News And Updates

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.

I’ve done the easy part. 15 of them. Next step is putting them in the router (or is it called mill?) and do the tricky parts.

I have created a gallery of old (15-20 years that is) pictures of my works to date. I am sad to say that there’s no photographic evidence of a lot of what I have done, but am happy over what there is. Particularly about the 80’s pictures of myself in shorts and the ones with huge glasses.

I have been spending my lunch hours at the lathe the past couple of days and have done the first few operations on the tuner pieces. I am making 15 of them to allow for some scrap and two complete bridges.

So, will it be ergonomic? I hope so, and I think so. To sanity check the design slightly, I made a 1:1 scale cardboard mock-up to mess around with.

Out of the four different playing positions, the last one may not be feasible, but the other three felt very, very good. Next, having verified that it will be a working design, I’ll start making the routing template for the body.