The next step

I've done a pretty good job on the sawdust part. I think I'm going to have to cut away the body under the neck to make the higher frets easier to reach. Other than that I'm happy with the design.

The next step is to get rid of that ugly headphone amp sticking out on top. This is the noise part of the blog. The idea will be to build a custom headphone amp into the body. I have some ideas on how to do this using only one cell, which would be slick.

I know it would be easier to open up the Vox headphone amp and just stuff that in the body. Building a headphone amp from an op-amp rather than transistors is not as obvious, as most op-amps need 9v supply, and I'd prefer to use AA batteries as that's what the rest of my electronics use (including the 4 track, which is a very plausible thing to bring along with me on travels).

The guitar's tone is harsh, probably due to the very short reach of the strings past the bridge as well as the general lack of resonance in the body. The tone is turned way down, but still sounds muddy. So another goal of the headphone transistor is to be able to fine-tune the frequency response. At the very least, add enough distortion so that the poor tone isn't noticeable.

Back from the shop

I lowered the neck down, re-drilled the bridge, painted the pickup ring, and was a lot more careful about sanding before painting. I also moved the right-hand strap button to the end of the tuner extension. In its original location under the bridge, it tended to flip the guitar away from me, making it awkward to play. Moving over to the location shown here and passing the strap over the tuners makes the guitar flip up slightly instead.

I also did a little bit of sewing in the strap so I could route the headphones through it and reduce the tangle of wires.

v1: There's a lame paint job

Also, the neck is too high (and/or too much angle), the pickup ring needs to be painted and the bridge posts aren't quite right. They're a sixteenth of an inch too narrow, and I measured them from the middle of the bridge, and not the end closer to the neck. Had I thought about it I would have realized that the high-E string is closest to an ideal string and what the bridge and neck should be positioned to, with the large strings needing uniformly more intonation backwards.

An evening with a dowel, drill press, rasp and sandpaper will fix that nicely.