EpiQuinto project thread

[Bajoquintoguy]

Hi AGF! This will be the build thread for my kinda frankenstein project.
I am getting to be comfortable with working on stringed instruments and this is going to be my first major surgery project.

I am an avid fan of mexican bajo quinto/sexto and with the experience I gain from this project I will build an acoustic one some day. But to start I will hack up my cheapo Epiphone Les Paul!

Im trying to keep this build cheap so I will reuse the neck. The tuner holes will be plugged and 5 per side of the headstock will be added. At 1" spacing between tuners grover mini's in 18:1 flavor will do the job. I am changing the scale length to 27" mainly to free up fret space in the upper registers. A new fretboard will have to be installed and the slotting will be outsourced as I am not set up to do that... Carbon fiber neck rods may be added when the fretboard is off.

Since I am keeping the neck original, the bridge will have to be moved. This leaves me with the old bosses for the bridge posts open. An LR Baggs M1 will be installed right where the old bridge used to be, and a DiMarzio humbucker from hell will be installed at the neck position.
I plan to have a variable coil split/tap on the HFH and may take my M1 apart to see if I can tap that one. It is a humbucker and I should theoretically be able to.

The bridge is going to be wood just for simplicity's sake. The only company to make a metal solid body bridge for a bajo quinto is Gabbanelli and I am not going to try and find one.
A decent piece of cocobolo has been sourced and a sketch of the overall design and outline has been drawn. The plan is to make the bridge a pinless design, in typical bajo quinto fashion. BUT, the strings will be ball end types and not loop end. Not having to wrap the string around itself to attach it will allow me to use more of the string so I can still use off the shelf bajo quinto strings even with the extended scale.
The bridge will be fairly big to stand up to the huge string tension and pull due to the pinless design.

So far the guitar is torn down, but pix will come soon.
Progress will be slow for the time being, im getting married mid-June and have been very busy at work.

[jaybones]

Sounds like an interesting project, look forward to seeing how this turns out!

Have you thought about how a pickup designed for 6 strings will work with 5 doubled? Seems to me that the magnetic pole's will be picking up more than just one string pair at a time. Might give you problems with volume balance across the strings. Maybe a blade type 'bucker...

[Bajoquintoguy]

Originally Posted by jaybones

Sounds like an interesting project, look forward to seeing how this turns out!

Have you thought about how a pickup designed for 6 strings will work with 5 doubled? Seems to me that the magnetic pole's will be picking up more than just one string pair at a time. Might give you problems with volume balance across the strings. Maybe a blade type 'bucker...

Hey thanks for the kind words

Here is the answer to your question Its always worked fine for me!