"Honey, I shrunk the Jag!", or the tale of the accidental Jarman

Talk about modding or building your own guitar from scratch.
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bodhi
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Re: "Honey, I shrunk the Jag!", or the tale of the accidental Jarman

Post by bodhi » Mon May 17, 2021 1:46 pm

As mentioned in the previous response and earlier, the switch placements felt a bit off when I was playing the guitar for a while, and after sleeping on the matter a few days I had made up my mind even before sorting out the other parts... There was also another guy at the shop who was taking some of the workspace I needed to continue elsewhere, so needed to focus on something I could do without some tools I needed to continue :mellow:

So, used the LP cover and the actual outline of the lower bout hole to get some material to work with...

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... that after a while actually fit into place... Well, the circular plug was easy enough with a belt sander, but the other plug isn't really uniform in any direction.

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While waiting for the initial glue-up of those pieces to dry, I also test-fitted the pickups in the threaded inserts. The fit seems to be a bit tight in alignment, so my drilling templates holes should probably have been set 1mm wider or so, but as I couldn't even get more than one pickup into place temporarily it's difficult to say for sure. The cavities are tight enough that cable routes are going to be needed to make it work, which I was planning anyways.

It's difficult to make out in the picture, but the upper corner of the paper template is bulging a small bit, since I couldn't manage to create a completely vertical edge on the small piece I was working on with large machine tools and didn't really notice it before gluing.

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Then I made a "sheet" of alder about 6mm thick and traced out a neck pocket and some "lids" to fill in the countersunk sections for the LP toggle switch lids, as they need to be moved over as well.

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Getting those made, I could then proceed to route out the oversized plugs from earlier, so I could put even more glue and a lot of clamps in place to the parts in place. The neck pocket shaped piece was sanded down to something like the StewMac shims, as I had needed to use a 1.5 degree shim to have everything playable earlier, and the route was a bit more than 1mm to deep.

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Returning the next day, the gluing had worked out just fine, but I made a small indentation at the neck pocket edge as I removed the sloping material with a router bit. The copy router bit was 15mm long and the neck pocket depth also 15mm, so was pretty much freehanding again...

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Some more to come in the next days as I've been able to work a bit more than what's posted, but got caught needing to order another router bit that should arrive on Thursday. Life is what happens while you make other plans, and all that :)
Jazzmaster project (got a body, placeholder neck, some pickups and ideas)
Tokai Telecaster Thinline with Creamery Pickups Filtertron and Tapped Tele
Blake Mills-inspired Strat project w/ Gold Foil and slide pickup

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ejendres
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Re: "Honey, I shrunk the Jag!", or the tale of the accidental Jarman

Post by ejendres » Tue May 18, 2021 4:47 am

bodhi wrote:
Mon May 17, 2021 1:18 pm
ejendres wrote:
Mon May 17, 2021 6:02 am
Really cool build man, I'm curious about how that bridge humbucker will sound. I've always wanted to do a dual single pickup in a build.
Yeah, not sure if they'll be all that different from a normal humbucker as the spacing is really close, but no idea how the individual pickups might work together (or not in this case)

Bought a rattle can metallic black, hopefully that works out... In the worst case it'll be something else fairly dark, as the way I imagine it that should balance with the shiny bits better without a pickguard?
I'd guess its going to sound more like a true WRHB than a normal hb. A WRHB is actually essentially two singles since they use magnetic pole pieces instead of a bar magnet.

Black should look real nice man. Best of luck filling all those glue lines lol

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bodhi
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Re: "Honey, I shrunk the Jag!", or the tale of the accidental Jarman

Post by bodhi » Wed May 26, 2021 12:29 pm

Before completely stopping to wait wait for the router bit, I spent some more time fixing and tweaking;

While cutting down the dowels for the Les Trem holes I managed to saw into the top a bit. Not the worst problem, but a slightly worse one was that I had squared off the edge of the the arm carve (as you might be able to tell against the red on the bench). I was using the belt sander to work as the space at the workshop happened to be limited at the time, so while it's fast it's also effective... Finally, the sharp-eyed might have noticed the half-moon shaped curve drawn at the trem area from the earlier pictures earlier...

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I spent a silly amount of time trying to rig up a jig to cut into the body along the lines of the half moon shaped line with a drill press, and in the end just pretty much winged it at around a 15 degree angle by hand. Should probably have used the angle plane below the drill press and clamped the body down, but didn't remember it was there...

Anyways, the whole point of that exercise was to enable the trem plate to have as large a range of motion as it can:

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Which means below the surface of the guitar :) I also used an orbital sander to grind down the T-shaped bits that are screwed to the body, so that the plate can move something around 1 mm more...

Still not a Floyd Rose by any imagination, but it starts to get into vintage Strat range, I believe...

One of the reasons I decided to go ahead with fixing the pickup toggle switch location was that I had slept on the idea for a few nights, and also came to the realisation that the resized body outline basically outlined the pickguard curve, as you can see:

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But the real guiding indicator was that the switch location felt wrong when the guitar was in my lap. As the fit was really close I used the printed template to mark on the body where the screw hole for the control plate would be.

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One final detail is that I noticed that the drill bit for the threaded inserts had actually penetrated the surface under where one of the telecaster switch plates is placed. Not any kind of concern, but it'll turn out to be important as I made sure to not route into the pickup cavities... And helps with basic alignment.
Jazzmaster project (got a body, placeholder neck, some pickups and ideas)
Tokai Telecaster Thinline with Creamery Pickups Filtertron and Tapped Tele
Blake Mills-inspired Strat project w/ Gold Foil and slide pickup

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bodhi
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Re: "Honey, I shrunk the Jag!", or the tale of the accidental Jarman

Post by bodhi » Wed May 26, 2021 12:55 pm

Almost a week later, with the new router bit in hand I returned back to the shop. In the meantime, I had used some wood putty thingie to patch up different sections that had been cut into, sanded down or otherwise messed up along the way. Which was a fair bit by now... I also used the same putty to fill in the remaining space from the patched switch cavities, and you can see from the picture what the extra trem plate cutout looks like. On top of everything else I tried to patch in the uneven countersink holes from the bridge posts, but that ended up not really doing anything at all in the end.

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On the back, there's also stuff to fix. The plugged cavities aren't that problematic, but I had used 80 grit paper on the orbital sander when I was sanding down the extra material, and I realised that that in turn had cut down a bit of material from the back around the upper telecaster plate and it was uneven... The belly carve was also problematic as I had clearly cut down a bit too much with the belt sander there as well...

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Fortunately the shop has a leveling sander thing, so actually making the faces flat again is a lot easier than you might imagine. I also marked out where the final control locations were to be placed and drilled the hole for the rhythm/lead toggle switch without going all the way through.

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... then with a smaller sized bit went all the way through to mark out where roughly the cavity needed to be placed. On the back, I then used the LP cover to check the placing with the full belly carve, using the holes and some basic trigonometry to figure out where the center spot for drilling should be.

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Similarly on the back, I could use a circular saw bit to cut out the countersunk area for the cover plates...

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And this is where we end up with the new cavities in place.

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This all went pretty much to plan, apart from me moving the router while the bit was still spinning without thinking while cleaning up the cover plate carves when I was almost done... :fp: I'm almost inclined to make it a middle finger the way all of this is going so far, but guess I'll fix it in a while... :whistle:

From the last few images you can see how much the putty was left around with the level sander thing, so there was a fair amount of unevenness here and there. I also used an orbital sander with 120 grit paper to fix the belly carve so it's pretty much smooth by now.
Jazzmaster project (got a body, placeholder neck, some pickups and ideas)
Tokai Telecaster Thinline with Creamery Pickups Filtertron and Tapped Tele
Blake Mills-inspired Strat project w/ Gold Foil and slide pickup

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bodhi
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Re: "Honey, I shrunk the Jag!", or the tale of the accidental Jarman

Post by bodhi » Thu May 27, 2021 9:57 am

So, that router bit? A fairly large dovetail...

It wouldn't be much of a Mustang-related guitar (ie the Jarman-ish) without anything Mustang-y about it, and I'm about to use the three-way slide switches for switching in the extra bridge pickup and probably some of the Jaguar tone cuts? Dunno, yet to try everything out, let's see.

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I fixed down some guide pieces with double-sided tape and dug out the inital routes.

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Then proceeded to make a smaller deeper cut almost all the way through, leaving a "shelf" there for the pickup routes and the threaded insert holes...

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After which I could rig up a fairly complex guide for the router from some scrap pieces around, and then use the dovetail bit itself instead of the straight bits. The reason I had to wait for it separately is that it's the largest one I could find available in a few days, the diameter is 20mm at the widest section.

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As the base diameter of the bit is 8mm, I have an effective gain of 6mm horizontally, which is digging in under the belly carve a bit while still maintaining the shelf for the pickup routes. The goal being to allow a better spacing between the pickup routes and the mustang switches than the 7-8mm a route with straight bit enables.

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Along the way I needed to make an extra 2mm thick guide along the black piece from the guide to not dig into the edge of the body with the base of the router bit...

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As the measured depth gauge of the router is missing and the other adjustment screw doesn't work at the extreme extensions of the router itself, I ended up digging into what was left of the body, but luckily not enough to go through... I can probably level that up with a bit of glue.

And it seems I ended up with around 3mm of material left, which is more or less the typical pickguard thickness. The whole body is about 41-42mm thick by now. I was aiming for 42, but the extra sanding has removed a bit more here and there, but I guess the finish might build some back a bit as well.

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I finally routed out some smaller runs for the pickup wires. Some are not properly straight as I was freehanding again... At this point it was around hour 7 of that day in the workshop and I was hoping to get stuff completed, which again is visible in the results. This time it's going to be covered up by the pickups themselves anyways, so don't need to fix these. I was a bit surprised to get some tearouts close to where the threaded inserts were located, but again nothing serious enough to require action by itself.

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This is what the back now looks like with the updated spacing. A lot better I feel, even from this side :)

I also drilled holes between the different cavities for the wiring and made a small route into the side of the concentric pot cavity using a cove bit, to have easy space for wires running from the toggle switch to the jack.
Last edited by bodhi on Thu May 27, 2021 1:14 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Jazzmaster project (got a body, placeholder neck, some pickups and ideas)
Tokai Telecaster Thinline with Creamery Pickups Filtertron and Tapped Tele
Blake Mills-inspired Strat project w/ Gold Foil and slide pickup

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bodhi
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Re: "Honey, I shrunk the Jag!", or the tale of the accidental Jarman

Post by bodhi » Thu May 27, 2021 10:11 am

So, this is where we're at right now:

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The spacing and placement of the toggle switches and everything else works for me now, no regrets ;)

With the cavities in the pickguard routes for the wires and holes between the cavites I finally had enough space to put the pickups into place to get a feel for the final look. I need to source a similarly colored jaguar pickup cover somewhere, and do something about the bright white of the mustang switches... Regarding the latter, I still haven't bothered to figure out the final placement of those quite yet, and I really don't want to mess it up when the fix would be pretty involved at this point...

Speaking of fixes, the spacing for the threaded inserts doesn't seem to work out when I did it by measurement on a template... The end result is that they're too close to each other by maybe a millimeter or so, so I'll need to redo that part. Probably going to drill into another template with the pickup in place this time, and then try drilling into some scrap first for once ;D

That's the upcoming weekend, maybe I could get into finishing next week...
Jazzmaster project (got a body, placeholder neck, some pickups and ideas)
Tokai Telecaster Thinline with Creamery Pickups Filtertron and Tapped Tele
Blake Mills-inspired Strat project w/ Gold Foil and slide pickup

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Steadyriot.
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Re: "Honey, I shrunk the Jag!", or the tale of the accidental Jarman

Post by Steadyriot. » Mon Oct 04, 2021 1:18 pm

How’s this one coming along?
"If someone duetted with a Bald Eagle, they could rule the Country charts from here to eternity." ~shadowplay

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