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Fender has set their legal department against any and all possible targets. I have been hit by trolling internet lawyers before. It costs them almost nothing to attack you, but it can cost you a great deal to be attacked.
I don't think Fender has a leg to stand on in this case, but they have two things in their favor: their own lawyers, and a piece of complete insanity known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.
All they need to do is find the right judge somewhere - anywhere - and this case is a go, and they will probably win. It could go on for decades in appeals, all the while damaging Fender's intended victims, so that Fender wins even if they lose.
Such is our legal system, and I want nothing to do with this, so I have taken down all my Fender projects until this shakes out. Sure, I only built a few things for myself, and I'm not selling anything, but for the price of a stamp they can reach out and touch me, and as I said, I've been there before. The American legal system is not about laws, it is about lawyers.
Fender makes nothing from sales of used guitars. I say boycott all new (retail) Fender products. That includes: Bigsby, Charvel, DeArmond, EVH, Fender, G&L, Gretsch, Jackson, PreSonus, and Squier. If you want a new Fender-style instrument, buy a Music Man. Or buy used.
More: Fender Legal Actions ...
The Fret Slotting Jig is basically a very precise mitre box. What makes it a fret slotting tool is the Fret Guide, which attaches underneath the workpiece with double-sided tape, and engages a pin on the Fret Slotting Jig directly below the saw blade. The holes in the guide are spaced to Fender's formula, so depending on which hole you start with for the nut slot, you can cut anything from a 36" bass to a 20" ukelele, and all the standard scales in between. The guide fits snugly between the inner rails of the jig to keep the workpiece centered and straight.
More: Fret Slotting Jig ...
actually Ennio Morricone
and a few others:
The list seems to go on forever; I recommend you check out the channel for yourself!
More: Don't Click This Link! ...
WordPress suffers from misguided ideology, bad programming, and arrogance, usually all at the same time. Case in point: image handling.
Image handling in WordPress is pure insanity. Left to its own devices, WordPress will create multiple copies of every image at many sizes. This creates a pile of garbage on the server, roughly doubling the disk space used, sometimes worse. And they are so sure they are right about this that there is no way to turn it off - not by settings, not by filters or hooks - no way.
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It's like a travel ad gone terribly wrong
More: Lederhosen ...
This is my attempt to recreate my very first bass, a "Montaya", as well as one of my first ventures into 'modding'. These SX's are great instruments. For 109 bucks you get an alder body with a beautiful 3-tone sunburst, a decent neck, functional bridge & tuners, and a flawless finish. What you don't get is any kind of useable pickups or strings. On this one, I installed a USA Fender pickup, my favorite d'Addario strings, and gave it a careful fret dressing and setup. I also added the tortoise pickguard, rosewood thumbrest, and ashtray for the looks only. At the time, I was going purely from memory, but I later found a picture of the original, and I got it dead right.
More: SX SPB-57 Ursa Bass ...
This OLP Stingray was one of the first basses I ever modded heavily. I routed a battery and a second pickup cavity, and did all sorts of experiments on it, before returning it to it's original single-pickup configuration, but with upgraded active electronics and pickup, and a nice new pearl pickguard.
More: Musicman Stingray Bass (OLP) ...
The new slideshow
A while ago, I took a look at the database tables, and realized that about half of the database was due to the slideshow plugin MetaSlider. MetaSlider crapped out thousands of entries across multiple tables. What bothers me is not so much the waste of storage space as the incredible inefficiency of having to retrieve all of that bit by bit from the database server. I did my best to minimize that kind of inefficiency, while the writers of MetaSlider did the opposite. In computer programming, more is almost never better.
More: Really Bad Programming ...
