Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

For those who haven't skipped over to my site to see this, i thought i'd post my first 'abomination' here for all to harsh critique - the 'calm like a bomb' seven string explorer.

this is the initial concept design - like everything i do, i take into photoshop first and play with the design:


and after much wrangling and the invention of seven new expletives that I have since been approached by webster's to contribute, the outcome was this:



some finer details of the build - this one shows the placement of a Digitech DF-7 (Distortion Factory Effects Pedal) into the guitar itself:



This one shows detail of the pickups etc:



and the pickup switching configurations:



and finally, the headstock:



Lessons learnt from building this:
- build from scratch, instead of pretty much destroying a perfectly good existing guitar for the sake of cutting corners because you're a noob and thinking you'll save time and money. WRONG.
- DON'T wire directly into the guitar post painting. As a consequence to my already bodgy paint job, I dripped solder, made additional marks and scratches, and drill marks on the still-setting paint. I pretty much have to strip this guitar back and re-spray it now, i've made that much of a mess of it. What i'm going to do next time around, is trace out the electrics position per guitar, and cut/drill some ply, mount the electrics for wiring into that and then wire it up - to get the wire lengths right. I will then just disassemble from the ply and drop the final assembly into the finished guitar - that way I also don't have to wait until the guitar is finished until constructing the electrics (I can't use my powertools at night after work during the week- but I can solder).
- Circuit board pickguard - yeah, well. never again. Massive headaches from inhaling fine particles while cutting it up (no doubt carcinogenic, too).
- Wait for the paint to dry and set properly before doing any further work to the guitar. Oh, and don't cheap out on spray cans with crappy nozzles. Spray somewhere where wife won't stab you in your sleep after also unintentionally spraying new expensive outdoor deck furniture. Good ventilation is entirely dependant on how many stars you want to see after having a dizzy spell and hitting your head on said expensive outdoor deck furniture as you pass out. So many good times.
- Safety first - total noob in regards to this, as a master of logic because of my day job, common sense often is absent. Eg. jumping to using a router, belt sander, jigsaw, dremel etc without any consideration of eye protection, ear plugs - eg. stupidly attempting to remove a hot router bit with fingers (the smoke should have been a give away), skipping around the work shed like a screaming tourette's monkey cradling an eye full of hot aluminium shards, saying 'what' to annoyed family members regularly post project time because of enclosed garden shed where workshop is and close proximity to power tools.

Full version of this build (its about 37 parts) on my site under the 'calm like a bomb explorer'.

I've since started building a 335 and a double neck tele/bass, applying the lessons learnt from the above this time around. No doubt my next 'lessons learnt' list will be bigger, but I don't care - I'm doing this for enjoyment, not a living, and you live and learn.

All I can say, stuff ups and all, I'm having so much fun. It is so good to be creative, put effort into something and have something tangible as the outcome - much different to my daytime job in IT.

Well done.
The Strat and Tele from Leo have good lessons in them. With a chamfer around the perimeter of the faceplate there is no need to rout the body for anything but basic cavities, the faceplate does not need to be let in like inlay. You can build and load (to all sorts of specs) the faceplate a thousand miles away from the body. It just screws on. Sure it may end up 3/32" -1/8" higher than the wood but that can be allowed for. Same applies to all the flat top lecky models.
Don't give up on modding existing guitars -tis the cheapest and IMHO the best way to learn. Very few guitars are total crap but most can do with a bit of TLC.

Circuit board pickguard - yeah, well. never again.

And I was just thinking of sending you my stash of old PCB's and seeing what you do with it.
I've never thought of incorporating those 'dud' boards I designed & had made into a guitar.
Even if you really do "never do it again" it was inspirational!

i think i overstated working with the circuit board as pick guard idea - puffy, definately got that it didn't need to be recessed (after the fact though, too late after i'd routed the recess), and I also didn't get assembling the wiring away form the guitar (though it is completely obvious), so spot on right away.

As for working with it again, it was just a pain to cut to suit, and the piece you see on this guitar is actually 4 pieces since I couldn't find 1 pcb board the size I needed. I'd just toyed with the idea of 'why do pickguards need to be acrylic ply or wood etc' and had a whole bunch of boards sitting around, and made the leap. If I was to do it again, it would be for a smaller pickguard - i'm not going to discount that it looks cool and works just as good as anything else

I'll definately be open to modding existing guitars (like the ibanez on my site), what I meant was a reference to how I built this particular guitar - I bought an already existing seven-string that was a different shape, and cut it up/added wood to be the explorer shape - what I thought would be fairly easy ended up a lot more complicated. I love customising/modding guitars, it is lots of fun and you can definately go to town tricking them out to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things..

Excellent, love the pickguard and t'rod cover great contrast with the body colour too, nice Dr Soda. (Promise i will give you credit if i steal the idea c'board guard idea)

Steve

drsoda wrote: eg. stupidly attempting to remove a hot router bit with fingers (the smoke should have been a give away)

Ha! I still do that sort of stupidity after 30 years on the tools.

I am not a big fan of the "Explorer" and have read a report on it shape in relation to the modes of vibration which made me like them even less. If you want to read it it is HERE. Great work on the going out on a limb and trying something different though.

Jim

That's cool, thanks for sharing that link - I am sure my explorer would be massively worse off because of the way I constructed it (the wood is not one piece - more like a jigsaw of pieces to get the shape). Makes me wonder how introducing some design changes (one piece body/neck as opposed to bolt-on neck, strings through the body as opposed to terminating on a stop-bridge, wood types and varied construction techniques, factory made vs hand made etc).

I have a great book in my collection by Richard French, called "Engineering the Guitar - Theory and Practice" (ISBN: 978-0-387-74368-4) which has an entire chapter on 'Structural Dynamics' that mades a very interesting read for the more technically minded of us, I definitely recommend it. PM me if you want me to shoot you a copy.

Wow that is so cool to have a functioning cb as the pickguard.
I'm not really an explorer fan, reverse firebird is about my limit but I do like what you have done here.
Cheers
Jeff