Electric Guitar

After building Josiah that bass guitar, I decided I wanted to use what I’d learned and build a guitar for myself. I made a few mistakes with that first one, so I tried to improve for this second one, but, of course, I made all new mistakes! Even so, I think it came out pretty good. Now I just need to learn how to play guitar. I guess I do know all the same three chords that Taylor Swift knows!

Specs:

The body is book-matched ziricote on the front on top of a thin layer of maple, on top of mahogany with the back book-matched curly maple. I decided to make the shape irregular in outline. I wanted the guitar to look like it grew out of the forest. I think it ended up looking like a Lord of the Rings guitar.

The neck is also maple, mahogany and a fretboard and headstock front made of ziricote. Not the hardest wood, but similar to maple, so hopefully it will hold up to playing. The headstock shape is my own idea. The neck has a StewMac Hot Rod Low Profile 2-Way Truss Rod, 18″ adjustable at the headstock with a cover attached with magnets. The fret dots are also ziricote from dowels I made myself. There was a small error installing one, and the fix resulted in a blotch. Oh well. The side dots are maple dowel, also that I made myself. It was fun to learn how to make my own dowels. The nut is water buffalo bone, and I built it myself. It probably still needs some work to make it right.

The finish is a seal of blonde shellac. The front was just finished with a combo of beeswax and carnauba wax. Oil based finishes darken ziricote too much so you can’t see the figure, so I wanted to keep it simple. I know the wax is not super hard, so there may be some challenges keeping it from getting scratched and dinged in the future. The back I treated with medium brown and golden brown TransTint to deepen the curls in the maple, but it didn’t come out as strongly marked as I’d have liked.

I decided to us an HSH pickup configuration (humbuckers at the bridge and neck and a stacked single coil in the middle). I attached these directly since I didn’t want a pickguard or even pup rings to obscure the wood. I used Seymour-Duncan HS4 humbucker (bridge), STK-S4M (middle), and SH-2N humbucker (neck).

Other hardware… the tuners are Guyker Locking Tuners (1:18 ratio, 6 same side for right-hand guitar). Control knobs are Xiyangjuan black metal with a hex nut tightener. The bridge is a Gotoh GE103B-T Tune-O-Matic style with large metric stud posts. The tailpiece is a Les Trem II Vibrato Gold Tailpiece for Les Paul with a tremolo bar. The jack is a black Strat style, but on the back, like on Josey’s bass, to keep it out of the way the front wood more exposed.

For wiring, I decided to do something pretty complicated. I found a 6 position switch, the 3×3-05 Free-Way Toggle (Ultra) which has 28 terminal positions that can be used in an insane number of combinations. I decided to wire the six positions as…

Neck, middle, bridge

2, bridge and neck

3, middle and neck

4, bridge and middle

5, neck alone

6, bridge alone

I also found a push-push potentiometer to use for a global tone control, but the push-push function also switches between full and split neck and bridge humbuckers. I also included controls for volume for the bridge and neck pups. That is a lot of combinations, just for fun! But it meant a lot of wiring. It was pretty fun figuring it out. Check out the diagram. I was pretty surprised that it worked! The control panel in the back has a magnetically attached ziricote cover.

So now it should be fun figuring out how to play guitar!