Month: June 2016

Possibly my most upscale guitar to date, #8 has a beautiful redwood top with mahogany back and neck, and ebony fretboard.  I spent a great deal of time working on the inlays, using abalone and mother of pearl.  The redwood for the top was cut some 80 years ago and shows amazing figure.  I used standard plastic bobbins but wound the pickups as usual on a sewing machine.  The pickups are switchable series/parallel using switches in the pots.  Home made knobs and switch tip from ebony.  I even turned the ebony guitar strap buttons on my mini lathe.  I named the guitar “Bohemia” for the European Bohemian movement of the 1800’s, oh, and also for Natty Boh beer!

 

 

…and here it is two years later and I’m still making guitars!

Here are some pics of my latest, the Sparkle Guitar.  I wanted to make a lighter guitar so I used Jelutong for the hollowed-out body with a stripe of figured redwood down the middle.  The top is maple with 20-30 coats of nitrocellulose lacquer over red metalflake.  I made the humbucker pickups on homemade wood bobbins, and installed series/parallel switching.  This one has a 26″ scale neck and I think it sounds just great de-tuned a whole step.  It sounds so good that I think I’ll concentrate on making more 26″ scale D tuned guitars for awhile.  The end result is 6lbs, 4 ozs, lighter than my Strat by a few ounces.