Dave Eldredge's Custom Machine

Project Guitar of the month March 2003

I had some spare time this year , plus a couple of daydreams and this is the result. The body is carved from two pieces of aluminum alloy billet stock. The body is split and hollowed out.

I used a Warmoth (tm) bolt on neck, Kent Armstrong (tm)213 & 214 pickups that are solid mounted from inside the body, dual concentric 500k pots - volume outside - tone inside, and a 5 way switch. The neck adjustment can be accessed through the neck pickup cavity. The string height is the same as an acoustic guitar which might feel different to some. The strings are anchored directly in the top of the guitar through keyhole slots, The bridge/saddle is made up of six individual solid brass risers each adjustable for height and intonation and slotted like the nut. The nut is fossil ivory and the tuning machines are Gotoh(tm).

I purposely left the guitar on the heavy side thinking that I could always lighten it up later, but it sounds so good I don' t want to mess with it now. At 12-1/2 pounds I'll probably get to keep it to myself. The final step was to "engine turn" the entire front and back of the body. This is not the fishscale "Spirit of St. Louis" pattern made by abrasives. Each line in the pattern is individually cut resulting in a surface that reflects light in unusual and unexpected ways. It gives a 3d effect that you can't really see in a digital picture. Also the digital pattern interacts with the pattern on the guitar and the pics here show "moire" interference patterns that are not on the guitar.

All machining was done on conventional manually controlled machine tools. The techniques were basically the same as for a guitar made of wood only my router has ten horsepower and weighs about a ton.

Visit Dave Eldredge's site for more pictures of this beautiful creation