w00t w00t - them folks at Warmoth are A W E S O M E. Several weeks ahead of schedule, the roasted maple neck showed up in the mail on Thursday. It killed me to have to wait till today to work on it, but finally got a couple hours tonight to git er dun. I cut the headstock with a chop-saw and a drum sander attachment for my drill press (yes, I am totally that redneck), but you'd never know it if I hadn't told you - I took good care and worked it down to 600 grit sandpaper, and the parts I cut are so smooth and even you can't tell where the Warmoth cut ends and mine begins (the shadows in the pic make the rounded corners look a little sharp, but thats' just the pic, i can assure, they are smooth!). It looks like a PRS, but it's just a look - the PRS look inspired me, obviously, but I free-handed the shape to be more to my liking. If you look close it's less pointy in all directions than a PRS, narrower and more rounded by the neck, the points on the top not as sharp or pronounced. It's also shorter than a PRS by almost an inch, and narrower at the base by (I guesstimate) about 1/2 an inch. Anyway - I am happy as a clam with how it came out.
Now that I see it all together, I think there is too much chrome on the pickguard, so I'm really happy I got one from Warmoth in the same order with no controls cut in it, just the neck and bridge humbuckers. I'll try a few looks and see what I like the most, but I'm back to thinking I may drop blackout/EMG type pickups in it, a minimalist switch-only control set, paint the body matte black, and leave the bridge, tuners, and output jack as the only chrome. I dunno, I'll figure that out as I go (that's what makes this kind of thing fun, right?). I'm also 'this close' to giving up on that crappy factory bridge and dropping a Kahler on it (all you Kahler haters can yap all you want, but I have never owned a guitar with more sustain -- a near full pound of steel in the bridge is near miraculous for making the strings vibrate until you get ready to stop them).
Oh, and to make it special to me, these are the 18:1 Gotoh tuners that I inherited from my Dad when he died. He'd used them on a 6 string banjo he'd owned for years (I inherited that too). I was (am) never going to play that banjo, but with these tuners on the guitar, I feel just a little bit like I'm playing something he passed on to me.
Anyway, I know, I know, #thisthreadisworthlesswithoutpics - it's kind of a crappy cell phone pic, but you get the idea. I'll post more up when I get it "done".
