Price: £345
This guitar was a prototype in that I wanted to test a particular kind of neck sourced from a German supplier. It was a jazz-style neck with a tall heel, not the kind you’d usually use with a Les Paul Double-Cut style build but it worked well for this.
Like many of my builds, this guitar was based around the bridge – in this case a high quality Tone Pros wrap-around bridge with locking posts. There are many things that I did wrong on this build – the first of which was I over-egged the neck / body join angle to something close to 4mm. This, once fitted, ended up with the bridge and pickups needing to be quite tall. This wasn’t a ‘show stopper’ as the bridge and pickup rings allowed me to reach up to the tall action but the pickups are stretching to get to the strings!
Despite the neck angle, the basic guitar played well and the neck was just great – totally playable; low, light and fast. A second mistake I made is that in copying (and re-printing) the DC shape from an online image, I under-sized it by a few small percentage points. This left the cut-away horns just fractionally too close to the body for my liking. I ended up carving the insides of the cut-aways to gain that extra bit of room.
The body is made from recycled mahogany (base) and recycled oak tongue and groove (!) on top, making it a heavy beast. I sprayed it in nitro – primer and then TV Yellow. I wanted the TV Yellow to run up over the fingerboard edge, losing the original fret marker side dots in the process. My attempts to re-drill them went wrong resulting in a mess. I ended up painting some black over them and leaving it alone!
At this point I was loving how the guitar played – but not liking the squareness of the guitar’s edges and its weight. So one day I just took the Shinto rasp to it and cut myself a fore-arm slope, a belly carve and some rounded edges. Then, to lose a little weight, I enlarged the electrics cavity and upgraded the pots / functionality. The guitar now has two mini-humbuckers with volume and tone and two independent push-push coil splits.
It’s got a personality now and I do love it, despite hating it on completion and for the first month or two of its life due to the various mistakes. But they were all learning experiences, so worth it in the long run.
