Edw5493

hey guys finished guitar number 2 this one is going to a friend that had quite alot of input into the design including the 1 neck pickup which im very fond of the look of. im really happy how its turned out woods are mahogany for the neck, hollow body and pickup cover with a flamed maple cap and the fretboard is rosewood all the hardware is gotoh and its got a split coil pickup going from underwound to a normal p90 sound  all using a push pull pot giving alot of versatility to a one pickup guitar. it was stained and then finished with tru oil

its standard gibson scale length 

and it sounds awesome hope you guys like it  

Hi first of all i apologize as the pics are taken on my phone as i dont have a good digital camera.

This is my first ever build and i set out to make my ideal guitar and did it as a one to one course in manchester England with phillip porter guitars and had a great time doing it so i am sure i will have another guitar to enter in the near future !!!

It was designed completely for my preference and as a bit of background i love the sound of semi hollow guitars and offset styles, single coil pickups, i also love the feel of strats but there were allways things i dont like about off the shelf guitars some of which are the access to the upper frets, neck profiles ect (i love a thin neck profiles but i have found most vintage style guitars have quite thick necks) and i like very light guitars, i wanted something individual but that has a sort of vintage vibe to it. and i always wanted my signature on the top of a guitar  

i have found this to be a love or hate guitar when i have shown it to people but for me it is perfect. 

I hope you guys love it too 

Specs:

Body wood : swamp ash

Top wood : flame maple

Neck wood : Flame maple 

Fretboard : ebony

Inlays: ablone

control cavity cover : copper backed flamed maple (from the neck offcuts)

The body is 2" thick in total. Hollowed out and carved on the top and back of the body to allow easy access to the frets, a back cut out, arm rest, angles on the top and sunk in volume and tone controls  this was definitely the trickiest part of the build.maintaining a 10mm thickness on the back and 6mm on the top but it gives it a wonderful sound. I have included pictures off this on my build blog which i will Finnish shortly if anyone is interested

The neck is a thin C shaped profile, scale length is 25.5" and it has 24 frets at its longest point and 20 on the low E due to the s shape that is on the end of the fretboard and is continued through the guitar on the body and headstock to give it the very unusual offset look

the tuning keys are schaller da vincis and the bridge is schaller 3d-6 which is a top loading bridge 

the paint is a very strong blood orange colour mixed in with the lacquer whilst spraying the cap also the cap was stained with black dye and sanded black it is also slightly burst with black by airbrush to give the appecance of a binding using the cap wood

It was all done using AC lacquer

it has dunlop internal straplocks 

and the pickups are underwound p90s that i wound myself, you might have noticed there is no pickup selector, i allways play with a blend of pickups and prefered the look without the selector switch.

Hope you guys like it as much as me!!!

On 08/05/2016 at 9:37 AM, Muzz said:

Looking sensational

Thanks appriciate the kind words 

On 07/05/2016 at 7:10 PM, 10pizza said:

nice build and great design! look forward seeing the end result!

 

Thanks man so am I

39 minutes ago, ScottR said:

I prefer original designs or barring that original adaptations of classic designs. Unique is good. As long as it is balanced and flows and yours is and does.

Humbuckers have their place....but it's hard to beat the sound of a single coil be it under high attack or gently picked. I seem to always like whatever I used in my last build the best. Currently that is a tele bridge pup and P-90 in the neck. That will be my favorite combination .....until my next build.

SR

That is a quality combo love teles with a p90 in the neck

2 hours ago, ScottR said:

The further you get.....or the more you show us, the more I love this. Everything about the design works. I'm also a big fan of P-90s.

To quote PaulieMac, I rarely see a guitar I wish I had built. If this one keeps going as it is, it may very well be that one.

SR

thanks i appreciate that its always nice to hear someone else likes my crazy design haha i will make sure to get some more pictures up after i get it painted and the electrics in  and p90's are amazing pickups never really liked the sound of humbuckers. I a big single coil fan!   

33 minutes ago, djobson101 said:

I like the combo of the slanted body shape with asymmetrical f-holes. The lines go nicely with the semi length frets down there too

Thanks man I wanted to keep the shape going through the body the same s line is on the top of the headstock too was going for an offset look 

35 minutes ago, Prostheta said:

I guess the size of f-holes really depends on how you balance out the design if they're not directly sized for functionality. They should work well here since a few design aspects break the boring norms, If everything balances out, that's what's important.

That is, until the squirrels make their home in the guitar. 

Haha hope they don't make a home in there  but thanks I think it looks pretty cool

41 minutes ago, SIMpleONe89 said:

Looks good but yes I think the f holes are too big. I'm sure it will look good with the finish. 

Yeh it's all a matter of taste the body itself is smaller than normal and I wanted them to be a big feature but I can definately see where your coming from alot of people aren't going to like that there different sizes as well but I love it which is the most important thing 

1 hour ago, Prostheta said:

 

Usually when people ask this, I get counting. 

If it were  a solidbody with no chambering, the answer might actually be a "no" on that one! I totally know how to spoil the party....hahaha....

Looking good man. All above board and looking good.

I know we couldnt find any more surfaces to clamp it but if I could have I would have we got alot of pressure round the edges and it glued together well so it's all turned out ok

one thing i forgot to mention was that we routed a channel in the body before glueing for the pickup wires to go trough all that was left when we unclamped was to sand the body so they matched rout the p90's, drill the jack socket in and the stap bottons and the back pickup into the body chamber (so we could get the wires to the pots  then we are ready for the paint and thats where im up to going to keep the colour a surprise though be back in a month when its done with the answer  

do you think we used enough clamps haha 

Finally we filed and sanded in the cap so it all fit together tightly exactly where it lined up with the bottom section of the body on the 3 pin system we were using. forgot to take any pictures at this point and got stuck stait into the carving and staining the cap which we then sanded back though again so it just highlights the grain once the paint goes on. the reason we did it at this stage was because the neck is staying as a natural wood Finnish so didnt want to get the stain on the neck.

when we were finnished it was ready to be glued together  

We made an interlocking template and routed the end of the neck into shape and sawed off the excess as being demonstrated by my glamorous assistant james 

Finally ready to start fitting it all together and rout the neck pockets in the cap and in the body. we made some more templates and pushed forward you might notice from the pics that the cap is cut in an s shape that is how the end of the neck will be also so we cut it slightly forward from where it needs to be in the cap so we could file it in exactly to shape more on this later 

F hole templates arrived and due to a misinterpretation via email when orderign them they  were the wrong size so we had to use them to make some the right size  once we had done that we used to templates to make a bottom body template and utilized the overhead router with a guideing pin on the bottom to cut them into the cap 

warning this is a love or hate part of the guitar i love it but some people think it looks a bit weird as they are different sizes and offset on each side who wants to have a normal guitar though 

We then worked out where the bridge and pickups where going to fit and finnished off the body routes and got the thicknessess exactly right on the cap and the back 6mm on the cap and 10mm on the back 

i wound the pickups whist i was waiting for some for some templates for f holes to arrive in the post unfortunately i didnt take any pictures whilst doing it just one of wax potting them at the end .

i am using P90's in this build and have underwound them. its supposed to be 10000 winds i did 9700 on the neck and 9900 on the bridge. i cant remember the exact resistances now but was what you would expect from a vintage P90

i also did a bit of carving on the horns that i will complete once the neck is positioned 

next was the control "cavity" access i utilised templates to route the access and where the cover plate will sit and left a strengthening section in the middle as the cavity is quite long 

figured out the pic thing sort of if i take a screenshot and upload that it seems to work haha

anyway neck carving time  get too see what the beautiful flame on the back of the neck looks like 

i have some more to update but unfortunate;y i cant seem to upload the pictures and im not really sure why anybody have trouble with uploading?

cheers man im glad i got somthing on the headstock i allways think it looks like it is missing somthing when there plain. i couldnt be happier with how it turned out 

Time for the frets (well most of them you will see why later) 

This is one of my favorite bits i got someone locally with a cnc machine to cut my autograph into a headstock veneer the bed on the cnc wasnt large enough for the neck so couldnt cut it strait in  and inlayed it with abalone to match the fret markers it looks awesome in person never comes out as nicely on pictures.

them we positioned it using the headstock template and drilled the tuning peg holes to line it up routed clamed and glued it to the headstock