Folks, I thought you might be interested in my latest 5 string electric design:
* Short 17 fret neck to push the pickup to where the 19th fret would be for a stronger/cleaner jazzier tone.
* Hollow body construction with spruce top and burr-walnut overlay.
* 36mm nut puts the strings at the same spacing as the bottom 5 courses of a guitar - coincidently, for the top 4 courses this is the same spacing you get if you take the centre point of the pairs of string on a typical 28mm mandolin nut. Seems to be about optimal for me anyway
* Gotoh SG381 tuners - I think I'm in love with these, much better than your typical mandolin tuners IMO.
* Shielded "box within a box" cavity - traditionally hollow bodies are hard to shield, and this still doesn't completely entomb the electrics in copper as we want the top free to move, but the gaps are small compared to typical RF wavelengths - seems to do the job.
Here's the back open showing the shielding arrangement, there's enough overlap of copper for the shielding on the back panel to make contact with that on the inside of the cavity. There are still plenty of gaps in the shield since the back panel insert doesn't quite touch the top, but it seems to do the job OK:
And finally, the obligatory video demo:
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