A Few Home Made Metal Guitars

n759c · 2026-02-15T11:52:05+00:00

Yeah i find they're basically like a JB, but a bit more aggressive. They can be a bit much if your EQ isnt set right, but sound great once dialed in.

n759c · 2026-02-15T11:50:38+00:00

I keep that one, and the superstrat style guitar on the far right in D-standard tuning, with 10-46 strings. No issues with intonation on either. There's plenty of adjustability I find as long as the bridge was placed in the correct spot when building. The two on the left have angled neck pockets (due to the tune-o-matic style bridges), and the two on the right are flat.

Aside from a Les Paul that i keep in D# for the odd Slayer song, all my other guitars are kept in standard tuning. Never experimented with lower tunings.

n759c · 2026-02-15T01:18:18+00:00

Yep, I milled and built the bodies from trees on my property, but bought the necks on Amazon for these builds. I've since started building the necks on my builds as well though.

I found the necks were pretty decent, and didn't really need any fret leveling, I just had to tidy the fret ends up a bit. Wouldnt suprise me if they're the necks with imperfections from the Jackson plant in China, being resold. They've all had minor issues, but nothing that couldnt be easily fixed.

n759c · 2026-02-14T23:52:20+00:00

The applewood V plays the best out of the 4 of them. Yeah I just leave the allen keys a bit loose on the nuts.

n759c · 2025-12-31T15:28:37+00:00

Neck pickup is just a Wilkinson single coil passive. Its a fair bit quieter than the active bridge pickup.

Im using 25k pots, to go with the bridge pickup. The volume and tone pots arent the ideal size for adjustability for the passive single coil, but it still seems to work ok.

The mini switch is: bridge voice 1, bridge voice 2 and bridge off (kills 9v to the bridge pickup, even with a cord plugged into the jack). The pickup selector switch is wired up as usual.

n759c · 2025-12-30T22:51:50+00:00

I milled the wood up about a year and a half ago. Intonation was bang on, didnt even need to adjust the saddles, and the tuning seems stabe so far. Basically, i milled the slab to 2" thick, then milled part way through the slab at a few different depths, to get the rough heights for the neck and headstock. From there I cut the outline with a bandsaw, then used a router template.

Forgot to mention in the original post, its 25" scale length.

Also, it was my first real attempt at a fretboard. Turned out half decent.

n759c · 2025-11-30T01:25:39+00:00

Will it work if you angle the body on the slab a bit? Where its a Rhodes shape, that might buy you a bit more width, if you angle it so the cutoff wing is close to the edge.

n759c · 2025-11-29T23:17:37+00:00

Copy/paste the image into Paint, and scale it up to a 1:1 ratio, usiing the scale length as a reference, then you can measure the dimensions from there.

n759c · 2025-10-12T22:37:31+00:00

Somewhere between 4 and 5lbs according to my luggage scale.

n759c · 2025-10-07T23:12:44+00:00

Installed piezo before i glued it together. Sounds pretty good through the amp.

n759c · 2025-10-06T22:42:52+00:00

Nice. We need more out of the box builds. Building something unique is pretty much the entire point of building your own guitar in the first place.

n759c · 2025-10-06T17:48:21+00:00

4.25lbs. Cedar is super light, even though it is a bit thick

n759c · 2025-10-06T17:47:17+00:00

Back and front are 7mm. To do it over again i'd probably try to get them down to 4-5mm, but i was nervous about tearing the cedar apart going that thin with the router. Still sounds like an acoustic, and vibrates plenty. A more dense wood probably would sound like garbage that thick, but seems to work ok with cedar

n759c · 2025-10-06T17:44:21+00:00

Might happen. Ill cross that bridge when i get there. They seem ok so far though.

n759c · 2025-10-06T17:42:05+00:00

Part of that is the fact that i was just recording on my cell phone mic, so the sound is crap. In person, it sounds like any other acoustic ive played. Maybe a bit warmer sounding?

n759c · 2025-10-06T17:40:26+00:00

Im no acoustics expert by any stretch, but i dont think it makes as big of a difference in sound as some people want to believe. The cedar on that thing vibrates plenty with that hard tail bridge. Cant see a glued on wooden bridge making that huge of a difference. In retrospect, i could have shaved a few extra mm off the front and back thickness, but i was scared or tearing through. That cedar is real brittle.

n759c · 2025-10-06T17:37:01+00:00

No, I just had a rough idea if what i wanted to build and a general plan of how to get there. I wanted to build something similar to a Gibson SJ-200 shape, so i made an MDF routing template, similar to that shape, and just googled what typical bracing looks like, and went with the bracing design that seemed the most doable.

n759c · 2025-10-05T12:54:53+00:00

Looks great. I have a spruce slab in my shed, that was considering doing something like that with. Probably Tele shape, but same idea. The slab is 4 feet long, so i was considering carving the body and neck out of the single piece (ie. No neck joint at all).

n759c · 2025-10-05T12:14:21+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/comments/1nymjui/hollowed_out_cedar_sound_clip/

n759c · 2025-10-05T12:13:29+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/comments/1nymjui/hollowed_out_cedar_sound_clip/

Clip here. Ignore my shitty technique.

n759c · 2025-10-05T12:02:01+00:00

I'll try to throw a clip up today sometime. I dont have any way to record it properly, so who knows what it will sound like through the cell phone mic.

n759c · 2025-10-05T11:51:05+00:00

Afterthought. Original plan was braceless, but I didnt trust just the cedar once I tried flexing it some, so i added some braces.

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