blackofe said:
Cagey, thanks for the comments.
i've seen some clips on youtube - a guy was building a guitar with warmoth parts. and i remember, he was making some adjustment for the neck: tuner holes, the neck bottom, and some stuff i didn't undestand. hopefully i'll just need to tune everything correctly.
Warmoth necks are as close to perfect as anything I've ever seen. If you saw somebody adjusting tuner holes, heels, etc., they were probably trying to fit tuners that the neck wasn't drilled for on a neck that wasn't appropriate for the body style. The only adjustment they ever need is to set the relief as they're shipped basically flat, and you may want to dress the fret ends, although many guys don't bother. Depends what you like.
blackofe said:
about radius and the other. i wanted to keep.. the spirit of vintage. thus i stick with 7.5" radius, 21 frets and "total vintage". however, i've been playing with the original '57 RI neck, and found out, that couple things were uncomfortable to me: the gloss finished fingerboard and the skinny vintage frets. the new neck has an ebony fingerboard (i.e. it's unfinished) and middle size stainless frets. it's not vintage a little bit, but i need a work horse - not just a museum exhibit.
The "spirit" of vintage is one thing, to actually use a vintage design is another. Improvements have been made to guitar design over the years for good reasons. Very tight radii preclude the ability to stretch strings, which limits your ability to play a lot of styles. 21 frets is ok, I've never seen much of a need to go past that anyway. Finished 'boards are generally limited to Maple 'boards. Tiny frets are make it tough to control your strings, and nickel-silver wears too quickly, a deficiency exacerbated by small gauges. So, you skip the Maple, do the compound 'board and use stainless frets. Solves all those problems, and takes nothing away from a "vintage" appearance.
blackofe said:
the same thing about tuners. gotoh vintage tuners look pretty similar to the current "RI" tuners. and btw, they work perfectly. may be someday i'll want to try
set of Kluson® tuning machines. i've read, that klusons were used on the very first strats by fender. i'm just not sure, if they fit to the gotoh-ready holes.. but we'll see.
I don't care what tuners
look like, they have to work, and reliably. So, again, you stay away from vintage designs. Old tuners sucked. Worst of the lot? Klusons. The only tuners worse than Klusons are the old Chinese copies of Klusons. Either way, kukka.
You want lockers of some sort, and the best of the lot are the Schallers, closely followed by the Sperzels and Planet Waves offerings. They have high ratios so they stay put, have little or no backlash, and you don't have to wind up a bunch of string on them to keep the string from slipping. All those winds unwind sporadically, which leads to inconsistent tuning, particularly if you have a vibrato bridge.
blackofe said:
then i've heard, that compound radius makes maintenance of frets (polishing, replacing) difficult. and the current 7.5" neck is good for me. the only complain - soft-v shape. c-shape is mush better.
That a compound radius makes maintenance or replacement of frets difficult is a vicious myth propagated by Luddites. Past that, polishing/replacing is almost unheard of if you use stainless frets. The things last forever and hold their shape while doing so, so they're essentially maintenance-free.
blackofe said:
pictures. the guitar is gonna look very black
. i want to use it as a background for some visual idea. i want to name this guitar "blackofe" - kinda "black coffee". it makes some sense to me. so i'd like it look like a black.. coffee table with coffee cups, stains, beans, spoons. well, something like that
.
I understand the desire for a "blacker than black" guitar. I built my first Tele that way, although I ended up changing the neck out for something with a Kingwood 'board rather than the Ebony. It just looks better, to my eye. But, I liked it all black, too. Still, that Kingwood is sweet. Couldn't help myself <grin>
I'm not trying to talk you out of anything; ultimately you're the one who has to play the thing, so whatever is the most comfortable in both appearance and playability is what you should put together. I'm just putting forth a bit of what I've learned over the years.
