Monday 5 January 2015

Getting started

First thing I need to make space for the guitars innards which means those castors have got to go.  Sadly they're welded in but I'm sure they won't put up much of fight against my angle grinder...

 Clamped securely to the old work bench ready for some grinder work

Castors were riveted and were removed nice and easily, next I need to get rid of those spot welded support plates


Extraneous metal work has all been removed now.  Annoyingly but not unexpectedly, there has been some slight deformation of the surface and structural twisting due to the heat of the grinder.  This should be easily fixed when the surface support struts get fitted.  Also given the work I'm planning for the front, the worst of the deformations will probably be cut out anyway and little dents and dings will only add to the steam punk character I'm aiming for.

Wednesday 31 December 2014

A wee touch of the crazy???

Hiya, thanks for visiting my latest guitar build blog!

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! :)