not quite a neck pickup. Right in the middle. For simplicity's sake I also didn't really want a tone control knob. I always leave my guitar tone at full brightness anyways. Who wants to bleed all their highs to ground?

To sum it up: one pickup, one output jack, no tone knob, and the volume knob is a maybe... I haven't decided yet. As of now (January 2012) I decided that I definitely will put in a DIY guitar preamp, powered with the same 9V battery as the LED's. Oh, and possibly a killswitch...

Like I said, this is a very weird guitar concept. The next guitar I make will have all the same bells and whistles most electric guitars have, plus a few added perks: Floyd Rose tremolo, preamp, and LED's.

At first I had this idea to do a black dye stain on the body, so that when I used some clear finish you could still see the wood grain. But it didn't show the grain well enough, so I decided to spray it with grey primer and then sparkly blue bicycle paint.

 Here it is before I decided to modify it some more.

 Here is the aluminum control plate, in sharp contrast with the chrome pickup.

Perhaps some buffing will help.

 Here is the back before I modified it, and routed out a battery cavity.

 And here you can see that I cut away some of the bulky wood. 

It makes it slightly more comfortable for my fret hand to reach the high frets.

I used an angle grinder with a ROUGH grit sanding disk.

 And here is the guitar with a new hole for the ON/OFF/ON switch.

I attached a handle so I could hold it away from my body while spraying.

The handle also allowed me to hang it up in the garage.

And here you can see the battery cavity. It's an odd sort of shape. 

I plan to make an aluminum plate to cover the battery cavity too.

So after I sprayed it with the blue spray paint, it looked pretty good. Then I tried to spray polyurethane finish on it. I'm not sure what happened, but the polyurethane didn't adhere (stick) to the paint very well. I noticed some cracks and bubbles, and when I pushed on them the polyurethane started to peel off.

I got so mad I didn't touch this guitar for almost a year. Eventually I pulled it out, and started beating on it to make it look "vintage." I sanded through some of the paint too, and scuffed it up where the pick might hit. I dragged it on the ground a little, and banged the corners on cement. After all that I applied a coat of good ol' lacquer.  Now it looks very strange indeed. It doesn't quite look like an old guitar, but doesn't look new either. Oh well. It has character.

Purpleheart LED fretboard

Purpleheart LED fretboard

• I drilled 5mm holes for my 5mm Ultra-bright blue LED's.
• I drilled in from the back of those holes with a larger drill bit to accommodate the base of the LED. I drilled this larger hole just deep enough so that the rounded tops of the LED's poke through the top.
• I used a milling machine to cut grooves in the back of the fretboard.
• I twisted the wires together and soldered the connections.
• I sanded the tops off of the LEDs.
• Afterward I put fret wire into the slots, smashing down the copper wires.

 The milling machine, which made my life easier. If my dad didn't own this 

wonderful machine, I would have had to use a router or a Dremel tool.

 Lines drawn where I wanted grooves or channels cut

 Looking kind of fuzzy. Needs some sanding.

 Lines drawn where I need to cut off the sides.

 Sides cut off; bottom cut off.

 All the components I bought from allelectronics.com.

I followed instructions I found on a YouTube video by a user named koenbus.

I used LED's with a 3.6 V drop, and I used 300 ohm resistors for a 

single LED, or 150 ohm resistors for two LED's in a row. 

After I soldered the components together with red wires for +9V and black wires for ground 

 LED's on!!! They're so bright, it almost hurts to look directly at them.

No frets yet, and copper wires poking through tiny little holes.

Later, this allows me to use the frets and the strings together as a switch. 

The round part of the LED's are poking through the top... 

...and now the rounded tops are being filed down flat. 

I apologize for the fuzzy pictures. I am getting better at taking pictures now.

Cutting Slots in Fretboards

Cutting Slots in Fretboards

Here is how I made some fretboards in early 2010. I haven't had the need to make any new fretboards since, because I took a break from making guitars.

I started out using a handsaw that was about 0.020" thick that I bought at Harbor Freight tools. It was very cheap. I only managed to use that saw on one fretboard and it got too dull to use any longer.

Then I bought a 0.023" tablesaw blade from StewMac and it made my life much easier. I made these four fretboards in just a few hours.

There are four fretboards shown; two purpleheart, one walnut and one Jatoba.

Here is the guitar neck with truss rod slot and the bare fretboard intended 

for the LED guitar. I copied the guitar neck on the right.

The "epic fail" fret saw. I spot welded sheet metal to the sides, and then 

super-glued plexiglass strips to act as a depth stop.

I simply marked the distances with a good ruler, and then used a square to draw the lines. I also used the square to hold the fretsaw next to it while I sawed away. It worked... until the saw got dull.

The new table saw blade and the template I made. As you can see, the 

template had slots I cut with a thicker table saw blade, and I used a 

woodscrew as the template pin. I screwed the pin into my 

table saw fence and then sawed the screw short.

A closer look at the template pin

I practiced on a piece of poplar wood first.

Jatoba (Brazillian Cherry)

Walnut in the middle, purpleheart on the sides

The tablesaw blade/fret slot cutter.

First two guitars (2009-2010)

Five String Fretless Bass

• Padauk wood sides with maple thru-neck design
• Maple is only visible on the back, thanks to a DIY veneer
• Cocobolo fretboard with padauk fret markers
• 5-string Schaller bridge
• EMG select pickups
• Tape-wound bass strings (for that upright bass feel).

If you look closely at the bottom, you can see a little bit of maple visible.

 The Chestercaster

• Poplar wood body 
• Robin's egg blue "vintage" creamy color
• Hickory neck
• Jatoba (Brazillian Cherry) fretboard
• One "soap bar" pickup and one humbucker