Thursday 14 August 2008

I haven't abandoned the T-beam guitar

...but I've put the project on hold for a while. I've been too busy the last half year or so to really focus on building guitars. Plus, I've found out that there is a number of areas - especially metal working - where I need to improve my skills and learn new ones.

On top of that, there are many things about guitars besides building the neck and body, which I'd also like to do. New types of bridges, new tuner systems, piezo pickups, etc., etc. These are mostly ideas that the design of the T-beam has lead to. For example, I need a locking nut for it, but since it's headless, I can't use the usual ones with three screws, each locking two strings. In order to roughly tune each separate string with the nut (principle described here), I need one screw for each string. Such nuts exist, but they are all narrower than the intended neck width of the T-beam. Meaning that I'll have to try to make one myself.

I did. It didn't work. I'll probably describe this failed attempt in another post and try another approach.

As mentioned, there are other issues besides the locking nut, all adding up to the guitar being a huge task with too many variables for an inexperienced builder as me. Therefore, I am going to fool around for a while, having fun trying out various ideas, hopefully gaining knowledge and skill in the process.

As a testbed, I've bought a cheap Gibson SG copy on which I plan to do some modifications and try out some ideas. This way, I can expriment without ruining anything valuable and have a functioning guitar on which to test the practical usability of the various parts that eventually will go on the T-beam.