I spent the afternoon putting this one together. First I have to say that I'm super happy with how this turned out. I have pretty much written this one off several times (as you can see by other posts I've made), I couldn't have imagined it would look like this when it was done.
Pulling the tape off the fingerboard was the first time I could kind of see some light. I have tried to take pics of this board many times, they don't do it justice. The fact that this was a free board from my wood guy is just icing on the cake. I had some black tapewounds in my toolbox I was going to use on a the last singlecut, but they weren't long enough, they look great on this one.
I only have black tuners here, and I was thinking that silver would look good, but now I'm back to liking the black tuners. I'll make a truss rod cover out of the same material as the fingerboard, the nut needs a little fine tuning.
My first scarf joint, it came out pretty good I think, it's not quite perfect. Next time I'll do some contrasting wood in the joint, I didn't have the confidence to do that this time around, I could barely get my head wrapped around the concept of what I was doing.
The control cover is finished with the water based Varathane dyed black and covered in a few coats of clear, this is what the oak on the body was supposed to look like. Right now it's held in place by friction, my engineer friends tell me to never use friction or gravity, I'll put some screws in it later.
The bridge is just a thin piece of ebony, I wasn't sure how tall it needed to be, it turns out not very tall. I cut slots in it, which is probably a good idea anyway. The pickup cover is coated in clear Varathane and polished. I need to do a bit more polishing on it, you can see some minor scratches in it.
I put an EMG preamp I bought used on Reverb in it, it's pretty simple, just treble and bass. It sounds good. Now I think it will be worth making knobs for it :-D.
I really like how the black dyed oak came out, so much better than the solid black it was at first. I think the amber from the Tru Oil added a lot to the way that black section looks too - the parts where you can see through the black are a nice amber instead of white like when I first started putting the Tru Oil on.
I'll admit I was a little concerned about the string terminations on the bottom. The routes are pretty tight for the ball ends, they only fit in standing up, they all went in easily. I was also concerned that the maple wouldn't be strong enough to hold them, it does not appear to be a problem at all, there's zero deflection. All of the strings are picking up the grounding springs, I didn't check that they are actually grounded, I'd have to check on the cut strings as the nylon wrap isn't conductive. I didn't hear any noise when I plugged it in.
The thing that took me the longest on the final build was getting the pickup cover in the hole, the fingerboard encroached on the opening a bit and the finish made the hole too small. I probably need to cut the cover down a bit, the screws are just barely long enough.
It plays really nice, I could probably bring the action down just a little more if I wanted too. I play a fair amount of slap and pop, that's not really an option on this one with no room between the strings and the fingerboard all the way down. The intonation worked out great with just the slant to bridge.
I'll record something in a bit, I need to get to some Honey-Do list items.
