ShortScale.org

give me an exact tracy and some good measurements and i will cut it out for about...... 30 bucks, but keep in mind, thats no shaping, fretting or even slotting, i mean bare minumum wood, but honestly i am booked for at least 2 more months.
i know you have itching to do this for a long time.

Hey robert(original), that price for necks sounds good.

I'd also be interested in ordering a neck from you (same specs as bubbles_horwitz, a blocks and binding Jaguar neck, only a rosewood fretboard instead of maple), as well as that body I messaged you a while back about. When you're free of course (and when I have more money!).

right o weijie. i'll be looking forward to it and prepareing things.
anywho, these are the newest pics.
top wood is sitka spruce( i may have already said that)
the back is flaming maple.

this is after i cut them out(1/8) bigger that they should be

and took them to a bevel roughter bit (about the size of my fist)
this is the male(it burned a bit)

this pic shows that its about 1 1/2 inches tall minus the bevel cut edges.

random pic

ok people i want to explain something to all of you real quik.
you cannot get an archtop guitar that is actually hand carved for under 8,000.00
its impossible, unless you are friends with me and you are the lead guitarist in a group called brown james, then you get a hand carved archtop guitar for alot less,
but don;t forget just to carve the top, not including the bottom of the top it takes anywhere from 15-20 hours on spruce and double that number for maple, and then with the insides of both carved out add another 60 hours.
thats just you and a piece of wood with a scrub plane and a violin plane.
no fancy gizmos and gadets.
this is after 10 hours on the top.


i tried to capture the dips, but the autofocus wasn't auto focusing well eough.
i have more photos but they aren't copmming up right now.

this is mainly about the jazzy body i made, but anywho, i just finished up a redone body template designed to keep more wood intact(and with p-90 routs)
im too drunk to take pics right now, they keep comming out blurry but i know one person that will reap the rewards soon enough
peace
love
bonghits and beer
im out bitches!!!!

this is basically what i have been up to for the last week, i couldnt use the camera for the last 3 days cuz of the card being full, but all you would be missing is the side bending aspect of it,which sucks donkey dick by the way.
but here they are.
this is the spruce top all done with carving and all that noize.

this is the duplicator, becuz maple is hard as hell and hand carving is close to impossible i used this to make it a bit easier, but not much easier cuz i still had to use a scraper to get all the bumps down.


this is the maple back after about 8 hours of scraping

and here are the two finished products(note the scraper in the middle)

keep in mind that the top is only thing that has been carved out so far,
the underside of both peices still needs to be worked a bit, only a small bit becuz of the center block, all you really need to work towards is the top so that it can vibrate a bit.
thats all i have of that but....
here are some 25 1/2 scale fretboards.

here is the whole lot that i have made,(minus 2)

this is a gibby style 24 3/4 scale.

and this one is for dgner8 except he doesn't know it yet.
as you can tell by the pics its for his mandocaster that he has been bugging me about for the last.......15 years or so.

http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g126/ ... G_5276.jpg
and here is a random shot of me in st lious, down by the river.(no van)

this is the face i gave when tracy said we could tour the budwieser brewery.

this is some hobo we saw get dragged off of a train and searched.

Dude! Fasten your seatbelt. I had a guy draw up plans for them. From what I can tell, they are about as solid as we are going to get outside of Fender. It doesn't include measurements in the drawing, but the hard copy he sent me is actual size, at about 25 inches from bumper to bumper.

He asked me not to distribute it, but I will need to send you some xeroxes if you are building the necks. I am glad a few of us GET how cool it would be to revive this design. It's like having just the high notes on a guitar in an alt tuning. Once we make a few traditional bodies I am thinking it would be cool to do a Musicmaster, and from there try a few advanced (Jag?) models. I have a spare Jag trem for just such an occasion. It may be the wrong size, but there's only one way to know for sure.

From my figuring they can be made with all Fender parts with one exception--the neck plate. I don't think that's a standard size. They may be Japanese designs that use smaller plates. Eastwood/Alden uses the individual ferrules, which can be had from Stew Mac, along with truss rods if we need them for the trem models. Early mandos had solid maple necks. That is generally not done because it limits repairs. The easiest thing would be to use standard Fender body and neck widths so that the neck screw depth would be the same.

ElCapitan wrote:maple necks with blocks are trashing as fuck. you might as well put pieces of electrical tape on a normal maple neck.

FOr a while I had the root notes of my favorite chords stuck on my fretboard with great big sticky vinyl letters so I could point to them before I changed chords in improv and the keyboardist could know where to go. HAHA

That's incredible robert.I would never tackle something like that.

Aug has been surpassed.

FUCKING FANTASTIC WORK, ROBERT!

My hat is off to you, dude. Truly.

it only seems hard until you do it, after that it seems liek common sense.
aug, i have not surpassed you, and i think thats the wrong way of looking at things becuz to be completely honest out of the 4 guards i have made all of them have been crap to me, and i have only ever painted two guitars, compared to you who has done countless refins.
we just excell in different areas which is perfect cuz then we could actually learn something from eachother.

robert(original) wrote:it only seems hard until you do it, after that it seems liek common sense.
aug, i have not surpassed you, and i think thats the wrong way of looking at things becuz to be completely honest out of the 4 guards i have made all of them have been crap to me, and i have only ever painted two guitars, compared to you who has done countless refins.
we just excell in different areas which is perfect cuz then we could actually learn something from eachother.

hahaha! fair enough...

once dave and I get shit swingin', you should make a trip to LA...we'll get hammered most nights, and spent all of our days buildin' shit and learnin' off one another. We'd love to have you...

...just something to concider...

aye, do they have oatmeal stout in L.A.?

robert(original) wrote:aye, do they have oatmeal stout in L.A.?

does a bear shit in the woods? Is a pig's ass pork?

i don;t have many new pics just cuz last week i was only there for two days but here is what i got pics of
these are the sides after they cured a bit, i had to rebend one side a bit.



this is the jig for makeing a dovetail.tendon, and tongue style neck joints. this particaular one is a tongue style, i forget what the degree for the kickback was/is.



and heres what it looks like afterwards.
hopefully this next week the body glueing will start.

i couldn't get much glueiong done becuz its been so humid the last three days in st. lious, i literally watched somones aucoustic back fall apart beucz of the moisture in the air.
i did however get the fretboard glued on before the moisture hit,

altho i had to let it dry for about 36 hours before i could really handle it.


this is the inside of the carved top.
it was a bitch trying to get it the thickess of 4 mms uniform, but i got it.

this is how i set up the drill press to get the hard maple back the same inside carved look,

cuz to be completely honestly the 335 is about as acoustic as aug is gay.

check this out, im gonna do blocks for tracy on a neck, except im going to use ebony blocks, out of over 148 ebony fingerboards this was the only one with any sort of grain, and it looks awsome, you can actually follow the grain from the first marker to the last.

these are the sides after being in the mold for about a week and with the center block in place.

and finally this is the template im using for the gun - f-hole
it may or may not have a bullet coming out of it,
i have not decided yet.

peace!

this week was really just a whole shit load of sanding and glueing.
but here is the f-hole, or gun holw or whatever.

and this is just glueing the kerfing on the sides.

can't wait to see how this comes out.

awesome stuff rob. the gun is an ace idea.

honestly i can;t take credit for the gun, it was jeromys idea,
he is like a tattooed acid cowboy or something.
he brought up the idea of two revolvers and then i changed it to just one with a bullet comming out. keep it a bit more simple, two was too much.
i thought about inlay crap around it all but that would be too flashy.

Thanks for sharing pics of this build.Looking like sondZ be coming soon.