Hi, I’m back. I had to take a little vacation and attend to some major business issues. From now on I’ll try to keep a more regular schedule of writing for the blog.
In this thrilling episode I want to continue to show you more of the guitars I built that gave me the practice and learning I needed to get me on the right track in creating better and better guitars. Each one I built was a lesson in either what not to do or what to do more of.
As my background is in product design, my main inspiration in building is to create guitars that are not copies of something else. I want them to project my thoughts and feeling of how a certain guitar should look. More of an artistic approach to building. A lot of people start out to build a guitar that is a copy of one that they like a lot but can’t afford at the moment. The most common guitar copy is a Strat as they look great and were designed from the beginning to be easy and fast to build. Plus there are are a zillion companies out there that make hardware parts for them. One of my goals is to be able to design my own versions of the hardware so that those parts are integrated more into the overall design of the guitar. I haven’t quite gotten there yet but it’s coming.
The next two guitars that I built are the Shark and Voyager II. I like the concept of a “V” guitar however, I find most of them are kind of boring. So that led me to create the shark. I thought that since a V guitar looks a bit like a fish tail fin, why not make it look more like that. Also make it look a bit more mean while you’re at it. I then choose, in general, to use a shark tail fin design and this is the result.
Some of the details of this one:
Hand shaped Alder body. White pearl laquer base with Tiger Shark stripes, Jackson tremolo and Bartolini pickups. Volume and tone for each pickup, pickup select switch and pickup series/parallel switch. The neck is a strat copy with modified headstock. At first I was buying necks, and for what I consider to be the best after market necks you can get I was buying from Warmoth Guitar Products in Puyallup, Washington. They were the first that I know of that began making compound fret board necks where the at the nut the radius starts at 12″ and blends to 16″ at the 22nd / 24th fret. Very nice!
Next in line is the Voyager II. The Voyager II and the Shark were built at the same time and I was working back and forth as they progressed. This also was the first time I bought all of the hardware for the guitars which was a step up in quality. I’m not sure when it was that I discovered the Stewart-McDonald’s Guitar shop Supply catalog but it was early on and is a great place to order parts, building supplies and tools from. I still use it to this day.
Here now is the Voyager II: (As you’ll see, I should have named it the Ferrari).
Details: Body, hand shaped solid Alder with House of Kolor black base and red pearl overcoat under a polyurethane clear coat. The neck is a Strat copy (Warmoth) with modified headstock. Jackson trem, Bartolini PU – bridge position and built-in Nady wireless. All of the electronics are under the removable face plate to the rear of the trem which enables you to get at all of that stuff with out removing the strings or anything else to do it. In the neck PU position is a blanking plate which can be removed for installation of another pickup. On the bottom edge is a ribbed rubber strip to keep the guitar from slipping off your leg if you’re a sit-down player.
Following these two guitars and with the experience I gained in building them, I was approached by my first customer wanting me to build him a custom guitar. So we had a meeting where we hashed out all of his requirements for the guitar. I later worked out a quote for the work including cost of materials, parts and a schedule for completion. We got together again where he accepted my quote and I started building. In this case too I was asked to use a neck that he provided, but he wanted me to remove and install a different fret board using a different type of wood called King Wood. For that I found a great exotic wood company in Berkeley, California which had just what I was looking for. The fun part was figuring out how to shave the old fretboard off with out destroying the neck. I decided to make up a jig to mount the neck on then run it through my table saw. I had to remove all the frets first and make sure the truss rod was in neutral before passing it through the blade. Was I nervous? You betcha! I think I did it in two or three passes, all went well on the saw and the jig worked just fine. Below are some photos of the finished guitar.
The details:
“Flat Strat” (80′s lingo) Alder body. Some grain detail of the King Wood which is a really nice wood in appearance as well as workability. It is also a great tone wood and by itself will ring when knocked on with your knuckle. I had some thick scraps left after the job and made myself a book matched fretboard blank which I’m still saving for something special. Oh yeah, back to the guitar. Again we have the Jackson trem / Bartolini pickups combo. As you can see too by the rear view, a built-in Nady wireless system and large back plate to cover all of the necessary trem and electronics cavities as well as a protection plate for the rear of the guitar. On the front side are a system on switch for the Nady, a series/parallel switch for the pickups and the PU select switch on the lower horn. The paint work is House of Kolor black base coat with purple pearl airbrush graphics under a poly urethane clear.
Boy, that taps me out for today but stay tuned, a lot more to come. The last three guitars were built in 1987 so there’s only 5 more years to go to the Vinnie Triple “V”.
