Headless guitar build

[DailyDovetails]

I took a little break from pedal building and this is what I made instead. It is from a kit but I ended up making a bunch of changes before I was happy with it. I recut the top of the headstock to get rid of the nut, carved a larger body contour on the rear, an arm contour on the front, a larger radius on the edges, contoured the heel and reshaped the neck to be thinner. Also I re cut the angle of the neck pocket to make the bridge height adjustment work better.




Many of the parts on this aren’t from the kit. The pickups are 8.1k and 7.9k wound Tokai PCB backed pickups and the selector is a 4P5T.



The pickup selector goes neck hum, neck partial split with internal trimmer, neck and bridge, inner single coils and bridge. For volume I went with a 500k wired as a voltage divider, the yellow knob is low pass filter with a 50k pot and 22NF film cap, the blue knob is a high pass filter with a 100k pot and a 68NF cap. The bass control is pretty subtle but does help with cleaning up some of the bass that can distort on cleans.

The finished weight is 5.3 pounds making it my lightest weight guitar. It’s comfortable to play standing and sitting and has pretty much no nose dive. It has a bit more work on the frets and some odds and ends here and there but I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I will probably build a few more guitars in the future.

 

[Aentons]

Very nice. I like the natural finish.

I've been thinking about attempting a headless kit. Which kit did you use and how would you rate the difficulty?

 

[Synchrony Pedalworks]

Wow!

 

[Alan W]

The time you spent cutting all those dovetails shows! Really nice job! 5 pierce necks seem rare for kit guitars.

My wife and I are talking about a few longer trips, and one of my sadnesses would be not having a guitar to pluck on, so this is attractive to me. I could see almost completely removing the body and having some sort of snap on attachment to make it lappable. But I have trouble with necks narrower than 1 11/16; how wide is that?

 

[DailyDovetails]

Very nice. I like the natural finish.

I've been thinking about attempting a headless kit. Which kit did you use and how would you rate the difficulty?

It’s this one. https://www.amazon.com/Leo-Jaymz-El...V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1&th=1

It came pretty much exactly how it’s shown in the picture. The quality of a lot of the hardware was terrible the bridge and headpiece were decent. I would think as far as kits go this one was more on the hard side. The frets needed a lot of work, many of them weren’t pressed in far enough, the ends on many of them stuck up because the radius wasn’t quite right. The neck needed a slight forward angle to hit the bridge right. The body and neck wood isn’t bad, they are both laminates but were decently easy to work with edged tools. Truss rod worked fine and the fretboard was straight.

I have considered doing this https://combineguitars.com/products/combine-6-string-multiscale-diy-guitar-kit but the 8 sting version as one of my next guitars. I think the quality might be better but it’s almost twice as much.

 

[DailyDovetails]

The time you spent cutting all those dovetails shows! Really nice job! 5 pierce necks seem rare for kit guitars.

My wife and I are talking about a few longer trips, and one of my sadnesses would be not having a guitar to pluck on, so this is attractive to me. I could see almost completely removing the body and having some sort of snap on attachment to make it lappable. But I have trouble with necks narrower than 1 11/16; how wide is that?

Thank you!

I feel your pain about both traveling without a guitar and the narrow nut widths. I used to travel 3-4 nights a week when I did sales. I traveled with a classical in a backpack style gig bag but it was a bit of a pain.

This one is a little narrower than I really like but is wide enough that I can still fret cleanly on it.

The zero fret is about 1.65” about 1.45” from string edge to edge. 1 11/16” would be 1.68”

The bridge is 2.1”