For Christmas 2014, Robert and Elizabeth bought Bdale a beginner's guitar
book, and Robert offered to help with a guitar build project based on the
success of his Telecaster build. This is the resulting project, Bdale's
-first guitar, started in February of 2015!
+first guitar, started in February and completed in December of 2015!
After a lot of reading and listening, a few core decisions got things rolling:
* build a "clone" of a hard-tail Fender Stratocaster (no tremolo)
* body and neck to be near-natural wood color with satin finish
-* no pickguard (maximum exposed wood grain, rear control cavities
+* no pickguard (maximum exposed wood grain, rear control cavities)
* pickups and all hardware in black
* standard strat-like 3-pickup, 1 volume, 2 tone design with 5-way selector
+* second tone control with push-pull switch to phase-reverse middle pickup
* noise-reduced pickups
We had a "spare" blank in alder big enough to machine the body, left over
from Robert's Telecaster project. So the plan was to machine a custom body
and buy the rest of the parts from various sources.
-Another intense period of study led to the decision to use
+One of the reasons for going without pickguard is that it exposes more of
+the natural wood grain to view. A pleasant consequence is that the access
+plate for the electronics will be on the back of the guitar, meaning it'll
+be easy to pull the plate and tinker with the wiring without having to pull
+the strings off... which, given I'm an electronics guy, might end up being
+a really good thing!
+
+## Part Selections ##
+
+A period of intense study led to selecting
[DiMarzio](http://dimarzio.com) Area pickups. These are stacked-coil hum
reducing pickups in the standard strat single-coil pickup form factor. The
chosen "standard" set consists of:
[Guitar Fetish](http://www.guitarfetish.com/), with the exception of a nicer
[hard-tail bridge](http://guitarheads.net/products/bridges/hardtailrear.html)
sourced from [GuitarHeads.Net](http://guitarheads.net), and a 22-fret natural
-Canadian maple neck purchased from eBay seller "bluelink88".
+Canadian maple neck purchased from eBay seller "bluelink88", and black machine
+screws in several sizes sourced from Amazon.
+
+## Purchased Items ##
| Description | Part Number | Quantity | Price | Total |
|-------------|-------------|---------:|------:|------:|
+|amazon.com|||||
+|DiMarzio Area Pickup Set Black||1|229.99|229.99|
+|ebay seller bluelink88|||||
+|22-fret maple neck||1|35.99|35.99|
+|guitarfetish.com|||||
+|Push-Pull DPDT Pot 250K Audio|F20|1|8.79|8.79|
+|Full Sized B250K Tone Pot|F22L|1|2.45|2.45|
+|Full Sized A250K Volume Pot|F22A|1|2.45|2.45|
+|USA Spec Stratocaster 5-Way Switch Black Tip|F158F164|1|11.45|11.45|
+|Set of Three Black Strat Replacement Knobs|A27|1|4.95|4.95|
+|Bag of BLACK Pickguard Screws|K60|1|6.45|6.45|
+|Pair Classic Strap Buttons Black|K33|1|4.45|4.45|
+|Black Vintage Spec. String Ferrules|K15|1|7.45|7.45|
+|Strat Jack and Plate Black|K09|1|6.45|6.45|
+|Strat Pickup Metal Trim Ring BLACK|K125|3|8.45|25.35|
+|Pair Black Butterfly Strat String Trees|K36|1|5.45|5.45|
+|Black Gotoh Style 14:1 tuners|E16|1|26.95|26.95|
+|Ultra Thick Black Neck Plate with Screws|K03|1|9.45|9.45|
+|guitarheads.net|||||
|black hard tail bridge||1|16.99|16.99|
+## Body ##
+
+I started out with a 1962 Stratocaster design file created in Alibre by
+user protomachinst6 on CNCzone.
+
+http://www.cnczone.com/forums/musical-instrument-design-and-construction/17659-cnc-32.html
+
+I originally hoped that I would be able to use FreeCAD to modify this design,
+but the STEP import process seemed to lose the ability to keep the various
+sub-assemblies oriented correctly relative to each other. Since Alibre has
+been replaced by Geomagic Design, I pulled down a 15-day trial version of
+that package to one of the Windows machines in the house, and (not
+surprisingly) it was able to read the file just fine. I was then able to
+export just the body and read that into FreeCAD, which was used for the
+remainder of the design work.
+
+Another interesting STEP file of the body from a 1962 strat drawn by Marc
+Erasmus is available on [GrabCAD](https://grabcad.com/library/62-strat-asm)
+and it appears at least one person has actually built a guitar using these
+files.
+
+To build the guitar body I want, the existing body design file was
+modified to eliminate the tremolo cut-out and rear cavity, to add screw holes
+for the hard-tail bridge, and to shift the electronics cavity from being
+front-open to being rear-accessible with the front just having 3 holes for
+the volume and tone control shafts and the slot and mounting screw holes
+needed for the pickup selector switch.
+
+The first attempt to cut the body on our CNC router failed, because a large
+delivery of building materials happened in the middle of the roughing pass,
+and I naively thought the router would be ok cutting for a while without
+me. Apparently, swarf jammed the bit up enough to cause the machine to lose
+steps and shut itself down. Unfortunately, when I attempted to restart the
+cut, something went horribly wrong and the roughing cutter put a deep gouge
+through much of the body of the guitar. I decided to call this attempt a
+bust, and look for more wood to start over with.
+
+## Wiring ##
+
+A standard strat has a volume control, 2 tone controls, and a 5-way pickup
+selector. The pickup selector allows neck, neck+middle, middle,
+middle+bridge, and bridge as choices, with the combinations formed by
+putting the two selected pickups in parallel. The first tone knob controls
+the neck and middle pickups, the second controls the bridge pickup.
+
+After lots of discussion with Robert and listening to many demo videos, the
+only significant change to this I decided to make is to use a push-pull switch
+variant of the second tone control, wiring it to allow phase reversing the
+middle pickup. Phase reversing one pickup of a blended pair yields a "nasal"
+or "biting" tone. Here is one of the
+[clearest demo videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIBHg4kwl2k)
+I found of this effect. What I like about this option is that it gives what
+sounds to me like an old-school blues kind of tone.
+
+The other minor tweak I'm considering is "treble compensation" on the volume
+control, which DiMarzio shows in some of their wiring diagrams. The idea is
+to compensate for the usual loss of treble content when turning down the
+volume on the guitar. It consists of an additional 560pF capacitor and 300k
+resistor in parallel between the hot and wiper terminals on the volume
+control. This may or may not seem necessary once we have the guitar together.
+
+## Artifacts ##
+
+The following files are licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
+International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/):
+
+* [FreeCAD](http://www.freecadweb.org/) design file for
+ [guitar body](guitarbody.fcstd)
+* [STL output](guitarbody.stl) from FreeCAD for guitar body
+
+
More to come!
projects / web / gag.com / blobdiff