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This blog documents the production of my Kaoss Pad 1 Guitar Modification. The posts appear newest to oldest, so it may be easier to go bottom to top if using it as a guide or reading the whole thing, or just go off the archive navigation below.



Cheers for stopping by, hope its in some way interesting, please feel free to comment!

Tuesday, 13 March 2007

Problem #1 - Bugger.

My Poor Tailpiece

Well, I had a feeling this might happen, and it did. It probably wouldn't if only the guitar was more than 30% wood but, all it is is the two screws + fixings that hold the actual stoptail tailpiece at base of strings in, aren't fixed anymore.

Please bear in mind that I doubt this would ever happen (with my measurements and positioning) if the guitar was solid body and better quality hardwood (such as the Epiphone range, which I believe tend to be cheap yet great bodies).

The cause is probably a mix of careless crap you can easily learn from:

  • Firstly, odd chunks of wood coming out in layers and chunks from above the hole, under the painwork, near the tailpiece. The worst affected one has a 8mm deep tiny hollow allowing me to see the body of the nut inside its messed up position.
  • Also, the width of my hole pretty much covers the width (unintentionally) of the main interior wooden body strip following the neck's direction inside. This could have led to stray pieces of wood as I could have almost completely sliced the 'plank' width ways.
  • All of this probably meant that when it came to belting my guitar with a screwdriver and hammer, this just slowly dislodged it and loosened it, allowing it do physically wreck its original bored holes, and if it gets to more of angle than its at currently, the tension from the strings will probably just pull it out.
So be careful. If this was my new guitar, I'd be crying my eyes out, so maybe add some more care than I have and it'll be fine, or just use a router or some sorta saw or drill to get a neater more contained cut, without the banging.

Still, its fine at the minute. Its just a prototype. But in fear of a metal tailpiece and 6 slicey thin strings wrapping round my wrist at 20mph, I might avoid playing it for now.

Again, I probably could have been much more consise about that one.

Me guitars fucked cos I wasn't careful.

-adam

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think people may get refused since your are referring to the stoptail tailpiece as the 'nut'. The nut is the one at the start of the fretboard, the one at the other end is the bridge, and then after that (on an LP based guitar) is the tailpiece.

citizen said...

Ah thanks mate, changed that post accordingly. Just goes to show how much I lack the expertise i guess!

Cheers for keeping me right + please do again in future if you spot any other mistakes in my text.

-adam

Anonymous said...

I saw a japanese punk band smash an Epiphone on stage and it was the same deal. The inside of the guitar body looked like it was made of cardboard or something really cheap and hollow. It must have been a really cheap epiphone, because I know that many of their guitars are very well built. Their line seems to have quite a range as far as price and quality are concerned though.

citizen said...

sounds like a good show! Yea, well phil's for example compared to mine! But indeed, maybe where they're built as well, but I guess to get homebuilt would be more a Gibson jobby.

I'll try to make sure I get a semi-decent well built guitar this time. That one I got now was really just a starter guitar (not like, to the level of being from Argos with a free trendy gig bag and a, 3W mini amp or something).