How to Make a Guitar Book

Wana_make_a_guitar

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Can you guys find one that is modern, related to warmoth (seeing as i'm going to buy all my stuff from there) and shows how to put together a metal guitar thats good for cleans (basically an all rounder guitar)?
 
A couple of the classics are "Build Your Own Electric Guitar" by Bill Foley, and "Make Your Own Electric Guitar" by Melvyn Hiscock. "Guitar Electronics For Musicians" by Donald Brosnac is a little more specialized. However, the single-source, most helpful book I own is Dan Erlewine's "The Guitar Player Repair Guide." His sections on detail work like nuts and fretwork is way better than the all-in-one books - you don't need to cut the wood, right? Another really useful book is "The New Wood Finishing Book" by Michael Dresdner. I don't know how good your state library system is, but in many places you can request all these books for free through the inter-library loan programs and see which ones work the best. Just the Erlewine book alone, and some judicious internet questing, provide enough info to do a great job - provided you have some tools, some experience working with wood, some patience and an IQ somewhat higher than a bar of soap.
:hello2:
 
+1 Dan Erlewine's book. That plus lots of internet surfing, especially on this board, is plenty of info.
 
Erlewine's book is a must have for any guitarist who changes their own strings. I've also really enjoyed Build Your Own Electric Guitar by Martin Oakham. Both of these books are great but don't cover finishing in detail. I don't know a book that does but these forums are great for that... or just get a finished body.
 
I read Dan Erlewine's book, but thought the plot was convoluted and the love-interest felt tacked on.

No, seriously.  Patience is the key, especially when doing finishes.  There have been so many times that after I screwed something up, I wished I had just been a bit more patient.  On that note, using a blow dryier to get your finish to cure faster, might seem like a good idea, but it isn't.  Trust me.
 
building a guitar is doen in two parts:  experience will blend the two a bit

1st part is assembly, this is usually simple, basically just bolt the stuff together, solder a few wires, at this point you have a craft project.

2nd part is to turn that into a musical instrument, by setting all your action intonation and other setups
 
I can do half of the first part, and basically all of the second part.

The first part i can bolt the neck onto the body, install tuners, knobs, nut. But i can't do the soldering of the wires and all the electrical business. Take the Capacitors and the Potentiometers, how do you change these around so, in my case, two are volume and two are tone?

So, more specifically, How to install electrical and mechanical innards of a guitar.(Doesn't have to have that title, but that should be the content.)
 
Just read about the Potentiometers (god i'm a dummy!)

X2 CTS Brand 250k Pot for tone
X2 CTS Brand 500k Pot For volume

That being known, i still need a book about guitar electrics.
 
It won't necessarily "explain" the electronics, but the Seymour Duncan site has wiring diagrams for just about every wiring scenario you could imagine, then adds a few.
 
POKE THROUGH ALL THESE (!):
http://www.unofficialwarmoth.com/index.php?topic=281.0

Of these, the Stew-Mac site has a great selection of explanations of what things DO, as does the 1728 site.

http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/
http://www.1728.com/guitar.htm

Seymour Duncan has a selectable page that spits up wiring diagrams for just about any switching/pickup combination imaginable.
http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/

Be warned: all the different pickup companies use different pickup wire color codes, no doubt just to make life unfair. You have to translate the codes for different pickup brands:
http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=color_codes

Stew-Mac has a perfunctory explanation of how to solder, but you really, really want the Erlewine book too:
http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/Electronics/Pickup_building/w101-soldering.html
There's a few cheap Radio Shack things that make it easier, little alligator clamps, all the tweezers and pliers you can muster, electrical tape, heat shrink tubing, regular old tape to hold stuff in place to solder on, etc. A functioning grasp of common sense is your best bet.

Soldering is more science than art, but Einstein's grade-school teachers thought he was an idiot... he probably was, for a while there. Most people ease into all this by fixing other guitars first. Ask lots of questions. If the first guitar doesn't burn you out totally, by the fourth or fifth one you'll want to try some wiring scheme that has never existed before in the whole universe - it's just a matter of inserting bits of one diagram into another. Electricity is really kind of simple, it just starts one place, goes to a thing that dicks with it somehow, then on to another thing that dicks with it some more, and so on until it pops out the chute.
 
Thanks man, that will really help me out.

Also i got my dad, he used to be a sound tech guy and a electrician, so he knows a heap about all this stuff if i get totally stumped! :toothy11:
 
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