Let me start by way of an introduction, how this little piece of madness became a real thing...
After completing my first two kit builds a friend of mine was so impressed that he decided he must build a guitar too. Thus as I was building my third project he was building his first. Using some parts he bought off eBay, a lump of mahogany that I gave him, my power tools and my 'vast' experience he built a copy of the Gretsch Billy Bo.
Here it is with the Les Paul Florentinette I built at the same time
He was delighted with how the Billy Bo turned out, he's decided he now wants to build a Gretsch G5810 (the cigar box style) copy. However he wants to make it acoustic version similar to Les Paul Florentinette that I've just built. Anyway in answer to this I thought I'd do the same but instead I wanted it to be different, I wanted it to be round...
Steam bending a circle, well that's no big deal (gulp) so long as I've got a round forma to use for the shape. So I went off searching round the house for a suitably big round thing. It needed to have a diameter of at least 14" and this is what I found...
This is an Ikea stainless steel plant base, it's the perfect size and when I placed on some bits that I had to hand it looked a bit like this...
Then I had a brainwave, or moment of madness. Instead of making a circular wooden body with all the associated hassles of bending wood, why don't I just use this plant base. I know there are steel sheet bodied guitars out there so it must be viable. I will make and attach a hard wood neck socket to properly mount the neck. The bridge posts, pickup and controls can be mounted direct to the front.
I will make some wooden mounts for a plywood back to attach to. I can envisage some tuning stability problems and it might sound a bit shit, however it will be fairly unique and if I can't have fun guitar building then I see very little point doing it! :)
