Luthiery Laboratories

Jan 18, 2018

This has been in the works for several years. You can see it is a scarfed joint. The slots were started as a row of holes on the drill press, just under 1/4", and then carved out with files and rasps to the final shape, a bit over 1/4". You need to leave a little extra thickness for the tuners on the sides. I drew the whole thing out on paper first and made sure all the string paths were clear.

The tuners are Chinese cheapies. They work just fine and are easy to convert from righty to lefty. The same is true of open-gear bass tuners - if you have a 4R set and you need 2R+2L, just take two of them apart and flip them. Obviously, you can't do that with sealed tuners, but if you keep a full set of R's and a full set of L's on hand, you can make anything you need immediately, and order replacements.

I really like the 'steampunk' look of this piece from all the different bits and alloys of the open-gear tuners crowded together.

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Feb 1, 2018