Rickenbacker 600 series

There are a number of great things about making your own instrument. They all center around catering to your whims and tastes instead of forcing yours to wrap around that of a company.

Another is that you can finally have all those guitars you've always lusted after without shelling out the dough. Well, not as much dough anyway.

I always liked the classic shape of Rickenbacker guitars. They also have a very unique sound, using mostly maple and mini-humbuckers. What I never really cared for is their finishes. Soooooo.......

I took a bunch of pictures from the internet of the shape that I like. I then scaled them up to the size I wanted, then traced the image onto some sketch paper. From that tracing I made the template for the body. It was the same process for the headstock. From there, it was pretty straight-forward construction.

I actually scaled the body down a bit. I think the original is 13 1/2" wide, mine is 12 1/2". The main reason I did this is because my planer is 13" wide. It doesn't hurt that I kinda like small bodies.

The body is 2-piece hard maple. It's topped with a 1/4" flamed maple cap that has been dyed green. The whole thing is triple bound in black/white/black.

The neck is mahogany. Maple is a really bright sounding wood with a lot of bite while mahogany is very warm and mellow. The combination of the two makes for a very balanced sounding guitar. The fretboard is chechen - a rosewood from the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. I inlaid the Ibanez style vine for fret markers.

The headstock shape is from the Rickenbacker 4000 series bass. Their guitar headstocks are pretty boring - just a basic rectangle. This shape really says "Rickenbacker".

I went with all gold hardware on this one. In my eyes, gold hardware is more upscale than black or chrome. With the green flamed maple and the vine inlays, I just felt this one needed a little more bling.

The pickups are Artec mini-humbuckers. I made the volume & tone have push/pull pots with a coil tap and a phase switch.

Overall, it's a good sounding little guitar that has ended up being pretty versatile. I'm not 100% happy with the final shape of the neck, but overall it's worth showing off.

end tables

Here's one of the two end tables I made. Doing things like this is what lets me keep making the guitars. It keeps the wife happy. They're made from sapele and zebrawood.

Sapele is one of my favorite woods to work with. There is no strong odor, it cuts like butter, sands up smooth & easy, there's no significant amount of chip-out when routing, isn't very heavy, and finishes up beautifully. It has a chocolate brown color similar to mahogany. It's often suggested as a mahogany substitute. For a while Cadillac was using it on their dashboards and other accents.

Sapele is also really cool in that it's all ribbon-striped, depending on how it's cut. One way and it's flat, almost maple-like in the grain. Rotate it 90 degrees and it gets a wonderful ribbon stripe that just glows with depth.

Zebrawood is starting to get some attention in woodworking circles. I love woods with a clear, distinctive grain, and zebrano fits the bill. It's not very fun to work with, though. It stinks, chips, tears out in the planer, is hard & dense so it doesn't cut easily, and it's heavy. So why would anyone want to work with such a PIA wood? Because it's so striking to look at.

I mean really... just look at that grain! Dark brown streaks in with the honey-tan background. The grain has for lack of better terms a sub-grain, like the grain of your carpet. But these sub-grains run in about 1" streaks that alternate directions. They shimmer with different reflective characteristics depending on how the light hits it. So yea, it just sucks to work with, but the end result is well worth the effort you put into it.

Music is life

In the past two years, I've made a LOT of stuff, learning a ton along the way: a series of wall crosses, a pair of end tables, a number of boxes, some frames, a couple of decorative pieces, and if memory serves 13 guitars.

Guitars are the real obsession. I've been playing since 1987. I'd die on the inside if I weren't able to play again. Playing has become extremely therapeutic for me. It's allowed me to express the depth of every emotion I have. I thank God for it too, because words just can't express what one feels. My fingers press down on and bend the strings, giving voice to my anguish, joy, love, rage, extacy, and depression. When my ex wife forced me out of my house, the rage poured through the guitar and out of the amp in a so clear a way you could feel the hate in the air. When my mother died, the strings cried the tears that I couldn't. When my children were born, the joy fell off the fretboard and through the house. When I'm at church, the chords and solos are my personal love letter to God.

One of my life's ambitions was to build my own instrument. Let me tell you - the satisfaction of pouring out all of the emotion I just described, but with an instrument I made with my bare hands is like nothing I've experienced before.

It's odd, really. I'm sick... diseased... consumed with G.A.S. No, not the typical male gas that will kill clouds of insects. Well.... I am filled with that too, much to the chagrin of my wife, but I'm talking about Guitar Acquisition Syndrome. For years, I had only one guitar: the 1988 Steinberger I was given as a graduation present from High School. I played it until 1999 when I "made" my first guitar: a kit from Carvin. I put quotes on made because I didn't make a damn thing. Everything came in the package done and just needed to be assembled. In the two years I've been messing with this, I've made 13, disassembled a few for parts, and have probably 5-10 more that I know I want to make. It's a disease, but I don't want the cure.

I suppose an introduction is in order...

For the foolish few who happen to stumble across this blog, you'll most likely want to know who and what I'm doing here. It's simple - I don't really have anything else to do.

OK, maybe there's more to it than that. I love wood. I love making things from wood. The process of taking a raw piece of limber and crafting it into something usable, be it functional or decorative... The satisfaction is beyond belief. It's all about the journey. The old saying about the destination not being as important as the journey was never more true for me as when I began this obsession.

Which begs the question "How did this all start for you?"

I always loved making things with my hands. My favorite toys when I was a kid were Legos, Tinker Toys, Erector sets, and the like. I loved building plastic model kits: cars, planes, tanks, robots... it didn't matter.

I eventually grew out of that phase (or so I thought) and took all the art classes I could in high school. I wanted to draw comic books - one of my other passions. Thankfully, I realized in my senior year that I simply didn't have the dedication to be a college art student. Still, I gained a sense of design and appreciation that I'd not have had otherwise.

Through my 20's and part of my 30's, I was involved in Games Workshop tabletop games. To over-simplify: I made war with little army men. While the games were fun, it was painting the miniatures that I enjoyed. It wasn't long before I was entering my figures into painting contests and winning them. I couldn't have done half of what I did without the basic art fundamentals I learned in high school. I eventually fell away from the gaming part of the hobby and concentrated on just painting.

As with all things, the painting interest passed. I'd probably still be doing it were it not for my wife. For Christmas 2007, she got me a Dremel set. That's all it took: one lonely Dremel. I almost immediately put down the brushes and dove into the deep end of the power tool pool. I've now taken over the old storage room in the basement to use as my workshop. Despite all of the dust collection and air filtration I've put it, the basement still gets covered in a fine layer of sawdust.

So it's all her fault. I get to remind her of that whenever she starts to complain about it.

I'll be posting some work in progress pictures of whatever I'm working on. When I get another digital camera, that is. My old one gave up the ghost about 6 weeks ago. Despite the hints, nobody got me one for Christmas, so I'll have to slog it out to Best Buy or Wal-Mart for another.

So what is it that I actually make?

Give it a bit and I'll show ya....