Way Back in Time

Back in the stoned age, I went to school to learn guitar building, or Luthiery to be exact. The art of stringed instrument building.

The course was 4 months long and you built one acoustic and one electric. This was starting with raw boards and building the whole instrument from the ground up. If you were fast enough and worked Saturdays you could start a third instrument.

This was my third instrument...



Sorry for the crappy photo, it's the only one I have and I had to go into the internet archives to get it.

Anyways... Right after I graduated I was hired as their main electric guitar teacher.

So this guitar still exists, sort of. It was flood damaged first, then it was heat/freeze damaged during a house fire. (The fire was during December so after being in the heat it was doused with water and then froze... Not the best for wooden items.) It would take too much work to make it functional again.

The point of this thread is to document some of these guitars I built. Some I've lost, some I still had after the fire (The Burn Victims) and a couple that I just re-acquired from a guy that bought them 15 years ago. I may later document some of my current gear...

 

While teaching I was told by the school's owner to "Build the wildest guitars you can" The idea was to show the students something to aspire to, I guess.

The fourth and fifth guitars I built happened at the same time, they are brothers. I don't remember which one got finished first.






Both of these were destroyed in the fire. R.I.P.

 

Number six was this 9 string full hollowbody carved top...



Everything is hand carved on this instrument, bridge, tailpiece, wood knobs were even hand shaped. (not turned on a lathe)

Destroyed in the fire... R.I.P.


(Those boards in the background were what we built guitars from. All Central American hardwoods, air dried in Arizona for over 20 years.)

 

Having worked with wood most my life, on a MUCH cruder level, I truly admire your workmanship. KOKO

 

Thank you...

 

I stopped numbering at some point because there was so much overlap in building. I didn't start one and finish it before starting the next. I also never made two the same, everything was a one-off, there were very few templates for anything and no automation. Some power tools were used, obviously, but those would be hand guided.

This one I built in 1987 and sold back in 2005-2006 and I have no idea where it is today... Hopefully it's making somebody happy.



This body shape I did make several of, but the build specifics of each one were totally different.

 

In case anybody wonders, in the first post I mentioned a student electric and acoustic... I have no photos at the moment.

The student electric was stolen not too long after it was built.

The student acoustic I sold, and from what I have heard the guy that bought it has said "It's not for sale, I'm going to be buried with this guitar". Hopefully the guy is still enjoying the instrument.

 

In case anybody is wondering why I put this thread in the Musicians forum... I'm a musician, much of my adult life I have been involved with musicians, and I used to build musical instruments. I figured here was better than anywhere else...


More later.

 

For 'stringed' instruments I prefer the cymbalom - a very versatile and a beautiful sound.

 

Yeah... I build guitars.

 

This guitar I still have, more on that later. It is similar to the last in body outline only. Everything else about it's construction is different.



That is Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick pretending to be a guitar stand.

In the background you can sort of see two guys chatting. That is one of the store salesmen distracting the Hamer Guitars rep. while Rick played my guitar and then we got the photo.
Rick Nielson was endorsed by Hamer and could not be seen, heard, or especially photographed with any other make of guitar or he would be "breaking his contract"... Oops.

He did really like the guitar... Thanks Bro! Made my day.

This one was fire damaged end of 2012, but was more damaged from the heat/wet/freeze that happened due to the fire being extinguished... It didn't burn but the finish was damaged to the point of needing to be removed. I did that at the end of last year and have it back to playing condition now. It looks totally different this time around, it's not tinted lacquer it's oil finished. Some day I hope to get some new photos going of current gear.

This guitar is magic... It's 35 years old, it was at the time the pinnacle of my ability... The Golden Koa top, Honduran Mahogany sides, back and neck, Ebony fretboard and head cap, all the best woods I could get my hands on. It's an electric full hollowbody carved top. Like the 9 string, all the bridge, tailpiece, knobs, etc. are all hand carved. I even covered the pickups with Koa.

The top is carved inside and out as an acoustic Jazz guitar would be, but Koa is a hardwood and the guitar is smaller. This allows an acoustic resonance but with controllable feedback when plugged into an amp. When I was planning the inside carve, traditional method would be to scoop out all the wood and achieve a consistent thickness with the top carve and then glue two braces in. I'm wondering why cut out wood that would make perfectly good braces and glue something else back in. So the braces are carved into the inside of the top... all one piece, no glue. Nobody does this...

More later...

 

There is a small group of guitars I have that are considered the "Burn Victims"... Fire damaged, but still playable.




The headstock in the foreground is one of my handbuilt guitars... I played it for 2 years after the fire with the same strings it had that night... it played fine, looked like shyt. Half of the neck is completely scorched. You can see where the neck support of the stand it was in was and everything above that is burned. When I found this one in the rubble it was frozen in a pile of what used to be my plaster ceiling, collapsed on to the floor.

I have since refurbished this guitar and I coated the headstock with matte clear over the charred wood... Looks burned, but you don't get charcoal on your hands from touching it. There is no way to make it look "new" again. Hope to have more about this guitar later in this thread...

The red guitar in the background is a cheap Epiphone that was also burned that night... It was about 3 weeks old when the fire happened, I had just bought it. I stripped the melted finish off the back of the neck, re-shaped the headstock to trim off the charred wood, put it back together and play it to this day (yesterday as a matter of fact) In the photo you can see the neck pickup is melted... it sounds great, though.

More Later...

 

Great thread ! I like to see your stuff

 

Thanks, Mally... Hope to have more coming.

 

Okay... One of the Burn Victims in greater detail.




The one on the right, circled in red. That is the guitar that now has the burned headstock shown above. (The other guitar I will get to later)

The one on the right has always been called "Solid" which is a jab at Gibson's SG which stands for solid guitar... I also say "Solid" like Linc from the "Mod Squad" (You had to be there...)

What it is, or was is somewhat Gibson SG shaped, but built more like a Fender Strat... Control layout, pickguard style, output jack, bolt neck... It even had a Strat neck on it at one point in time. It's had a bunch of necks and bridges on it while I was teaching. It was kind of a "mule" for trying different ideas. In it's final iteration it's an all Honduran Mahogany handbuilt guitar with active electronics, pickups I designed and wound, scalloped fretboard of my own design. (It's an atypical scallop)

The body for this, and it's rough shape was a body a previous student had started but never finished... He had screwed something up and ended up over his head so it sat in a wood bin for years before I came along. The wood is not only Honduran Mahogany but it's from a root slab which makes it very dense. Imagine the weight of an old growth jungle tree sitting on top of this and this root being responsible for holding this massive tree upright. Dense wood. It's not stained, that is it's natural color with a clear oil finish.

The neck is all Mahogany with a Brazilian Rosewood fretboard. Pickguard and pickup covers all made from Mahogany. (Pickguard is actually 5 layers with maple laminates between mahogany, can't see that in the photo) Both pickups are pretty "radical" designs compared to the norm, but I wasn't going for normal. The active electronics has a volume, bass, treble control. Mini toggles control pickup selection and bridge pickup series/parallel. The wild huge chrome bridge is a vintage "Washburn Wonderbar"... that some guy gave me because it wasn't a "Floyd Rose". Back in the day the Wonderbar was a $250 part. Sure, I'll take it? (Don't tell anybody, but it works better than any Floyd ever designed).

But, Solid was sitting in it's stand, right at the top of the stairs the night of the fire. Fire started downstairs, after doing a fire tornado in the landing at the bottom of the stairwell the fire blasted up the stairs and it was like hitting Solid with a blowtorch. Three days later, after digging it out of frozen rubble, I wiped it off and it played... In Tune. The thing was still in tune. Nothing should still be in tune after that... but, Solid was ready to play.

 

This guitar is one that was finished around '88. I sold it to a guy back in 2006... He ended up selling it back to me just a few months ago along with two others he had bought from me. (more about those later)





Yeah, there was a guy collecting my guitars...

Anyways, this guitar is a carved top hollowbody made from super flamed Koa, top and back, both. Yeah, it's actually hollow, top and back only contact around the edges and the neck joint. It breaths. Braces carved into the top as I've done in the past. It is a very thin guitar, there are no "sides", just top and back plate glued together. Mahogany neck, ebony fretboard, one off inlay. (meaning there were no patterns for the inlay pieces, cut piece, shape it, inlay it, cut next piece, etc. rinse and repeat)

Being a full hollowbody this guitar has the tendency to sustain feedback on certain notes, that's the breathing thing. It's very controllable with this guitar because there is a very small volume of air inside this guitar, it's air movement that causes feedback. Also the "cat's eye" sound hole can be muted with your arm shutting down air movement. It was an idea I had... It works as expected.

Pickups are 80's Bill Lawrence R500 and XL500 , for you guitar nerds... Nobody else has a clue what I'm talking about.

More later

 

A couple more photos...




And this is the headstock inlay...




That is cut from one block of Mother of Pearl, the black lines detailing the face are all saw cuts. It was a very fragile piece before inlaying into the Koa headcap.


This guitar is called "The Aviator", thus the inlay... Skull with an aviators cap and goggles up on his forehead. (Just in case anybody wondered)

 

Getting back to this guitar which was seen earlier. These photos were taken before it was completed and it is one I sold that I recently got back from the guy that purchased them back in 2006-2008... (He had 3 and I got them all back)





The major difference with this guitar is it is "assembled" not hand built... What that means is the body came from one place, neck from another, etc. etc. There are a lot of guys out there saying "I built this guitar" when they actually assembled something that was basically a kit, or pre-manufactured parts built to the same specs so everything fits together even if bought from various suppliers. To me, having built guitars from raw wood the distinction becomes more important. Not saying "kit building" is bad... It is quite enjoyable and somebody can build a great guitar that way, but it is different than building from raw wood. Skill set is totally different..

Having said all that this "assembled" guitar has magical powers... It just does.

Not sure if I got the neck or the body first, I was doing a lot of buying and selling of guitars and parts on ebay at the time. (Mid 2000's) I acquired these with no intention of putting this neck on this body, it just evolved that way. Same with the rest of the parts.

The body is solid Koa, I got it used off ebay for cheap but it started out life as a Warmouth brand Strat body with a clear lacquer finish. (Probably early-mid 90's build date) The clear finish had been stripped off before I got it and somebody had mangled the tremolo route for some reason. The finish was stripped (I'm guessing, but I'm qualified) because somebody let a 9 V battery burst and leak inside the guitar. That soaked through the wood and under the finish... may have even started eating the finish. But the stain and wood damage on the back of the guitar was still visible when I got it. I sanded the whole body, inlayed some Koa pieces around the tremolo bridge to repair that mess, stabilized the battery damaged wood, and oil finished it.

The neck was also an ebay find, it was listed as "Warmouth" but I knew from the photos that it likely wasn't built by them. It is built more like the So Cal guys, Jackson, Charvel, etc., were building in the late 80's and this neck had been sitting around, unfinished, for about that length of time. It was unused, bare wood (no finish) and the headstock was not shaped, no tuning machine holes, etc. I drilled and cut the headstock to be a reverse of my traditional headstock shape. Carved the neck profile to be a little less chunky than the guy that made it had done and oil finished it. The neck is all Birdseye Maple, which is a hard rock, N American Maple known for it's density. "Birdseye" is a figuring in the wood, it's really pretty, but it's not showing up in those photos. (gotta get some new photos at some point.)

Now is where the "story" starts getting weird... At some point, prior to me getting the body and neck, this guy that had bought the Aviator guitar above told me he had bought a Koa wood Strat pickguard... "Because it looked cool". He doesn't work on guitars and probably didn't own a Strat, but that pickguard does look cool. He bought it because it was Koa, basically. About a year or more later he was making payments to me for the last guitar he got from me. Sometimes cash, sometimes trades... I still hadn't seen this "really cool" Koa pickguard but had just acquired the Koa body so what the hell... "You want to trade that guard?" "Cool"... So when it showed up I set it in place on the body and ..... The damned grain lines all lined up. No, it's not from the same board, probably not even the same tree, but it looks like some wild wood wizardry going on there. The gloss finish guard on the oil finished body looks "really cool" too. Even if I had the tools and started from raw wood I couldn't have pulled off a match like that... Besides all that, this is the guy that later ended up owning the guitar for 12 years. That wasn't in the cards at the time, just more weirdness that happened later.

The pickups are old Strat pickups that I had rewound to my own specs back in the day and was saving for "My Guitar" whenever I happened to come up with a Strat I actually liked... Which is basically "never" because at best I tolerate Fender guitars. Well... This one is not Fender, and the neck is more Gibson/90's hair metal/SoCal hotrod neck so this pickup set went into this guitar. Custom control wiring of my design along with my set of the custom pickups and this thing was coming together just fine... The magic begins.

I put the rest of the guitar together and strung it up. Setting up a freshly made guitar is a lot of tweaking and prodding to get everything up to snuff. At some point in here I realized "this was my Strat"... The tones this thing produced, the abruptness of the attack, the playability of the neck, the tones from the wood... It was all there. ....... a week later I got a shut-off notice from my electric company... A week after that the Koa Strat was in a box on it's way to the guy. He helped me out of a jam, for sure... and I knew where it was going... but having to sell that guitar really hurt, man.

BUT... It's back now, and missed the whole "flood 2010 and fire 2012" thingy... Odd how that happened.


More later...

 

Have you ever heard that work played in a concerto form with the cybalom and full orchestra.?
I believe that the roots of the cybalom go back to Hungary.
Prior to watching this video, I did not know how the sustain worked. It certainly produces a magnificent staccato, but it must take a lot of skill, since you are applying the damper across the whole range, rather than allowing one string to resonate.

 

No, I first became aware of this instrument as part of a slovakian/Hungarian folk music group.