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For the tuners, I am using the wonderful Steinberg gearless 'banjo' tuners. Remarkably, the Epiphone Firebirds - for a short period of time - had these fitted as standard! I reckon, if you could find one on ebay, you could take the tuners off and sell the tuners at a hefty profit! One of the splendid things about them is that they are cylindrical and strings are clamped dead centre and so they can be grouped very much closer together than standard tuners - to the point that I won't have to add 'wings' to the headstock. Keeping all the string runs straight, this is what I came up with: And, to keep the body vibe, I wondered if I could do a cutaway plate, something like this. BTW, you can see here I had already popped a couple of ebony sides on in the expectation of needing small maple extensions...which I now realise I don't need : So, with a piece of the offcut from the body ebony, I gave it a try. Yup, I think this works: Before gluing the plate on, in addition to backing it with a maple and black veneer, I cut the trussrod access out of the plate. It will be magnetically held as a flush cover and thus be pretty unobtrusive. Here it is out: ...and here it is in place: Next jobs include, a little more body carving, temp-fitting the tuners, fitting the T-o-M and stoptail, stringing up, 'live' shaping of the neck next time Alex is free.

Only access to the 19th fret? That’s way high enough IMO. Plenty of notes lower down to make a statement, without annoying the local dog population.

Cutting the pickup chambers meant that I could do a mockup to talk to Alex what his preference for the position of the controls is before I cut the control chamber: And then the control chamber could be cut and the carve continued at the back - this time switching to the trusty gooseneck card scraper: Next was fitting the trussrod, cap and gluing the fretboard after laminating it with a maple and a black veneer to give me a demarcation line: Starting to get there: Time to start the neck carve and then blend that in with the continuing body carve.

Thanks! The observant amongst you will have noticed that, as the whole scale has been moved back and inch or so, then the upper frets are not reachable. This is one of the advantages of it being a custom build for a particular player. To get better access with the better balance could have been achieved by a deeper cutaway...but then the 'Essence of Firebird' starts evaporating rapidly - and Alex doesn't, and tells me he doesn't ever intend to, play up at the dusty end but, instead, prefers retaining a passing nod to the lower horn of his Epiphone. Once I've finished the carve, my guess is that he will be able to do top string bends up to around 19th fret but no further. And so a few jobs I can do in between continuing morphing towards the final shape. One of those is the Humbucker pickup chambers. As with the weight relief, chambers, I prefer to use a router only to deepen a chamber with a fully captive flush bearing bit. So I start off drilling the corners using a drill 1mm dia larger than the radii of the pickup and leg corners: Then I hog out with a forstner right to the very edge of the pencil marks: Then I remove the forstner 'waves' with sharp chisel and mallet and get the finished dimension to around 10mm depth to act as a guide for the router bearing: And then, and only then, get the router out to clean up the sides and achieve full final depth: To my admitted surprise, the rout did indeed cut into the cable slot I cut before adding the ebony top. Phew!

With the neck blank done, I could start trial-fitting the wings and top. I joined the book-matched ebony top and cut out the broad shape. I also cut the alder back wings slightly oversize and a couple more strips of ebony between them and the neck and dry fitted them to make sure everything was going to end up in the right place: The ebony will have a sheet of constructional maple veneer (1.5mm) as a demarcation: All good so out came the sash-clamps: The neck is the top face of the original billet and the length between the top wing front join to the tail is angled the 3 degrees to give me the required neck angle. Double check that I've got it right before the next stage: