Official Luthiers Forum!

Finished my second ES-335 style guitar - this one is right handed so I can actually play it. Plates and sides from Daniel Yeager (who has sold his business to Ken McKay who does post on this forum. The rest of it is pretty much standard stuff - mahogany neck, ebony f/b, headstock, pickguard and pickup rings, nitro. We went with Seymour Duncan Beneditto pup in the neck and a PAF in the bridge - the new owner is a jazz player and he made the choice - I think it was a good one.









Gotta do something about that plastic truss rod cover. It was my pleasure today to deliver it to him while he was doing a gig at our local Market (he didn't know it was finished). My wife and I had lunch at a little bistro and listened to some fine jazz.

What's your take on the Duncan Benedetto?
I am thinking of using one on an upcoming project.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Do you have any pictures of the inside of the box before it all got glued together. I'm thinking of building myself a semi, and am always interested in all the different center block arrangements people make.

Very, very cool Freeman!!! My kind of ax! Very well done my friend!

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Ann Arbor Guitars
World-Class Repair and Restoration
http://www.annarborguitars.com

Very Nice, one, or two of these is on the list.

I have a 335 dot reissue. My dad was a superintendent for a large construction company in Nashville and he was in charge of a big addition/remodel of the Gibson factory there. "Henry" liked working with dad and company and Dad built the Memphis factory. When they finished they gave dad a beautiful blonde 335 dot reissue and we did a trade........ My mom went out of town with dad, Henry took them out to lunch several times she says, He's really nice".........Hesh don't disown me:)

Beautiful!

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

Won't ever happen Greg my friend!!! Great story too!

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Ann Arbor Guitars
World-Class Repair and Restoration
http://www.annarborguitars.com

In the couple of days I played it I liked the Benedetto a lot and on his first few minutes with it Jac said it has "depth". When you get close to buying yours shoot me a PM and I'll ask what he thinks at that time. Because of the hassles of wiring a semi hollow I put a couple of terminal blocks in the neck pickup cavity which would make changing them very easy in case he ends up not liking them.

Edit to add - I got a message from Jac this morning - he said he went from the 10's that I put on to 12's and is much happier with it now. I didn't know what strings he would like but figured that was an easy change, particularly since it has to come back in a week or two so I can go over it.

I've built two of them now. The first I had some plans that turn out to not be very correct - it showed a partial block which I duplicated with a big hunk of bass wood and carved the top and back arches into the center block.



It worked, but I wasn't happy with it (by the way, I do not recommend the plans that can be purchased from Australia)

On this one I followed the Gibson method much more closely - a center block (maple) with kerfted filler pieces top and back. I made a couple of runners to fit the arch



and made kind of a sled for my router



Here is the filler upside down setting on one of the plates



Here is the rim with the center block and the two plates with their kerfed fillers

One other thing that might be helpful if anyone wants to build one of these. 335 style guitars do not have any access to the center cavity for wiring - traditionally one prewires these things outside of the box and fishes the components thru the f-holes. I've heard all kinds of tales of using chop sticks to align components and general headaches with wiring.

While the back was still off I positioned the components and did the actual wiring, leaving a little bit of slop with the wires. The wires going thru the hole into the center block are two 2/c shielded cables for the pickups and a string ground to the bridge



I put two little terminal blocks in the bridge pickup cavity (I made it extra deep), hooked the pups up and tested the heck out of it - made sure the switch worked in the right directions, all the pots did what I wanted them to do, yadda yadda. Basically just plugged it in to my amp and tapped on the pups.



Then I pushed the components inside and masked off the f-holes and other holes (I should have used individual squares of tape for each component like you can see at the jack



I tied a piece of string (actually dental floss) to the shaft of each component, fed it thru a hole in the masking tape and tied a big knot on the outside. You can see the little white knots of floss at each hole



When the finish was all done (and buffed) I pulled the masking tape using a dental pick and tweezers, then pulled the components thru their little holes and put the nuts on.



It worked!

Pretty amazing Freeman!
The finish is top-notch!

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wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

Nice Freeman.

Congrats!

One little correction since you mentioned me. I did not buy the business from Dan and Acme, I have been making plates and kits for years on my own.

Again, congrats, beauty for sure

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Ken

Freeman,
Great work!!!

What scale do you use on these? Standard Gibson?

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Joe Beaver
Maker of Sawdust

I'll uses whatever my customer wants but in this case (and the last 335) it was Gibson standard (24.75)

I do have a set of plans but frankly they are not very accurate concerning the internal bits, however it does give me a pretty good idea of general size and layout.

btw - I'm working on a single cutaway hollow body (ES-175 sort of thing) and I'm going to make it long scale (25.5) just for the heck of it. I have a short scale electric and I like long scales on my acoustics so we'll see what happens.

Looks fantastic, bet it sounds like heaven.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Mmk


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks for the pics and info,,, it looks a treat! I bet it sounds amazing.. even better in a few years after being played in

Very Nice indeed Freeman, I really like the two little terminal blocks in the bridge pickup cavity idea.
I wanted to ask; Did the use of such induce any audible noise into the circuit?
I was thinking of doing something similar with small rca connectors and terminal strips awhile back but changed my mind as I though it might be noisy.
I see that both the big manufactuers and no doubt many smaller ones too, have moved to small multiple pin connectors and I dislike those.
I think the idea is excellent though as it is nice to avoid soldering if doing a simple pickup exchange.

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You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you're got music. -Sid Vicious

William, those particular terminals were designed for very low power circuits. I used to work in a machinery fabrication shop and we use load cells in some of our equipment. Typically load cells have a very "weak" signal - in the order of micro volts - and these terminals seemed to work fine with them. They were made by a company called Wago and unfortunately I don't know the part number. I'm sure there are lots of similar connectors.

I did tin the wires before putting them in the connector, but that is a bit of a paradox - under clamping pressure from the terminal screws a tinned wire will cold flow and actually loosen slightly.

Short story, seems to work fine, if there was a problem I could easily go back and solder splice the wires. However this does allow easy pickup change and of course, the idea was to wire the box when I could still get inside.