I decided I'd post this here even though it's not a guitar. I've asked various questions on here during the planning stages, and I'm not a member of a string instrument forum, so it seems appropriate. If people think it's OT I'll move it to Other Instruments, but I hope people find it interesting...
My daughter plays the violin and asked me to build her an electric 5-string in the style of Ed Alleyne-Johnson's. After building my 5-string guitar last year I reckoned I was up to the challenge. The last few months has been researching, drawing, measuring and sourcing electronics, but now it's finally under construction.
It's going to be maple through-neck for strength with the rest of the body made from pine. Fingerboard and tailpiece are ebony and the pickup will be a piezo under-bridge with preamp. Ed Alleyne-Johnson's violin uses some sort of fancy bridge with individual string saddles, but I'm going to use a normal violin bridge and single piezo.
So far I've shaped the fingerboard (I bought a viola board to get the width I needed for the 5-string, so it needed a fair bit of work with scrapers to get it to the required width, thickness and radius), cut the rough neck shape from maple and shaped the headstock. All going quite successfully so far...
Comments
But don't care as long as I can find it to watch the progress
I'll leave the thread here then.
@sporky Nothing like as ambitious as your cello - no hollow acoustic body here!
It's nice that it's so small - only 6" of neck back to shape instead of 2 feet on a guitar. And no frets
On the other hand it must be very light that way.
It's going pretty well I reckon, most of the woodwork is almost finished. Mr Alleyne-Johnson cut an oval hole in the middle of his (presumably to take some weight out because his is all hardwood) but my daughter reckons it looks better without the hole and it's not overly heavy, so that's one job I don't have to do.
Here's some progress pics from the weekend:
Trouble is, I didn't have any proper violin players I knew that could give a view. It's great that you have a violinist that can check it out for you!
Still time for it all to go horribly wrong though...
I'll be really interested in seeing the finished article (and sound clips? )
It went on the wall (it does look great!) while I looked for someone who could try it out properly, but life took over and it's still on the wall!
I'll take this as a reminder to find a violinist to try it in real life