I've never done one like this before. I thought it was gonna go faster, but it took a lot of time to sand and final shape the body. The band saw I have has a very small blade, which leave more marks to sand out than a wider one. It is also much harder to control. It took me about 45 mins to just cut the wings out. I don't have access to an oscillating spindle sander or a palm sander like my last project and this has all been sanded by hand with a sanding block.
The neck profile also took me about 5 hours total to rework. I was sanding, comparing to my Jacksons, checking with the calipers, sanding some more. It was stressful getting the heel correct, especially near the binding. I am home from work now so I am going to get the rest of the bevels routed tonight.
This weekend I will take it to my luthier friend and he will install the bridge. I am staying out of that process. He does excellent work and gives me really great prices. It will cost $50 USD, but I have to make him the template to fit the bridge into the body. He has the rest of the template set for a Floyd Rose and those will work for the routes on the back side.
Here is a picture of the bridge that is going in. It is a NOS Kahler "Killer" 2700 series. It was the top of the line Kahler Floyd style fulcrum.
A host of nice features for this trem:
Every piece on the trem is hardened steel.
The arm is screw in style with a tension adjustment screw so it will flop or stay where you had it last.
The ends don't have to be cut from the string. This is cool because it aids in stability having the string end anchored as well as locked down near the witness point.
It has the lowest profile ever for a Floyd style bridge.
The fine tuners have almost twice the range of a standard Floyd.
The saddles can be adjusted for radius, intonation AND string spacing. All without shims.
You can do "pull ups" on individual strings by pressing the string lock thumb screws that are on the back end. The amount you can go up is dependent on where the fine tuner is screwed though. You're basically playing with the rest of the range, but it's still a neat effect to put your palm on them and rock it from low to high.
The knife edge is not on the trem itself. The knife edge is located on the "posts", which are really just black machine screws. The tremolo has little pockets to accept the edge of the screw head. So when the knife edge wears, it costs 50 cents to fix, instead of refiling or replacement.
