One-piece body
This piece of alder, which was wide enough for a one-piece body, was sanded down to 45mm (13/4") with a big thickness sander. After this I kept it straight for several months by clamping it with 2 pieces of wood and 4 clamps.This, however, only works if the blank was sufficiently dry before sanding or planing. Otherwise it would almost certainly have warped.
where its humidity equals that of the surrounding air. It is therefore essential that wood which has finished drying out of doors is made to adapt over a sufficiently long time to the climate of the environment in which it will be used later.
Checking the weight of wood over a longer period of time is a simple way of determining when it's dry enough. When wood has been stored for a sufficiently long time at constant humidity, the moisture content will eventually become constant, too. The easiest way of finding out when this point has been reached is to regularly weigh a not-too-small piece of wood from the stack. Kitchen or bathroom scales (for larger samples) will do for this purpose.
The water contained in moist wood makes up a high proportion of its total weight; as the wood becomes drier, this proportion becomes ever smaller and eventually constant when the wood moisture content is in equilibrium with the air moisture content. The sample should be weighed once a month at the beginning of the drying process, and once a week in the later stages. Each time you weigh a piece of wood, note its weight and the date straight onto it. When the weight of the sample piece remains constant over three weeks you can be sure that the wood has finished losing moisture and has reached a moisture equilibrium with the air surrounding it. This form of wood-seasoning often takes very long and can even take years, depending on the thickness and the type of wood.
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Hardware |
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Tuners |
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The tuners consist of a shaft, a worm gear and a knob. Gear ratios |
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indicate how many turns of the knob are required to make the |
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shaft complete one turn. The most common gear ratios are |
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between 1:12 and 1:20. A gear ratio of 1:14, for instance, means |
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that 14 turns of the knob are required to make the shaft complete |
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one full turn. As the name implies, tuners allow the tuning of a |
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guitar, and their quality is crucial for a guitar's ability to main- |
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tain a stable tuning; it would therefore be a false economy trying |
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to save money on them. Go for good quality instead. The |
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smoother and more precise the operation of the tuners is, the |
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easier it will be to tune the guitar. Enclosed-gear tuners with |
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sealed lubrication are better than ones with open gears. The |
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amount of play can often be adjusted with a screw on the knob. |
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Schaller (1), Gotoh (2), Grover (3), Kluson and Sperzel (4) are |
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some manufacturers of quality tuners, and especially the ones produced by the German manufacturer Schaller have a very
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good reputation. Those made by the Japanese company Gotoh are less expensive but equally good in quality. Most tuners come in chromeor gold-finished form or in a colored style. If you want to save a bit of money, buy machine-polished tuners instead of hand-polished ones.
Bass tuners are bigger and stronger than guitar tuners. The picture shows a Schaller (5) and a Gotoh (6) bass tuner. There are even bigger models which have a visible gear wheel (7).
HipShot bass tuners (8) are light in weight and smaller and thus help to keep the weight of the bass peghead low (especially with 5- or 6-string bass guitars). Further advantages: peghead can be made smaller, gear ratio 27:1, greater shaft diameter (3/8" = 9.5mm), can be fitted on leftor right-hand side.
There are “L” (left) and “R” (right) tuners (3L/3R or 2L/2R), according to the side of the peghead on which they have to be fitted (9a). It is also possible to fit all tuners on one side (6-in-line or 4-in-line). If you choose to do so, you obviously have to buy either “L” or “R” tuners only (9b); but if the head is not to become too large, the tuners will in this case have to be rather smallsized. The tuners are normally mounted from above with bushings. Their outside diameter determines the size of the holes needed for fitting them (pegholes). This diameter is normally between 9mm and 10mm (3/8" - 13/32") on electric guitars and between 12mm and 17mm (1/2", 9/16", 11/16") on basses. Most of the tuners can be fastened additionally with a small oval or round-head wood screw to stop the unit turning.
On locking tuners, which are mostly used in conjunction with tremolos, the strings are clamped in the tuner shaft with a knob situated at the bottom (10) or at the top of the tuner (11).
Locking tuners are of general advantage: the guitar can be strung more quickly because the strings obviously don't have to be wound up; and due to the absence of windings which could settle the tuning is stable immediately. Fastening knobs situated on the top of tuning machines fitted on the right-hand side of the peghead have a counterclockwise thread.
Photo: Stewart-MacDonald's Guitar Shop Supply
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Staggered tuning machines (1) with shafts of differing lengths |
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are only needed if the peghead is not angled back. Because such |
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tuners help to maintain sufficient string pressure against the nut, |
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peghead string retainers are not required. |
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The same effect can be achieved with normal tuning machines |
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by using a wedge like shown in the drawing below. Such wedges |
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or stager stripes are commercially available. Alternatively it is |
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also possible to taper the thickness of the entire peghead. |
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Locking tuners and staggered tuners are now available from |
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almost all manufacturers. Gotoh has recently developed a model |
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where the shaft height is infinitely variable. |
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Headless tuners are mounted on the body. The picture shows the |
full set of the German manufacturer ABM. The head part (2) is screwed to the top end (head end) of the neck. Special ball-end strings (3) are anchored here and in the tuning unit (4), which is fitted at the end of the body. An alternative with this ABM unit is to use normal bass strings with one ball-end and clamp the other end with allen screws at the head part. The bridge (5) is screwed onto the body between the head part and the tuning unit (as shown in the picture, but turned at an angle of 180°). The guitar is tuned with small 3mm-diameter screws that pull back a small string-holder in which the ends of the strings with the larger balls are anchored, thus tightening the strings (6).
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Sound differences
When an open string and a fretted string are played, there may be a certain difference in sound because of the different materials used for the nut (bone) and the frets (metal). Using a brass nut can help to reduce this difference. But I should also mention that such a sound difference due to a different nut material is only of a theoretical nature; in practice, most of us won't hear any difference. So I wouldn't worry about it - almost every guitar has a bone or synthetic nut anyway.
Nuts
The nut (7) is the point where the strings rest on the neck. It serves to guide the strings and helps to keep them clear of the fingerboard. Plastic nuts are only used on cheap instruments. Good, hard materials to use for making the nut are bone, which is either solid bone or compressed bonemeal, or a synthetic substitute of bone.
Nuts made of graphite or some other high-tech material and roller nuts with small rollers on which the strings rest help to keep friction to a minimum.
Nuts can be bought as blanks or in pre-slotted form. When buying pre-slotted nuts the desired neck width, fingerboard radius and string spread have to be taken into consideration. Nut blanks have to be trimmed and slotted to the dimensions
needed. There are also metal nuts with height-adjustable string
rests available which will save you some work because they do 8 not require any slot filing.
It is also possible to use a zero-fret in place of a nut. In this case the nut is placed directly behind the zero-fret and only serves to guide the strings.
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Bolt-on neck hardware
Neck attachment plates for bolt-on necks are normally 3mm (1/8")-thick, 40mm x 50mm (about 1.5" x 2")-large, chrome, black or gold metal plates (8). Alternatively, when a flat neck attachment plate is impractical you could also use special round, 4mm (about 5/32")-thick, 15mm-diameter neck attachment ferrules, for which 15-16mm (5/8") counterbore holes are needed (9). Plates as well as ferrules are used with 45mm (1 3/4")-long Phillips oval-head screws with 4mm (5/32") wood thread.
Pickguards
On the pickguard some or all of the electronic parts can be mounted. There are plastic sheets available for custom-cutting your own pickguards, but you can, of course, also buy finished shapes. Most of these have already-cut-out pickup cavities, but there are also some available for custom-cutting cavities. The standard screws used for mounting pickguards are 3mm x 13mm oval-head screws. Pickguards come in white, black and in a few other colors. They can consist of several differently-colored laminated layers. Apart from plastic they can also be made of veneer or some light metal such as aluminium. The electronic parts (or parts of them) can also be mounted on additional metal cover plates.
Fretwire
Fretwire is available in many different dimensions, e.g. in packs
of 24 short-length pieces (10), in 2-foot lengths of straight wire
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(11) and in rolls (12). On most electric guitars medium-sized fretwire or an even higher and wider type - so-called jumbo fretwire - is used. The short-length pieces are difficult to bend evenly and should be avoided if you want to use a radiused fingerboard.
Crown
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Fretwire (cross-section): |
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Tang |
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