MIMF

Just about a year ago my Dad gave me some rough sawn pecky cypress. The plank was 1 7/8" thick x16" wide x16' long. He wanted my brother and I to each have an 8' chunk of it and my first thought was, can I make a guitar out of that.

So here's the experiment. I think this would be called a "semi-solid" electric.
I tried to keep all the routing to a minimun since there isn't much solid wood. And I couldn't tell what was inside of the slab.
I used a single coil sized humbucker (13.84k), with a concentric 500k pot for volume and tone and mini switch to split the coils.
It has a top loading bridge and I used an endpin jack. There wasn't a solid area to put a jack in the typical location.



The dark streaks are from years of dirt build up in the exposed peckies. After I had it planed down, and the rough body cut, I used a high pressure air hose to clean all the dirt and chaff out of the holes. Some of them go all the way through the body. I couldn't think of anyway to get rid of the staining from the dirt so I left the dark streaks and used black hardware to compliment it. I also used a satin poly finish instead of gloss finish.

My four year old grandson called it the tiger guitar.

Here's the slab it came out of.

The straight-on front shots just don't do it justice - too 2D. The swiss cheese end/below shots are just awesome - love at first sight once I saw those. Great use of that wood and coordinating the hardware. Some little tiny part of my brain wishes there was a tortiseshell pickguard on there, but it would indeed be a shame to cover up that funky surface.

JC Whitney wrote:The straight-on front shots just don't do it justice - too 2D. The swiss cheese end/below shots are just awesome - love at first sight once I saw those. Great use of that wood and coordinating the hardware. Some little tiny part of my brain wishes there was a tortiseshell pickguard on there, but it would indeed be a shame to cover up that funky surface.

Thanks JC. I have enough left to build three more but I'm not sure, don't want to flood the market.
When I started this I googled pecky cypress guitar and this is the only one I found, a pecky cypress strat. There has to be others out there?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AredNqMSqMg

Wonderful! just wonderful!

I love it also.

Very unique and looks good also.

You can store extra picks and cords in the holes.

Nice guitar Roger. I'm sure it was no easy job working around all the holes. It sure looks good and I enjoyed the Dickie Betts video. Any idea where your father came by it. We have quite a bit of it here in Florida.

Jim Bonnell wrote:Nice guitar Roger. I'm sure it was no easy job working around all the holes. It sure looks good and I enjoyed the Dickie Betts video. Any idea where your father came by it. We have quite a bit of it here in Florida.

I'm not sure exactly where it came from or when it was cut but it has sort of been in the family. My great uncle was a carpenter and had a custom cabinet and furniture shop for over 50 years. When he passed my great aunt stayed in the house but didn't sell the shop or any of the contents. Several years later she sold the property and moved to Tennessee to be closer to her son. Everything left in the shop was given to my dad, their son had already been there to get what he wanted. That piece of cypress was in the back storage area.
That was about ten years ago when dad took it out to his place. I'll have to ask him if he knows where it came from originally.

My son is here trying it out this afternoon, it sounds soooo much better than when I try to play it! There's some truth to the saying, tone is in the fingers. I'll post a video later.

Roger Rosenberger wrote:

Jim Bonnell wrote:Nice guitar Roger. I'm sure it was no easy job working around all the holes. It sure looks good and I enjoyed the Dickie Betts video. Any idea where your father came by it. We have quite a bit of it here in Florida.

I'm not sure exactly where it came from or when it was cut but it has sort of been in the family. My great uncle was a carpenter and had a custom cabinet and furniture shop for over 50 years. When he passed my great aunt stayed in the house but didn't sell the shop or any of the contents. Several years later she sold the property and moved to Tennessee to be closer to her son. Everything left in the shop was given to my dad, their son had already been there to get what he wanted. That piece of cypress was in the back storage area.
That was about ten years ago when dad took it out to his place. I'll have to ask him if he knows where it came from originally.

My son is here trying it out this afternoon, it sounds soooo much better than when I try to play it! There's some truth to the saying, tone is in the fingers. I'll post a video later.

Here's just a little of him playing around today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzEWtwvgSCU&feature=plcp

Sort of makes it easy to run wires on that, eh?

cool look!!
sound decent too
Cheers
Charliewood

Barry Daniels wrote:Sort of makes it easy to run wires on that, eh?

Ha, none of them were in the right place so I still had to drill holes.

That's really funny!

What Aaron said.

That guitar might be the key to time travel - talk about wormholes! No, really, that's a really cool instrument!

Holey pecky wood, Batman! That looks like a lot of fun and sounds fun, too!

Would that be considered a "chambered" guitar?
I cut into an old piece of alder and noticed a few worm holes on end. Assumed not a problem. When I thicknessed the slab to 1 3/4" a myriad of tunnels were revealed! Thus the Termitecaster!

Ashley Davis wrote:Would that be considered a "chambered" guitar?
I cut into an old piece of alder and noticed a few worm holes on end. Assumed not a problem. When I thicknessed the slab to 1 3/4" a myriad of tunnels were revealed! Thus the Termitecaster!

Hi Ashley. I don't know if I would consider those "chambers" or not, I think of it as more of a semi-solid.
Did you finish your Termitecaster? Any more pics?

These are awesome guitars and exactly what my prefered clientel would swoon over. Bring on the flood! Do a tele thinline next. Its just a matter of ignoring the holes during construction -- almost.