Surf Guitar Build pt.4 – Hacking out the control cavities

I wanted to keep going without having to disassemble the guitar, so I decided to just start digging out the control cavities with a drill and chisel. It’s a quick payoff — I get to preview how she’ll look with all that chrome. Very nice. And then I take stock on what I’ve done so far and what I’ve got to do next.

I’m mixing a bunch of paradigms on this guitar, so I’ve got some arbitrary things to figure out, such as how high off the body to have the strings, whether to surface-mount the pickups, whether to surface route or drill between cavities for the wiring, etc.

I’m struggling with some setup and stability issues. It plays and intonates great at the 12th fret, but the first and second frets are a little sharp — so I guess I’ve got to file the nuts a little deeper. But I’m also getting some fret buzz here and there on the lower frets despite my fairly thorough fret levelling. The neck relief isn’t stable at all — depending on the weather, every few days I’ve got to turn the truss rod one way or the other — the changes are fairly dramatic. Neck relief is also noticeably greater for the low E than the high E, which is disconcerting. Hopefully once I add finish to the neck it’ll stop being so sensitive to humidity changes. And hopefully I’ll be able to sort everything out once I get better tools and I can do everything with greater precision — notched straight edge, feeler gauges, nut files. But maybe flat 13s are just too much tension for this cheap flatsawn neck?

Here’s the playlist for this series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOeX7S4wiV4&list=PL2CusUsZBnzIAdERrYmU3Xsn9PUV-FFul

Background music is my old surf rock band, Monsters From Mars.