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Post by folkstrum on Dec 13, 2008 21:12:36 GMT -5
This is GREAT, Glen. Speaking for *our household,* we are really enjoying your build-thread! I love the Slope!! (Now, if you could build even a rudimentary Dulcimer for a certain party here, I think I could guarantee a sale--even if she's not perfect (vis-a-vis whatever "standards" might exist!!). Super stuff. Even if ol' Bill won't let me near the "backstage" this year, If yer comin' so am I!! I've even saved up enough to buy you a "Funnel Cake". Please, keep this stuff coming. You have ripples going you don't even know about. Now--about a Green Mountain Dulcimer (hey, it fits so well!! )
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 14, 2008 15:16:46 GMT -5
You want to inlay a funnel cake into a dulcimer? Would that be one funnel cake? Or one funnel cake for each vendor? ;D That would be like really funny? ;D Funnel cake sound ports?
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 14, 2008 19:54:59 GMT -5
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Post by Rhapsody on Dec 14, 2008 21:09:16 GMT -5
Are you making a guitar hat for Henry?
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 15, 2008 10:20:43 GMT -5
A guitar hat would be cool. ;D We're not making a guitar hat but, we did make a santa hat for his friend Jericho. I don't know where Jericho is right now or I would send a pic of him. ;D String spacing for the 000? String spacing at the bridge? We have options. 2", 2 1/8", 2 3/16", 2 1/4", 2 5/16", 2 3/8", and more! I like 2 3/16". I find that folks that play better then I do, and it's not hard to find one of those, like it a little wider. Like 2 1/4". 2 5/16" is harder for me to play barr chords. It might be easier to play barr chords if the neck had a tighter radius like 14" or 12". I normally use a 16" radius. So for this one I'm planning on using the 16" neck radius and making the string spacing at the bridge 2 1/4". String spacing and neck width at the nut? We have options. I could use a 1 11/16" neck width at the nut. I can hear thousands of guitar players cringing at the thought. ;D Just hold on a second. With a 1 11/16" neck width, I can put the two E strings onto the fingerboard from the edge 3/32" making the string spacing from E to shining E, 1 1/2". With the low E closer to the edge, it might be easier for some folks to reach over the top and grab that E with their thumb. And with the high E that close to the edge you might not be able to vibrato it very hard without it falling off of the edge. Depending on playing style. Another option is to put the two E's 4/32" onto the fingerboard making the string spacing 1 14/32". That might give you more room to vibrato the E's but making the string spacing tighter. Not as much room for your fingers in there. Or we could put the low E 4/32" onto the fingerboard and the high E 3/16" onto the fingerboard giving a lot more room to vibrato the high E but making the string spacing 1 3/8". I work a lot in 32ths of an inch, so sometime I don't reduce those numbers down. Sometimes I do. Sorry for the confusion. Check my math too! Another option is to make the neck width at the nut 1 3/4". And if I use my three options of tucking the E's onto the fingerboard such as 3 and 3 32nths, and 4 and 4 32nths, and 4/32" and 3/16" my string spacings will change from 1 18/32", to 1 1/2', and 1 14/32". And as we move up to 1 13/16" neck width at the nut, using the three options we have string spacings of, 1 5/8" 1 18/32" and 1 1/2". 1 13/16" seems a little bit wide for me. Someone else might like it though. I like the 1 3/4" neck at the nut with the option #3 of low E 4/32" onto the board and the high E 3/16" onto the board with the string spacing at 1 14/32". It seems like folks that play better then I do, and it's not hard to find one of those, like the string spacing a little wider. So one option would be making the neck 1 3/4" at the nut, tucking the low E 4/32" onto the fingerboard and tucking the high E 5/32" onto the fingerboard, making the string spacing from E to shining E, 1 15/32". Because these boxes are proto types and I don't have someone telling me what they want, I need to pick some numbers to shoot for. And I am going to pick, 16" radius on the fingerboard, 2 1/4" string spacing at the bridge, neck width 1 3/4" at the nut, with the low E 4/32" onto the fingerboard and the high E 5/32" onto the fingerboard giving me a string spacing at the nut 1 15/16". And we might as well do the same thing with the slope shoulder dreadnought. Unless anyone else has any suggestions. I'm always open to new ideas to make these things easier to play. Glen
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Post by Rhapsody on Dec 15, 2008 12:21:07 GMT -5
Are there "player guitars," similar to "player pianos?" ;D
(It just occurred to me that I had a Mickey Mouse one as a child---with a little crank on the side to play tinny-sounding calliope music. I was thinking of something far more sophisticated than that--with rolls of perforated paper and stuff....)
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Post by cotten on Dec 16, 2008 1:49:00 GMT -5
Very interesting thread, Glen! Thanks for giving us these glimpses into handmade guitar gestation. Any estimate on the expected "birth" day? Doing things your way, with all you've got going, how long do expect these two to take from start to completion? You do know we're going to want to hear both of them before they're adopted by someone else, right? cotten I think the technical term for those ebony fingerboard spots is GLWTs: God's Little Woodpecker Targets.
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 16, 2008 10:18:11 GMT -5
I asked Henry about the guitar hat and he said, "No!". He doesn't care if it plays Freebird or not. He wants to build a lute for Miley Cyrus. And here I was thinking that boys were going to be soooo much easier to raise then girls. I figure if I work night and day for the next 5 weeks, I should have these 2 playable. ;D I started them in August. Then I got bit by my dog and got a bad staff infection. That put me out of commission for about a month. So it should take about 5 months to do these 2. But I can't work on them all of the time. My wife comes up with these ideas like, I should go plow the snow out of the driveway instead of building guitars. And I figure why? Why plow the snow? I don't need to go anywhere. Yet! ;D As soon as I get strings on them, we will be making sound files. My wife wants to sell one on Ebay. And I would like to road trip the other one. If I can keep them hidden that long. Some folks like to buy them sight unheard. And that works well for us. But right now I have to go buy some plans for a lute. ;D Glen
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 16, 2008 23:15:13 GMT -5
I found Jericho. He's the one wearing the Santa hat. ;D I worked on my fingerboards a little bit today. Didn't do to much and it wasn't very fancy. I straight edged one side with the Plexiglas as a straight edge and trimmed it off with the router. And did the same to the other side to give me the taper and finished size that I was looking for. I didn't show it but I used 3 small pieces of double sided tape to stick the board to the Plexiglas. And I clamp it down a little bit to keep it from moving around. Other then that, it really wasn't to fancy. Glen
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 17, 2008 15:32:28 GMT -5
We started cutting some fret slots today. ;D Here is a video of our friend Steve doing it for his bass. This is how we are doing it today anyway. ;D luthiertube.com/video/314/fret-slotsI trimmed the nut end off with the band saw, and cleaned it up to the line with the disc sander. And there they are. And we started sanding the fingerboard surface of a neck blank. Now I need to go start on some snow removal. ;D Glen
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 18, 2008 23:23:58 GMT -5
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Post by folkstrum on Dec 19, 2008 9:10:51 GMT -5
Glen--I'm noticing the slight angles on the fret-grooves on the rosewood fingerboard (?). I know this would be the "organic" or "fan-fret" approach; but the angle doesn't seem as great a one as I've seen on some of Bashkin's work. Are you choosing less angularity, or will it be really noticeable once the fret-wire is hammered in? Also, maybe you mentioned this, and I missed it...what kind of bridge/and/or saddle compensation will you need to make? Is there anything with the "nut" as well? Thanks for any info. Great build-thread, BTW. Even has "Rhap" interested. Also, are we to understand "Jericho" is a block of wood??
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 20, 2008 0:51:19 GMT -5
Hi Norm, Jericho "used" to be a block of wood. It has been transformed into a Jericho! ;D The scale lengths that I am using are 25" for the high E and 25 3/4" for the low E with the 8th fret being the perpendicular one to the center line. I guess you can go with a more radical fan and then change the perpendicular fret to make it easier to play by the nut or higher up the neck depending on your playing style, mood, position of the moon and all of that. Lots of options. I figured that I would start here and see how it goes. When they are finished they will look like this one. Not electric of course. To figure out the saddle compensation I made some mock up necks and made a stick. I made a pin less bridge that I could screw down in different places and figure out where the leading edge of the saddle should be to make each string play in tune all the way up and down the neck. Once I got those 6 points located, I figured out how wide to make the saddle and compensate it, to make this work. Then I designed the bridge around the saddle and turned the X brace to work together with the bridge off of that. Here is a video of the stick. This is me hard at work doing research and development. ;D luthiertube.com/video/313/top-secret-Here are the necks. I haven't seen anyone else post pics of the way they do the bracing, or the right way to do the bracing for these things. So I'm just going with what I know and rolling the dice. Hope it works. I couldn't turn the X brace as much as I wanted to on the slope shoulder dred because the X brace would run into the transverse brace. I have it close and I don't see why it "won't" work. Here is a pic of it. ;D Isn't that a nice looking top? Compensating the nut is another story. I don't see why that would work. I'm not saying it won't. I just don't understand it. I haven't done enough research at that end yet. I would say that you would want to move the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd fret closer to the nut and leave everything else alone and it should be fine. But like I said, I haven't done enough research at that end yet. ;D There is a thread on another forum (the AGF) about the dark ages of Martin where they were putting the saddles 1/8" to far forward in the 70's and making the intonation out of whack. And they were doing it in the 40's, 50's, 60's, etc. One of the stories that comes up is that the jig that they were using to locate the bridge was worn and that caused the bridges and the saddle to be shifted 1/8" to far forward. I'm not convinced that that was an accident and not intentional. I could tell you my theory about it. But it would take a long time and I would have to use a lot of these. ;D ;D ;D How far do we need to go with making our intonation perfect? It depends. I was talking to Rick Turner one day about intonation and he said, "Did Jimi Hendrix ever play a guitar that was in tune?". ;D I could post a blind fold challenge right now to challenge anyone to tune a guitar by ear and tell me, by playing every fret, on every string up and down the neck, tell me which one is 1 or 2 cents high or low on a tuner and which ones are right on. And my experience with that is, it won't take you very long to find someone who can not only tell you which strings and frets are high and low, but they can tell you how they would de-tune it to make different chords play in tune and how they would tune it to make it play in tune with its self on an average. I have a sneaky suspicion that they are not going by what they hear, but by what they feel as well. I haven't had anyone confirm that. It's just a suspicion. ;D Now you know what I do in my spare time. You folks ask some great questions. ;D Glen
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Post by Glen DeRusha on Dec 20, 2008 23:09:14 GMT -5
Spent most of the day doing snow removal. ;D Worked on this a little bit. Book matching some East Indian Rosewood for a head cap. Started on this one until my band saw blade broke. Time to call it a day. Glen
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Post by tonyc on Dec 21, 2008 11:02:04 GMT -5
Regarding the "tuning" issue... I have a Martin D28 that came with an "uncompensated" saddle (and I was clueless in the '70's about even the existence of a compensated saddle) but my ear very clearly heard the dissonance. What I did was: 1) tune to "natural" tuning, open strings 2) retune to make the G chord (GBDGBG) ring harmonically 3) retune to make the 2nd string (B) D note match the open D string 4) flatten the high E just a tad to make it blend 5) recheck that G chord Seems crazy, but it worked; Now, even with a compensated saddle, when I play in "drop D" (which is mostly where I do play), I tune the bottom D string so the G note (5th fret) is "spot on" because the overtones from the open D will generally match well enough with the rest of the chording. BTW, 2 weeks ago I got to play my first "fan fret" guitar. I wasn't certain how it would go, would it feel funny, would it sound off? Happy to say I didn't even realize at first that I was even playing with a different fret alignment! And the long scale of the bass gave the guitar even greater resonance- very cool.
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