Hey Luthiers. I just finished my very first build and wanted to show you guys. Well, I'm 95% done really...still have some final adjustments. I'm calling it the Oso Grizzly (TM, lol). I'm pretty proud of it. Keep in mind I have no access to a shop and did this entirely with hand tools and without any jigs or templates (aside from pickup templates).
Specs:
I made about a bunch of rookie mistakes:
Specs:
- Oso Grizzly
- Wenge one-piece neck-thru
- Figured cherry side wings, partially chambered
- book-matched flame maple top and headstock face
- big leaf maple rear stripe
- figured katalox fingerboard, epoxy coated
- JE Moser alcohol anilene wood dye color....flemesh brown oak, deep red mahogany, medium maple, and colortone amber liquid stain
- Lacquer finish over shellac grain fill undercoat.
- dual-action truss rod
- titanium stiffening rods
- 16" neck radius
- 1 3/4" nut
- 34.25" scale
- 16.5 mm spacing at bridge
- luminlay luminescent side dots, green rod
- delano MC5FE bridge pickup, JMVC5 FE neck pickup
- Passive harness with DPDT switch for series, single, parallel operation, MM pickup only
- No blend on the electronics....either neck pickup run or bridge pickup solo.
- ETS Transmission bridge
- Switchcraft barrel jack
- Dunlop straplocks.
- Hipshot ultralite tuning machines
- Warwick just a nut 5S
- 9.8 pounds
I made about a bunch of rookie mistakes:
- I swore the wenge I ordered was 8/4 48" long. I ordered it a few years ago and set it aside. Once I started the build, I realized it was only 46" This mistake alone accounts for the majority of the problems I had later on
- The shorter length meant I had to inch up the body on the neck, which makes the final 2 frets inaccessible to my short fingers.
- When I cut the neck, being a dummy, I decided to correct the cut so I could glue the wings on parallel to the neck. Of course, I made a mistake on this cut and had to plane down the bass side to get it straight. This made the neck 1/32 too narrow at the nut and 3/16 too narrow at the neck heel.
- Since I had to narrow the spacing to correct the above mistake, I had to stretch out the scale to 34.25....as far as my neck would allow.
- The cut mistake also made the truss rod ever so slightly out of center...not a huge deal as the neck is so thick the truss barely moves the solid wenge, but it's still an error.
- I cut the wrong piece of the wing for the upper horn, which made the piece for the lower horn a bit too narrow, and cramped the electronics cavity a bit. Still got it in there, but it was tighter than I would have liked.
- I didn't cut and drill any dowels to align the side wings when I glued them, so they didn't sit at the exact angle I wanted. This made the bridge higher than I wanted and I had to sand the body down to lower the string height.
- I didn't get the wings 100% shaped before I glued them on, then had to go back and reshape them. During that process, I took a chunk out of the fingerboard that I had to fill with epoxy.
- The headstock was shaped after everything was glued together and cut. This was a mistake because when I started shaping it, it revealed a split in the wood that I had to cut out. This, along with the shorter than expected plank of wenge, made the headstock unusually small and off-center. Because of this, I couldn't properly align the tuning machines. So in order to get them to sit right, I shaped that funky string retainer out of round bronze rod, soldered onto flat rectangular brass rods. It works ok, but could have been avoided.
- I mis-measured the screw holes for the bridge. Didn't notice until it was almost done. I had to move the bridge up 1/2", which made the bridge pickup 1/2" too close to the bridge.
- I made some rookie mistakes in the finish, but I'm actually ok with that.
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