I'm back...and daddy's building stompboxes

Hi all.

Man has it been a long time since I posted anything.

Of course I have a whole bunch of excuses:

• I'm still hoping my coleague will fix his CNC router, to save me from doing some really hard precise work.


• Since my wife's pregnancy I started work on the baby room.


• The baby room used to be my guitar room, so I'm without guitar building space at the moment.


• And last but not least: I have a beautiful son now. He's absolutely fantastic, but quite incompatible with the sound of woodworking!

So, until I find a proper (and affordable) worshop/garagebox somewhere, it's a bit difficult for me to practice woodwork.

BUT FEAR NOT! THE WARMACHINE PROJECT CONTINUES!

When I first designed the warmachine, I thought of it as the ultimate metal machine. One of the original plans was to integrate distortion circuitry into the guitar itself, hell, I was even in doubt whether it should be bypassable! (who needs clean sounds, right?)
This obviously required me to take a look at how effect circuitry is normally made. In my quest for this knowledge I stumbled upon websitessuch as BYOC, DYIstompboxes, freestompboxes and newtone, all of which offer a wealth of information about DYI effects circuitry! The last one (newtone) is a company based in The Netherlands that sells parts and compete construction kits of effect stompboxes. I ordered some of them and immediately liked the way I coul easily build these stompboxes and modify the way they look as well!

So I decided to expand the warmachine project to include stompboxes! So far I've built an MXR Distortion+ clone and an Ibanez Tubescreamer Clone and I am currently working on the housing of a stompbox that emulates the capabilities of Mesa Boogie's Dual Rectifier sound.

As I'm still working on them you'll have to wait for some result pictures, although I will post some pretty soon.

Well,

good to be back, and I hope to post a little more often from now on!!!

Wow! That's a long time ago!!!

Damn! It's been over 3 months since I posted. That's a new record! Well, unfortunately it's not all because of holidays (I wish!). I've had a lot to do, the last couple of months, part of it is holiday, most of it was jobs around the house though. We are improving the first floor in our house, and that's been taking up a lot of time. One of the rooms was going to be the guitar room, though, so it was also in the best interest of the WarMachine project! Then the following happened:

Results:

• The room will no longer be the guitar room


• Probably even less time to spend on the WarMachine


• A VERY HAPPY ME!

It will at least be half a year until I become a happy daddy, so I still hope to be able to work on it, shortly, and I will keep posting results on this blog!

Shaping the head

Now the "wings" have dried, it is already time to destroy them again: time to shape the head of the guitar. Using a photo of an ESP explorer headstock, I created the following outline:

It's not exactly to scale, but that doesn't matter: neither is my practice neck. I've printed the outline, cut it out, and put it on the headstock panel, and of course forgot to take a picture of that :( Than I used a bow saw to cut the headstock according to the outline. Couple of sheets of sandpaper later, this is the result:

If I can make some time tomorrow, I'm going to try using a different material for the fret inlays, since the epoxy stuff was such a disaster.

Wings!

I finally did some building again. In order to make my practice session more complete I glued some wings to the headstock of my practice neck.

Wings? Well yeah. In order to eventually saw the headstock into the correct shape, some more width is required, so I cut some more of my old bed up into two small pieces of wood, which I glued to the sides of the headstock on my practice neck. With any luck the glue will have dried tomorrow and I will be able to cut it into shape and sand it down.

Let's get picky!

Just as something to keep me motivated, I had the pick you can see in the logo of this blog made. Price wasn't too bad, except for the fact that i had to pay half again that amount in customs taxes to have 'em shipped into this country from the United States :(

Well this is what they look like:

And once again.... it's the mailman!!!

Yeah, the mailman's back... and with some good stuff.this time he brought:

• A truss rod and cover
• Some tuners, 6 I believe ;)
• Fret wire
• Pickup rings
• Gibson style pickup switch
• A jack-input cover plate (although I might have a different plan for that, more about that in future posts)
• A tom style bridge and tailpiece

I believe this means I actually have EVERYTHING I need to build the war machine, except for the wood to build the body. Since I have to wait a little before being able to route the templates I need to route the body later, I haven't gone out to buy it, since bringing the template will ensure I get a piece of wood that is the correct size.

Did he stop building?

Ok ok, I admit, it's been a while since I posted some news. Does that mean nothin's happening? Well, ehhhm.... yes, it does!

Well not exactly. Before I stopped blogging I rounded the practice neck I made. I just forgot to take a good picture, so the one below will have to do.

As you might be able to see, I rounded the back of the neck, so it would be smooth to play....if it were a real neck. Having dropped it a couple of times now, the resulting dents make it painfully clear that pine is WAY too soft to make any guitar part, al though its great to practice on.