Guitar Of The Month - November 2022

Woodfab -The 8020 Guitar

So at work I've found quite of a few people play guitar. We use a product called 8020 aluminum for projects so I got an idea to build a simple no frills guitar with a built in amp to leave at work. Well at first the plan was to make it quick and dirty, no paint and just a rectangle, well of course  I kept adding to it.

Wood - mahogany pulled from a dumpster, 1/4" aluminum, Grovers, cheap pickups and a $20 battery guitar amp.

I used a 3W battery-powered D5F4 amp. I'm thinking of upgrading the amp to a 20W with a better speaker.  

I angled the frets to match the natural angle of my hand at higher frets which I find it easier to play.

Also I been using on all of my guitars a "first fret" at the top of the speaking length rather than the nut, this makes it very easy to get the lowest action.

Bizman62 - Ovie

With this one I wanted to challenge myself properly.  This is my fourth full build, built at the community college workshop during wintertime Saturdays. She's a semi hollow LP-profile neck-through as I titled the thread but let's just call her Ovie... So:

• Top: Flamed Ovangkol from Madinter, Spain
• Body: Torrefied Estonian Alder from the sauna department of the local hardware store
• Accent laminates: 0.55 mm flamed Birch a fellow builder got from a bankrupted flooring factory
• Neck: Maple with Cherry and Nogal stripes from the outlet of another flooring materials factory
• Fretboard Merbau from the same flooring factory
• Hardware from AliExpress, Banggood and Ebay
• Pickups: Humbucker sized P90's (Ali)
• Finish: Crimson Guitar Finishing Oil
• Final finish: Self cooked wax mixture of Carnauba, Beeswax and Pine Turpentine
• Weight 3,36 kg/7.4 lbs

As you can see, the body has been shaped using a Les Paul template and the headstock owes a bit to PRS. The rest has just been improvised.

Designing the F-holes:

Just short of putting it all together:

The pickups were a bit tricky to install, especially the springs:

Fast forward to today:

The devil is in the details: The jack is recessed - and that's wax I didn't notice when shooting these pictures!

I tend to leave the upper neck too wide so I widened the nut with offcuts of the fingerboard. The truss rod cover is also from an offcut.

The back:

And how does she sound? Well... When I play she's yelling and screaming and thumping but fellow builders seem to get some very pleasing music out of her. Just as expected...