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NV-III
ÓNylon Variax – ThreeÓ
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Okay here we go for build number three. I have tested the variax circuit with nylon strings and it sounds unbelievable. You are listening to a sample of a nylon-stringed Variax 500 from Variax_Junky of the Line6 Variax forum. If you don't hear the sample looping click here. I have wanted a Sadowsky Nylon Stringed solid body for a few years now, and believe it or not this was the year I was probably going to get one but, now that I am making guitars, why should I settle for a Sadowsky when I can have a ÒRoseWÓ Nylon Stringed Variax!!! So this is going to be a ÒRoseWÓ Nylon Stringed Variax, custom design of mine similar to a Sadowsky. The body will be a carved top variation of a Fender Telecaster with a 5A quilted maple top and back with a sandwich of chambered zebrawood in the middle, natural body binding both top and back. The color will be a natural to bright blue-burst. The neck is a neck-thru style 3A flamed maple base wood with a figured pau ferro fretboard, no face markers, two purpleheart laminate stripes and quilted maple peghead. The guitar will have gold hardware with the L.R. Baggs Hex Pickups mounted in a cocobolo bridge. Well.......lets get started. If you have questions I can be reached at |
Scroll down for build details
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Tue. Mar. 14th Ordered my neck today from Soulmate guitars. It should arrive the week of April 17th. |
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Fri. Mar. 24th Picked up the wood today from Exotic Woods. 1/2" 5A quilted maple top, and the back which is zebrawood with a 1/4" 5A quilted maple laminate back. |
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Thur. Mar. 30th Neck arrived today, it is absolutely gorgeous and almost 3 weeks early. Kudos to Soulmate Guitars on their quality and expedience. I guess I wonÕt be ordering necks from Warmoth anymore. |
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Sat. Apr. 8th I shot the final clear coat on CV-II, itÕs got to cure for 3 weeks now. So I guess it is time to start this build. I am drawing some of the non-standard Telecaster curves that I am gonna use by hand here. I made some minor variations to the telecaster design. I rounded out the back a little more, I made a strait angle from the upper horn to the lower horn and I narrowed and pushed down the lower horn a bit, and I made the whole guitar a little bigger than the standard Tele design. |
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Sat. Apr. 8th Custom Tele template. |
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Sat. Apr. 8th Tele pattern transferred to 1/2Ó AAAAA maple top. You can see that I traced it a few times until I got the position on the Quilt that I liked. Then I used a fat sharpie marker on it. |
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Sat. Apr. 8th Cut & routed the body with the pattern. The zebrawood is extremely heavy and dense. I had a very hard time cutting it with the band saw, I went through 2 new blades. I am going to have to put a lot of chambers to remove some weight on this build. |
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Sat. Apr. 8th Yeah that is gonna look awesome when it is complete. |
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Thur. Apr. 13th I used the router, bandsaw and sander to cut the neck down to the right size for installing in the back. |
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Thur. Apr. 13th This will be the neck position, I double-side taped it down. As you can see it is moved forward quite a bit to allow easy access to the upper frets. |
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Thur. Apr. 13th I took a pencil and traced the neck tenon to the body. |
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Fri. Apr. 14th Today I ordered the L.R.Baggs Hex pickups from Aamps Electric Guitar Store. With these piezo pickups they get installed individually into a wooden bridge that I will have to make. |
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Tue. Apr. 18th This is the template for the neck mortise. I made it by double-side taping the neck tenon to the poplar template and then tracing it. Next remove the neck tenon and use two 1-1/2Ó x 1Ó x 18Ó pieces and one 1-1/2Ó x 1Ó x 1-1/4Ó piece of red oak double-side taped to the outside of the tracing. Then you use your router to rout the template. You can still see the outside of the pencil line on the picture. It is very important to be very accurate here. You do not want your mortise template to be to big. |
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Tue. Apr. 18th Test fit of the neck tenon into the template. It is a perfect fit. |
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Tue. Apr. 18th Double-side taped the template to the back in position for routing. |
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Tue. Apr. 18th Neck mortise is routed. This took forever. I only took off about 1/16Ó each pass because of how dense the wood is. I did not want to put a lot of stress on the router or dull the bit by taking a lot of material each pass. |
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Tue. Apr. 18th Test fit looks good. |
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Tue. Apr. 18th Neck is dead on center. |
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Wed. Apr. 19th I am going to make a wooden bridge that looks like the bridge on a Sadowsky Nylon Stringed Electric. This is the design on some cocobolo wood. |
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Wed. Apr. 19th Bridge cut out and L.R.Baggs hex pickup saddle slot added. |
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Wed. Apr. 19th Bridge sanded, shaped and oiled. I used tung oil on the top of this bridge. You rub the oil in, let set and dry for 12 to 15 hrs then buff with an extra fine steel wool. Apply 3 to 6 coats doing this process to finish. |
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Wed. Apr. 19th Great artistic looking bridge by me, I mean Sadowsky!!!! |
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Thur. Apr. 20th The Hex Piezos came today, so I drilled the holes in the bridge for the lead wires and test fitted the piezos. They fit perfect. IÕm getting pretty good at this wood working thing. |
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Fri. Apr. 21st I wanted to carry the concept of the guitar to the headstock. Since the guitar is a hybrid, combination of classical and electric, I needed to come up with an idea that made you feel both when looking at the head. This was actually pretty easy. Electric back mounted tuners on a classical looking headstock. This is the drawing on a piece of poplar that will be the template for the real headstock. |
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Fri. Apr. 21st Completed template. I think that is going to work just fine. |
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Fri. Apr. 21st Template taped to the headstock for routing. |
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Fri. Apr. 21st Headstock routed. |
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Mon. Apr. 24th This is how I determine neck angle without actually using an angle. |
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Mon. Apr. 24th 1st measure bridge height to the top of the saddle. Saddles should be as low as possible. Bridge height here is 9/16Ó. More coming on this soon. |
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Mon. Apr. 24th This is the amount of material to be removed from the bottom of the neck tenon for proper neck angle. |
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Mon. Apr. 24th Material removed and test fit. At this point trace around the neck tenon where it meets the body. |
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Mon. Apr. 24th This is what you get, the line for the amount of material you need to remove from the top of the neck tenon. |
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Mon. Apr. 24th Sanded in neck heel contour. |
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Mon. Apr. 24th Top material removed with a bandsaw. I cut about 1/32Ó or so to large then fitted the neck in the pocket, clamped it down and removed the rest of the material with a sander. So it would be level with the neck mortise. |
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Mon. Apr. 24th Gluing the neck tenon in the mortise. I used Titebond glue |
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Tue. Apr. 25th Neck gluing finished |
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Tue. Apr. 25th Tonight I cut in the neck Mortise to the 1/2Ó top. I was scared as shi# to do this. Most other cuts and routs on the guitar you have some wiggle room if you are off a little, you can resand, recut or compensate and it will be okay. If this neck mortise here is off by as little as 1/32Ó you will have a big gap between your neck and the top. |
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Tue. Apr. 25th Whew!!!!......Perfect fit, what a relief |
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Tue. Apr. 25th Oh Yeah!!!!!!!!!!!! This is gonna be one great looking Tele. |
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Thur. Apr. 27th I need to determine what chambers to make, so I traced out where the electronics and battery cavity are then just chose some shapes. I guess chambers is the wrong word here. Chambers makes you think for sound, but these are actually to remove some of that heavy butt zebrawood from the body!!! |
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Thur. Apr. 27th Chambers completed. I routed down to a depth of 14/16Ó. This did take a lot of weight out of the body. When the electronics and battery cavities are routed, the guitar will be pretty light. |
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Thur. Apr. 27th The little holes that you see are from where I had to screw my templates for the routs in. The double sided tape was not holding strong enough for this. |
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Thur. Apr. 27th Started the carving on the top tonight. I used a 1-3/4Ó cove bit to rout the edge down 5/16Ó, which left 1/4Ó edge on the bottom of the top. I actually had my top cut to 9/16Ó not 1/2Ó. That will give me a little more area of carve on the top. |
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Fri. Apr. 28th After edging the top with the cove bit I put some duct tape around the edge as in the picture. Next I use a drill with a 60 grit sanding disk to add the rough carve shape to the top. You donÕt want to sand over the 1/4Ó edge of the top. If you get to close you will hit the tape and you know to back off. The tape just makes it real easy to see when you are getting to close to the edge. |
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Fri. Apr. 28th Next I retape the edge again then I add the recurve basic shape with the dremel tool. Once again the tape is to make it easy to see when I am getting to close to the edge. Here I have completed the recurve with the dremel and sanded the recurve smooth. On CV-I I did a real tight recurve, on this one I will do a medium sized recurve. |
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Fri. Apr. 28th I still have a little shaping to do on the top but it is close to completion. |
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Sat. Apr. 29th The cocobolo bridge looks great but did not match the guitar well and seemed to have a little to much presence on the top of the guitar. I made a new bridge out of pau ferro and made it a little smaller so it wonÕt overwhelm the guitar. |
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Sun. Apr. 30th Today I finish sanded the top and the back around where it joins the neck area. That area will be hard to sand once the top is glued so you want to get that done before you glue the top on. Here is the glue on the back before the top goes on. |
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Sun. Apr. 30th Next I position the top and hold it while my wife puts on the first four spool clamps at the four corners of the guitar. After that I start putting on the rest of the spool clamps tightly around the edge while my wife cleans the oozing glue from the edge with a rag that is wet with denatured alcohol. DonÕt use water it will raise the grain of your wood. |
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Tue. May. 2nd Glue is dried and its all one piece now. It came out pretty good. The front was dead on however the tail-end of the guitar was about 1/64Ó off so I need to sand it even and sand off some of the glue that dried along the edge also. |
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Tue. May. 2nd I put some double-sided tape on a small air freshener can that was full then put some 80 grit sand paper on. This is what I used to sand the edges level. Change the paper and tape often. |
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Tue. May. 2nd Be carefull to keep your hand level when you are sanding like this or else your edge will not be straight. I started with 80 grit then went to 120 then 180. |
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Tue. May. 2nd Started on the rear cavities tonight. IÕll finish them tomorrow before band rehearsal at 7:00PM. |
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Wed. May. 3rd Finished routing the electronics cavities. |
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Wed. May. 3rd Covers are cut now. I need to put the magnets in them soon. |
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Thur. May. 4th Today I am going to drill the holes for the string ferrules. Here I have used the standard 2-1/8Ó E to E string spacing, which means 6.8/16ths spacing between each string, centered on the guitar centerline. |
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Thur. May. 4th The first holes drilled are 1/8Ó holes all the way through the body. |
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Thur. May. 4th I did a very nice 3 + 3 hole angle on the top where the ferrules will go. This is one of those places where I had an error but I could compensate. The two holes in the center are where I drilled the first two holes from the back. They are mis-aligned. I did not realize that my 1/8Ó drill bit was flexing as it drilled through the hard zebrawood. So I had to compensate with the angled 3 + 3. Now what I had to do so that error would not happen again was to drill from the back only about 2/3rds the way through the body then drill from the top to meet the holes from the back. They were only off very very slightly but still meet up in the body. The end result is holes on the top and holes on the back where you want them to be and a very very slight mis-alignment in the body. IÕll accept that!!! |
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Thur. May. 4th The back string ferrules require a 5/16Ó diameter hole and the top string ferrules require a 5/32Ó diameter hole. Go very slow when starting to drill the hole, that will keep the bit from splintering the wood around the hole. I taped the drill bit for the correct ferrule depth. Just drill until the tape is just flush with the body. |
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Thur. May. 4th I give me a 6.5 out of 10 on the ferrule alignment on the back. Awwwww its okay, but no cigar. should have been a little better. This is just a test fit, the ferrules donÕt actually get placed in the guitar until after the guitar is clear-coated. |
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Thur. May. 4th Drilled the 13/32Ó holes for the tuners. First I drilled a pilot hole all the way thru with a 3/16Ó bit, then I use the pilot holes as guides for the 13/32Ó bit. Drill half way thru from the back then turn over and drill from the top all the way thru. Alignment is pretty critical here. |
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Thur. May. 4th Sanded the headstock then test fit the Ibanez tuners. Hmmmmmm never seen nothing like that before. |
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Fri. May. 5th Getting ready to start the jack rout. I have the template clamped into place. |
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Fri. May. 5th Routing half completed. |
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Fri. May. 5th Jack plate rout finished. Looks good. |
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Fri. May. 5th I put a temporary nut on the guitar, put both E string ferrules in, strung up the E strings and set the intonation on both strings. This will let me know precisely where the floating bridge will sit. |
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Fri. May. 5th Drilled a hole into the body cavity for the piezo wires from the bridge. |
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Fri. May. 5th Drilled and recessed the pot holes along with the 5-way switch screw holes. The 5-way switch screws holes are 1-5/8Ó on center. The slot is 1-3/16Ó long. I just have to cut the 5-way switch slot and put the magnets in the covers then this build will be ready for final sanding. |
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Sat. May. 6th Setting up the dremel to cut the 5-way switch slot. I take my time and only cut down about 1/32Ó each pass |
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Sat. May. 6th Cleaning up the slot with some 150 grit paper wrapped around my little precision rule. |
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Sat. May. 6th This is going to look sexy & very classy. |
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Sat. May. 6th Okay I am going to put this aside for a couple of weeks. I got an email from Warmoth saying that CV-II neck will arrive here Tuesday. IÕm going to take a few days off cuz IÕm suffering from building burn out right now. IÕve been building non stop since I started back in October, 05Õ. When I start back in a few days IÕll be working on CV-II. |
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Sat. Jun. 3rd Okay back to work on this one. I am just finish sanding here. |
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Sat. Jun. 3rd Over the next few steps here I am going to show you how to do a natural body binding on a guitar. Your guitar wood should be something light for the best effect, but of course you could use any wood you want. The first step is to tape off around where you want the binding to go. I use auto pin-striping tape, this is vinyl gray 1/4Ó width. The vinyl streches nicely around the corners. Be sure the tape edge is pressed firmly aginst the guitar so the finish will not bleed underneath it. |
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Sat. Jun. 3rd After the body is taped you want to brush a couple coats of whatever type of clear you are finish coating with onto just the actual binding. This will keep your paint or dye from bleeding under your next taping. |
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Sat. Jun. 3rd After the two coats are dry remove the tape and what you will have is clear on the binding as in the picture. |
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Sun. Jun. 4th Now you carefully tape just the binding on the guitar. It is important to tape on the clear only and not on the wood on the top of the guitar. If you misalign the tape and tape on the wood your color coat will seep under the tape and you will have a ragedy edge at that location. When that is complete you apply your dye or color coat. |
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Sun. Jun. 4th I am going to put binding on the covers as you can see. |
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Sun. Jun. 4th After you add your color coat to the guitar let it dry and remove the tape from the binding. And there you have natural body binding. |
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Tue. Jun. 6th Dyed, binded and burst the headstock and hit it with a couple clear coats. |
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Fri. Jun. 9th Made magnetic truss rod cover. Dyed and binded it also. |
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Fri. Jun. 9th Added magnets to rear covers.. |
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Fri. Jun. 9th I am going to start clear coating this guitar this weekend and since I donÕt like to hang the guitar when painting I thought I would make a stand to paint the whole guitar. This was really easy to make it only took about an hour. |
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Sat. Jun. 10th NYLON VARIAX - THREE |
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Sat. Jun. 10th I have started clear coating this instrument with nitro-cellulose. I shot 3 coats today. I will wet sand lightly tomorrow with 320 wet-dry and then shoot 2 more coats during the day. I had been having a problem with my finishes taking many months to harden. Jeff and I came to the conclusion that I was shooting to many heavy lacquer coats (15 to 20 heavy coats). I am only going to do 7 or 8 medium coats this time and I am going to use a 50/50 mix of thinner / nitro versus what I was doing before which was a 30/70 mix of thinner / nitro. I hope this will allow the instrument to cure in about 6 to 8 weeks instead of months :-) YeahÉ.I am still learning |
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Sat. Jun. 10th That is the shipping box from my dearly departed Variax 700. I use it to test spray from the paint gun when I start coating. |
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Sun. Jun. 11th Today I wet level sanded the guitar with 320 wet/dry sandpaper and a solution of a cup of water and a couple drops of dish washing liquid, this lubricates the sanding process nicely. After that was complete, which took a couple hours, I shot another coat of clear waited 3 hours and shot a second coat for the day. So far I have shot 7 coats of clear (2 light wash-coats, 3 medium coats, level sand and then 2 more medium coats) |
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Sun. Jun. 18th I have finished all of the 8 clear coats and this guitar is curing now. IÕll visit this guitar again in about 3 to 4 weeks |
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Sat. July. 22nd Well this one has cured long enough and today I wet sanded the whole guitar with 400 and then 600 which took about 5 hours. When that was complete I buffed the guitar with medium and then fine Menzerna buffing compound which took about 4 hours. Lastly I buff by hand with Meguiars Scratch X to remove the fine swirl marks that are left and this takes about 1 hour. |
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Sun. July 23rd Mounted the Ibanez tuners. |
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Sun. July 23rd Added some of the Variax electronics to the guitar today. |
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Tue. July 25th When my guitars are just about finished I take them to my guitar tech (Rick Emory at The Music Place, Berlin, NJ) to do an all out setup on the guitar. Ric dresses the frets, sets the neck relief, checks the nut and files for string binding, adjusts string height, checks and adjusts the bridge, he just does it all. The reason I take my guitars to him is because I can do a good job at it but he does a phonominal job. Ric has been doing this for many years and is by far the best at it I have ever seen. He is doing his magic on this guitar now. I canÕt wait to get it back. |
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Wed. July 26th I want to add a little footnote here about the curing process of nitro on my guitars. I usually wait between two to five weeks for the guitar to cure enough to sand and buff to a finish. This is really a minimal time frame and should probably be much longer. When painting with nitro-cellulose they say that it never totally cures, that it is still curing years after it has been applied. After only two to five weeks the finish is hard enough to sand and buff but still fairly soft and can be easily marred or scratched. Twelve to sixteen weeks would probably be a more appropriate amout of time to truly let the guitar get hard, but I know my patience wonÕt let me wait that long. Keep this in mind when you are finishing your guitar. |
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Mon. Aug 14th I got the guitar back from Rick Emory today. She plays like a dream. |
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Notice the brass nut there !!!!! |
If you have questions I can be reached at
Completed !!!!!!