Alan Ratcliffe wrote
I have some experience with the claro walnut (a variety found in California) - a walnut Thinline and a Warmoth Strat. Apparently the black walnut is less desirable from a looks perspective (claro can have the same intense figuring that English walnut does, but with a darker colour), but tonally is all but identical.
Somewhere between mahogany and sugar maple tonally but more like maple weight and hardness. Can be quite tricky to find the right pickups - traditional choices can be quite brittle sounding, but hotter pickups help mellow it a bit. A hollow body helps with weight and tone.
BTW - You could always rout your neck pocket before you cut the body shape.
Thanks for the insight Alan, interesting stuff.. All the info I've gleaned off the net so far hasn't been very conclusive regarding my pickup choice.. Joe from Kinman suggested that Walnut + single-coils is tricky in that single-coils have a tall narrow sonic peak, and if this doesn't compliment/fall in with the sonic characteristics of the wood, you would end up with a terribly thin sounding instrument, which reaffirms what you've said. He also said that a chambered body would downplay this a bit. In the end he recommended the Broadcaster set, which has a broad frequency response. But, for $72, I decided in the interim to go for I guess what you would call "traditional+ but cheap", a set of Wilde Bill's Keystones:
Pickups are things that are easy to change and its always nice to have spare sets of them lying around. I'm hoping for the best with the keystones, but I won't rule out the potential for replacement.
Re the neck pocket, I need the extra template anyway for the f-hole and control window, so I might as well make routing the neck pocket easy. Plus, its probably one of the more important bits of a build and almost falls into the bracket of setup - may as well do it properly.
Gearhead wrote
You do intend to rout the back of the body with the router coming from the top, don't you ? ???
Yep I do. I intend to use a 22mm Forstner bit in the drill press to take out most of the cavity, leaving about 9mm at the bottom of each cavity and then use a top bearing trim bit (from the top) following my template to neaten up the border + trim the bottom of the cavities down to 7mm.
