Leaderboard

The Steinberger tuners are pretty easy to fit, although this little pin hole does have to be in the right place! And tuners temporarily fitted for me to be able to set up a couple of strings to position and line up the tune-o-matic bridge before the scary insert marking and drilling! Still some more subtle curve carving to do, but I'm pleased how this is beginning to look:

Thank you so much! Glad you like it.

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.

Like a Saville Row suit, the final neck shape will be arrived at after a number of 'fittings'. What I will do is carve the broad shape and then string it up so that Alex can play it between me scraping whispers of timber away with a cabinet scraper and repeating that until the shape is just right for him. But for that first rough cut I use a combination of spokeshave, razor plane and card scrapers. It doesn't take long to get the rough shape : And then, to be able to fit the strings, I'm going to have to fit the bridge, but to fit the bridge, I'm going to need to fit the tuners...and to fit the tuners I'm going to have to work out what I'm going to do with the headstock! Which is the next bit

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.