Playing Impressions and To Do List

To get the neck pickup working I had to flip a connector that I had wrong on the EMG pickup buss.  Then everything was well.  This guitar sounds good - the neck and body don't resonate much, so it has acres of sustain.  Also because of the lack of resonance, it lacks a certain amount of "tone".  It's a little too clean and plain.  But you know what?  I mean to do that.  That's why I picked a composite neck, thinking that the two materials (wood and fiberglass/epoxy) would fight each other an resonate with nothing.  It's why I picked a solid bridge.  It's why I picked EMG pickups - for their low string pull.  It's why the body is a large, very thick slab of what passes for mahogany these days.

I wanted a guitar primarily for high gain chord work, with massive sustain, that could do some nice cleans, and I think I got it.  I've decided to concentrate all the controls in the main mahogany slab.  That will give me the freedom to do whatever I want with the body shape, or even leave it the way it is (though I would like an leg rest and one for my arm as well).  Why shouldn't my guitar be a block with little sticks hanging off it holding up wood bits like a Tinker Toy atom?  Let everyone else build more Telecasters and SGs and LPS and Strats and whatnot.  Make mine different.

Now I have to do a bunch of things, and in order not to waste strings, I have to remember to do them all at once:

1. Cut the humbucker springs by 1/3 or so, particularly the neck
2. Mount the pickup selector mini-switch (a DPDP on-on-on strapped into SPDT center-on) on a piece of aluminum near the master volume
3. Mount the output jack.  It can't go on the end of the guitar because I want this thing to stand up when I lean it against something.
4. Route reliefs around the rear cavity edges to receive cover plates - at the same time I ought to clean up the cavities and make them even
5. Fix up a dead note up near 16 or 17 on the high E, where the edge of that fret is way too low.  I missed this in leveling and I'm not sure how I want to fix it:  I can re-level the frets (then re-crown them and re-polish them) or I can level just the upper half, sloping down gently, like some instructions say.  The problem with that second one is that if I do that, and it doesn't get enough material, I'm in trouble.
6. Thin the back of the neck?  I've got about 10/64s back of the truss rod, and the neck is thick.  If I had had to force relief into the neck with the rod, it would be pushing on that material, but I think it's pushing on the other side instead (because the strings are acting on the neck well).  Still, I think I'd rather be safe than sorry.  The neck plays well.
7. Figure out what to do about rests for leg and arm