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Do-it-yourself
Bass Guitar kit
Building your own guitar has a real attraction
for many musicians. But normally,
left-handers are left right out! Here’s a
complete kit that comes with all the parts
needed to build, string and get playing
your own electric or bass guitar.
I
f you’ve been frequenting the internet lately, you may have noticed a
lot of advertisements from Banggood
and similar outfits, of interest to readers of this magazine.
Most of the items are electronic
gadgets but recently I started seeing intriguing ads for DIY electric guitar kits.
These provide you with all the necessary wood, electronics, strings etc;
it’s then up to the purchaser to do the
assembly, nut and bridge adjustments, connect the internal electronics
and so on, but most importantly, apply
the finishing coat to the woodwork.
One common query I noticed was:
“Do you make left-handed versions?”
and it was clear from the sometimes
nonsensical answers that the good
people at Banggood had no idea what
was being asked!
I play left-handed and after doing
Some of the parts included in the kit, from left to right: pickguard, two pickups,
bridge with saddle, volume & tone controls, nickel-plated strings, tuning pegs,
assorted screws plus nuts and backplate cover.
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Celebrating 30 Years
some research, I found that the only
company who appear to offer lefthanded bass kits are Pit Bull Guitars
(www.pitbullguitars.com), based in
Western Australia. I also discovered
that, once exchange rates and shipping
are taken into account, the Pit Bull
products work out to be only slightly
more expensive.
But Pit Bull offer a much bigger
range of models and build options,
plus you get the benefit of local, English-language backup.
They even host a builders’ support
website: www.buildyourownguitar.
com.au/forum
Pit Bull’s main line of business is
supplying fully-finished guitars to
music shops in Australia, but clearly
they thought there was also a market
for enthusiasts who wanted to “roll
their own”.
So they appear to be just supplying
the same kit of parts that their Chinese factories use to assemble their
fully-finished products. There are a
few other places in Australia who also
offer DIY guitar kits, but none appear
to have anything like Pit Bull’s range.
I’ve always wanted to own an electric bass but left-handed models of
reasonable quality are hard to come
by and not particularly cheap. Pit Bull
have a range of 14 different left-handed
guitar models, including three basses,
and I chose the JB-4L, “inspired” by
the Fender Jazz Bass, as played by
siliconchip.com.au
By Keith Walters
Michael “Flea” Balzary of the Red Hot
Chili Peppers.
The JB-4L kit costs just $199 including shipping anywhere in Australia.
So I clicked the appropriate boxes, hit
the PayPal “Pay Now” button and Australia Post delivered it a few days later.
It came adequately packed in a stiff
carton with lots of ecologically-correct
cardboard and paper padding. The
screws were all sealed into pockets in
one plastic bag with no identification;
you have to work out where they go.
All the other bits are sealed in their
own separate plastic bags.
There are also no real assembly instructions; Pit Bull suggest you visit
their website for that. They do recommend you carry out a “mock build”,
basically placing all the parts in their
approximate positions to check that
everything is there, but that’s pretty
much it.
I did all that and after confirming
that everything was there, immediately started the assembly. There are
actually four main parts to the process
and there is no specific order in which
they need to be done (although this is
for a bass, the instructions are pretty
much identical for a 6-string guitar
apart from the extra two strings):
A. Metalwork assembly, basically
getting all the mounting screw holes
in the right places
B. Fitting and wiring up the electrical parts
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C. Painting or otherwise finishing
the woodwork
D. Adjustment of frets, action and
intonation.
In my case I did them in the order
above, which gave me a presentable
guitar after step C. To be honest, if I’d
know how little time step D was actually going to take, I probably would
have done it A-B-D-C. Normally, you
would want to leave the finish until
last, to avoid damaging it.
The first thing you need to do is
attach the neck. Some people recom-
mend temporarily clamping it in position when you’re getting the rest of the
components lined up, but I can’t see
any real value in that, at least with a
bass, so I decided to screw it into place
immediately.
The neck comes pre-drilled with
four holes, and you first have to drill
matching pilot holes in the body,
which was where I ran into my first
snag...
There is a metal backing plate that
the screws are meant to pass through
to spread the load. I left that off during
The neck of the guitar is attached to the body via a bolt-in joint, with four holes
drilled through the body. This type of joint is quite strong, fairly easy to produce
and doesn’t require glue.
Celebrating 30 Years
November 2017 69
Preparing the holes for attaching the bridge (left) and one of the pickups (right). The bridge is the sheet of metal that is
secured to the body, while the saddle is attached to the tail-end of the bridge and the strings then sit on top of the saddle.
The type of bridge/saddle combination used in this guitar is called a Tune-O-Matic bridge. It is adjusted by tightening or
loosening the screws, thus altering the tension the springs apply on the strings.
the drilling because I didn't want to
scratch it, and when it came time for
the assembly, I encountered this:
The screw holes on the backplate
that thread through to the neck didn’t
align properly, as shown in the photo
below.
I mentioned this on the forum, and
another builder making the exact same
“lefty” bass reported he had the exact
same problem! So somewhere in China
is a jacked-up drilling jig. Anyway Pit
Bull say they are looking into it.
To be fair, they probably don’t sell
all that many JB-4Ls, and nobody has
reported similar problems with other
models. Fortunately, I found some
bamboo skewers that were exactly the
right size to fill the erroneous hole, and
after gluing one of those in there I soon
had the neck re-drilled and properly
attached.
The next stage is fitting the bridge.
There are various techniques described on the forum. I decided to use
some cotton kitchen twine, normally
The backplate had one misaligned
screw hole, which meant that the hole
had to filled and then re-drilled.
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Silicon Chip
used for tying up roasts and the like. I
used this because it doesn't stretch and
used Blu-Tack to secure two lengths of
the twine behind the nut.
I marked the position of the 12th fret
with a Texta pen, and then doubled
the twine back and marked it where
it passes through the nut (it's better
if you can get someone to help with
this). That way, the first mark should
be at exactly half the scale length, and
the second should be twice that (the
actual required scale length).
We need to measure the scale length
as it’s used to help set the location
of the saddle on the bridge, once the
strings are attached.
I added some weights to the other
ends of the twine so it hung over the
end of the body, keeping the twine taut.
The reason for this is because the
distance from the 12th fret to the nut is
the same as the distance from the 12th
fret to the bridge, plus some compensation depending on the type of bridge
and other factors.
Then it's a simple matter of dropping
the lengths of twine into the relevant
slots on the bridge and moving the
bridge around so that the twine lines
up with the outermost pickups, and
the pen marks line up with the centred
adjustable bridge saddles.
I recommend you just drill two pilot
holes at first to make sure the bridge
hasn't moved, and re-check the alignment before you put the rest in.
Unfortunately, I subsequently encountered another snag! Despite one
poster on the builders’ forum stating
that the bass bridge saddles should be
centred exactly at twice the 12th fret
distance as shown, it turns out for a
bass, the bridge needs to be mounted
another 5mm or so further away from
the pickups. Otherwise you may not be
able to get the intonation right.
Editor's note: This is typically due
to the total string length being longer
than the scale length to provide a
buffer distance (about the distance the
string bends when pressed to the fretboard), and is typically done by having
the saddle set at an angle.
Intonation of the guitar
Editor's note: we recommend doing the body finish before attaching
The 12th fret is marked in black on two pieces of cotton twine and we use the
total distance from the nut to this marking to calculate half the total scale length
for the guitar.
Celebrating 30 Years
siliconchip.com.au
the electronics/strings and doing the
intonation, as you will need to remove
them before applying the finish.
Take for example the E string. You
normally tune the guitar so that the
“open” (unfretted) E string is tuned to,
well, “E”. Then, when you hold the E
string down at the 12th fret and pluck
it again, it should sound 12 semitones
higher, that is, E again, but one octave
above the open frequency.
The problem is, when you fret a
string you’re both tightening it, which
will increase its pitch, and lengthening
it, which will tend to lower it. Normally, stretching wins out, so if the
12th fret is positioned exactly halfway
along the string, the fretted note will
sound slightly higher than E.
You correct this by adjusting the individual saddles on the bridge with the
adjustment screws. If the fretted note
is too high, the saddle has to be moved
away from the pickups.
This is complicated by the string
“action” chosen, that is, how high the
strings sit above the fretboard, since
that affects how much the string has
to be stretched during fretting. The
action is adjusted using an Allen key
they supply, with the small screws
fitted to the bridge saddles (see later).
This does open a bit of a can of
worms, because while lower action
allows you to play faster and there
is less intonation shift, it makes the
guitar more prone to fretboard buzz
if the neck is not quite straight or the
fret heights are uneven.
As it turned out, I couldn’t quite get
the intonation correct on the E string
because the spring around the saddle
adjustment screw wouldn’t let me
compress it enough.
I solved that by simply cutting the
spring in half! I have heard that if you
use higher-gauge strings you need to
move the bridge forward, but in that
case, they recommend you put on a
better quality bridge.
There was still a bit of an issue with
the over-winding that holds the brass
stopper at the end of the string fouling
on the bridge saddle, but I fixed that
by putting a couple of nyloc nuts on
as spacers. A bit feral, but it works!
I am jumping the gun a bit here, because after fitting the bridge I needed
to fit the machine heads before I could
put the strings on! Lining the machine
heads up is pretty easy; you just press
the metal ferrules into the holes, fit the
heads, line them up by eye, then mark
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This photo shows the four
tuning pegs attached to the
headstock. The headstock is pre-shaped
but does leave some room for a custom design.
The small hole you can see where the headstock
meets the neck is where the truss rod is located. This rod
helps to adjust upwards or downwards tension on the neck.
and fit four screws for each one.
Here I ran into yet another minor
problem. The “reproduction” screws
they supply are a bit on the cheap
and nasty side, and I had the choice
of either risking stripping the heads
or breaking one trying to screw them
into the maple neck, or drilling bigger pilot holes and risk having them
work loose.
In the end I went into Bunnings and
bought some much more solid-looking
sheet-metal screws and drilled the pilot holes out to 2.5mm. They may not
be as authentic-looking but they still
look pretty good.
After that you really need to get the
pickups wired in. Conveniently, the
neck and bridge pickups are slightly
different sizes, and the neck pickup
(red wire) will only fit in the cutout
closest to the neck.
The pickups are each held in place
by four long wood screws, with springs
fitted over the screw shaft between the
pickup and the body to allow height
adjustment.
I simply fitted the pickups into po-
sition (you have to feed the shielded
lead through a hole in the body first)
and then used the point of a hand-held
4mm drill bit to mark where the pilot
holes should go.
After that I drilled four pilot holes
for each pickup with a 2mm drill. At
first glance it might seem like a nightmare getting the screws and springs
to stay together while wiggling the
pickups into position. Actually it’s
no problem at all; the magnets hold
everything together nicely!
The pickup wiring is pretty straightforward: the shields simply are soldered onto their appropriate pot metalwork, while the signal wires solder
to the wipers of their respective pots.
This is not the usual method, but
since the Jazz Bass doesn’t have a
pickup selector switch, wiring the pots
in the conventional manner would
cause interaction between the volume
settings.
But then another quirk revealed itself: the pots were wired in reverse of
the normal action, so fully clockwise
meant minimum volume!
There are two knobs to control volume and one for treble. Initially the
potentiometers were wired in reverse, so that winding clockwise would
decrease volume.
Celebrating 30 Years
November 2017 71
It’s possible that whoever designed
this guitar decided that since everything else in a left-handed version is
a mirror-image of the right-handed
model, the pots should be wired backto-front as well! None of my other lefthanded guitars are wired like this, so
I re-wired it to the conventional configuration.
Another point that needs to be addressed somewhere in the assembly
process is the matter of electrical
shielding of the pickup and volume
control cavities.
I have my doubts that this achieves
very much, given that my other guitars don’t have this feature. There
were suggestions about using copper
foil but I simply painted the interior
with “aquadag”, which is the graphitebased conductive paint they put on the
back of CRT TV picture tubes. Jaycar
sell a very similar product called “Wire
Glue”, Cat NM2831.
I then ran copper wires through the
access holes and fastened the wires
to the conductive surface with small
screws. There is also a grounding wire
that sits under the bridge metalwork.
You just thread the wire through an
already-drilled hole, strip off some of
the insulation and screw the bridge
bracket onto it.
After that I fitted the supplied
strings and used the truss rod to adjust the neck tension. The truss rod is
adjusted with a supplied Allen key via
a small hole behind the nut.
There was initially a bit of confusion
as to how this adjusts, but eventually I
realised that there is a half-turn “dead
zone” between the clockwise and anticlockwise directions where the rod
turns with virtually no resistance, then
become progressively tighter in both
directions.
The truss rod I received from Pit
Bull was set for zero tension, which
led to the middle of my neck curving
up towards the strings. This meant that
the truss rod needed to be adjusted to
exert force in the opposite direction
until the neck was straight, such that
using a straight-edge the frets will line
up to the saddle.
Editor’s note: it’s important to note
that typical fretboards for electric and
acoustic guitars have a convex curvature with a radius of somewhere between 7 and 16 inches. So it’s important to differentiate between the neck
bending up or down, and the fretboard
not being flat when doing intonation.
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Silicon Chip
This is what the body of the guitar looked like after applying the first few coats
of oil and wax finish.
Many guitarists find it easier to play
chords and bend strings due to this
curvature.
Finishing coat
Once I’d done all that and gotten the
intonation and action approximately
right, I turned my attention to the actual timber finish.
Instead of the usual approach of either painting or lacquering, I decided
to use two products I’ve had great success with in the past: Feast Watson
Fine Rubbing Oil and Gilly Stephenson's Cabinet Maker’s Wax.
Both products are available from
Bunnings and are not particularly expensive; plus they keep in their tins for
years. These two products are meant
to be applied to bare wood and give an
old-fashioned low-sheen finish that’s
quite unlike any kind of painted or
sprayed-on lacquer.
I’ve used these products for restoring a number of items of period furniture, and they are particularly useful
if you’re not interested in doing a full
restoration (which can drastically reduce the value anyway), but simply
making the wood look “presentable”.
I simply strip off all the old varnish,
leave all the cuts, nicks, cigarette burns
etc exactly as they are, and apply the
above two products with 0000 grade
steel wool (also available from Bunnings).
Apart from the fact that I had some
of both products already, there are a
number of advantages:
1. There’s no need for pre-sanding;
the steel wool smooths down all the
imperfections, which produces a
Celebrating 30 Years
smooth finish, while preserving the
“character”. But make sure to give it a
quick wipe down to remove any leftover residue before applying the finish.
2. There’s no real issue with the finish quickly hardening or otherwise
“going off”, so you can do as little or
as much as you like each night, spread
over several evenings.
3. Both products have a pleasant
gum turpentine smell; they don’t smell
at all “painty”. You could even work
on it indoors, while watching TV!
On the downside, it’s a fairly slow
process, and the finish takes a couple
of weeks to dry completely, but the results are well worth it. The grain comes
up beautifully, the finish is surprisingly durable, and best of all, if it gets
damaged, it’s pretty easy to repair (Pit
Bull sell and recommend what sounds
like a broadly similar product called
“Dingotone”).
If you want to do an actual paint,
lacquer or shellac finish on your guitar,
there is plenty of advice on how to do it
on www.buildyourownguitar.com.au
However, it is far from a simple task
to do properly, similar to re-painting a
car. And you have to face facts. However good you are at it, you’re still
pretty much going to wind up with
something that looks like a cheap Chinese copy bought from a music store.
With the “antique” oil finish, nobody
is going to know what it is!
It’s worth noting that Flea of the
Red Hot Chili Peppers mostly uses a
custom 1961 "shell pink" Fender Jazz
Bass, which appears to have had an
extremely hard life. But not only is
Flea clearly not interested in getting it
siliconchip.com.au
The guitar after applying the finish, with masking tape covering the fretboard to protect it from damage when doing fret
adjustments. The tools below it are all exceedingly useful for this type of work and are as follows, from left to right: a
radius gauge, 12-inch radiused sanding block, fret rocker (level-gauge type tool for measuring three frets at a time), set of
diamond files, a fret-crowning file, fret hammer and rulers.
refurbished, Fender also now sell the
“Flea” Jazz Bass, with all the beat-up
pink paintwork faithfully replicated!
Back to building, the first step in
finishing the woodwork is to remove
all the metal hardware, placing the
various pieces into labelled zip-lock
sandwich bags with the relevant
screws. I also removed the neck, but
put two of the neck screws back into
the neck and the other two into the
body. That makes them easy to hang
up between coats.
I spent about 30 minutes each evening for a week applying the rubbing oil,
then another week applying the cabinet wax. The instructions are on the
cans, but basically you just apply the
product by rubbing it along the grain
with the steel wool, give it a half-hour
or so to dry a bit, then polish with a
soft cloth.
You can put on as many coats as
you like but after about seven you will
not see much more improvement. The
photo to the left shows how it looked
about halfway through the procedure, which does look pretty good
but I found it near impossible to take
a photograph that does the actual finish full justice!
siliconchip.com.au
The end-grain is more problematic,
because it’s a lot harder to get that
smoothed right down, but it still comes
out looking OK; certainly no casual
observer would be likely to notice.
There are various schools of thought
about how the rosewood fretboard
should be finished, but for my money,
a single buff-up with cabinet wax is
more than enough.
Editor's note: typical fretboard
woods like ebony and rosewood don't
necessarily need a finish due to how
much natural oil they produce, compared to drier woods such as maple,
but it’s always something that can be
done at a later time.
Headstock design
In case you’re wondering about the
“hatchet-like” headstock, that’s how
it comes from Pit Bull. For legal reasons, suppliers can’t sell exact copies
of name brand guitars (Fender, Gibson etc).
Apparently, it’s difficult to copyright
the body shape, but the headstock
designs are regarded as registered
trademarks. There’s nothing to stop
a home builder re-finishing his headstock to the standard Fender “Treble
Celebrating 30 Years
Clef” design and in fact blueprints for
all popular guitar models are readily
available on the internet.
But because this is being published
in a magazine, I’ve left the headstock
as is for now. I’m actually intending
to make my own design anyway, and
I also didn’t want to run the risk of
damaging something before photographing it!
On that subject, if by any chance you
ever manage to hit the big-time playing your DIY guitar, you may have to
consider trading up to “the real thing”.
While the leading guitar manufacturers generally turn a blind eye to copies of their products being played in
pubs and so on, they tend to get a bit
tetchy if they start appearing in music
videos and on CD covers!
Fretwork
After you’ve gotten your guitar all
assembled and prettified and so on,
you should have a playable instrument, but the next thing that will need
attention is the frets.
The fret heights must be carefully
aligned, otherwise you will get fret
buzz where the string makes contact
with frets it’s not meant to. This is a
November 2017 73
Part way through shaping the frets. You can see a slight protrusion where not all
of the markings have come off the crown of the frets, indicating that they are not
yet all lined up.
The frets crowned and polished with 0000 grade steel wool. The profile on these
frets weren’t as circular as they could be, but they do the job well enough.
The fret-levelling gauge (fret rocker) being used to show that these three
adjacent frets are all level.
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Celebrating 30 Years
highly specialised subject and is covered in considerable detail at www.
buildyourownguitar.com.au
If you intend to make more than one
guitar, some of the specialised (and
quite expensive) luthiers’ tools may
be a reasonable investment, otherwise
you can still get a surprising amount
done with some of the more basic tools
available online.
A steel ruler, a fret flatness gauge
(fret rocker), a lightweight fret hammer, a basic fret file and a 12-inch radiused sanding block are the minimum
requirements. A cheap set of diamond
or sapphire files can be helpful too.
The radiused sanding block is similar
to a standard sanding block except that
the side where you attach the sandpaper has been machined to match the
curve of the frets in the instrument you
are working on.
They are available in various sizes,
but virtually all electric guitars use
a 12-inch radius, meaning the frets
match the curvature of a circle with
a 12 inch (~300mm) radius. If you’re
not sure, you can spend a few dollars
more and get a radius gauge which is
the pincushion-shaped thing in the
image above.
The basic procedure is to first take
the strings off and get the neck as
straight as you can by adjusting the
neck truss rod and checking the flatness of the frets with the steel ruler.
However, before you do anything I
strongly recommend you tape up the
fingerboard between the frets with
strips of masking tape to avoid damaging the wood and to stop steel filings
from getting near it. The photo to the
left shows my bass taped up and ready
for adjustment, the tools laid out below
it and the Allen key fitted to the truss
rod adjustment.
After you’ve gotten the neck as
straight as you can, the next step is to
identify any offending frets with the
fret gauge. The fret flatness gauge is
simply a piece of steel plate cut with
straight edges of various lengths that
allow you to bridge just three frets at
a time. If the middle fret of the group
of three is higher than the other two,
you will be able to detect this by rocking the plate.
Starting at the pickup end, identify
any offending frets and then carefully and extremely slowly reduce
their height until the gauge can be
laid across the group of three with
little or no rocking. Actually, you can
siliconchip.com.au
Above: a close-up of the bottom side of the chrome tuning pegs.
Right: close-up of the saddle showing adjustment springs. You
can see the spring for the E-string’s saddle (the lowest one) has
fewer turns than the other saddles as it was cut in half to help set
the intonation correctly.
start by simply tapping the offending
frets down with the fret hammer. In
some cases, that will be all you need,
but usually you will need to use the
fret file.
The fret file is actually smooth
where a normal file is rough; the roughened parts are cut into the edges (it’s
a bit like a rat-tail file in reverse). You
can get radiused fret files (crowning
files) but they’re horribly expensive
and require considerable skill to use
properly.
I must re-emphasise the “extremely
slowly” part! If you overdo the filing
on just one fret, you will have no option but to shave all the others down
to match. Work your way along the
frets, starting from the pickup end.
When you reach the nut, re-check
the overall straightness, re-adjust the
truss rod if necessary, then repeat the
entire process.
You are unlikely to get all the frets
completely level this way, so once you
have the frets as even as you can get
them, the next step is to lightly sand
the frets using the radiused sanding
block and some extremely fine (800
grit or more) wet and dry sandpaper.
You can get fancy sandpaper specifically designed for this application but
it’s not particularly cheap and I don’t
see that it makes a lot of difference,
although people will argue otherwise.
The first step is to mark all the frets
with a felt-tip marker. That way you’ll
be immediately able to see which frets
are being touched by the sandpaper
and which are not.
After an extended period of sanding
and re-marking, you should get to the
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point where all the frets get the ink
taken off together, and at that point
they are as level as you are ever likely
to get them.
The very top left photo on the opposite page was taken part-way through
the process. You can see how the two
towards the centre have a slight “dip”
which basically means the rest of the
frets will have to be sanded down to
match.
The final step is to carefully polish
the frets with 0000 grade steel wool.
This is where the masking tape comes
into its own.
You can’t expect to get these adjustments absolutely perfect if you’re
not a professional luthier with all the
expensive tools, but that will by no
means make the guitar unplayable. It
will mostly limit how low the action
can be set. It will certainly still be
plenty good enough for most people!
The main difference between a fullpro job and what I’ve described here,
is that with the pro job, the fret crowns
will end up precisely semi-circular,
while yours will be more trapezoidshaped. Generally, people have rated
a well-built Pit Bull kit as roughly
equivalent to a $500 “store bought”
job, but with vastly more “street cred”!
Setting the action
Setting the playing action is simple
enough, you just adjust the screws on
the saddles to raise or lower the string
height off the fingerboard. Of course,
as soon as you do that, the tuning will
shift and will need to be re-set.
The minimum action height Fender
recommend for a genuine Jazz Bass is
Celebrating 30 Years
about 2.4mm, but in practice you’d
need the frets dressed by an expert for
that to work without fret buzz. Setting
mine to 3mm gave a satisfactorily fast
playing action with zero fret buzz, and
I doubt that the extra 0.5mm would
make a whole lot of difference.
With a guitar tuner, setting the intonation is really quite easy (I have a
modern digital one but I still prefer my
1980s vintage analog Korg for this).
You simply adjust the “E” bridge
adjustment screw to the correct pitch
while holding down the 12th fret, then
re-adjust the open E pitch, and if necessary, adjust the bridge screw again
and repeat as necessary.
With my tuner, it was easier to simply “hammer on” the 12th fret, playing
it like a piano, rather than plucking
the string. In most cases doing this
procedure just twice per string should
be enough.
Additional information
You can get more information on
the process of building and setting up
guitars, or purchase tools to aid you,
at the following websites:
www.anzlf.com is an online Australian and New Zealand instrument
maker’s forum; they also have a list of
local vendors.
www.stewmac.com is a fairly popular American-based luthier shop that
supplies hardware, wood and everything else you could need to build
primarily guitars and some other instruments.
http://luthierssupplies.com.au/ is an
Australian-based business which supplies luthiery tools and supplies. SC
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