sweet baby jesus, is this a page or what? that 12 is quite possibly the most astounding homebuild i've ever seen. adding the vibrato is a bold move, but i like it. and the bass looks so good that i'm going to consider that type of finish for the mahogany Tele neck i'm going to get.
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
FIFTY YEARS OF SCARING THE CHILDREN 1970-2020--and i'm not done yet
The wood is koa People do do built up finishes with tung oil but I would not recommend it, you drying times are going to be lonnnnggg. You really want additives like a teak oil (deep rabbit hole) or true oil. Also you might want to use thinners.. I did not thin, I’m just doing 3 coats where you really rub it in to the wood and wipe off all the excess, then I’ll do a coat of wax. Right now it’s going to sit and cure for a week of so
I worked on the dies a bit and made a dummy of the pickup cover I want to make, but I don't really like it (the thing with the cactus and UFO on it). I'm kind of stuck on what sort of design I should put into the top of the cover...been looking at 50s era atomic age designs but nothing really peaks my interest...I don't really want to straight up copy the Davoli pickup embossing. Maybe just a simple Sputnik looking thing?
First test of the pickup cover die I made for these trapezoidal nickel silver covers, pretty surprised how well it came out! There is some waviness on the sides, I need to smooth the male die out a bit, not perfect but pretty cool! I went with your recommendation of the "Z" labled 50s design, just rearranged a bit, sort of looks like a spacey landscape!
I made another but annealed the nickel silver, made it much easier to press, but I don't think it's as crisp and has this scale on it from the heating that is tough to remove.
Last edited by repoman on Fri Apr 09, 2021 2:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
repoman, are you the same builder that I remember seeing previously that was doing cast aluminum bass necks? Maybe saw it on the EA forum or something...
Nah never cast aluminum before. I was thinking about making a sort of Bigsby style tremolo to simply how to build these and do a aluminum casting of the main parts. Machining that part is just too much time, I think cast aluminum would allow much more interesting shapes as well.
For people interested in making your own pickups, don't use a shop called Tone Kraft. They took my money and never shipped the stuff and don't respond to inquiries about where the stuff is.