The Box - my first guitar!
Posted: Tue Feb 04, 2014 12:49 pm
Hello everyone!
I've gotten so much wonderful feedback, information and eye-candy from this forum ever since signing up, both from the replies to my posts as well as from other posters, I figured it would be appropriate to post something hopefully entertaining as a way of saying thank you.
I present to you the first guitar I ever built - a couple of years ago, before I ever picked up a proper guitar making book. The production was accordingly clumsy guesswork, but the result came out playable and fairly durable, so I cannot complain.
The guitar was built around a single plank of walnut, which I used as the neck, as well as a "spine" for the neck through box body. The plank was glued to the box by means of a very primitive end block wedged between the top and bottom plates.
The headstock was shaped from the far end of the same plank, and simply had holes for the tuners drilled in and a very primitive metal nut tapped into a sawed slut along the plank. Rather than having a fingerboard, the frets were put straight into the plank in the usual way, save for the fact that they didn't need the bending since the entire plank was left flat. This obviously caused problems with fret buzz all over the place, but I was actually able to get it to sound decent with lots of tuning and setup.
The scale length is 24 3/4" and the instrument actually has fairly good intonation.
The body itself was built out of thin (1/2'') maple veneer blanks.
The bridge for the guitar is somewhat similar to a Tune-o-matic, and was one of my silly "experiments".
Essentially, I took a bar of fairly soft alloy metal, grinded it to an octagonal shape and filed slots for the strings into it. Another of my "experiments" was suspending the bridge on top of two engine piston springs protruding through two holes drilled into the top plate. Oddly enough, the thing still holds intonation well and helps distribute the string tension, which would undoubtedly crack the top plate if left as-is. The strings anchor at a metal bar which is screwed into the end block.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about is the pickup. Having no access to any proper pickups or pickup making materials and tools, I decided to fashion myself one. (This is before I knew horseshoe pickups exist, unfortunately). I took a massive, and I mean MASSIVE block of Cr/V steel and turned and milled it into a pickup housing. I was fortunate to have some AlNiCo magnets lying around, so these were then inserted into the housing and made adjustable by putting them into the pole piece holes, then cutting a thread on the end of the pole piece hole, so a screw with a felt tip could be inserted to adjust the height of the pole piece within the pickup.
The pickup was wound with thick electrical copper wire (at least three times thick as your average pickup wire) using a metal lathe at very low speed with a special winding jig I constructed for that purpose. Incredibly, I managed to do almost 10 thousand winds without breaking anything, at which point the winding was getting too thick already. The end result is a pickup that is ridiculously underwound for its inductive properties, but still has enough oomph to pickup the strings at an amplifiable level. How does it sound like? Well, like guitar strings through one of those old Jazz Bass pickups. Lots of bass and incredibly clean sounding. And yes, there is quite a lot of hum.
I wish I could have more pictures of the finished instrument and the building process, but this was a long time a go before I moved abroad, so I'm afraid I can't do much to change that. I can upload the drawings and sketches of the tools I used and the entire bridge assembly if any of you are interested.
At any rate, though I feel slightly ashamed of my ignorance at the time, I feel fairly proud that I managed to make a playable instrument. I might also add that the materials were all from the local scrapyard and that I did all the fabricating in a friend's basement workshop. In other words, I literally made this from nothing - both knowledge and material wise.
Hope it's something entertaining to you guys. If nothing else, it's a freak to chuckle at! But I love the darn thing.
I've come a long way since then in my knowledge of the basics, but I haven't built my first "proper" instrument yet. The lack of people who could offer me advice or teach me has been very discouraging.
Hope to make another post worthy of display on this forum soon.
I've gotten so much wonderful feedback, information and eye-candy from this forum ever since signing up, both from the replies to my posts as well as from other posters, I figured it would be appropriate to post something hopefully entertaining as a way of saying thank you.
I present to you the first guitar I ever built - a couple of years ago, before I ever picked up a proper guitar making book. The production was accordingly clumsy guesswork, but the result came out playable and fairly durable, so I cannot complain.
The guitar was built around a single plank of walnut, which I used as the neck, as well as a "spine" for the neck through box body. The plank was glued to the box by means of a very primitive end block wedged between the top and bottom plates.
The headstock was shaped from the far end of the same plank, and simply had holes for the tuners drilled in and a very primitive metal nut tapped into a sawed slut along the plank. Rather than having a fingerboard, the frets were put straight into the plank in the usual way, save for the fact that they didn't need the bending since the entire plank was left flat. This obviously caused problems with fret buzz all over the place, but I was actually able to get it to sound decent with lots of tuning and setup.
The scale length is 24 3/4" and the instrument actually has fairly good intonation.
The body itself was built out of thin (1/2'') maple veneer blanks.
The bridge for the guitar is somewhat similar to a Tune-o-matic, and was one of my silly "experiments".
Essentially, I took a bar of fairly soft alloy metal, grinded it to an octagonal shape and filed slots for the strings into it. Another of my "experiments" was suspending the bridge on top of two engine piston springs protruding through two holes drilled into the top plate. Oddly enough, the thing still holds intonation well and helps distribute the string tension, which would undoubtedly crack the top plate if left as-is. The strings anchor at a metal bar which is screwed into the end block.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about is the pickup. Having no access to any proper pickups or pickup making materials and tools, I decided to fashion myself one. (This is before I knew horseshoe pickups exist, unfortunately). I took a massive, and I mean MASSIVE block of Cr/V steel and turned and milled it into a pickup housing. I was fortunate to have some AlNiCo magnets lying around, so these were then inserted into the housing and made adjustable by putting them into the pole piece holes, then cutting a thread on the end of the pole piece hole, so a screw with a felt tip could be inserted to adjust the height of the pole piece within the pickup.
The pickup was wound with thick electrical copper wire (at least three times thick as your average pickup wire) using a metal lathe at very low speed with a special winding jig I constructed for that purpose. Incredibly, I managed to do almost 10 thousand winds without breaking anything, at which point the winding was getting too thick already. The end result is a pickup that is ridiculously underwound for its inductive properties, but still has enough oomph to pickup the strings at an amplifiable level. How does it sound like? Well, like guitar strings through one of those old Jazz Bass pickups. Lots of bass and incredibly clean sounding. And yes, there is quite a lot of hum.
I wish I could have more pictures of the finished instrument and the building process, but this was a long time a go before I moved abroad, so I'm afraid I can't do much to change that. I can upload the drawings and sketches of the tools I used and the entire bridge assembly if any of you are interested.
At any rate, though I feel slightly ashamed of my ignorance at the time, I feel fairly proud that I managed to make a playable instrument. I might also add that the materials were all from the local scrapyard and that I did all the fabricating in a friend's basement workshop. In other words, I literally made this from nothing - both knowledge and material wise.
Hope it's something entertaining to you guys. If nothing else, it's a freak to chuckle at! But I love the darn thing.
I've come a long way since then in my knowledge of the basics, but I haven't built my first "proper" instrument yet. The lack of people who could offer me advice or teach me has been very discouraging.
Hope to make another post worthy of display on this forum soon.
