I am planning a new project, an ultimate superstrat! For this I nicked Marks Exotica design (I hope you're OK with this Mark; if not, let me know). I calculated the dimensions from a frontal picture of the actual guitar. They should be OK, give or take a few mm's.....
Now I have a cunning plan..... I can order a custom body blank with my supplier: 3-piece swamp ash with two purpleheart splines in between, so a 10 cm central piece of swamp ash and a 1 cm purpleheart spline and 10 cm swamp ash on both sides. A bit like a racing car.......
For the neck I'm thinking of a full purpleheart blank, maybe with a fancy maple veneer over the slightly angled headstock....
Al black hardware: Trem, locking tuners, knobs 'n all..... 3-way switch, push/pull pots for coil splits and for adding the middle pu to any combination of the humbuckers.
I had to modify the headstock for a bit, because I like a straight string path in combination with a trem, while as the original design has a splayed string pattern. Does anybody know if such a string pattern will cause tuning problems with trem use? If not, I may stick to the original, looks a bit better I think...
What do you think, any mistakes I made? Weird lines? Suggestions?
Measure once, cut straight away and maybe you're lucky......
I do have a problem however.... I put on a set of strings to test the action and trem and my fret work didn't turn out as well as I had hoped (and expected to be frank, I never had any trouble with my fretwork at all....). The high E is chocking like mad when bending the string above the 12th fret.... I guess I did lean too much on the edge of the fretboard while leveling, so the frets are too low at the edge...
Well.... nothing that can't be fixed I guess.... I just have to go over the leveling again... This time I'll use a radius block to make sure I get the radius right....
Robin 22/10/2020 1:53 pm
