It's been quite a while since my last post about building this guitar body. I didn't have anything to write about on this for a while because I had set the project aside for a while. My last post specifically about this project was about 2 months ago. You can read that post here.
https://steemit.com/guitar/@amberyooper/building-a-guitar-body-part-6
In my mid January update post, I did talk about finishing the wood with clear Danish Oil, but that was all I had gotten done at that point in time. This is what the body looked like with the clear oil finish.
The birdseye grain does stand out nicely with the clear oil finish.
I had mounted the pickup in the slot and ran the wires through the holes to where the controls will be, to see how that would work out. I also mounted the bridge pieces. The original height adjustment screws were too short to lift the bridge pieces high enough to clear the fret board, so I replaced them with longer screws.
A few days ago, I decided to try putting strings on the guitar to see if I could string it without having a tailpiece. There's a hole in the back of each bridge frame for a string, but I wasn't sure if it would work with how high I had to raise the bridge pieces so the strings would clear the fret board. It turned out that I was able to put the strings on without too much trouble.
It turned out that I have plenty of clearance between the strings and the frets.
Since I only have 4 strings on this guitar, I had to decide which tuners would work best for the alignment of the strings to the nut.
I was able to tune the strings and play the guitar, but it needs intonation and string height adjustments. I'll be messing with that a bit at a time until I get it where I want it. I'm going to see if I can get screws for the bridge pieces that are shorter then the ones that I have now, but long enough to work. I may end up having to modify the screws so they don't stick up so far out of the bridge pieces.
The next thing I need to work on for this guitar is cutting a cover plate for the controls so that I can mount a volume and tone control, and then wire up the controls and the cord jack to the pickup. Once I do that, I'll be able to test it with an amplifier. That should be interesting.
One other thing about this guitar is that the strings are spaced pretty far apart, even for a baritone ukulele, which is what this is, sort of. I may have to look in to changing the string spacing a bit in the not too distant future. It plays fine with open chords, but barre chords are less than optimum. I guess I'll deal with that if I decide I need to do it.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check out this post!
(edit) I decided to try moving the strings a bit closer together because I just wasn't getting good performance from my barre chords. I had originally put 2 grooves in the nut to evenly space the two middle strings evenly with the outer strings using the original grooves. That put the strings at about 14/32s inch apart. I made another couple of grooves that moved the strings a bit closer together, they're now 12/32s inch apart. That little adjustment works much better for barre chords. In the process of doing this, I moved the E string in a bit, so it's not right on the edge of the fret board. That helps me with not accidentally muting it while playing certain open chords. All in all, I like this a lot better.
