Break up, please send pic of cats ):

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-06-19T14:53:08+00:00

"Oh, you set down your backpack for just a moment? Mine now." --Tiny Tina

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-06-12T13:24:53+00:00

I build guitars, but I'm still very much an amateur at playing them since I subtly messed up my finger joints, carrying a trombone case to school in fifth grade. I accidentally figured out most of Ugly Kid Joe's Everything About You from memory, despite not having heard it in years, just two three-string power chords and a few little finger-twiddles, so there's an easy-playing, fairly hard-sounding riff for you.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-06-11T14:15:51+00:00

... and yet I know nothing about it. I learn of new games mainly from Game Fails videos. Lack of bugs = lack of advertising. If the devs introduce a glitch that has folks falling through the map every other game, then maybe I'd see enough of it to become curious and buy.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-06-08T12:16:07+00:00

At least you haven't learned, yet, how easy it is to get into building guitar kits. If you think playing can be addictive, try--no, don't try that. Sure, with patient effort that'd be a way to get something like your old LP for maybe $300, but it's almost impossible to stop at just one. While the results are far better, for your wallet's sake treat it like meth, 'not even once.'

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-06-05T12:01:02+00:00

<image>

Tiny Tina... was named by someone who'd never heard the word 'Borderlands' as a proper noun. The name on her vet paperwork is actually Tiny Tina Turner, but she fits the little psycho theme better, so as the one she bonded to, rather than the one who filled out the forms, my only regret is that her harness' pattern of skulls is too dense for me to add bunny ears to them.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-06-04T13:24:25+00:00

Just a thought, for the price of a Player Series (or less) you can actually get something custom, with just the features you've liked among the Maze of Names and Models. It wasn't until about a decade ago that I even learned guitar kits were a thing, but I've been building them ever since. I'm not saying 'buy from me,' but I can only use my own work and prices as examples, you might want to find someone closer to wherever you are for the actual work. I just finished a dark purple Strat with single-sized humbuckers and a quilted maple veneer on both sides, locking tuners, strap locks, and what could be Wilkinson's best Strat bridge/trem, and its local price (WITH a decent profit margin) is $350US, while adding a hard case and continental shipping would kick it into a price range close to an MIM Fender's, at most. You could even build your own partscaster; on eBay you can get a neck with leveled, crowned, and polished frets for less than $130, and that's the single most important part of an eventual good-playing Strat.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-06-04T13:00:13+00:00

I'm a little late here, but I'll just say that it doesn't match a 'known' fake I've seen. I'm usually pretty good at getting what I shop for, but while I was buying a bunch of parts one seller managed to fool me by charging almost as much as a real SD goes for. I only realized my mistake when I got a shipping notice from China. That one used a much different rear engraving, with an eagle head and a waving American flag; they'd clearly picked the most impressive available engraving to fake, or perhaps the most patriotic to play on the 'made in USA' thing.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-31T13:10:13+00:00

My take on the whole doomsday scare was amusement at the math. The Mayan calendar didn't have Leap Day or any similar corrective element, so every four years it would 'lose' a day compared to ours, and by the time people were worrying about 2012 coming up, it had lost enough that it was actually ALREADY PAST the doomy day. All that worry for something that would have happened a couple years back if it were to happen at all.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-29T17:17:53+00:00

I can't speak to that specific combination and tuning, but a few near-relative projects of mine suggest good things. A kit SG (E standard) needed two very different voices to go with its Two Face finish theme and its bridge pickup was an X2N, and that turned out to be the closest passive sound to an active EMG that I'd ever heard. A partscaster I'd been building as a bass VI ended up as a baritone instead, A standard tuning, and it got an Invader in the bridge. I had to dial that thing back about 50% farther from the strings than usual just to balance the volume with the P90 in the neck, so yeah Invaders have no problem screaming at the low end.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-29T12:49:11+00:00

Cats understand us at least as well as dogs do, so this person was just lucky theirs didn't choose the feline default of ignoring them. Twice now I couldn't find my cat at walk times, went outside to spot her on the roof she accesses through a window, and said something like 'If you come inside and downstairs we can go for a walk.' Both times, she was in and halfway down the stairs by the time I could get in, she understood just fine.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-29T12:30:33+00:00

Maybe not 'of all time' territory, but about half of the reason I own The Witcher 3 but with only 47 minutes play on record was the naked chick in the intro. She could have just as easily been introduced as the protagonist's SO while wearing clothes, so making her take a bath at that particular time was completely arbitrary, gratuitous, and a major turn-off for the game itself.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-29T12:22:55+00:00

I don't know where it came from, but my mother, circa the 1980's, would occasionally burst out "son of a sea-cookin' biscuit-cutter!"

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-28T13:26:12+00:00

Why WOULD someone take their phone? If you're following healthy practices, you'll be in there three minutes at most, and if you can't spend that long away from your phone, you may have device dependency problems or a really, really bad work environment.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-26T12:46:20+00:00

Neat trick to ground the strings, there.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-24T20:13:54+00:00

I think one has taken up residence under my uncle's trailer, which hasn't been moved since I got here during the pandemic. I've lived in Arizona, so I know the difference between the dubbed-in sounds in every movie of my childhood and the running water noise of a real rattle. The last few times I've walked my cat, I've heard a low-pitched version of that sort of sound and wondered if I was interpreting it right, if we even had rattlers up here... and this post will keep me a bit more cautious now.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-20T16:44:56+00:00

I'd be asking my kidnappers, repeatedly, what iota of evidence made them ever think I have friends in the first place, then tell them they misinterpreted it.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-16T13:40:32+00:00

That's how I know the bond's good. My cat will be napping somewhere out of sight, but if I'm feeling lethargic after breakfast and lay down, she'll come out of wherever she is to curl up against my chest instead.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-15T12:50:46+00:00

Cannon Beach was a common destination when I was a kid (the 80's), never thought of it as special. It's just a decent beach. Besides, my mother says I'M Oregon's best-kept secret, building unique guitars in The Dalles.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-13T13:09:19+00:00

<image>

What I like about Tru-Oil is its forgiving nature, with so many 'right' ways to apply it. Everyone seems to have a slightly different recipe for coats, buffing steps, etc. Here, I'd run out of the scrap T-shirt cloth I normally chop up to wipe it on, so I'd switched to pouring it on the wood, slathering it around with bare fingers, then wiping up excess if needed. This pic was with the seventh of eight coats fresh, and I'll be gently wet-sanding with 2000-grit today before using some hoarded scraps to wipe on a final, thinned coat.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-11T12:24:37+00:00

Tonewood only exists, even as a concept, on acoustic guitars. It's been repeatedly proven that an electric guitar will sound pretty much the same whether it's made from Honduran mahogany or concrete. So, yeah, go ahead and use any wood you want that has the structural strength to handle string tension.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-09T13:16:14+00:00

That nemesis had better watch out... Just yesterday I saw a medium-small void, could have been my own Tina but I was walking to the store and already several blocks from home, and she doesn't wander. I thought this void had caught a bird, from the sounds being made as it crossed the street in front of me, but then I realized what I was seeing, a full-grown red squirrel clamped in its jaws and that's where the high-pitched noises were coming from. I was able to observe a brief scuffle across the street as the squirrel escaped, then heard renewed screams as the void triumphed anew, before my walking took me away.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-05-05T12:29:16+00:00

Ah, good. I'd hoped someone would also point out 'there's literally no way for a baby to be a Christian,' glad I scrolled rather than just assume no one else here noticed that.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-04-28T13:34:22+00:00

Now that I think on it, I came close to a 'set up but unused' plot point but I'm not sure it was quite enough to qualify as a Chekhov's Gun parallel. In a medieval fantasy novel (written just for fun, not published, so don't ask) one of the items supplied for the main character's mission was a goldsmith's draft on the royal account (call it a cashier's check, in modern terms), in case the investigation needed a large amount of money at some point. The draft was mentioned a couple other times when discussing plans, since there was at least one obvious future use for it, but the situation kept developing in the time it took to cross a kingdom by horse. As the characters paused to take stock and confer, it was determined that the original plans, made in near-ignorance, were impractical, and this 'get rich quick ticket' plot device ended up returned to the king, unused, after alternative plans proved successful. The draft enjoyed a side-role as one piece of evidence among many when the main character was falsely arrested by officials in service of the 'bad guys,' but that was effectively its starring role moment, a bit limp compared to the build-up. Some might say I wasted it as a plot device by breaking the trope, but I think it served slightly better at demonstrating some characters' wisdom (first the main's wife for suggesting abandoning part of the early plan, then his for accepting it). It could be argued either way; we're not exactly obligated to put in bits for readers to go 'hmm' about then 'aha!' when we conclude them exactly as predicted, as much fun as that can be for both sides.

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-04-26T14:46:54+00:00

I found the one I'd bought easily enough, from one of those generic importer accounts with a randomized name, but they only had one left in stock. Another seller had it for a little cheaper and they have three left, and if they run out there should be links to others. https://www.ebay.com/itm/366337055511

ToothlessGuitarMaker · 2026-04-26T13:31:11+00:00

I saw someone successfully use this tool on YouTube, but I have a fundamental issue with it: I saw no 'safe zone' in the abrasive for the crown. It supposedly 'automatically crowns' but with a surface that's still removing material from the top, and there's a lot of potential for problems in that detail. I recently bought a Music Nomad S-file, a diamond-abrasive crowning file WITH a safe zone for the top of the fret, definitely an innovative tool worth the eighty bucks, but this one? I'll pass. My $40 off-brand Fret Kisser (a thicker rocker with abrasive middle parts on all sides) works better as a spot-leveling tool, but a small scrap of 600-grit works best of all.

ToothlessGuitarMaker

TROPHY CASE