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| Folding Electric Guitar |
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| Bogstandard:
Chris, have a go at making one. Unfortunately I won't be able to give you many pointers yet. No Jack, what you see is it. Maybe later, you will be able to see all the little bits 'n bobs. John |
| Stilldrillin:
John. That's beautiful! :clap: David D |
| sorveltaja:
What can be said? just wonderful job, Bogs. Bit of an offtopic, but if one wants to start building/modifying an electric guitar, do yourself a favor, and start with cheap and crappy one, just to get familiar, what prevents it to be an enjoyably played instrument. If all electric components are count out, mostly it is the neck, frets, saddle, and/or tuning hardware, that makes the bugger even impossible to tune correctly. Look for guitar, that has preferably a maple neck, as it is rather stable material. And definitely worth some work. Check if the frets are equally thick. If they aren't, maple/rosewood fretboard is bumpy, so frets should be removed, and fretboard sanded/machined straight. Might sound easy, but then comes truss rod, that (should) keep the neck straight under the tension of strings. Just my two offtopic cents :poke:. |
| Bogstandard:
I am now able to give a lot more details out on this build, but not all. But a little note about the testing that has been going on. Since it has been built, and played almost every day since, three strings have broken, and in each case it was the end of the string around the ferrule untwisting itself, so that has been put down to string failure because of bad manufacture. It keeps perfect tune most time it is folded, and if one string does go out of tune, it is only by a minute amount, so it looks like the tuning system I used is working rather well. My man has now bought another guitar, exactly the same as the one I modified, and he states that the modified one sounds a lot more mellow and better than the original, most probably because the whole set up is a lot more rigid. So I can now show roughly how I went about it. The first thing that needed to go was the tuning mechanism, and was easily chopped off on the bandsaw. No turning back now. After a little work on the mill, there was a wooden spigot left over that the new string holding head could be fitted. You can see from this shot how the string is now held, back to front, the tuning will be done from the other end, to be shown in a later episode. A little more decorative work was done on the head, and by use of pins and Loctite, brass side cheeks were fitted. Once well bonded together, I could get on with blending and bling. The black inserts were made as a feature, but also to give a little more adhesion to strengthen things up. I could have made the inserts almost any colour, as all they are is a tiny drop of felt tip ink mixed in with the 24 hour epoxy to fill up the recess. Also notice the screwed pin. This goes into a threaded hole in the LH brass face and goes thru all the string ferrules to eventually into a locating hole in the RH brass cheek. This is to stop the strings jumping out of position when the guitar is folded. So that is the basic head finished. Except for a little bling. Engine turning is a straightforward and easy process but does in fact serve two purposes. The first is that it looks good to the layman, and secondly, once it is done, even though it will tarnish, it doesn't show fingerprints as a polished surface does. Mounted front, and the flash makes it look terrible. In normal lighting it looks perfectly smooth and highly polished. Mounted back. So that was the first part I made, next I will be showing how I got around the neck with it's folding problems. Bogs |
| z3t4:
Magnificent stuff, John. Thanks for sharing. I'm sure you're aware, but for those that aren't the most well-known 'headless' guitars are made by Steinberger. Loads of stuff on't t'Interweb. Did you put a relatively chunky bit at the head end to help the balance (having lost the machine heads there)? I tried a headless Steinberger a couple of times and it always felt really strange because the balance was all wrong. Must go and look up 'engine 'turning'. Regards, John. |
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