MassimoPL77

Thank you @scorpionscar!

Thank you @Prostheta, your words make me proud! And I would like to compliment @KempGuitars, @Osorio and @Andyjr1515 on their amazing buildings!

Thank you Mr Natural! Thank you Andy! I really appreciated your build: beautiful woods, awesome high gloss finishing and really clean work inside the electronic cavity! Thank you Patrick! Thank you Zoltar, I'm working on some new stuff in these days... I will keep you updated!

I decided to give a second chance to this guitar: this is my eight build so far and was intended to be a sum of all things i've learnt in three years of guitar building. I decided to call her Ladybug, or Coccinella in italian, because of the inlay on the twelfth fret. The guitar has been built following the plan of a '59 Gibson Les Paul, but woods and decorations are all customised. The body is made of european ash with a big weight relief chamber, while the top is indonesian ebony, a wood really similar to Makassar ebony, but more porous and lighter. The guitar has a full curly maple binding on body, fretboard and headstock with a thin ebony purfling between the binding and the body. The body has a real golden mother of pearl purfling made with the traditional teflon strip technique. The fretboard and the headstock are inlayed by hand with a rose themed layout. The full inlay is made of almost 300 tiles and the materials used are white mother of pearl, abalone paua, australian greenlip abalone, green abalone, rosewood, and red dino recon stone. On the headstock the writing Delky (a joke from my surname Del Col) is inlayed in golden mother of pearl. The neck is a five parts laminated one (indonesian ebony/hard rock maple) with a 15° scarf joint with a volute. The finish is high gloss poly. All the hardware is golden: Gotoh TOM bridge and tailpiece; Hipshot open machine heads with tulip button, SD covers on pickups, Freeway 6 positions toogle switch (traditional positions + split coils). Seymour Duncan Jazz + JB pickups. CTS pots and Orange Drops caps. Here is the building thread on ProjectGuitar.com for this guitar. This is my FB page Massimo Del Col where you can see other builds and inlays and this is the official page of my guitars Delky Guitars and Inlays . Let me know your opinions! And finally a video of the guitar running through a EVH 5150 made by the young but talentous guitarist Marco Bruni.

Thank you! That part was really a PITA! but I think that they make the leaves more real!

Thank you! If you haven't read it yet, I suggest you "The art of inlay" by Larry Robinson. It's a small book, but it covers the technique very well. He made some dvds too, but I haven't seen them.

Thanks! As I said before, this guitar was built as a sum of everything I've learnt in three years of guitar building, so I wanted to do a full inlay on the fretboard and on the headstock. I felt in love with inlays admiring Larry Robinsons' masterpieces, so this is a kind of tribute to his style

Thank you!

Thank you Woden I've always been in love with the Les Paul design, I believe it's the queen of guitars! Pickups are Seymour Duncan Jazz at the neck and JB at the bridge. I like how they sound but one day I would like to try some handwound pickup or PAF replica...

Thanks a lot Meatloaf! I'm really happy that you like it!

Here are some pics of the assembled guitar: In addition to standard three wires, I had to use other two for the split coils, so, all in all, there are five shielded wires running through the body. I was a little worrying about noise, but luckily the guitar is not noisy at all! The sound of the guitar surprised me: having used really dense woods like ebony and ash for the body, I was waiting for a more trebly, sharp sound, while I think that the guitar sounds equilibrated. I wonder if this depends on the large chamber routed in the body.

Now the guitar is almost finished so I took a photo with the hardware. I choose golden hardware, because I think that it matches better with the wood and complements the golden mop purfling. I f I could go back, maybe I would also put EVO gold frets... Now it's time to varnish. I didn't want to dye the wood, so to get an hi gloss finish i decided to use polyurethane and acrylic 2k finish. This combination is really easy to sand and you can get a mirror surface with no need of wet sanding. This is the guitar after clear coat. The mop stands out a lot under lacquer! And this is there result after finishing and buffing. I couldn't be more happy!

Thank you! Thank you Prostheta! I'm glad that Nina liked it!

Thank you Andy, I'm really flattered for this comment To cut the hole I used a drill press drilling the headstock from the back and going really slowly. It was stressful!

I decided to put a rose also on the headstock, to complement the inlay on the fretboard. This drawing is smaller than the others, because the flower has to go between the machine heads. I decided to inlay on the headstock also a drawing: the logo Delky. It's just a joke from school times, a nickname from my surname Del Col. The leaves are made with abalone paua, the petals are made with white mop and australian greenlip abalone. The contrast between the different colours of the shells helped me to give more depth to the rose. The writing is made with golden mop. As you can see on the picture, I always print several copies of the same subject, because each time I cut a piece of paper I ruin adjacent pieces. In the photo you can see the effect of the two shells used for the petals: the lighter stuff is white mop, the darker is australian greenlip abalone. Here is the writing made with golden mop. And this is the final effect when everything has been inlayed. I've also completed the flamed maple binding on the headstock. I have to improve my skills to cut miters