MIMF

Beautiful! Nice to see a finished guitar here again. Thanks!

There are a bunch of PDFs here- https://www.electricherald.com/gibson-e ... emplates/- including a contour map.

.325" is pretty high, but if it's a brand new guitar, you might want to wait a few weeks and see if the geometry changes. Especially if you are in a place with high summer humidity.

Walnut should be very easy to find from most tonewood vendors, and nearly any hardwood dealer. The cheapest way to go is to find a suitable board and saw your own. If you don't have a bandsaw, a well-tuned table saw (good fence, zero clearance inset, thin kerf blade, everything in alignment, feather...

Chris- I can do that, but it could take a while. I'm still in the hare-brained scheming stage. Not sure when or if this year's guitar building season will start.

I browsed the library, but forgot I could search it. Beautiful guitars there by both Barry and John. As usual, it looks like there's more than one "right" (or wrong) way to do it. Thanks to both of you.

Thanks, Barry. How much height (body depth) do you think it would need for the dovetail to work?

I recently picked up an unfinished laminate archtop body from the Guitarfetish clearance sale. I'm planning to replace the binding anyway, so I thought I would take the back off to see what is inside before I cut into the top for a pickup or two. It's about 16 1/2" wide, and the ribs are about ...

"similar to a dovetail, but only tapered in the vertical direction"

Do you mean a sliding dovetail with straight (parallel) sides?

That's beautiful. How did you brace it?

Great. Thank you, David.

Thanks to all. David, do you apply the Transtint before or after installing frets? And do you put anything else on the board (oil?) after the dye?

I have an ipe fretboard (and bridge) that I need to dye black. Any reason not to use regular water soluble aniline dye (Behlen's), rather than the leather dye that StewMac sells for fingerboards?