I like to experiment with materials, designs, and techniques outside of conventional luthiery to build low-cost, high-quality, fully-functional, and attractive electric guitars and basses. What I am not interested in is doing the same old thing the same old way it has been done for decades.
Projects contains details on all the instruments I have built, and some other related subjects.
Laboratory contains tools, techniques, and designs used in my projects.
Blog - anything else I feel like writing about: carpentry, programming, music, etc
This site is aimed at the home hobbyist, and particularly the first-time builder. So welcome to the lab. See what's on the slab. I hope you find this site interesting and informative.
Navigating This Site
Main navigation is at the rightleft around here somewhere. First there is a "breadcrumb trail" showing where you are, with "up-links". This is followed by a list of child pages, or "down-links". Around that is a list of sibling pages, or "side-links". There is also an overall Site Map, as well as indexes for each major section. Finally, the search box works surprisingly well, or just hit the Random link.
If you are on a small 'mobile' device like a phone or tablet, the main navigation collapses to a button at the upper-right, with the rest at the bottom. The button opens a condensed popup menu. The mysterious unlabeled checkbox in the menu is a 'pin' that holds it open as you navigate between pages. You can force 'mobile' mode on a larger device by making the browser window narrow. In any case, the layout is optimized to make the best use of the available screen space.
This site was assembled from a mass of material I had previously posted on Talk_ass. This is seven years of material - over 200 pages and a gigabyte of images, and ongoing. Just getting it all back up was a huge task.
Been doing some quick experiments with CA and glitter for the last few days. At left is gold crushed glass. Center-top is very fine gunmetal plastic glitter. Center-bottom is silver crushed glass glitter. At right is standard plastic glitter. The green tube is medium CA, the pink one is thin, the standard formulation. Thick CA is quite rubbery when it dries, I would not use it for this.
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The Silvertone 1450 is a relatively rare model from 1965 to 1967. It is identical to the much more common 1452 "Amp-in-Case" model, except that the 1450 has a three-ply tortoiseshell pickguard in place of 1452's white masonite, and the 1450 did not come with an amp. The three-bolt neck attachment indicates that this is a fairly early example. There should be a date stamp inside the neck pocket, but I don't want to take it apart. For a long time I thought this was a 1452, I was quite pleased to discover while writing this that it is actually the more deluxe 1450.