Fretless 4 string guitar/mando/something idea

[Blackened Soul]

Sweet! What a cool find!
Yeah the finished on those are shit, I’ve had a tele by them forever it’s been a love hate thing.... the finish on those is plasticy stuff, and brittle… at a guess it should come off with a heatgun… or melt to the guitar more… good luck!

[coldbrightsunlight]

So, not at all surprised by this, but what a shock the baby weird guitar is made from MDF found an existing crack and expanded it with a chisel to see what was under the >1mm of paint (hey it was always going to be a beater and it's not somewhere important).

Yeah, thinking a heat gun or maybe some disgusting chemical stripper? IDK enough about products for that kinda stuff and obviously they might ruin the "wood"...

But whatever method, firstly it's gonna take some doing, second I'd need to lay down a similarly opaque replacement finish I'll leave the finish on the back burner for now and get it playing how I want. The pickup, surprisingly, sounds entirely fine, and with some new strings on it plays pretty well. IDK how good the intonation can possibly get but it's manageable for now - the wide spacing makes little bends for subtle adjustment within chords nice and easy. I've not yet tried to get my new nut slots at the proper height or adjust the bridge at all, one thing at a time.



This layered paint effect is actually kind of cool so I'm tempted to experiment with some heavy and uneven sanding to see if I can bring it out across the body.

[dubkitty]

geologic relicing!

[coldbrightsunlight]

Well, the frets are off. So now it has 7 frets, which felt like a good balance. I've only removed frets once before and did a very dodgy job. This has gone fairly solid, despite the frets being VERY low profile so I actually had to use a razorblade to dig into the edges of the higher ones (trick I saw on youtube) to get that first purchase with the pliers. After a bit of rough sanding to take away the few chips and tearout, it plays well up and down the neck, all the notes sound out fine. The sustain obviously is minimal on the fretless portion, but the notes do come through nicely. With a bit of fuzz the sustain is improved

[dubkitty]

which ones did you leave in?

[coldbrightsunlight]

3, 6, 8, 13, 16, 19



The tape is a significant bit of the fingerboard that came off, that I'm going to glue back on at some point

[dubkitty]

that poor baby has the construction quality of an Italian tank from the North Africa campaign.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Yeah I'm not exactly helping. It's a lot of fun though

[dubkitty]

i've never seen an entire chunk of fretboard come off like that, and i've been doing this forever. i think you can blame this on the materials. it could be any kind of weird wood.

[coldbrightsunlight]

IDK if the picture is good enough resolution to zoom in properly. It's a pretty small piece actually and I think I could play OK without it, just looks ugly. Will be getting the glue and clamps out this morning anyhow

[oldangelmidnight]

I've spent a little time thinking about stuff like this. It seems like a lot of people use ukulele bridges. If you want to get something custom, you can look into folks who make baritone electric ukuleles.
I got one from this person:
http://www.honnimusic.com/
It's rough but it was cheap and they're all custom so you can probably get it without frets no problem.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Oh those are really cute, and they do tenors. Annoying how little of this stuff turned up on google when I was looking

[dubkitty]

about a year or 18 months ago they changed the way the Google front page works; it's now far less useful than before.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Yeah I've definitely noticed this, and been unsure whether this was the case, whether the internet is just that much more full of generative bullshit and advertising, or whether it was in my head. Nice to have some backup

Impossible to search for gear info without running into endless pages and pages of algorithmically generated press release/product page regurgitation. Why is this complete and utter crap prioritised by google??? When I know what I want is on forums written by HUMANS WHO HAVE TRIED THE PRODUCT and google would have got me straight there in the past.

[dubkitty]

and worse, the Boolean searches i've relied on literally since the 90s don't work as well any more. particularly, it doesn't always exclude words from the result when you tell it to.