CMS guitar @ Hardronic 2012

Wow.
This year's Hardronic broke all the records. We had over 1000 CERN personnel plus guests rocking out!!

The guitar played great. I tried to play great. The videos are coming, watch this space.

Ready!

Ladies and gentlemen: the CMS Guitar v1.0 is ready.

As announced earlier, the instrument will debut during the 2012 CERN Hardronic Music Festival on Saturday July 21st, during my performance with Miss Proper and the Moving Targets, around 23:30 CET.

You can watch it either in person or through a live webcast, details at http://musiclub.cern.ch/hardronic

Electronics

As the neck is drying I finished up with the body - put in the switches and knobs, pickups, soldered the connections in the electronics compartment

And this is how she looks now:

Headstock decals

The final touch to the headstock is the logo. Two logos, in fact. One is the official CMS logo - like in http://cms.web.cern.ch/. The other my logo - "TRAQ guitars". The second one goes on dark background so I had to make white lettering. The way to do this is to print out the black letter outline on decal paper and color the inside white. Then when the decal is applied upside down, the black lines covert the white and create nice edges for the letters. Here's what it looks like:

I had quite a number of failed attempts with this, from accidentally tearing the decal to brushing over it with nitrocellulose lacquer and ending up brushing the decal itself away. So i decided this needs to be sprayed, the only thing I had available in a spraycan was automotive acrylic clearcoat (I didn't want to fire up the spraying rig again, plus I've run out of 2K paint anyway).

So I buried the headstock face in that. This is an intermediate picture after several layers:

Since I could still see the surface having a different texture over the decals, I levelled the whole thing with P1000 wet&dry sandpaper and sprayed on a few more coats. Waiting for them to dry now.

Frets, dots etc.

Getting the neck ready for action. First I installed the side dot markers:

After that the time came for the instalation of the five frets.

Hammered them in, made sure they stay put by running superglue down the slots, leveled, recrowned, dressed the fret ends and finally polished to a mirror shine:

Then after installing the nut I could finally put on two strings to make sure everything is aligned and working.

After that I've taken her apart again to do the final bits of work - headstock logo, electronics installation etc.

Announcement: First public performance coming soon

I am planning to debut the finished CMS Guitar at the 2012 CERN Hardronic Festival on July 21st, during my performance with Miss Proper and the Moving Targets. The festival will be webcast live to all the world. Details will follow soon on:

http://cmsguitar.blogspot.com/
http://facebook.com/traqq
http://musiclub.cern.ch/hardronic

Some work in the headstock area

After the neck came out of the clams with the fingerboard on, I turned my attention towards the headstock. First, I want to add something to the part where the original logo is. I chose padouk again since the color is already present throughout the design. 

I managed to cut out a piece matching the shape and glued it on. On the following day I put together a simple jig for shaping the edges of the fingerboard. Running the neck along I can precisely trim it down to get the fingerboard with almost perfectly matching the neck. Then I can finish up with sandpaper glued to an I-beam to make sure the line is straight.

Finally, I used the sanding drum to shape the part of the fingerboard behind the nut. Here's how it all came out: