Tristan Williams - 8-string fanned fret Iceman-ish

[Tristan Williams]

Here's the pine I'm using for the core - this is Thermo-D pine/spruce. It is roasted to high temperatures, resulting in a darker colour and massively increased stability. It is often used here for places that see extremes of humidity - saunas and outdoors. The particular stuff I'm using here are a couple of decently clear offcuts from decking:

You can see here the profile:

A quick bit of work with an aggressively set jack plane removed all of the profiling and left me with nice bits of squared up lumber. I love the colour of this stuff, it should look great sandwiched between two pieces of maple:

It is interesting stuff, because unless you cut through a knot you really can't smell that it is pine any more. It has a smell reminiscent of caramel, instead - quite delicious actually. It seems to me that it works more easily with hand tools than normal pine does.

[Tristan Williams]

At last, here is my stack of wood for this project:

A closeup of the Finnish oak for the fingerboard - I believe it is quercus robur, so I guess that is also known as English oak, or French oak:

[Tristan Williams]

I didn't achieve much this weekend as it was a busy one what with spring finally starting and all (spring cleaning, changing to summer tyres, bike maintenance, etc), but I did glue up and thickness the body core:

Loads of fluffy shavings from that roasted pine, it sure works nicer than normal pine. Note my super-simple planing stops - just screws driven into the benchtop & vise chop. I screw them in so they dip under the surface when I'm not using them.
I also spent some time improving the software I wrote to lay out fretboards. One of the things that has been bugging me is my uncertainty about where the bridge needs to be to achieve decent intonation, so I extended it so that I could feed in the tuning I want to use what string tension I'd like to achieve. It searches through the D'Addario string specs and picks the best strings to use, then calculates the compensation required for each string and plots it on the output DXF.
The "final" fretboard specs I've picked are 750mm bass scale, 675mm treble scale, with the 7th fret being straight. 3" sounds like a lot, but with the same nut & bridge angles it would only be a 2" difference on a 6-string guitar, which is a pretty typical amount of fanning. I'm aiming for a tuning of EAEADGBE.

[Tristan Williams]

Is there any interest in my fret software, by the way? I could make it freely available online (perhaps with a "Donate" button for generous souls). Its a fairly simple thing, you feed in all of your specs to a simple graphical UI and it draws the fretboard you've specified. It optimizes your string selection based on your tension preferences, calculates compensation and draws saddles in the correct positions. You can readily tweak the design on-screen, save/load the project, and export to DXF format. It would be fairly easy to export to PDF format, too, and to output fret charts.

[Tristan Williams]

Today I cut a neck blank from my maple and squared it up. I figured I'd laminate a few strips of that Finnish oak for extra strength, so I ripped a couple of strips of that using a cutting gauge - I forgot to take pictures of this process, but you cut deeply from both sides, then put it in a vice and whack it with a hammer or your palm and it snaps cleanly. It is fast and accurate, and generates less sweat than sawing. Then I ripped the neck blank a couple of times:

I cleaned up all the cut surfaces and glued the lot up:

[Tristan Williams]

I've taken a few days off so I should (hopefully) get plenty done this week.
Truss-rod slot was cut using my little Record 043 plough plane. Its a nice little plane, but my U-channel truss rod is 10mm wide and the widest cutter I have is 1/4". So it had to be done in two passes:

And then:

Perfect fit!

[Mark Swanson]

Tristan, the fret software sounds interesting. I'll have to bring it to Charlie's attention if he hasn't seen it already.
The work looks great too!

[Tristan Williams]

It took me a while to decide what to do with the headstock. I knew I wanted an angled headstock, but I also wanted the end of the fretboard to be angled the same as the nut. I've noticed that most multiscale guitars still have a 90 degree fretboard end, which to me just looks awkward and unprofessional, but if you want to get it to be angled like the nut then you need to make the headstock a compound angle. Not just a plain scarf joint, but also angled in two planes. Tricky. I can see why most don't bother. Next time I think I'll do a Fender style stepped down headstock instead. After some very careful layout and a practice cut in pine I started the cut with my trusty Dozuki:

Once the kerf was well established I switched to the Ryoba to slice through:

And finally cleaned it up and got it dead flat with a freshly sharpened low angle block plane:

Phew! That is the part that I've been dreading the most in this build.

[Tristan Williams]

With that done I went on to taper the neck blank. This is a quick job with a hand plane:

Next up I'll glue the headstock in place. I'm planning to tack one of the offcuts from making the crazy scarf joint in place to help me drill through for truss rod adjustment.

[Tristan Williams]

Tristan, the fret software sounds interesting. I'll have to bring it to Charlie's attention if he hasn't seen it already.
The work looks great too!

Cheers Mark Here's a screenshot with the project for the 8-string:

[Tristan Williams]

It was going to be exceedingly tricky to clamp this joint, so I decided to do something a bit unusual to glue it up. I smeared Titebond all over the joint, then wiped it away and added dots of thick CA (superglue) at the places I thought most likely to be wasted away when carving the neck profile. Then I pressed the joint together as tightly as possible and sprayed it with CA accelerator. I then just needed to hold it for another 20 seconds or so, wipe off the excess Titebond and it was done - a nice tight joint with nary a clamp in sight.

[Jason Rodgers]

Hmm, I've hit a snag so I've had to have a rethink: I had my doubts about the walnut, so I had a luthier friend look at my lumber and assures me that it is black walnut, rather than European walnut (which is what I purchased it as at the lumber yard). As far as I'm aware, that means it has come from the US. D'oh!!

Eh, not your fault. I won't hold it against you. This is for fun.

[Tristan Williams]

This is for fun.

Sure is! Also: boy am I jealous of the lumber yards near you there! I spent a few days in Portland while on honeymoon, fantastic place. I almost managed to get out to Gilmer, but not quite.. Next time!

[Tristan Williams]

I began today by cutting & planing off the extra from the headstock. Next up I wanted to drill a hole for truss rod adjustment, but my attempt at jigging it with some scrap wood failed - I ended up reverting to continuing the square channel out through the headstock. I chose to do this by drilling & chiselling out the waste:

Then I glued a single "ear" to the headstock. Once that had dried I proceeded to rough cut it to shape with a coping saw:

The result is surprisingly small - it is actually smaller than a normal Telecaster headstock. Tuning it will be a bit cramped but it shouldn't be a problem.

[Tristan Williams]

While I waited for the glue to dry I worked on the truss rod - this is another of my hardware store specials. About 3€ worth of bits and pieces - an bolt, coupling nut, furniture nut, a washer, some threaded rod and aluminium U channel:

Last year I bought myself an expensive birthday present - a small lathe and mill. So this time I don't have to file the truss rod nut round I screwed the bolt into the coupling nut, chucked it in the 3-jaw:

I turned it down to 8mm as far as I could, then flipped it around in the chuck and turned the remainder down:

[Tristan Williams]

I used the lathe to shorten the furniture nut so that it is about the same as the width of the U-channel, then filed a round seat for it in the end of the channel:

Then I filed the washer into a rectangle, threaded the lot together and its basically done:

I just need to epoxy the furniture nut in place and the adjusting nut together, then wrap the threaded rod with tape or some irrigation pipe that I'm sure I've got lying around here somewhere..

[Mark Swanson]

That is a real nice handmade rod! but I am wondering why you didn't use a round steel rod for the core piece and just thread the ends. That makes a better rod because it's stronger, a threaded rod is really much like using a thinner one.

[Tristan Williams]

That is a real nice handmade rod! but I am wondering why you didn't use a round steel rod for the core piece and just thread the ends. That makes a better rod because it's stronger, a threaded rod is really much like using a thinner one.

Good question! I just had the M6 threaded rod laying around so I didn't think about alternatives. I need to pop to the hardware store tomorrow anyway so maybe I'll make up a new one before I glue it into the neck.

[Tristan Williams]

I wandered down to ye olde metal shoppe today and picked up some supplies for the later stages of this build. Following Mark's advice I picked up some real 6mm steel rod. 0.30€ worth goes into this truss rod! First, threading each end (it goes much nicer if you add some cutting fluid):

Then we have a much more substantial looking rod:

Wrap the rod with tape so it doesn't rattle, reassemble, and its ready to glue into the neck (plus some tape to prevent glue getting into the workings):

[Tristan Williams]

Next up was a bit more cardio - resawing some plain maple for the back of the guitar:

Along with some other bits of maple I have lying around (including one previously used for testing finishes) this will become a 5-piece back:

In this picture you can see some other winnings from the metal store - I've decided to machine a slanted wraparound TOM for this axe. I got enough 12*50mm aluminium 6082T6 barstock for two attempts, and some 3mm aluminium plate I fished out of their scrap bin that will be used to make saddles. That there is about 2.50€ worth of metal.
It was a fair challenge designing a TOM-style bridge for this guitar, as the bass strings need an extraordinary amount of adjustment range. The range needed rapidly drops off as you work up the pitches though so I took advantage of this to try to add some class to what would otherwise be an overpoweringly large hunk of metal. The angles will make it a challenge to machine: