My Guitars

[another doug]

Hello all! I joined in September after lurking for about a year and a half. I have added my two cents to a few topics, so I figured I'd better get off my butt and share some of my work.

I am not a pro by any stretch of the imagination, but I have made three electric guitars and one bass. All are playable, but they also have some problems (mostly cosmetic), and I plan on revisiting a couple of them in the future. In fact, I have already refinished my first one (twice!).

It all started when I came across Melvin's Hiscock's book in a used bookstore. After reading that I was hooked! It didn't even occur to me that there may be info online until much later, so all of these guitars were made without some of the knowledge that I have gained here (most notably, none of them were made using templates). I don't have a lot of time to devote to this hobby, so each guitar usually takes more than a year, and I have settled for "good enough" more often than I should have.

Enough disclaimers! Here's my first guitar:

The neck and center of the body are laminations of maple and mahogany. The wings are mahogany with a birdseye maple top (although not a particularly strong birdseye). There is a birdseye maple veneer over the front of the headstock. It has a pre-slotted rosewood fretboard from stewmac. There were originally no dots, but I kept getting lost on the fretboard so there are now plain old hardwood dowels from the hardware store (not spaced very accurately).

The finish was originally nitro lacquer, but I sprayed it wrong, so it was very brittle. I later sanded it off and it now has a gloss tung oil finish.

The pickups are the old stewmac fake Lawrences, since I was unsure about getting my string spacing correct the first time out of the gate. There are individual volume and tone controls and phase switches. There is also a phase switch to throw the pickups out of phase with each other, and a regular gibson-style pickup selector. The Roland pickup is the latest addition.

The bridge is a schaller roller bridge, with adjustable string spacing. It is set to the narrowest setting, and I later angled it slightly to get the strings even closer together, because my neck ended up a bit narrow.

I think I covered it all! Stay tuned for number two!

Doug

[I'm Not Rex Brown]

i dont like the peghead but body looks quite cool

[MCH]

Nice job. Nothing like building something with your own hands. I also just got into building guitars. Very addictive. Haven't finished my first and am already drawing up another design for another build. I don't use templates (store bought) other than the ones I create myself. On my first build I'm using tung oil and find the finish very attractive for the natural look. I'm not into the high gloss plastic look.

I've built a lot furniture over the past few years; so guitar building is an extension of this madness. Hopefully I'll be able to start selling some guitars. I'll start with the 3 electrics I bought. Hard to let go of the ones you build. Anyhow I don't know how easy it is to sell custom made guitars, if there is any viable market.

happy designer sawdusting making

[another doug]

I forgot to mention, the last one was made 5+ years ago.

Here's number two, made 3 or 4 years ago:

As you can see, it is modeled on Jerry Garcia's "Tiger" guitar.

The body has a one inch thick maple core, with laminations of bloodwood and maple. The top and back are padauk, and the neck is padauk and curly maple, with an ebony fingerboard and headstock veneer. The cream lines in the top and back are binding material, which was glued to the padauk core. The padauk wings were then scribed, cut, and sanded until it all fit together nicely.

The inlays on the neck are the result of my over-ambitiosness. Very intricate inlay on a pre-radiused board with no inlay experience! Some are great, but some got sanded down too far, and others just look a bit blah.

The inlay on the back and the one on the headstock are both made of veneers of maple and teak. This was not my most successful experiment, as cutting such a shallow hole for it was a pain, and I sanded through the teak on the back (D'oh!).

I made all the white covers out of w/b/w pickguard material. The tailpiece was shaped from a lump of brass via lots of drilling, sanding, filing, polishing, and dremel-ing. It still doesn't look great, so it's on the list of things I want to fix. The cover behind the tailpiece is a temporary. It's supposed to be ebony inlaid with mop, but now it's just a printout glued onto a dyed piece of alder .

The electronics are wired like Jerry Garcia's guitar: 2 Dimarzio Super 2's with coil taps, 1 Dimarzio sds-1, 2 tones, 1 master volume, an effects loop with bypass switch, and a unity gain buffer pre-amp (I'm not an electronics guy, but I think that this makes sure you don't lose too much signal in the effects loop).

Most of my research came from this site: Garcia's Tiger

PS. Jerry's guitar was chambered, and weighed 13 1/2 lbs. Mine isn't, and only weighs 12 (still huge, I know).

Stay tuned for number three!

Doug

[I'm Not Rex Brown]

i know my friend would like that other guitar

[Marzocchi705]

I LOVE the second guitar! the back is awesome! thats some nice work there! keep it up!

[another doug]

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

Here's number three:

It's modeled after a Jazz bass, but I made the cutaways deeper to reach the high frets (and the sting path is off a bit). I'm not happy with the shape, so that's another thing that I'm going to revisit later.

The neckthrough is maple and mahogany again, and the wings are made of a maple core, plain walnut back, and the far more interesting walnut front (it doesn't really show up too well in that picture, though). There is also a walnut headstock veneer, with my "logo" and a compass star of inlaid mop and abalone. It has a tung oil finish.

The fretboard is zebrawood with abalone block inlays, bound with a black & white stripe and tortoise celluloid binding. There is a stewmac trussrod with the spoke nut sticking out of the body end of the neck.

Plain old cheap bass tuners and bridge.

The pickups are a set of active Basslines JBass pickups (I can't remember which one). There are two volume controls and one tone.

Even though I haven't touched it (except to play it, naturally) in a couple years, it's still not really finished, since I still need to take a little off of the back of the neck. It's pretty thick! I also need to fix the action, and to do that I need to deepen the pickup routs so I can lower the pickups! But I'm not a bass player really, so It hasn't been a priority. It's playable, but the action is pretty high. All in all, I was pretty proud of a lot of the work I did on this one, even though I still made plenty of mistakes.

Again, stay tuned for the final chapter (so far). It'll probably be tomorrow though.

Thanks for looking.

Doug

[goat]

They are nice,and they are your own.

I like your bass best best bass bass best bestessest

[I'm Not Rex Brown]

i still like the shape of first one to this one i dont like peghead again

[another doug]

Here's my most recent, about a year old:

After a couple of over ambitious projects, I decided to keep it simple. I used my old Japanese Fender Strat to get the basic shape. The body is ash (not swamp ash, though), finished with a burgundy stain and topped with Deft lacquer. The neck is cherry with an ebony fretboard, finished with tung oil. Again, there is a spoke nut at the body end of the neck. I wasn't sure about the suitability of cherry, but so far it's holding up very well (probably helped by the fact that it's thicker than normal).

It has Grover locking tuners, and a hard-tail string-through bridge.

It has three Dimarzio Dual-sound pickups, each with a humbucker/single coil/parallel switch (overkill, but I wanted this one to be as versatile as possible). The saddles are Graph Tech Piezos, connected to the acoustic preamp and the Graph Tech Hexpander, which provides midi output. There is a volume and tone control, and a regular five way switch. The knob which would normally be the second tone is actually the volume for the piezos. There is also a piezo/both/magnetic switch and a midi output jack.

Again, this one has a few issues. Most notably, the bridge was wider than the one on my old strat, so the strings are a bit too close to the edge of the fretboard near the neck pocket. I researched and measured, and measured and researched, and still ordered the wrong stuff! Also, the ferrules on the back don't line up properly because the drill bit wandered (and there was a thread about this the week after I drilled them! D'oh!). It would also benefit from F-spaced pickups. Finally, the finish is starting to sink into the grain a bit (and I thought I had finally got the hang of grain-filling!).

On the whole I am pleased with this guitar, though. I promised myself I would fix a couple of the ones I have already made before I make any more, but we'll see what happens!

Thanks for looking. I figured if I was going to comment on anyone else's work, I'd better get mine out there, warts and all!

Doug

[leeranya]

I like the simple one the best