Hi all!
Here's my entry - a strange beastie that came together over the last couple months of 2021. It's called "The Nameless One, AKA Keith Richards" after a bunch of friends kept telling me it made them think of Keef.
It's a 25.5" scale built from a slab of live-edge/end cherry I got from my brother-in-law. At first I didn't think I'd be able to use it, but it just kept calling to me, and I knew I didn't want to go with the normal "resin-fill" that seemed to be the obvious way to deal with the disintegrating bits. The more I mucked around with the wood, the more it started to design itself. The big problem, of course, was that no bridge/tailpiece in existence would work in the 'canyon' area, the wood was just too soft and prone to falling apart. I did as much as I could to stabilize it by carefully squeezing super-light Starbond CA glue into the cracks, but that wasn't going to be enough. So I grabbed a 3/8" steel rod, my angle grinder and a blowtorch and began heat-bending hunks of rod into the two-piece tailpiece, and then the same to bend (and then thread) the bridge.
I knew I wanted just a single pickup/single volume control, and the volume needed to go inside the hole I cut in the upper horn. I wanted it to appear like it was 'hovering' there, which took a moment to sort out, but some threaded rod, three nuts and some JB Weld did the trick. I also wanted to give it a strange future-swamp-acoustelectric-abomination feel, so I sourced a 4" flat steel ring and recessed it into the top, and bored a hole all the way through for the pickup mount. The pickup is a StewMac overwound Parsons Street that I hand-distressed, and the relic volume knob and tuners are from GFS.
This thing is my sixth or seventh build, and the whole thing became an exercise in NOT letting traditional design force it into something it shouldn't be, and quite frankly given the nature of the wood itself, couldn't be. The headstock is a great example of this - there was literally -just- enough to get a full length neck, but it was too stubby. A little hunk of walnut turned into the 'mohawk', which is perhaps a debatable choice, but it's really grown on me. I've been on a bit of a quest the past four or five years to up my game in this arena. I did a couple of kits about 7 years ago, and once the bug bit hard it became time to start seeing what I could do with my own designs. You can see more of the weird stuff I'm doing on my IG page: https://www.instagram.com/tunguska.guitars/ or my website (which is still very much a work in progress) https://www.tunguskaguitars.com/
You can hear what it sounds like (in context of a tune) here:
I'll post a video of it raw straight out of an amp shorttly.
Hope you enjoy perusing the odd beast. :)
Guitar Of The Month January 2022
in Guitar Of The Month entry/poll archive
Posted
Hi all!
Here's my entry - a strange beastie that came together over the last couple months of 2021. It's called "The Nameless One, AKA Keith Richards" after a bunch of friends kept telling me it made them think of Keef.
It's a 25.5" scale built from a slab of live-edge/end cherry I got from my brother-in-law. At first I didn't think I'd be able to use it, but it just kept calling to me, and I knew I didn't want to go with the normal "resin-fill" that seemed to be the obvious way to deal with the disintegrating bits. The more I mucked around with the wood, the more it started to design itself. The big problem, of course, was that no bridge/tailpiece in existence would work in the 'canyon' area, the wood was just too soft and prone to falling apart. I did as much as I could to stabilize it by carefully squeezing super-light Starbond CA glue into the cracks, but that wasn't going to be enough. So I grabbed a 3/8" steel rod, my angle grinder and a blowtorch and began heat-bending hunks of rod into the two-piece tailpiece, and then the same to bend (and then thread) the bridge.
I knew I wanted just a single pickup/single volume control, and the volume needed to go inside the hole I cut in the upper horn. I wanted it to appear like it was 'hovering' there, which took a moment to sort out, but some threaded rod, three nuts and some JB Weld did the trick. I also wanted to give it a strange future-swamp-acoustelectric-abomination feel, so I sourced a 4" flat steel ring and recessed it into the top, and bored a hole all the way through for the pickup mount. The pickup is a StewMac overwound Parsons Street that I hand-distressed, and the relic volume knob and tuners are from GFS.
This thing is my sixth or seventh build, and the whole thing became an exercise in NOT letting traditional design force it into something it shouldn't be, and quite frankly given the nature of the wood itself, couldn't be. The headstock is a great example of this - there was literally -just- enough to get a full length neck, but it was too stubby. A little hunk of walnut turned into the 'mohawk', which is perhaps a debatable choice, but it's really grown on me. I've been on a bit of a quest the past four or five years to up my game in this arena. I did a couple of kits about 7 years ago, and once the bug bit hard it became time to start seeing what I could do with my own designs. You can see more of the weird stuff I'm doing on my IG page: https://www.instagram.com/tunguska.guitars/ or my website (which is still very much a work in progress) https://www.tunguskaguitars.com/
You can hear what it sounds like (in context of a tune) here:
I'll post a video of it raw straight out of an amp shorttly.
Hope you enjoy perusing the odd beast. :)