News And Updates

“Stall” is the Swedish word for bridge. It is also the state in which my guitar endeavors have been in for the past couple of weeks, due to a very heavy workload and a skiing-trip. Nonetheless, my Floyd Rose drop-in replacement is taking shape.

I just have to drill the holes for the small screws that will stop the plunger from rotating and make the threads and then I am ready to send the whole thing off to finishing. I’m just hoping that they will let me tag along with someone else’s order since they have a quite hefty minimum charge.

I had a couple of questions over at Project Guitar about the amount of twist of the neck and how the body/bridge relates. I did take a couple of pictures before but didn’t post them, but here they are:

It is a little hard to tell, but you’ll note that the ruler sits about 15 mm above the top in both pictures. To achieve this, the whole body slopes away, downwards, and the neck/fretboard joins the body at about a 7 degree angle. The nut sits at about 20 degree angle in comparison with the body. I have studied what others have done and I guess Lace arrived at the 10.8 degree angle through some kind of trial and error, but I decided to be a little more agressive. The wrist does get a very comfortable position when “fretting” a barré cord. If I decreased the twist, it wouldn’t give quite the same effect. My main concern is the fretting out when bending downwards. Only a test will tell, I guess.

With only about a half hour per day during lunch, progress is painfully slow. I am very happy with what there is though:

I actually got a little bit farther today than what is apparent from these pictures, but will post later. Here are a couple of pictures of my second styrofoam prototype.

Again, the intent is to create a positive mould out of this that I can then create a negative mould out of fibreglass. In this, I will then vacuum bag the carbon fibre back. Finally, a wooden top and fingerboard will be glued onto it.

What’s the verb for making knurled knobs? I finally managed to borrow the tool needed from an old friend and colleague and got some work done on the knobs today. During the week, I have also completed the slotted plungers that the strings will run through.

Here are some pictures:

This last picture shows the tool itself. To make a “cross” shaped knurling, a tool with two wheels is used. I personally purchased that tool along with this one at the company I borrowed it from this week, but it was almost 20 years ago, so not surprisingly, we couldn’t locate it.

It’s slowly getting there. I have a lot of finishing to do, and I still don’t have the knurled knobs, but today I completed the first tuner with the correct threads and it is looking good.

If you compare these threads with the ones from the prototype post, you’ll notice that these are much finer. This means that more turns are required to tune the string, giving a better fine-tuning action. You will also note the radius on the base plate. The plan is to use identical base plates whether it is a trem unit or not, so I have made two to test both concepts.

I just found the coolest clip on YouTube that illustrates exactly what I’m after with carbon fibre. I’ll have to stop myself from building this too, or it will be a long time before I have anything playable…

I have made some progress on the tuners and bridge. In the image below, the pieces for the base plate of the bridge can be seen.

Tomorrow, I should receive the thread cutting tools I have ordered so that I can continue on the threaded plunger and tuner knob. In the meantime, I am also cutting myself a second styrofoam 3D prototype.

I wanted to a) see if I could create a mould for the carbon fiber idea and b) see how things would turn out, so I set out to create a simple mockup without a bandsaw. I had a spare can of spray insulation, so that seemed like a good idea:

but not really…. So, I went to Bauhaus (i.e. home depot) and got myself a sheet of styrofoam, the kind used to insulate floors.

It was a lot of fun. It taught me a couple of things as well. First of all, the “raised” (or rather, “uncarved”) portion where the controls are supposed to sit will not work. I have angled the edge to sit more comfortably on the leg, so will have to re-think one or the other. Secondly, I made the upper left corner, where the arm rests, quite carved. This is very comfortable and standard “stratty” but will not work out with a body made of a glued on top out of a different material than the bottom. Re-think #2.

I have decided to make my materials available under Creative Commons licensing. Take a look at the footer of these pages. It reads:

Strandberg Guitarworks plans by
Ola Strandberg are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

What this means to you is that you may use plans and ideas that I publish here but that you:

1. Have to notify others that I was the originator of the work and
2. Have to make your materials available under the same license.

This is important - if you use it, you have to publish it and let anyone else use it. I would also humbly request that you let me know that you are using it as well although this is not strictly part of the license. I will in the coming days, weeks and months publish anything I come up with in the spirit of creating better instruments. I am convinced that you and I will have differentiators that make someone like your work or my work better and that we can both co-exist.

Thanks in advance for respecting this.

I have so many ideas, I am having a hard time choosing which route to go. Most ideas revolve around neck construction. I have received carbon tube samples that would allow for a very stiff and light neck, but haven’t had time to put them to the test yet. I have also talked to a carbon fiber expert and am confident I could pull creating a mould for vacuum bagging a carbon fiber neck off. But I would have to find reasonable amounts of materials at a reasonable cost first.

I have handed my bridge pieces over to a local shop that will help me with the oval holes in the tuners, for consistency. My router simply isn’t good enough to get any precision over a series of 15. I have also been in touch with a finishing company who can do pretty cool things with aluminum. More about this later - I am waiting for some samples to arrive.

Lastly, I am making slow progress nonetheless.

Above is an acrylic router template for the body shape. I should have some swamp ash lying around my day-job’s US subsidiary by now… Just have to wait for someone with some space in their suitcase to make the trip over.

Secondly, I couldn’t keep myself from ordering some Dugain picks as a follow up to previous post. It would be kind of neat to ship each guitar with one.