Homemade guitar

[knockman]

Just finished my cheesy twanger project, inspired by old dan electro/Sivertone guitars:



The idea was to recycle scrap, junk and old parts. Basically, I made everything except the neck and electronics. The neck was originally on a Fernandes Zo-3 (called a "Nomad" outside Japan I believe). I'm still planning to wind my own pickup for it, but there's an old humbucker in there for the time being.

The body is a ply facade over a block of cherry:


Part of the reason I wanted to do this was to practice some lacquering techniques with gold flakes. (The gold came with beer I was given about 10 years ago - in less austere times, people added it to food & drinks)



I documented the build in a blog if anyone's interested more details: http://silverysqueaks.blogspot.com/

Hope to post some sound or video files soon.

Cheers

[Hink]

knockman, dude why isn't this thread up to 50 posts already? That is fantastic, I assume you had access to a machine shop? Really awesome job

[vurt]

nice
you gonna do dan electro style lipstick pickups?

[GaryG]

That's excellent.

I think with a headstock like that you've really got to get the body right for it to balance (visually) and I think you've got it spot on; quirky but not annoyingly so. Think the pickup mount looks very cool too.

[knockman]

thanks for the kind comments.

hink - no machine shop, just hand tools. a couple of power tools though (drill and trimmer/router). a proper workshop and things would have been much quicker. no doubt would have turned out neater too. the curves on the body are a little 'wrong' in places.

vurt - that was my intention at first, but i had no lipstick tubes. the idea was to use up scrap and parts i already had lying around. the pickup shell is half of a plastic pill case and a sheet of aluminium mesh. i hope to wire my own pickup to go in there, in due course.


cheers gary - i tried to mirror the headstock in the lower horn of the body. i feel the curves could be a little better. doing this makes you appreciate the art that goes into building proper guitars. the guitar the neck originally came from is a Fernandes Zo-3 which resembles an elephant. in japanese, "Zo-3" would be spoken as "Zou-san", meaning elephant.

here's a video of not great playing:


cheers

[Hink]

I think the latter part with distortion speaks volumes for how good this guitar sounds. When you're grooving along the sound of the guitar itself is overpowering the the amplified tone and I can really here the character of the guitar...awesome job all the way around

[Shane Sanders]

Cool!