Katmaster - a Bobkitten... [finished p.2]

[epizootics]

Long story short, a little while back, the guitarist from my old band in Manchester & I decided it would be fun to get back to work after a six-year hiatus. I think we both needed to start making plans again in the midst of all that covid mess.
He was a huge fan of Rowlan S. Howard back in those days. Our band was quite noisy and messy live and he pretty much played his old Daphne Blue Mustang to pieces through those years. I told him I'd build him a new guitar to whatever spex he chose because I felt at least partly responsible for the destruction of the old one.

Here's a general idea of the band's vibes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DguRoNx3go

I mostly sang & played the saxophone in this band but we decided we needed two guitars to accommodate the new songs. I thought I would build us twin guitars, for a bit of visual fun if gigging ever resumes and because, of course, it was good excuse to add another guitar to my too-many-already.

Here's the photoshop thingie for his:



...and for mine:



The body shape is very close to that of the old Harmony Bobkat. Both are 25" scales with cherry bodies.

Last time I went down south to raid my father's wood stash, I made a bunch of neck blanks from quarter-sawn walnut & ash:



("look up, hooman! Dere are a bunsh of UFOs flying in dis flat"

His neck will be ash, mine will be walnut. Both will have pau ferro fretboards and stainless frets.

He wanted a pair of fairly standard JM pickups and a Tele-ish bridge. I was happy to oblige. The plate was cut out of a square stainless steel tube and the saddles were made from 2017 round aluminum stock - a hard, highly-resonant alloy.



I haven't quite gotten started on mine yet, but the plan is to hollow out most of the body under that big stainless steel plate. The tune-o-matic will be attached to the plate with rivnuts, as I did on a few other guitars - simply on a larger scale here. The single pickup is a top-mount, super-flat XII-style I designed a while back but haven't got the change to make or use. Although I might change my mind and do something completely different as I usually do.

[Bradley-Jazz]

These are beautiful! That is a great body shape - really looking to see how they progress!

I wonder if the mounting the pickup on yours on the stainless plate over a big cavity will affect the sound - make it more zingy...?

[Zork]

As always a great design!
The 25" scale bass is interresting. What kind of strings are you planning to use?

[adamrobertt]

Guessing you've been browsing Harvester's site for ideas? lol

[epizootics]

These are beautiful! That is a great body shape - really looking to see how they progress!

I wonder if the mounting the pickup on yours on the stainless plate over a big cavity will affect the sound - make it more zingy...?

Well - that's always hard to tell. If anything it should take some zing out of the pickups since the plate adds more conductive metal in the vicinity of the coil. However, the other three guitars on which I bolted the bridge directly to a stainless plate over a cavity had a nice, rich sound. That's not big enough a sample to draw any conclusions - all three had a different scale length and different pickups - but for the sake of the experiment it should be fun to see what happens with a larger plate & cavity. A friend of mine in the center of France builds all his guitars with stainless steel bodies and they sound incredibly nice. I suspect that in my case it'll be more of an aesthetic thing, but who knows?

As always a great design!
The 25" scale bass is interresting. What kind of strings are you planning to use?

Aw, that would have been really fun, but I'm afraid it is just a plain old, boring 25" guitar. Looking back at the picture, I must admit it does look like a P-bass pickup But each coil will have three poles, like the Fender XII. I ended up ordering some AWG 46 for those as they will have very flat coils to fit under the strings but retain some sort of adjustability. I'm aiming for a 6mm-tall pickup, with some length of the magnets pole pieces sticking out at the bottom and going into six holes in the stainless plate.

Guessing you've been browsing Harvester's site for ideas? lol

As always! The long, oblique pickguard line dividing the body in two on the one at the top is Harvester-ish enough to make me uncomfortable. Funny thing is, after I used it on the bass I built last year, that's the second time I have been asked to do something similar on a guitar. It's very cool visual idea that I borrowed and now can't seem to return to its owner.

edit: aw shit. I just went and checked AP's page again. That's a lot closer than I thought. Pretty much a reverse color version of his Goldthwait XII. I drew that mockup in good faith but I am going to have to change it. I remember seeing it back when he built it and really loving it. I used to do that all the time when I was starting to write songs. "Yeah - that new one is alright - but you simply rewrote Hangin Around by the Stranglers".
Sorry AP.

[dc]

those look excellent, both the bodies and the guards -- looking forward to more progress pix. more pictures of the cat, too!

[epizootics]

Alriiiight. After much deliberation and a few hours of CAD, here's what me and my buddy agreed on for his guitar:



This is what my CAD projects end up looking like after a while:



...which makes me glad I am not using real paper to do this


I genuinely hate it when I end up ripping off somebody else's design by mistake. There is always a fine line between borrowing and stealing when it comes guitar designs. Aiming for something 100% original is bound to fail - there have been too many guitars built in the last century for most shapes not to have been used in one guise or another - but I try not to borrow more than ONE idea from a particular brand/builder/model at a time. And apparently, failed, in this instance

This stuff always brings this poem to my mind:

'I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters —
Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
the black swan of trespass on alien waters.'

...from the Ern Malley collection, incidentally one of the best Australian literary hoaxes of all times.

[hexes]

i thought harvester too (i had a hard time deciding which model of his to order last year. almost picked a goldthwait for that angular pickguard!)

the body shape is a spectacular one, though and I always love your designs. the updated one feels very fun and almost brutal with that pickguard.

can't wait to see how these both shape up!

[bodhi]

Wouldn't worry about the resemblances that much, on a base level there isn't all that many different shapes that most of the parts can take... It's not like the body shapes at Harvester are original either. Really like some of the takes aesthetically, just like yours.

[MayTheFuzzBeWithYou]

Alriiiight. After much deliberation and a few hours of CAD, here's what me and my buddy agreed on for his guitar:

Wow. This looks interesting! Love the Pickup-Cover-contrast. And the pickguard gives it a great 50s Sci-Fi-Space vibe!

[Fiddy]

Oh yeah, looks great.

[Trout]

Your mate is lucky

[epizootics]

Gee whizz, it has been ages!
As usual...I got sidetracked.









That's a mix of a the Value Leader and the Thin Twin from the old Kay catalogue. I am building this one for my brother. We were originally going to make it a working class guitar but his neighbour, who has been making violins for over forty years, offered to give us a piece of curly maple for the top.
I am not usually a big fan of curly wood, but I kinda like the bling factor it brings to what was originally a cheap Sears & Roebuck guitar. For good measure, though, I picked a down-to-earth bakelized linen sheet material for the pickguard. The caveman tailpiece just needs a bend now. The pickups will be fun - something akin to the Kleenex pickup in a mini-humbucker format.

The Bobkittens were put on the back burner for silly reasons (ie. my trying to go the fancy route and get some templates laser-cut before realizing getting stuff laser cut was far from being a smooth ride - more on this later) but will be back with a vengeance very soon, with a few twists (my pal wants some, uh, peculiar electronics mounted into his).

More soon!

[Ceylon]

This stuff always brings this poem to my mind:

'I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters —
Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
the black swan of trespass on alien waters.'

...from the Ern Malley collection, incidentally one of the best Australian literary hoaxes of all times.

I'd never heard of this, thanks for hipping me to a cool piece of literary history!

The designs look great. It's probably basically impossible at this point to draw up something that isn't "derivative" whether or not it's intentional, so a cool design that isn't a straight up copy is still a cool new design, and this fits that bill for certain.

[epizootics]

I'd never heard of this, thanks for hipping me to a cool piece of literary history!

The designs look great. It's probably basically impossible at this point to draw up something that isn't "derivative" whether or not it's intentional, so a cool design that isn't a straight up copy is still a cool new design, and this fits that bill for certain.

My pleasure If you get the chance, I recommend the book Michael Heyward wrote about the affair. It almost reads as a pulp novel and gives you a good overview of the whole thing. The hoax raised some interesting points with regards to modern poetry. Those poems, for all the trickery & disdain involved in their creation...were really quite good!



OK, onto my laser-cut templates woes. I wanted to see how much of the building process I could make easier by cramming as much information as I could onto my templates while using conventional tools. The level of precision required called for something as precise as laser cutting. I drew up a neck template with all the usual stuff - center line, tuner holes, nut line, etc. but added a few things to it. I put two 1/4" holes onto the center line so I could align it perfectly with the 1/4" truss rod channel using router bit shafts (or any other object a 1/4" in diameter.



This way, all I needed to do was to routed the truss rod channel, mark the position of the nut and slap that template on, without fiddling with alignment.

I also added four 1mm holes, precisely located under frets 2, 3, 19 and 20. The idea was to drill those four holes onto the neck blank, stick the template onto the fretboard, align it with the fret slots, and drill the same four holes into the corresponding slots. While doing that, I would also be able to drill 2mm holes to locate the fret markers (I put two series of them on the template, one along the top edge of the fretboard and another one in the center). The fretboard would then be perfectly aligned with the neck shaft using four 1mm toothpicks or brad nails.

All of those still are valid ideas. The one thing I didn't expect was how much of a hack job the laser cutting service I used would make of my template. I got as far as cutting the outlines on both the necks:



...before getting the feeling that something was wrong. I took off the template and inspected it from the side, and there it was:



I should have checked this as soon as I received the templates, but it honestly didn't cross my mind. One side of the template was cut at an angle. I assume the part must have shifted in the bed while the cut was being made. You can see by transparency that some of the holes were also angled.

I went and checked the MDF neck pocket and pickup cavities template I got them to cut in the same order. None of the edges were square either.

A battle with the cutting service ensued. This was long past the date where I could make a formal complaint but I made the case that it wouldn't have occurred to me that the edges wouldn't be cut square. To their merit, they ended up reimbursing me, which is the only thing that prevents me from naming them here. Getting one-off pieces cut isn't cheap and the combination of my not checking and their sloppy work could have caused the destruction of two perfectly innocent neck blanks. Thankfully I left enough wood outside the line not to ruin them.

I am now waiting on another set of templates a friend in the UK is making for me with the laser cutter at his place of work. Sorry for the long rambling post, but I guess that's something to keep in mind if you ever go down that route