II: Motivation

I've been fascinated by the idea of building my own guitar for quite some time now, ever since I performed an extensive upgrade on my Korean Strat back in May, installing a set of EMG active pickups, and redoing the wiring and electronics in the process. I'd thought about building one from a kit, but I suspect that the quality of the individual components in those won't be of the highest quality, likely. It also takes some of the fun away if all the parts are pre-made to fit together, and all you're really doing is putting a few screws on, and snapping a few wires in place. After having worked on repairing/restoring a friend's old classical guitar, I saw an ad selling an unfinished guitar body and used Cort telecaster neck. I gave the neck a pass (not a fan of the tele style neck, and I wanted a short-scale instrument to compliment my strat), but came home with a gorgeous maple-topped mahogany body, bought a Gibson-scale neck from Songbird Music on Queen West, and went from there. I thought it'd be fun to make the "Guitar to End All Guitars™," but realised for my first project that it'd probably only be the "Guitar to End a Certain Number of Guitars™"

The Guitar to End a Certain Number of Guitars™
Or: Building a Kickass Electric Guitar from Sundry Parts, and the Wisdom of the Ancients Gleaned Along the Way

Many, many, many thanks to:

• The always helpful and knowledgeable staff at Songbird Music
• Joe Varga of Long and McQuade

For their patience and advice. I'd have made ten kagillion more mistakes in the past few weeks if it weren't for them. Also thanks to Ken Delathouwer for the loan of his drill, my dad for his insights and his work with the jigsaw, and my upstairs neighbour and friend Janina, for not having logged any noise complaints to date.

Body:

• Solid mahogany with flamed maple top, purchased privately

Neck:

• 22-fret maple with rosewood fingerboard, Gibson-scale (24.75"), purchased from Songbird music

Electronics:

• Seymour Duncan Cool Rails single-coil-sized humbucker in the neck position
• Seymour Duncan Vintage Staggered single-coil in the middle position
• Seymour Duncan Hot Rails single-coil-sized humbucker in the bridge positon
• Controlled by a six-position, four-pole rotary switch, with the five standard stratocaster positions, plus a sixth split-coil neck and bridge "Telecaster" position
• Master Volume and Tone controls

Misc:

• Hard-tail, top-loading bridge
• Grover non-locking tuning machines
• Bone nut
• Vintage Gibson Byrdland truss rod cover (just for the heck of it)

Notes:

• I chose a rotary switch for the primary reason that it's much, much easier to drill a hole than it is to cut a slot in a wood body, and have it look good, with the limited toos that I have. It just so happened that Songbird had only a six-position switch, and not a five-position one, which gave me the idea to wire up a split-coil telecaster-like configuration in the final position.
• I originally wanted to stain this guitar bright, translucent red, but after talking with a few friends, and really thinking it over, decided just to hand-finish it "natural" with a tung oil finish.

IV: Stuff I Had to Do

The neck came without a nut in place, and I had to cut away part of the fretboard rosewood at the correct position (done by measuring 12 3/8" from the middle of the twelfth fret to where the edge of the nut is to be), and shape a blank bone nut to fit. I then had to file a groove for each string using a set of miniature files. Installing the tuners was a relative snap (well, six drillings and a corresponding number of nut-tightenings). Possibly the most difficult part of it was to position the bridge so that the strings would line up correctly with the pickup pole pieces, and so that the middle of the high "e" saddle is exactly 24.75" inches from the nut, all the while trying to find where the neck ought to be positioned, because the neck pocket was designed for a larger 25.5" scale neck. Yikes! Those strings can be quite finicky when there's no tension on them because you're trying to fiddle around with the bridge placement.

Also, much to my chagrin, I found that while the body is quite aesthetically pleasing and well-made for the most part, the neck pocket was placed left of the centre-axis of the body, which meant that the strings would be offset from the pole pieces of the pickups, which is quite a bad thing, one would assume. To fix this, my miniature Dremel tool came to the rescue. A cutter bit and a sanding belt make it a good precision handheld router substitute.

I used six coats of tung oil for the body finish. An interesting tidbit I found out was that rags soaked with this stuff are a hazard of spontaneous combustion if they're not laid out flat to dry. Whoa... ;-)

Wiring presented an interesting challenge. I couldn't find any wiring diagrams for a six-position, four-pole rotary switch online. And the stuff I did find online covered the basic, traditional guitar wiring configurations (strat, les paul, superstrat, etc). So I actually had to put a bit of thinking into the bloody business and design the circuit myself. Not quite using my Electrical and Computer Engineering degree to its fullest potential, but not many things actually do, sadly.

Something I did learn the hard way: a screwdriver, screw, and elbow-grease, are in no way a suitable substitute for a real drill. In my impatience, I wired a used Hot Rails pickup to the bridge position before I had the other two pickups, just to test-drive the guitar, and to set the action, neck relief, intonation, etc. I just screwed the bloody thing in there, without drilling first. I managed to strip the head of one of the screws, making it impossible to remove later, and when I did manage to force it out by pulling on it with a pair of pliers, I'd managed to mash one of the two coils of the Hot Rails pickup. This was an expensive mistake. I think what must have happened is that I shorted out one of the two coils, making it a regular, albeit slightly thin-sounding single-coil pickup. Anyone interested?? Cheap-cheap!!

I took care of the loose neck pocket problem with some mahogany veneer I bought at a hardware store. I still have waaayyy too much of it, if anyone's interested :-) This is even after I made an electronics cavity cover out of several pieces of it glued together.

V: Sound

As sexy as the guitar may be visually, it'd be pretty worthless if it didn't sound good. Here's a series of quickly-recorded sound samples demonstrating what this baby can do. I'd like to think that I've been able to nail a good range of tones in one instrument, from a warm mellow jazz sound, to a twangy, jangling telecaster sound, to a smooth distorted lead sound, to some all-out raunchy overdrive. All samples were distance-miked from my Vox P15SMR amp, with amp reverb and gain boost as the only effects except the Mike Oldfield "Incantations IV" solo excerpt, which uses a multi-effects unit.


Neck Humbucker: Mellow Jazz Sound
Random Chords + Mike Oldfield's Songs of Distant Earth Theme

Twang & Jangle, front and rear, split-coils
from "Farewell March"

Lead Solo, mid and bridge pickups
from Mike Oldfield's "Incantations IV"

Rhythm Picking and Strumming, mid and rear pickups
from "Surrounded by Spirits"

Palm-muted heavy overdrive, bridge Hot Rails
excerpted from a work-in-progress instrumental

VI: Conclusions

I've no illusions of becoming a master luthier (heck, the hardest woodworking parts of guitar-building were done for me in this project), but it was definitely a good chance for me to have a lot more control over what I wanted in a guitar, and I learned a hell of a lot about guitars in general in fumbling through the steps. There are cosmetic imperfections in the final instrument, but there's a story behind each one. Ask me sometime if you ever get a chance to see it in person.


September 28, 2004