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Got 'em Dave. They helped a lot. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon noodling designs in Illustrator. Came up with the design below. I borrowed design cues from a number of other headstocks I had seen out there. Hard to come up with something entirely original. As you can guess, I flyfish, so I am doing this guitar with a flyfishing theme, nothing over the top, just line art from some of my pencil sketches. The fish and fly will be inlaid in the headstock, and I will be using flies or fish on the fretboard as well. I don't have those fully fleshed out yet. The body of my 000 is done, so I need to get my designs finished.



Ken

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http://www.casperguitar.com

Looks good Ken! I see doing it this way prompted you to adjust the E posts a bit.... nice to know that on paper before drilling holes!

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Dave
Milton, ON

Hi Dave,

Yeah, I moved the tuners around a bit, trying to get the right balance and also provide sufficient clearance. I wanted to keep the headstock somewhat narrow. I originally had even smaller 'wings', but I had to make them a bit bigger to get the E tuners out more. Playing with the layout on the computer was much easier than a bunch of drawings on paper. I did my initial headstock sketches on paper, but the computer made easy work of tweaking it and placing tuners.

Ken

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http://www.casperguitar.com

I'm at this stage in my current build as well and, like Ken, have been using Illustrator to create a template for tuner placement and hole drilling. However, I'm a little confused by the drawings provided on the Stew-Mac site. Either I'm using Illustrator incorrectly (quite possible, mind you) or some of the elements in their drawings are not made to scale.

For example, their drawing for the open back Grover Sta-tites shows the tuning shaft with an outside diameter of .249". When using Illustrator's circle tool to create a .249" shape it matches perfectly. Great! However, the Stew-Mac drawing shows the mounting bracket of the tuner as being 1.340" tall and .688" wide. When I use Illustrator's rectangle tool to create a shape at those dimensions it doesn't match the footprint of the drawing. If I scale the entire drawing down in Illustrator to fit the proper footprint (1.340" x .688") then the hole for the tuner shaft is no longer .249. As I said, I'm confused.

I guess this is my long way of asking, am I doing something wrong? Has anyone found similar discrepancies when creating a layout in this manner? At this point I don't know whether to trust Illustrator or Stew-Mac. It's probably operator error, but I sure don't want to drill any holes until I can figure this out.

All responses greatly appreciated,

George :-)

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George :-)

Number one rule of reading prints. Never, never. never ever assume that the image is to scale. Published dimensions can be trusted images can not because printing and scanning process will and almost always distort the image then when that image is scanned and re scanned off of a scan and so forth and so forth the error is just increase. If the image of a spec drawing was always 100% correct then there would be no need for dimensions on the drawing. But because drawn images tend to be distorted in reproduction drafters and engineers include pertinent dimensions for you to read. Most the time on a spec drawing when there is not a dimension given for a specific feature, that feature is not pertinent to the requirements for assembly or mounting. This is done to avoid giving out a full detail drawing but yet provide the info needed to assembly or mounting.

Hi George,

The Stewmac tuner images are not necessarily scaleable. They are bitmaps and can be resized. That is about it. The ones I pulled down were close to the size of my tuners, but not exact. However, they provided a basic reference and saved me from drawing the tuner knobs. I drew the circles in Illustrator close to scale that represent the heads where the strings wrap.

I am still noodling the design. I'd like to get the E posts a little further apart, but to do so requires me to move the posts closer to the edge or use bigger wings. I don't know if it is kosher to have the E tuning posts closer to the edge of the headstock than the four others. Looks fine to me, but I don't know if that breaks some 'design rule.' If I make the wings wider to even out the spacing between the posts and the edge of the headstock, I lose the very gradual curve I have in the design. The more I tweak it, the more I come back to what I have.

Ken

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http://www.casperguitar.com

Thanks for the replies. Good to know I'm not crazy. I have to check on that every now and again. :-)

I like working in Illustrator. Tonight I'm going to use the Stew-Mac info to make accurate renderings of a few different brands and styles of tuners. It'll be fun to see how each kind fits my headstock.

If anyone wants a PDF or Illustrator file of the final drawings, just let me know.

George :-)

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George :-)

Sign me up George!

Ken

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http://www.casperguitar.com

I'm neither an engineer nor an expert draftsman, so I can't guarantee that these are perfectly accurate. However, I believe they are pretty close. Hope they are helpful to you, Ken--and to anyone else who may use them on a headstock layout.

Merry Christmas to all and best wishes in the new year,
George :-)

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George :-)

George my friend thanks for putting this together for us - I just printed it out, put it in a sheet protector, and it now lives in my note book for future reference. Great job!

thanks for doing that bro!

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sweat the small stuff.

Yep... I like it!!

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http://www.casperguitar.com