Official Luthiers Forum!

A friend of mine has a custom guitar that was made for him by a friend who took some kind of workshop. My friend designed it and his friend built it. At first glance it looks really fancy, and it kind of is, nice woods, good parts, but it looks like he finished it in a real hurry. The maple burl top wasn't filled and whatever finish is on top sunk into all the oddities of the wood, kinda looked like somebody sent it through a laminator. And of course the real problem was a crappy setup job. When I took the neck off to level the frets, I noticed there was a small piece of paper underneath it giving it an angle. The builder didn't take bridge height into account when making the neck pocket. I had to stick another thicker piece of paper under there to set the action right.





So we replaced his bigsby non-adjustable floating bridge with a schaller roller bridge, re-levelled the frets, did some nut adjustments and set the action and intonation just right. Plays great now. It has some gotoh locking tuners but I wasn't sure how they worked exactly. Really cool looking guitar although it did have some functional oddities, such as the knobs and switches being on the opposite side of the guitar (it's not a lefty) so you accidentally hit the coil split very easily.




And I almost forgot, he brought this over:



I think we're gonna work some kind of trade for it. It's a huge piece but it's kinda thin and it's not very flat. How much would one of these be worth? They'd have to be level sanded which would make them even thinner.

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http://www.tinyhouseandland.com

I can't really tell the size of the bookmatched burl pieces, nor the thickness. I'm a sucker for good wood though and would probably deal a portion of my usual fee for the work performed if the size is adequate for a top. I typically look for 1/4" thickness for a non-carved top and may do 1/8" with binding. I like to have enough to do the headstock from the same wood.

It's pretty large, and probably a 1/4 in thick, but like I said, it needs to be sanded flat which will make it a little thinner. And it's slightly warped. Not hideously warped, but noticable. I wonder if they can be flattened at all with some moisture+heat. I'd be afraid of warping it even worse, being such a wild grain on that thing.

Anyone else have suggestions? It's big enough to do just about any realistic guitar you could think of, not that you would make a jumbo body or anything.

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http://www.tinyhouseandland.com

That's AWESOME! Like a modern Bigsby! LOVE IT!