MOTORIK II - Final pics on page 21 - new owner!

[eupat]

for sure it's very nice !!

[glimmertwin]

I could see how this would appeal to those into very bad ass guitars. Congrats - it's looking lovely.

[Slow-Pop]

God I love this guitar!

[RaDana]

Was that HSS or carbide router bit you used? Did you use any lubrication when going about it? I plan on doing something similar soon and was just curious.

[garyptaszek]

you never cease to amaze me... soo glad there are great builders like you in the UK

[Jazzprod]

Ben, looking super as always!!!


I envy your skills!!!

[noisepunk]

I'm not a huge fan of tremolo pieces like that that are right up against the pick guard but aside from that it looks fantastic.

[cylonrodeo]

Love that pickguard and rotary switch!

[theworkoffire]

Thanks for the kindness

Was that HSS or carbide router bit you used? Did you use any lubrication when going about it? I plan on doing something similar soon and was just curious.

They're carbide bits I use, but no lubrication or anything. Those tiny bits are designed for cutting PCBs and are a bit useless in aluminium. Some way of keeping the cut cool would be a great help. If you just meant the bit on the router table, that's carbide coated, too, I think, and cuts through the alu with absolute ease.

[theworkoffire]

Another day, another drip-feed of workshop shennaniganizing.

Luckily there are no photos of me meticulously setting up a jig to drill the truss rod hole, drilling it perfectly, then realising I'd done it with the neck the wrong way up, leaving the hole about 3mm too low Nor are there any photos of me plugging the hole with a dowel of maple and sanding it back flush. No real damage done, and it's mostly covered by the adjuster anyway. There's always something...

So this is me doing it properly, if a little low-tech. It's all a bit ad-hoc because the rest of my workshop is jam-packed with real work, meaning I can't get to half my tools, and I've never got round to making a decent neck jig. Once again, I don't really have the time, and the next one I make will be significantly different from this one anyway.

Drilling for the truss adjuster - with the neck upside down, as it should be :



Routing the channel. For these spoke rods the channel needs to go right through the end of the heel so the rod can slide in.



The rod gets held in place with some dabs of flexible adhesive to keep it from rattling, and I made a wee fillet to re-fill the channel above the adjuster. From this angle you can't see the cock-up with the misplaced hole.



I chopped the fretboard (pre-slotted 25.5" scale from stewmac) between the nut and the first fret, and cut a new nut slot at the first fret to make it 24" scale, more or less. The nut-heel distance will need to be just 0.069" longer than on an exact 24" scale neck. Also, I copied John's trick of chopping the board at the new 23rd fret slot and immediately re-glueing it to hide the line. This is it clamped up to set.



That's as far as I got. On with the block routing next.

[k o y l]

Wow Ben, this is amazing ! I'm glad your back to guitar building.

It's kind of funny because I barely have the time to really be part of the community anymore, but I'm sick, stuck at home (and bored) so I thought I'd come here to see what's happening and find this thread... all this happening a week after one of the frets of my Squier Cyclone popped out for no reason, so I find myself in need of another cheap, short scale offset, and guess what kind of guitars I keep stumbling on during my searches ??

Anyway.. I'll be watching this for sure !

Ps: love the Dexter shots

[theworkoffire]

Hey Loïc!

Whose guitars are you calling cheap??

Hope you get better soon, though not if it means you disappearing again.

Are you going to be able to get the cyclone neck fixed easily enough? Funnily enough those necks are the only Fender necks that would have fitted the 1st MOTORIK body.

[k o y l]

I was talking about the Aria 1802T and alike but I meant "cheap" like in "not expensive" only.

I'll try not to disappear.. I'm actually still lurking quite often but I have often no more to say than "cool project" which has already posted a hundred time before so...

About the Cyclone: The neck doesn"t really worth to get fixed (I'll post pics and explain why soon), It's a Squier Cyclone, not a Fender one which make a big difference. For ex, I discovered why the fretboard looks so ugly... This is because there's NO fretboard, they just colored the top of the neck.
So I'd rather buy a Fender Cyclone, cheap Mustang, duosonic etc... instead of fixing this one.

[theworkoffire]

there's NO fretboard, they just colored the top of the neck.

ouch! I see what you mean

[theworkoffire]

Some work on the neck this morning:

I trimmed the fretboard down to size on the router with it stuck onto the neck, then stuck it down onto my block routing guide, which I had to re-draw to adapt for my new router. The board is stuck onto the MDF through a hole in the drawing, btw:



Routing the block cavities with a 3mm bit, one left to do:



Squaring the corners - I ground an old chisel down to make it thinner to get into the smaller corners:



I lined the board up on the neck and drilled small holes through four of the block cavities for alignment pins. Then I glued it up, not spreading right up to the rod cavity so as not to jam it up, and on with all the clamps I could find, making sure the pins were in their holes to keep it in place: