Truly headless

After postponing it a number of times, I cut off the strat headstock of my very fine Warmoth neck. That took a bit of self persuation, but I needed it headless. A brass angle bracket is holding the strings. I also made a new acrylic body. This time, I tried to make it really fit my torso. I tried too hard: Most of the curves and shapes are too pronounced and it's actually too tight on the body.

Bridge and tuners are the same as in last post. I plan to make an improved version of the tuner bracket (or perhaps abandon it in favour of one using my plunger type tuners).

The pickup is a P90 mounted above the strings. I plan on experimenting with a couple of experimental pickups using primary coils with few windings and a current transformer, but I haven't gotten around to that.

It still needs a strap to be really comfortable.

Things I might do next:

• Make a steam bent plywood body in the style of the acrylic ones.
• Make a new and more ergonomic acrylic body.
  
• Make a proper wooden body for the neck and ditch the rectangular steel tube for a while.
• Test and develop my pickups.
• Get back and properly finish the two-string bass. This involves adding a slidable pickup and a piezo-pickup with preamp.

Two piece brass bridge

The strat type hardtail bridge that's on the developing testbed guitar was in many ways a temporary solution. Tuning lacked smoothness and precision with the strings going through the holes in the bridge plate on their way to the tuners. Also, it looked out of place - being chrome plated as well as being wider than the rectangular steel tube it was mounted on.

The bridge that replaces it is made from a brass U profile. It's height adjustable. To achieve acceptable intonation of all strings, it is divided in two. This makes it possible to adjust the wound bass strings and the unwound treble strings in two separate banks of three.

It seems to work fine, but I haven't tested it enough yet to judge if the design is good enough to develop further.

New tuner design

In the previous post, I described my intention of creating a playable testbed for experiments with different pickups. It turned out to be nice to play, so I improved it with a strap horn and the acrylic body from my t-beam bass. As it turned out, it was quite neck heavy. And since I prefer a headless guitar in most circumstances, I began to consider a tuner system down behind the bridge plus removing the headstock.

The design - as many others - uses traditional tuners mounted at the end of the guitar. Most of the existing designs however, has the strings fan out from the bridge and onto the tuners. The tuners have a lot of distance between them in order to allow room for the fingers when tuning. One solution is a design using two rows of three tunes facing each other and sharing the same slot. For the latter, I bought a set of six twelve-string tuners (they have the pegs closer together than six string tuners, saving space).

I built a bracket for mounting them on the end of the testbed guitar. It is soldered together from rectangular brass profiles. The profiles carrying the tuners are at an angle so that there's a (reasonably) straight string pull.

The tuners are made from one side of the twelve string tuners, cut in half - i.e. 2 x 3 tuners. I found out that they had a nice copper coating beneath the crome, so I filed away some of the chrome. I hope, when the steel and copper oxidizes, that they will look more discreet. They seem to work decently, but I imagine that better quality tuners might improve the system somewhat.

The strings can be tuned easily and precisely. Mounting the strings is a bit troublesome, but will probably be easier when I've tried it a couple of times. Unfortunately, my soldering job was insufficient and the top plate broke off. When I re-soldered it (and bolted it too, to be on the safe side), I was too hasty, and the holes for the pegs didn't line up. I had to do a bit of filing, and now the arrangement works, but less smoothly than the first time. I'm not completely satisfied, so I will buy a machine vise for my drill press and make a better bracket. That will give me a chance also to try some better tuners. They could be these due to their good looks (though it might look too _deliberately aged_ for my taste) or these due to their high gear ratio

If they keep working well, I'll cut the headstock off the neck, but for now I am anchoring the ball end of the strings in the existing tuner pegs on the headstock. I plan to play it for some time and make sure that it's a keeper (the overall design, not this particular version). I've got to be certain this works before chopping away.