More Junk I Could not Live Without

The addiction worsens.

When I started building my Telecaster clone, I had no idea guitar cavity covers were made from pickguard material. I decided to make one from wood. Maple, to contrast with the walnut body.

I had a new router inlay kit (recent addiction-related buy), so I used it to make a 6″ by 2″ cover about 3/16″ thick. I made the blank on the band saw, so it was a little oversized.

I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I made an acrylic template for the router. I was really disappointed in the results, because I overshot the length by three units of measure. Later, when I measured the finished cover, I realized things were not so bad, because those units were thousandths of an inch. This is how crazy I’ve gotten. I missed 6″ by three thousandths, and I feel like a failure. You can’t even see three thousandths on a ruler that reads to 1/64″.

So anyway, I had this overly thick cover, and I wanted to thickness it. But how? I have all this junk in the garage, but none of the woodworking tools were right for the job. You can’t really use the planer on something this small. The table saw could conceivably do it, if you made a weird jig and tried to resaw it, but it would likely fail. The band saw is useless for precision work; it ought to come with a sander built in.

I decided to try the sanding drum (okay, one of two sanding drums I bought) on my drill press. I got the drum at Woodcraft. It’s amazingly cool. It’s about 3″ by 1 1/4″, and the great thing about it is that it takes regular sandpaper. You cut it and cram it on there somehow. No running around town looking for overpriced sleeves in inappropriate grits.

Someone showed me a thicknessing jig at Stewart-Macdonald. It’s like a tiny router fence you put on your drill press table. You adjust the distance between the drum and the fence and run parts through. It costs $159, though. Even I am not that stupid.

I built a little fence from MDF and gave it a try. I couldn’t get it to stand square, so I sanded it, figuring it would have to end up parallel to the drum. This probably ruined the flatness of the fence, but I don’t think that matters as long as the distance between the contact points of the drum and fence are constant. Anyway, I did it, and it seemed to work.

Wow, was it slow. I ran some scrap through it like 10,000 times, and nearly nothing happened. Forget that.

Also, it made horizontal lines on the wood.

Today I got an email pimping a DeWalt belt sander with an inversion stand. I thought this was the greatest thing I had ever seen! You end up with a belt sander with the belt running perpendicularly to your bench, with the movement in the vertical or horizontal direction. I had to have this! It would solve all my problems.

I started Googling around, and in a few minutes I realized I was an idiot. There’s a real tool made for this purpose, without a weird little stand. It’s called an oscillating spindle sander. And wouldn’t you know it: Ridgid makes the best one for home use, and it also does belt sanding, with a special attachment. You can literally put a belt on top of it. And it has a flat table with a miter slot, and the table TILTS.

Come on. How was I supposed to not buy that? Be serious.

I found it it’s an extremely popular tool among luthiers. I should not be surprised, with all the stuff it does.

Anyway, now I have to figure out how to make a jig that will let me thickness stuff with it.

One wise guy on a forum told me to thickness the part on the milling machine. Okay, yes, I could have done that. But that wouldn’t have made my addiction very happy. Also, it’s probably not very easy to mill stuff that’s 1/8″ thick, in a milling vise. I could try to do it with double-side tape, but it seems like a good way to fling the part at my head or get a very nonuniform thickness.

I’m going to see how the sander works. It’s still in the box.

I’m also getting a dust extractor for my tiny DeWalt 611 router. This router is wonderful, but it shoots the dust into your face like a cannon. I tried my big DeWalt the other day, with the built-in dust thing hooked up, and apart from the noise, there was no evidence it was working. I never saw a speck of dust. But when I lifted it up, the routing was done. That convinced me dust collection is a must for routers. Sadly, DeWalt doesn’t include the $5.00 extractor with the 611, and the only place where I can find it charges $9.00 for delivery.

I broke down and bought a ridiculously expensive replacement hose to run between my tools and the Shop-Vac. The regular Ridgid hose is about as flexible as a culvert, and when you hook it up to a small tool, it likes to help you steer. And it also rolls the tool off your bench and onto the garage floor. The new 10′ hose is way better, but it costs twice what it should. I’m going to look for other sources.

I was going to get a dust collector, but as time passes, it seems less and less appealing. The table saw doesn’t make much dust, and the vacuum can handle it. Dust collection doesn’t work on the band saw. The little router dust extractors are fantastic. The planer has its own fan and dust nozzle, and they work great. There is no way to put dust collection on a drill press. It’s starting to seem like there was never any point in getting a cyclone. Maybe they’re only useful for people who generate lots of dust, like commercial shops. For me, it seems like a big expense, no improvement in performance, and a great deal of plumbing work.

If I can get the cavity cover done, I’ll start sanding and finishing the guitar. We’ll see how it goes. I think it’s going to turn out very well. Next time, I’ll make my own neck and save $200.

Time to go face the dust.

Holes

Here is the guitar body. I put a rout in it for the neck pickup, I routed out the control cavity, and I drilled passages that will connect both pickup cavities and the control cavity.

I just learned that the “correct” thing is to drill slantwise from the bridge pickup hole into the control area. Thank God I didn’t know that. I might have tried it and gone right through the back of the guitar. Instead I drilled down the centerline of the guitar from the neck pocket, all the way to the future location of the bridge pickup. This connects the pickup holes. Then I drilled a 7/8″ jack hole and inserted a 1/4″ bit and continued on to the bridge pickup area. That will connect the control cavity to the pickups. I’ll run the neck pickup wire through the bridge rout and into the control area, and the bridge pickup wire will go straight into the control rout.

Using routers is a nightmare. They jump and bite and act crazy. It’s just barely conceivable that their poor behavior may have some tenuous relationship to my complete lack of skill. But I doubt it.

I think I’m going to make a couple of tiny bowtie inlays from maple and stick them in the border between the light walnut inlay and the guitar body, above the neck pocket. This will make the pocket inlays look like something I did on purpose, instead of a massive screwup. Once it’s done, I’ll delete all Internet references to my mistakes and claim everything went perfectly. No one will ever know. Shhh.

For some reason, I inherited a bag of silver coins. I might inlay a couple of liberty dimes into the guitar, if I can find two from the years my parents were born.

Every choice I made added a new level of complexity to the project. Because of the rear control rout, I have to drill potentiometer and switch holes, and I have to create a walnut cover for the rout, and I have to cut a rabbet into the guitar to receive the cover. Ordinarily, you just make the hole in the front of the instrument and slap in a prefab metal cover that holds the controls.

Here is my conclusion: if you choose to make a clear-coated bookmatched Telecaster with a rear rout, you will multiply the woodworking time by about five. Seriously, I could make a solid-color body in two days.

The TV Jones pickups also added work. I had to figure out where to put them, and I had to use a special routing template. The templates I bought have holes for Fender-style pickups, but they’re useless for TV Jones jobs, which don’t even fit standard humbucker holes.

I’m hoping I won’t have to recess the Bigsby into the top, but after all the crap I’ve routed, it probably would not be a challenge. Maybe I should do it just to be a wise guy.

Sad news: I’ve learned that you can make a guitar neck using a router and a jig. This is sad, because it means I will probably go crazy and make a neck eventually. I’ve realized that fat necks work very well with electric guitars, even though they’re a horror on acoustics. I ordered a big neck from Warmoth, but I don’t think it’s as fat as the one on my amazing Burny LP clone, so I’m not totally happy.

I went nuts and ordered a jointer/planer. Then I came to my senses and cancelled the order. I improved my planer-jointing technique, and I decided to keep my money. Then I went nuts again. The planer/jointer is once again on the way. I face-jointed a couple of really squirrelly mahogany boards I stole from someone’s trash, and it was a nightmare, so the new machine started looking good again.

I got the planer working really well, apart from the problems with twisted wood. I learned how to completely eliminate snipe. I knew it was a good idea to pull up “a little” on boards as they entered and exited, but by experimenting, I have found that snipe disappears if you pull up a WHOLE LOT. You’re trying to simulate the action of the powerful rollers that hold the wood down, so you really have to apply yourself. I had been afraid that pulling up hard would drive the wood into the blades, but that doesn’t happen, because the roller closest to your hand prevents it. I guess if you have a three-foot-long board with increased leverage, you can apply too much force, but on a twenty-inch workpiece, you can pull like crazy.

I’m going to try to get the routing done today. Time to go out and buy even more piles of double-side tape, to hold stuff in place while I work.

If I can make my own necks, I may make a new guitar with headstock and body shapes that are completely original. Probably similar to a Telecaster, but with better fret access from above. I hate the Telecaster control plate. It’s inconvenient and jams the selector switch up against the volume knob. I’d probably rout from the rear again.

Wish me luck. More accurately, pray I don’t screw this up any more than I already have.

Give me Another Week

The Telecaster clone is taking shape. Today the neck arrived, so I fixed the neck pocket and did the roundover rout around the body.

This thing is going to look fantastic once the Bigsby is in place. I hadn’t realized how good it would look.

I Made It

I finally got my guitar body repaired. Arrgh.

To summarize the mess so far, I made three pairs of bookmatched walnut boards, and I glued them together like a sandwich to make a Telecaster body with a glue line down the middle. Then I shaped it into a Telecaster body, and I routed the neck pocket. In the process, I used the wrong thing (weak clamps) to secure the router templates, and I ended up with an extra-large pocket. I then had to make bookmatched walnut inlays about 0.7″ thick to fill the pocket so I could rout it again.

When I made the basic body shape, I gouged the side of the guitar at the head end, where the strap pin would be. Because this guitar will have a clear finish, I had to fix the gouge, and I could not do what Fender does. I could not use Bondo. I decided to make a maple inlay, rout a cavity around the gouge, and stick the inlay in it.

Today I made the inlay and installed it.

I found a reasonably nice piece of maple, sawed it open on the band saw, and then shaped and jointed it (on the milling machine) so the bookmatched grain on each piece would be at about a 15° angle to the grain on the other piece. This looks better than merely reflecting the patterns. I glued it together using Titebond III, and when it was solid, I face-jointed it on the mill.

After that, I had to use the table saw to cut a piece of acrylic, and I turned that into a router template by cutting it on the mill, using the DRO to get a precise rectangle (which I screwed up because of addition and subtraction errors).

When I finally had what I thought was a good template, I stuck it on a piece of scrap and tried to cut a cavity with it, and danged if the router bit didn’t jump and eat one of the corners of the template. I hadn’t realized I needed room for the bit to completely exit the wood on each pass.

When it came time to stick the template (still usable) on the guitar, I realized I was an idiot for making a bookmatched inlay, because it had a glue line which had to match the one on the guitar to within a few thousandths. Somehow, I made it work. I routed the hole, smoothed it with a file, and checked the inlay. It fit like it grew there, and the corner which was screwed up by the damaged template was clear of the guitar, where it would be carved off later.

I used an inlay kit to make the inlay and hole. This is an amazing set of tools. If I described how it works, you would not understand, but if you saw it in action, you would get it. Basically, you stick a set of bushings over a 1/8″ bit, and you center everything precisely on the router, and you make a rout for the cavity and a rout around the inlay. By removing one of the bushings, you adjust the router so the same template that made an inlay will make a hole that fits it perfectly.

I pounded the inlay into the hole, and it worked, so I pulled it out, applied Titebond III, pounded it back in, and applied a [probably superfluous] clamp. Then I sat down and hyperventilated for 20 minutes.

Not really. But the whole time I was doing this, I was waiting to make another impossible-to-predict mistake and ruin the whole project. I felt like I was running on a frozen pond in buttered shoes with a bottle of nitroglycerin in each hand.

For me, using a router is like walking in a minefield. Things are going fine, and then BAM, your project is sawdust. Preparation helps, but without experience, you are going to do stupid things you can’t anticipate.

Tomorrow, I hope to rout off the excess inlay material and then use a roundover bit to go around the edge of the entire guitar body. After some sanding.

Man, I should have made a solid-color guitar. I could have made ten of them by now.

Soon the neck and hardware will arrive. I’ll have to finish the bridge I’m making and order a Bigsby. I’ll have to grit my teeth and try to apply a finish. That will be harder than anything I’ve done yet. Paint hates me. It sits in the can plotting against me. It thinks of ways to run, or to fail to mix properly, or to make orange peel, or to just explode. Paint can do things to me that it can’t do to anyone else.

I have no problems with house paint. I can paint an apartment in four hours. I used to do that. But anything requiring a quality finish…scary.

Sometimes when I wonder how I will get this thing done, I think back to getting my physics degree. I had gotten Fs in high school math, and I didn’t really know algebra. Somehow, I did it. If I can do that, I ought to be able to make a guitar out of a cigar box and a bag of wet newspapers.

Sometimes you have to keep plowing forward, assuming the answers will come later.

I’m not thinking about Telecasters any more tonight. This was a good day. I am entitled to rest.

Killing Flies With an ICBM

Everyone should own a milling machine.

I had a problem with the guitar I’m making. I routed a cavity bigger than it should have been, and I had to make some 0.7″-thick inlays to fill it so I could start over. I was piddling around, trying to get my router table to work so I could put perfect 1/4″ corners on the inlays (to match the cavity cut by a 1/2″ router. I started thinking, “Man, I wish I had a 1/4″ roundover cutter for the milling machine.” Then I realized…I had a collet that would fit the router roundover bit.

Naturally, that put all thoughts of routers out of my head.

I started machining the inlays. Man, what a difference. I face-milled each one down to within 0.010″ of the correct thickness. I made the edges perfectly square. I used the band saw to cut them to length, but truthfully, and end mill works better. The cuts are virtually perfect, and the surfaces are glassy.

I stuck the router bit in the mill and made that corner. It probably took 15 minutes, because I had to sneak up on it on two axes. But by the time I was done, it was much better than anything I could have done on a woodworking machine.

Unfortunately, when I was using the band saw to rough-cut the pieces down close to the right size, I made a cut from the wrong end and ruined an edge adjoining the nice corner I made. So I have to make that corner all over again. Still, the mill is amazing. I should use it for face-jointing difficult pieces of wood.

I don’t know why more woodworkers don’t use mills. I know they cost a lot, but for precision joinery, they blow woodworking tools out of the water.

Also Much More Likely to Work

I thought I would report on the woodworking efforts. Sadly I am too lazy to take photos.

I decided to make a Telecaster clone, using a router and some templates. A template is like a router stencil. You fasten it to the wood, and the router cuts away everything that doesn’t look like the template. Hopefully.

I put six pieces of walnut together to make a bookmatched slab, and then I succeeded in routing out the guitar body. But I still had to rout out the neck pocket and some other stuff.

A Telecaster has a bolt-on neck. “Bolt-in” is more like it. Okay, “screw-in.” It doesn’t actually have bolts. You make a rectangular pocket in the front of the guitar, and you put the end of the neck in there, and you use four big screws to hold it in place.

I received a neat Dewalt 611 router for Christmas, and I decided to give it a whirl. This is a very small hand-held router similar to a Bosch Colt, only better. It has a sweet plunge base.

I clamped the template to the front of the guitar body, using Irwin Quick-Grip 12″ clamps. These are newfangled one-hand clamps with silicone pads on the gripping surfaces. They’re great for quick clamping.

The router worked fine, and walnut seems to like being routed. But I had a major FAIL. As I was routing, I noticed that the template was a tiny bit off the centerline of the guitar. I assumed I had screwed up when I was attaching the clamps. I kept routing, figuring I would finish and see what the damage was. Then things went completely weird, and I ended up with a pocket that extended about 1/4″ to the left of its proper location. The clamps caused the problem. They’re so weak, you can’t use them for template routing. They let stuff move.

I had been using double-sided tape for routing, but I got this crazy idea that clamps would be less trouble. Wow, was I wrong. So if you decide to make yourself a guitar, take it from me: you don’t want Irwin Quick-Grip clamps. They’re too weak for gluing slabs together, and you can’t trust them when you’re using a template.

Now I have to figure out how to fill in the giant neck pocket and start over. I could just trash the body and make a new neck, but this body was intended to be a learning instrument, and now it’s giving me a chance to learn how to do inlays, so throwing it out would be stupid.

Yesterday I practiced using templates with the small router and my nifty new glue gun. I made a straightedge template from a piece of plexiglass, and I made two more from hardboard, and I used hot glue to fasten them to a scrap board in a way that formed a shape like a neck pocket. Then I went to town on it. I noticed a few things.

1. Pine is actually harder to rout than walnut, even though it’s soft. Sometimes it just refuses to let the bit go through.

2. If you use separate pieces to make a template, they have to be the exact same thickness in order to give you the best results. Otherwise, the router jerks when you move from a lower surface to a higher one, and I suppose it can tilt, too. You want the router base to be absolutely parallel to the workpiece.

3. Hot glue tears up hardboard templates and is not easy to remove from the workpiece. I had been cautioned that two-sided tape might tear up the wood, but the glue is worse. I suppose I have to learn how to heat it and soften it without messing up the work. But you can’t do that to glue that’s between a template and the work. I don’t think so, anyway. It’s easy to use heat to get the glue off the wood once the template is off, but by then, you’ve already torn up your hardboard template. Plexiglass, on the other hand, is stronger than glue and won’t be harmed. I have a heat gun, but it gets the work very hot very fast, so I was hoping I would not have to use it.

4. Small templates are just plain bad. You want the template to be as big as possible so it supports the router and prevents tipping.

5. When using a template, it’s probably best to use a bushing before you use your flush-cut bit. The bushing will give the template and workpiece complete protection while you use the router to remove over 90% of the material. Then you have a much easier job left for the flush-cut bit. It will also allow you to use the template when cutting at a very shallow depth. You can’t do that with a flush-cut bit, because you have to sink the bit all the way in to get the bearing in contact with the template, unless the template is very thick. I wonder if the rings on my router table will accept bearings. That would be cool.

I think I’m going to go back to the table router. It requires a lot less skill. I was concerned that the dubious flatness of my router table would cause problems, and maybe that’s true, but that will only matter at the bottom of the neck cavity. I should be able to get 90% of the way there using the table, and then move to a handheld router to finish it off.

Woodwork is great, but I hate the dust. Every time I use the router or sander for more than a minute, I have to take a shower. I’ve learned that router dust control is a fantasy. You can limit it sometimes, but even the professionals use the shop-vac for most of their sawdust.

Anything you do with tools has a price. With woodworking, it’s the danger of the machines and the unmanageable dust. With metalworking, the machines are much safer, and there is no dust, but you get splinters, and fluid goes all over the place.

I managed to machine a guitar bridge from 360 brass. I wanted a gold- or brass-colored half-ashtray bridge, and no such product exists. I had a round brass bar I bought to make bathroom drawer knobs, so I cut a length of it out and turned it into a rectangular chunk, and then I hollowed that out, giving me a box with one side missing. If you Google “ashtray bridge” and imagine what you see with the pickup part cut off, that’s what I have, except that I still have to put a few holes in it for screws.

I can’t believe how beautifully brass machines. The feeds and speeds are just like 6061 aluminum, and you can omit cutting fluid if you’re brave. It polishes up in a hurry, and when you work it, it almost seems to want to cooperate. It’s no wonder brass has been so popular throughout history.

I’ve decided I need an offset wrench for my router table, so I can remove the collet nut without scraping the table. But no one makes a 24mm wrench for a Bosch. They used to make them, but not any more. I think I’ll try to machine one out of steel. I have a bar that might work, but it may be too narrow to make the working end of the wrench. If that’s so, maybe the answer is to cut it out of a piece of scrap angle iron. With the bar, I could machine a couple of 90° angles into it for a very sharp offset. That would be nice.

I may also get a Jawhorse. I’ve been watching router videos, including one made by router expert Pat Warner, and I noticed he uses a special bench for a lot of his work. Most of it is what appears to be a two-by-eight, at waist height, parallel to the ground, with wide sides horizontal. He has a big C-clamp welded to it, to hold workpieces on it while he routs. If I had a Jawhorse, I could make a jig that would work about the same way and put it in the Jawhorse’s clamp. If you don’t know what a Jawhorse is, look it up. It appears to be an incredible tool. It’s a three-legged steel sawhorse type of thing with a giant clamp at one end. It does all sorts of stuff, and it has a workholding welding attachment that looks like a godsend.

Last night, I realized something about tools. I’ve always said tools end frustration and remedy helplessness. Last night I realized that working with tools is great for your character. Much better than sports, which teach you to crave attention and sex, and that women are disposable toys, and that you’re so wonderful, no one will ever make you pay for the bad things you do.

When you use tools and begin to see success, you will develop a sense that you are able to cope with problems. You will learn that creativity, perseverance, and prayer pay off. It will help you to realize that the failures you’ve experienced in the past are not predictive of your future, because you can defeat your challenges if you use your brain and refuse to give up.

It costs a lot of money, but then so do worthless pursuits like golf. And in the end, you (and your descendants) will have things you can touch and handle, to remind you how you overcame, and how to overcome in the future. To me, a nice handmade guitar would have a lot more gut impact than a trophy or a newspaper clipping or a diploma. It’s even better than cooking food that makes people’s eyes roll back in their heads. Food disappears in a matter of minutes.

Any effort you make to develop skills and accomplish things will help your character, but there is something special about tools. Perhaps it’s because the concept of tools is so fundamentally, inextricably intertwined with the concept of ability. A tool is an extension of your body and mind, intended to enhance you in the most direct way possible. It’s almost a prosthetic. When you have a tool you know how to use, you are augmented. You are more than you were without it. To acquire and learn to use tools is to redesign and improve yourself, and it will improve your confidence in other areas of life.

Simple Woodworking Project Threatens to Penetrate 2011

With the good Lord’s help, this will be a Telecaster soon. The bookmatching is not all that great, but I think once the bridge, neck, electronics panel, vibrato, and pickguard are on the guitar, the lack of perfect symmetry will not matter much.

It looks bent, and it looks like the joint is big and sloppy. Those are illusions due to the shapes of the slabs I joined and the mysterious effects of digital photography. It’s like flat glass, and the joint is as tight as a liberal’s purse during a charity drive.

Don’t even ask how hard it was to get this far.

I decided to cancel the jointer/planer I ordered. I have to think about that decision, now that I have a relatively easy way to edge-joint boards.

Some day I’ll have a drum sander. But I have not gone that crazy just yet.

Stuff is Happening

I made my pineapple upside-down banana nut cake, and I wasn’t that happy with it. A lot of the pineapple sauce leaked out, so it needed more, and I was out of pineapple stuff, so I was stuck. Also, I was not totally pleased with the way it went with rum raisin ice cream.

I thought it would be fantastic served hot, and when it wasn’t quite fantastic, I figured the sauce was the problem. Then I stuck it in the fridge, and later, I tried a cold slice. It was magnificent! Very odd. You would think hot would be better, but this cake definitely has to be served cold.

I didn’t get a chance to try it cold with ice cream. It was too good to keep. I had to throw it out. I could have given it to friends at church (in fact, I got hollered at for failing to do so), but I don’t know if I could have avoided eating it before I got a chance to deliver it.

I used a 9″ springform pan. That was a mistake. I can’t remember why I used a springform pan in the past. It’s not a bad idea, but the cake is too tall, and 9″ is the wrong diameter, because you can only fit 4 pineapple slices in it. And you have to have extra-wide foil to keep the sauce in the pan. Next time I think I’ll go to 10″ and use wider foil.

In other news, I changed my oil today. “Big deal,” right? Well, it IS. First of all, it looks like vehicle dealers have universally adopted a strategy of jamming oil plugs so they’re impossible to remove. I think they do it to force you to come back for help. I had this problem with the Harley, and today I had a tough time getting the plug out of the Dodge. An impact driver had no effect. I finally put a half-inch socket wrench on it and basically military-pressed it open. I would guess I put over a hundred pounds of force on the wrench. There is no reason for an oil plug to be that tight.

I had a lot of fun dealing with almost 3 gallons of dirty oil and removing the air inlet hose to get to the filter. The truck is so tall, I have to stand on a box to work under the hood. On the up side, there’s tons of room under it.

Anyway, by the time I was done, my arms were pretty much black from the fingers halfway to my elbow, and I had blood on my shirt from a cut I still haven’t found. It ought to be worth it, however, because I can go 37,500 miles before my next oil change.

I used Amsoil and an Amsoil filter, for the best possible performance. That meant changing the oil myself, because I couldn’t find anyone around here who would do the change and just charge for labor.

I also had fun moving my spare tire back to the storage doodad under the truck bed. I got up on the side of the truck and started to shove the tire toward the back, and I felt a horrible sensation in my side. I still don’t know what it was. Now I have a sore spot between my ribs. And to make things even more pleasant, this happened before I did the oil change, so I got to enjoy feeling the soreness increase while I was struggling to drag myself around under the truck.

Once you get past a certain age, you can hurt yourself badly enough to justify an ER visit, just by breaking wind without warming up.

I’m trying to get the garage fixed up. I threw out some of my beloved scrap items. A big box of Cat 5 wire, spools of copper wire, the steel frame from a desk, and so on. I know I’ll need all of it ten minutes after the garbage truck comes by, but I have to de-clutter. If only I had a shed…no, TWO sheds…and a barn…with a lean-to…and a blimp hangar…

I have been going nuts trying to build a Telecaster-type guitar from six slabs of walnut, and I finally decided to accept reality and order a jointer. I got my planing sled to work, and I even put feed tables on my wonderful DeWalt planer, but you know what? It still sucks. I pretty much solved the planer jointing problem, but I just don’t care. It sucks.

I watched a woodworking video last night, and the old guy doing the work grabbed a piece of wood and tossed it on the jointer, and BANG, he was done. In about seven seconds. I wanted to strangle him.

I started thinking about the horror of mounting wood on the planing sled, lifting the planer onto a table, using duct tape to cobble together a dust collection scheme, and then fighting snipe, and for a time, I went insane. I found out it was possible to use credit card points to get the price of a jointer down so low they almost paid me to take it, so I gave up and pulled the trigger.

This is one reason I need room.

I decided on a Rikon 10″ jointer/planer combo. Wait! Shut up! Don’t lecture me! I know it’s not a classic 8″ Powermatic, and I will even admit that some nutcase just sold a like-new Powermatic for $500 on the local Craigslist. But I needed something small, and I wanted to be able to joint wide stuff. The Rikon is a blatant copy of an old machine made by Inca, and people still love the Inca machines and pay high prices for them. I feel sure it will work for my needs, and it has a neat stand with wheels, and it doesn’t weigh three tons or whatever the Powermatic weighs, and it doesn’t have a forty-foot wingspan.

Sometimes you have to compromise.

Jet makes combo machines for much less, but nearly everyone who reviews them says leprosy is more fun than getting a Jet to work, so I couldn’t make myself face the risk. Seriously, the reviews are like little treatments for brief horror films.

I made myself a router fence so I could do edge-jointing on the router, but I started thinking of the geometry-based ramifications my project would involve, and I realized it would be a torment straight from hell’s pit, so there’s another reason to throw in the towel.

Making the router fence was surprisingly hard. The table saw is the tool from paradise. It does everything with microscopic precision and drug-fantasy ease, and it made the parts in no time at all. But putting them together…not fun. It turns out you can’t screw into the side of 1/2″ MDF, even with pilot holes. I had to go with all-glue construction, and I had to make the fence parts perfectly square. I don’t know if glue is strong enough to hold this thing together under stress, but there is no other way to do it. We will see.

I have an idea for combining angle iron and scrap wood to make a dynamite router fence that will slide on my Biesemeyer rails. That would be beautiful. I could just order a short Biesemeyer fence, but that would cost a pile. It’s impossible to buy a pro fence, by itself, used.

I now have a spiffy restored vintage Stanley No. 6 plane (cheap!), but I have to learn how to use it, and I don’t think I’ll regret getting the jointer. It has become clear to me that I need to learn to use a bench plane and a shoulder or rabbet plane, in order to have any type of respect for myself as a man. There are too many problems they solve quickly. You can’t witness them in action and then not lust for them mindlessly.

I may still be inept, but I continue to strive. Success, or at least the comforting illusion of success, comes incrementally. It’s sort of like socialism in the USSR before it all went down the toilet and the whole country got a reality check from the back of Reagan’s hand.

Now if I could only find my tape measure…

Half-Day Job Only Takes Weeks

On the theory that people are morbidly fascinated by tales of inept woodworking, I thought I’d post an update on my continuing efforts to create six pieces of walnut suitable for assembling in a slab which can be turned into a Telecaster body.

Tonight I resawed a new chunk of walnut, stuck the pieces on my new, shorter planer sled, and face-jointed them. It actually worked, although I got a tiny amount of snipe on both boards.

Initially I figured my tools were 98% to blame and I was responsible for the other 2%, but it has gradually become apparent that those numbers needed to be reversed. Ignorance, lack of technique, and sheer stupidity were causing most of my problems.

I have learned that good technique can almost eliminate snipe when I use the planer sled, and improved shimming and a more manageable sled are solving my other problems. The infeed tables I ordered should make things even better. The orbital quarter-sheet sander I bought yesterday does an acceptably quick and effective job of fixing my jointing errors. I now have six 18″-24″ pieces of usable wood, and I only had to buy nine feet of walnut to do it.

I guess I won’t have to buy a jointer right away, although the little Rikon 10″ looks really enticing and may end up in my garage anyhow.

I look forward to the arrival of my restored Stanley No. 6 plane, so I can put the sander and maybe even the planer away.

By the way, here’s a great tip I came up with tonight. When using a shop-vac as a passive receptacle to catch planer dust, don’t connect the hose to the shop-vac’s blower side. Don’t ask me how I got so smart. You wouldn’t understand. It’s a gift.

Telecaster Thoughts

I tried to get my garage cleaned up enough so I could work on a Telecaster body. It took me an hour and a half to do about 30% of the job. I guess you could say I let the place get away from me.

My big problem is that I work until I’m tired, which means I don’t set time and energy aside for cleanup. It’s sort of like swimming out to sea until you feel like swimming back. By that time, you’re too far out to make it home.

I do not understand Telecasters at all. It’s a board and a stick. It’s not even a pretty, curvy board like a Les Paul. It looks like a half-eaten popsicle, and what is the story with that stupid little headstock? It looks like Leo Fender ruined his original design by slipping with the router and then carved the current crappy design in order to save the neck he was working on. On top of all that, the Telecaster has only two pots. You can’t adjust the pickups independently! In spite of all of this, the guitar plays anything you want it to, it feels good in your hands, and it exudes kitschy American style.

When it comes to style, sometimes I like to try to imagine what Mickey Rourke would choose. This is one reason why I wear French cuffs with sportcoats and blazers. It’s one reason I bought a Thunderbird instead of a Boxster. I think Mickey Rourke would probably go with a semi-restored circa-1960 Cadillac, but I’m not made of money.

If Mickey Rourke could play the guitar, I think he’d pick a Gretsch, a Telecaster, or an ES345. Either that or a tobacco burst Les Paul that had been used as a murder weapon.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to get a slab put together for a guitar body. I’m shooting for bookmatched walnut, and if I can pull it off, I’ll inlay lighter-colored strips of some other wood around the edges.

“But I’m With the Band!”

I got some interesting insights into God’s mind this week. I hope they came from him and not me.

I feel like God uses my dealings with other people to teach me what his life is like. This is a fairly obvious thing. For example, God gives us children and makes us participate in creation so we can understand what it’s like to try to teach and improve people, and what it means to love someone more than you love yourself.

I’ve noticed that there are times when people do things for me, in a way that is not a blessing. They come up with ideas that seem good to them, and they go forward with them, even if I discourage them. They may put in a lot of time or money or effort, and then I get the result, and they expect me to be thrilled and to reciprocate, and of course, I am not thrilled, and I do not reciprocate. What they’re doing is not generous. It’s manipulation. They do it for themselves, not me. There is a certain amount of love in it, but it’s buried in selfishness and stubbornness.

I don’t feel guilty about refusing to get sucked into the game, or about hurting their feelings. Sometimes you need to have your feelings hurt, and if it doesn’t happen, you’re actually cheated. Christianity is not about being nice. It never was.

Seems like God uses these people to teach me how he feels when we do what we want, in his name. I believe this is what “taking the Lord’s name in vain” means.

Jesus said people would come to him–probably at the Rapture–and point to the things they had done for him, and he would tell them to get lost, because he had never “known” them. They would not be permitted to attend the wedding feast in heaven; instead, they would have to suffer the Tribulation.

The word “know” means “know” the way men know their wives in the Bible. Presumably, he meant the wedding rejects had never become joined to him as parts of the Body of Christ, executing his will instead of their own. A man and woman are supposed to be one flesh. Christians are supposed to be united with Jesus, as his flesh on earth. If you’re off doing things he didn’t tell you to do, you’re like Dr. Strangelove’s arm, doing things the owner does not intend.

Jesus made it clear it was possible to do amazing things, using supernatural power, without pleasing him. He said people would point to worthless miracles they had done in his name. Apparently, you can get divine power before you get divine righteousness. Isn’t that always the way life goes? The legal driving age in most states is 16. Enough said.

We’re supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and we’re supposed to be cleansed of demons and filled with supernatural righteousness. I think that’s how it works. Jesus got baptized with the Holy Spirit, and he immediately went out and fasted to clear the demons out. Satan himself showed up to tempt him, and Jesus persevered and overcame, and Satan fled. After that, Jesus began using God’s power and doing great things.

It may sound crazy to suggest Jesus had demons assigned to influence him, but of course, it must be true. The Bible says he was tempted as we are, in all ways, and we know demons are assigned to tempt us. They give us addictions and bad attitudes. They drive us to act impulsively. They whisper corrupt thoughts into our minds. Surely Jesus had the same problem. In fact, this is proven conclusively by the appearance of Satan during the fast. Presumably, after 40 days, all of his underlings had given up, and Satan had to go in person to hit Jesus with the heaviest artillery he had.

The prison-like habits and tendencies demons get us to take up are called “iniquities” in the Bible. A sin is an act. An iniquity is a chronic thing. You can prevent a discrete sin by an act of will, but getting rid of iniquities requires supernatural power, which is why we have to fast and pray.

What did Jesus call the people who did false works in his name? “Workers of iniquity.” They were not clean. They were under the influences of demons and the flesh, and they obeyed those influences. An evil influence may tell you to build an orphanage for Jesus, when you’re really supposed to write a book. It may tell you to work a flashy miracle when you’re supposed to stand back and pray. It may tell you to give money to a bum who actually needs to starve until he agrees to go to rehab and repent. It may tell you to build a giant, shiny church and ordain homosexuals and write books about self-esteem and positive thinking, and you may become a millionaire many times over, and when you meet up with Jesus, you may learn that you might as well have been running a brothel.

This is why the church has done so many evil things. People serve demons and the flesh, thinking they serve Jesus. They work iniquity. If Jesus accepted their works, he would be serving Satan. The workers of iniquity are led by Satan, and they do works that please him, so if Jesus goes along with it, he himself serves Satan. That is not possible, so he rejects them.

It makes perfect sense. We are supposed to be the Bride of Christ, and those who are faithful (not all Christians) are to be spared the Tribulation so they can attend the holy wedding feast in heaven. If you serve iniquity, you are unfaithful, like a cheating fiancee. Over and over, even in the Old Testament, those who turn from God’s voice are compared to unfaithful wives. Look at Hosea’s wife. We are supposed to be one with Jesus, as a man and woman are one. Three’s a crowd. You can’t marry Satan and Jesus.

It’s a sobering concept. If it’s correct, most Christians are wasting their time (that part seems indisputable), and they will be left behind in the Rapture. Then they will have to suffer unspeakable persecution, as well as martyrdom. Probably at the hands of Muslims and “progressive” Christians.

I truly believe this is correct. It’s a natural extension of things I’ve learned from Perry Stone and Robert Morris, and it makes sense of scripture, and I didn’t sit down and figure it out. It came to me. Had it been the result of study and conjecture, I would have much less reason to think it was sound. Revelation does not come from the puny human mind. The Bible itself says only the Holy Spirit explains scripture.

In other news, I already received the router templates I ordered, so today I am going to try to work on building a Telecaster clone. I have to joint and plane some walnut and put it together with Titebond and clamps. I think I’ll get a crummy piece of pine for router practice, to use while the walnut sets up.

Yesterday I realized I have already found uses for the upper part of the 24-fret neck on my Telecaster, and I will not be able to reach that area when I play my Les Paul and 335 clones. That’s important knowledge. I didn’t realize upper neck access would be so important to me. I thought those extra frets were a novelty. Now I’m wondering if I can build a double cutaway Telecaster, to make neck access even better. If you look at the design of the Telecaster, you will see why some people think a DC design lacks solidity. Maybe glue would solve the problem. I know of no reason why you can’t combine screws and glue. Matsumoku did it when they made Gibson clones.

Hope this works. It should be tremendous fun, and I think it’s fairly easy, as woodworking projects go.

Youthful Stupidity is Not Cheap

This week I got depressed. That’s interesting, because it’s something that almost never happens to me.

I spent the first thirty years of my life depressed. My family was dysfunctional, and my childhood was pure misery, and it took me decades to outgrow the habit of depression. I still think of childhood as a prison; if I had to choose one thing for which I’m most grateful, other than my relationship with God, it would be my adult status. I have never gotten over the thrill of adulthood’s freedoms. I don’t have to ask people for money. I can get in my truck or on a plane and go anywhere I want. I don’t have to worry about older adults threatening to beat me up. I don’t have to deal with sadistic teachers any more. If someone makes my life unpleasant, I cut them off and never speak to them again. There is nothing like being an adult.

Maybe we feel the same way when we leave the earth behind.

I think my status as a perennially depressed person ended when I started law school. A career in law wasn’t exciting, and law school was fairly dull, but I had a lot of friends, and I had something to do with my time, and things went reasonably well. Since then, I have never been depressed for more than a day or two.

I got depressed this week because my father invited me out for a drink and then started nagging me about getting married.

You have to understand the history. My mother was a wonderful woman, and when she met my dad, she decided he was IT. He may think he caught her, but the truth is, she caught him. I believe this is usually the case in marriages. Men don’t like to admit it, because it ruins their reputations as ladies’ men, but we are much less picky than women, and women usually end up deciding whether a marriage is going to take place. Men like to think they set their romantic goals and achieve them, and that’s probably true when it comes to casual sex, but when it comes to marriage, women make the decisions. I know there are exceptions, and pride will drive men to dispute it, but the rule seems solid.

My dad was in his twenties, and God dropped a great wife on him without requiring any diligence on his part. As a result, he does not understand that life is not like that for all of us. Asking him about romance is like asking Lindsay Lohan about making money. He landed a great lady early without any real effort, so he thinks it works that way for the whole world.

The Bible says a good wife comes from God, not from your own effort. And it will not always happen on your schedule. According to the Jews, even Isaac, who was highly blessed, did not find a wife until he was middle-aged. Some fine people never marry, and it’s not because they didn’t try. There are some things in this life you can’t control completely, and finding a mate is one of them. You can play the field and then settle; to that extent, you have control. But if you’re hoping for a real blessing, it’s like waiting for rain. God supplies it when he feels like it. And the biggest factor in his timing is your progress as a Christian.

If I had stayed close to God back in the 1980s, when I started attending church and changing my life, I would surely have found a wife long ago. But I stepped outside the flow of blessings and into the domain of the enemy, and I got the kind of wages enemies pay. I accept that. Like all human beings, I was born an idiot, and idiots suffer until they recover from idiocy.

God is repairing my life now, but it is not an instantaneous process, and I am not going to saddle myself with an awful woman just because I’m getting old. I enjoy life tremendously, and there is nothing that can match a woman’s potential to cause misery. I am not going to try to force a blessing.

I didn’t enjoy being reminded that I had frittered away my youth. Ordinarily, I don’t think much about it, but parents have a way of pushing buttons. So I was down for a couple of days. I wasn’t looking for a bridge to jump off of, but I’m ordinarily very happy, so two or three mildy gloomy days have a big impact on my perception of my life.

It’s particularly upsetting to get this kind of speech, given the choices my dad would make for me. He means well, but he tries to fix me up with cocktail waitresses and cashiers. He used to try to fix me up with his paralegals. Anyone he thinks is good looking will do.

This highlights the magnitude of the blessing he received when he found my mother. He could have married some sleazy woman who saw him purely as a meal ticket. God blessed him, pure and simple. I could have a wife next week, if a cocktail waitress was what I wanted. And before you start lecturing me, I’m not referring to a nice Christian girl who had no choice but to serve drinks for a living. That should be obvious to any intelligent person.

My church is full of nice women, but most of them are black, and only a small percentage of black women are willing to marry outside their race. A lot of the women at my church are young, and while a woman should be no older than her husband, I feel a little odd talking to women in their twenties. Quite honestly, I always think, “This girl would be cheating herself.” Some of the women in my church are too old to have kids. That rules them out; I don’t care how nice they are in other ways. I’m not closing that door. It may seem unfair, since it means I won’t date a woman my own age, but then I didn’t make the rules of biology, and I won’t be held accountable for them. God put Ruth and Boaz together, after all. I don’t know of any Biblical stories of young men marrying old women. Feminism is a modern conceit; it has nothing to do with reality.

There are also women who already have kids. There are a couple of problems with this. First, I am not a kid person. I know I would love children of my own, but I don’t like being around other people’s kids all that much, except for really good kids, for short periods of time. And women with kids tend to be overly eager to get remarried, partly for financial reasons, and that causes problems. Second problem: being injected into a prefab family complete with a family court judge, a hostile adult male, and two sets of in-laws does not appeal to me.

Psalm 37:4 says God will give us the desires of our hearts. I have seen that happening to me, and I know it applies to all aspects of life. I’m not going to wreck it by making a desperate lifeboat-style grab for a wife. I have a wonderful life as a single man. Why would I trade that for a miserable life with a woman who was unattractive or unpleasant or lacking in faith? God will provide, or he won’t. I keep my eyes open, and I will make the effort, but I know the difference between carnality and spirituality, and I am not going to let my flesh run the show.

I don’t know if my church will provide a solution. I’ve only met one woman who seemed to have potential, and she’s young, and there are other issues.

I’ll say this for my church: for young people, it’s a marriage factory. I’ve seen a number of great young people get hitched there, and some are also developing good careers. They’re so lucky. They have stayed within God’s protection, and they are getting blessed early in life. Hopefully they won’t have to go through the chastisement and droughts people like me go through.

In other news, I’m planning to build a guitar. I found out how easy it is to build Telecaster clones. A factory neck is a necessity, unless you’re a skilled woodworker, but anyone who can run a router can make a body, and you can get perfect results and great control, without spending much. A Fender American Standard sells for $1000; for that kind of money, you could build the finest Telecaster known to man.

I’d like to make a guitar with a bookmatched walnut top. I already have the wood. I want humbucker-sized pickups and a Bigsby. Truthfully, it would be a Les Paul in a Telecaster shape. It’s very hard to build a Les Paul, and a Telecaster-type guitar would do the same things.

Telecasters are amazing. A Telecaster is a stick and a board, and it only has two pots, but it can still have an incredible action, great responsiveness, and all sorts of wonderful tones.

I’d like to play slide blues, and you need a guitar with a fairly high action for that, and I don’t want to dedicate any of my existing guitars to it, so building seems like a good way to go. For $500, I can make something wonderful. We’ll see what happens.

Last night I had a playing breakthrough. I keep studying theory and scales and whatever, and so far it has led nowhere. I had some ideas for “Sweet Home Chicago,” so I started working on it with no real plan, and before I knew it, I had a complete solo.

This tells me I may be able to do what “natural musicians” do. That would sure be a nice shortcut. Some people play and compose beautifully without getting into theory, and if I could do that, it would make life a lot more satisfying while the theory studies progress.

I know of several ways to approach the guitar. One is to sit around studying theory and scales. Another is to memorize other people’s arrangements note for note and go from there. Another is to hear arrangements in my head and try to write them down in tablature form. Last night I realized there’s a simpler way: just pick the guitar up and play. This is probably how B.B. King did it. I think I can guarantee you it’s how John Lee Hooker did it, because he played whatever he wanted, all the time, and he complained that he had no freedom when he worked with bands.

While I was working with the guitar, I realized I was getting to know the fretboard instinctively: which notes worked and which didn’t. I was finding positions to use. That stuff could be very useful. So from now on I plan to spend a certain amount of time every day, just PLAYING. I think it will work. One of the things I hated about the piano was that I practiced and practiced, but I never played.

I have to go make cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, and two pumpkin pies now. Happy Thanksgiving.

Talent = Pedals

Today I picked up my J200 from the luthier. I haven’t tried it yet. I bought a new PEDAL on the way home! Every electric guitarist knows practice and talent mean nothing; it’s all in the pedals. So I buy a new one about every ten minutes. Today I chose a Fulltone Plimsoul.

This thing is amazing. I wanted to get a tone that sounded hot, without losing all the treble grit. I tried a Way Huge Fat Sandwich, and it’s great, but the distortion is so powerful you can’t always get it to work with your guitars. I tried a Way Huge Pork Loin, and it has some nice sounds, but it tends to kill the treble. Today I’m trying a Fulltone Plimsoul, and it does EVERYTHING well.

This is supposedly an improvement on the Fulltone OCD, which is a respected overdrive pedal. The neat thing about the Plimsoul is that it has two independently adjustable overdrive stages. One is fairly soft (no treble edge), and the other is harder. You can get a nice warm sound using the first stage, and then you can sharpen up the edge with the second. When I do this, I can play slow blues with my neck pickup, and I get a big, fat, round sound that’s still so hot it makes you feel like you just opened the oven door.

I’m also using a “new” guitar: my old American Roadhouse Strat. I love this thing, but it’s been put away, because I put elevens on it, and I wasn’t ready for them. Changing string gauges on a Strat is a pain, because you have to adjust the springs on the trem bar. Lighter strings lower the bridge, and you have to bring it back up.

The Roadhouse Strat is not all that popular. I don’t know why. I love it. It has three Texas Special pickups, which are hot-sounding single-coils. They used to make a Texas something or other Strat that had a humbucker at the bridge, and I think that was more popular, but I think the Roadhouse is fantastic. It has tremendous clarity, heat, and responsiveness, and you can hear it through a brick wall, so it would probably sound good right through a band.

I thought the Strat might be what made the pedal sound good, so I plugged in my magical Chinese Epiphone Riviera, and it sounded exactly the way I’ve been wanting it to for weeks. I can actually hear the individual notes on “Sweet Home Chicago.”

One thing I didn’t expect: I can get even more tones by using the Plimsoul and my Way Huge Pork Loin and Fat Sandwich, in various combinations. I feel like I finally have a little control over my sound.

I showed the Chinese Epiphone to my luthier, and he admitted the neck was a thing of wonder. Are they all this good? He had a Chinese Les Paul on his lap when I came in, and he didn’t seem too excited about it. He seemed to think the Riviera (and presumably other 335 clones) were designed better. If that’s true, it’s time for people to run out and get Epiphone 335 clones before the Chinese screw them up. You may hate the pickups, but for $200, you can have any pickups you want.

Here’s something funny: he plays an Eastman. This is a Chinese guitar made by a company known for violins. Obviously, a luthier sees a lot of instruments, and he knows what’s good. When he played the Epiphone, he said for a minute, he almost felt like he was playing the Eastman. That was his way of saying it had a great action.

I no longer have any excuse for buying electric guitars. I have seven now, and they’re all at least very good, and four are wonderful. I’d love to have an Epiphone Casino, but they’re fully hollow, so I would expect a lot of feedback. The Riviera is great, but I think the third pickup is pointless. I guess I could rewire it with the middle pickup cut out of the system.

I talked to the lead guitarist from my church, and here is what I gathered: the CAGED system I have been busting my rear end studying is pretty useless unless you know theory first. Great news. There has to be a way to “get inside” the guitar without selling your soul to the devil, but I have not found it yet. My technique is getting better, but technique is useless if you can’t sight-read, improvise, and write music. I may have to break down and take lessons. Maybe I should find a jazz instructor. I am not really interested in jazz, but I figure a jazz player can handle anything the blues has to offer.

I finally have equipment good enough to not drive me insane, so I guess I can think more about woodshedding and study. It’s hard to think about those things when your tone or the bad actions on your instruments are making you climb the walls. I know I’m picky, because I can’t make myself leave the truss rod covers on any of my guitars except my Taylor, my Fenders, and my Epiphone. Those guitars always seem ready to go, but when the others move a couple of thousandths one way or the other, I notice it right away, and it’s very distracting. I think the Historys and the Burny will be okay as I home in on the right setups, but the Gibson Blueshawk will probably always be a little crazy, because it wasn’t made all that well.

You can’t blame Gibson for making guitars with wavy necks. After all, they don’t have the advantages of half-trained Chinese labor and a $500 price point.

Back to practicing.

Japanese Les Pauls Pretty Inside and Out

Today I had some fun putting Harmonic Design Z90 pickups in my History Les Paul clone. These are P90-style pickups, made to fit a humbucker hole.

I noticed a few things.

First of all, the Japanese use pretty dubious electronics. The potentiometers were very small, and the tone capacitors were super-cheap ceramics. I keep reading complaints about cheap tone capacitors. It’s hard for me to believe they make a difference, but you can get very good Vishay capacitors for about $3.00 each, so what’s the point in going cheap?

Second thing: the woodwork is even better than I thought. The guitar is a solid piece of very nice mahogany with a thick maple cap and a very thin piece of sycamore veneer. It’s not as expensive as a high-end Les Paul with a cap of fancy wood and no veneer, so I thought there might be some difference in the instrument’s performance. Now that I’ve seen the inside of it, I tend to doubt the veneer makes a difference.

The cavities in the guitar are finished very well, and they’re painted with what looks like shielding paint, and the plastic covers have metal foil in them. Most expensive guitars look pretty bad once you open them up. This one shows a surprising level of meticulousness.

The pickups did not work. At least the bridge pickup didn’t. Someone who tried the guitar a month or two back told me something about a problem with the selector switch, but I think the real problem was the bridge potentiometer. I tested everything as well as I could, and I believe the bridge potentiometer is shot. Maybe it’s corrosion from the Japanese climate. The other pot acts funny, too. The resistance goes infinite when you turn it to 10.

I went to a website and found myself some full-size American pots to replace the small Japanese ones. The cavity is big enough. I ordered four. Why wait for the tone pots to poop out? I ordered some Orange Drop capacitors, too. I’ll stick this stuff in the guitar, and I may fix the wiring so pickups can be switched without soldering. Might as well. I don’t think you need soldered connections in a guitar. After all, the cord is the biggest connector, and it has solderless jacks on each end.

This has taught me a little bit about Japanese guitars. If I were buying a new Les Paul clone, I’d order a Fujigen gold top off Rakuten for about a thousand dollars. At that price point, you get Japanese wood and Japanese electronics. American electronics add over $300 to the price. I’d dump the Japanese electronics and pick the American electronics myself. For $60, I’d have something better than the higher-end guitar. And because I’ve seen the guts of Fujigen Les Pauls, I think I could be confident that the instrument itself was top quality.

I’m not sure, but I think a person who did this would end up with an instrument surpassing a Custom Shop Les Paul, for under $1500. I don’t know enough about Gibsons to say. I do know Fujigen has better quality control, so when you buy one over the web, it’s not the crapshoot a Gibson would be. If you got one with a flamed top instead of gold, you’d have veneer, which (I assume) is not what you get from the Gibson Custom Shop, but with a gold top or a black guitar, who cares? I doubt Gibson is putting bookmatched flamed or quilted maple under gold and black paint.

I believe you have to go with the Custom Shop to get a Gibson with a properly set neck with a long tenon, but that’s not the case with Fujigen products. I think they find it difficult selling cheap woodwork to discerning Japanese consumers. This is the country where they used to buy American cars, take them apart, fix the problems, put them together, and THEN sell them.

I may be nuts, but it’s starting to look like a smart consumer buys Japanese wood and American electronics, unless he’s willing to pop for a used top-tier American guitar in great shape.

It’s sad that you have to become a luthier in order to make an electric guitar work, but I guess it’s better than the hassle and expense of paying other people to do the work.

Maybe I’ll post photos when I get the electronics fixed.

New Pickups

I stuck new pickups in my Japanese “History” brand ES335 copy yesterday. Now I have to fire it up and see if I like them.

Funny thing: the potentiometers were covered with some kind of sticky foil. I don’t know what this stuff is. I assume it’s intended to block noise. If anyone can tell me what it is or where to get it, I would appreciate it. They also have strange black fabric tape on them.

Looks like I put the selector switch in backward. DOH.

Fujigen makes some really nice Les Paul copies at very reasonable prices. These are essentially the same thing as History guitars. They make several lines. The lowest two lines differ only in that the cheapest ones have Japanese electronics, while the next tier of guitars has American electronics. I’m not sure US electronics are a smart buy. The Japanese pickups in my Burny Les Paul are fantastic, and I have no reason to think the potentiometers and so on are any lower in quality. My guess is, a smart person would buy the cheaper Fujigen guitar and then customize as needed.

Not that I will do this. Oh, no. Not me.

The cheaper Les Pauls go about a thousand dollars. The next level is around $1350. After that, you jump up a few hundred bucks to instruments made with 200-year-old wood raised from the bottom of the Great Lakes. At this level, you get thick caps instead of veneer. You could conceivably spend up to $1800. Does that sound bad? Consider the Gibson alternative: a short-tenon instrument that costs $1900, with inferior workmanship and cheap wood. Hmm…Fujigen Custom Shop for $1800, or price-point bargain-basement Gibson for $1900. Indeed. Yes. A puzzle.

There is a stunning History guitar on Yahoo Japan auctions right now. It looks like a Gibson L5. I don’t know much about fat Gibson hollowbodies. Really nice to look at.

The fanaticism of Japanese craftsmen is hard to turn ignore. It’s a little neurotic, but you end up with wonderful products.

Time to switch on the amp. Hope this works.