Tone Modification Project On RG7420

[courtney2018]

Originally Posted by elcid

...your project updates are always interesting.

"Interesting" is definitely one way to put this project. This project is a bit of an experiment. I took an Ibanez RG 7420 and routed out the middle of the body. You might ask why I would do such a crazy thing as that. Well, I'll get to that. If you stop here and look down at the pics you'll probably think I'm more than just crazy. A 7420 it is no more!

This project has a few parts to it. I wanted to go thru the steps in removing the middle of an existing body and inserting something else. The original idea is to use a block of aluminum. You might ask, "why aluminum". If you do a search for Rogue Aluminator, you'll see a guitar body made completely out of aluminum. Aluminum will make the guitar sustain forever, but you lose out on the warmth that wood provides. So here the idea was to combine the two to get the best of both worlds. That way you get an increase in sustain as well as the warmth that wood provides.

Another part to this project is this is a birthday present for the bf. I don't know if I'm going to make the birthday deadline, but I'm shooting for it. It's in May.

So what I did was I bought this body off of e.b.a.y. at a pretty good price. The owner before me had butchered up the pickup cavities and for the life of me I can't figure out why. I went with a 7 string body mostly because the bf needs a 7 string. I routed out the middle and glued into place this block which is a laminate of purple heart in the center, white hard maple on each side of that, and bubinga on the outer sides. I glued the block into place this afternoon, so it'll be put up until next weekend to give the glue time to dry completely.

I'm also going to be making a pickguard out of figured maple. The figured maple that I have is just under an inch thick. What I'll do is plane that down a good bit and I'll also recess the pickguard's shape into the body. This body is going to get a swirl paint job. I'm going with what I think is a contemporary look with dark red, black with a touch of white. The pickguard is going to be stained with a trans-black color with solid black on the edges. So it'll look like a burst, but in this case it'll be a black burst.

I'm going with 2 humbuckers and a single coil in the middle. I'll have to swirl the body with the pickguard removed. Once the pickguard has dried I'll attach it to the body. I'm thinking of gluing it into place and then putting small hex bolts thru the pickguard to make it look like that's what is hold it onto the body. Then again it might look just fine with nothing on there. I'll play that one by ear when I get there.

Ok, so on to the pics...



Here's what the body looked like when I got it.

[courtney2018]

Here's the body after it was stripped down to the wood.

[courtney2018]

Here's the laminated block of wood that I'm using as a substitute for aluminum.

Here's the body after I routed out the middle.

[courtney2018]

Here's another shot of the body after being routed. It was alot of wood to remove, as you can see.

Here's some pics with the laminated block of wood placed in the body. Everything fit nice and snug.

[courtney2018]

Here's a couple more shots of the block put into the body. I'm just test fitting it to make sure everything is snug with no problems.

Here's a couple of shots after I planed the laminated block down to be even with the front of the body.

[courtney2018]

And finally, here it is all glued up. I'll be putting this project aside until next weekend. Tomorrow I'll be working on the first body for my custom guitar business.

[Foulacy]

this guitar will be an interesting project indeed. so where does the aluminum come in now?

[courtney2018]

It doesn't. That's why I used the wood block instead. This is just a concept that I'm working on. The next step is to see if this turns out being a success or not. I want to see how this thing is going to sound and all. After that I'd have to look into getting a small milling machine to work on aluminum. This would have to be some time down the road. There are other things that I'd rather get first that a milling machine.

[william1993]

Looks pretty awesome.
I reckon you should do H-S route
single coil in the neck. that way theres more wood left.
cool project man.

[william1993]

and those pickup routes are/were for emg707's by the way.