My guitar built from a battleship
Moderators: Slowy, Capt. Black
- NippleWrestler
- Vintage Post Junkie
- Posts: 2891
- meble-kuchenne.warszawa.pl
- Joined: Sat Jan 02, 2016 5:05 pm
- Has liked: 78 times
- Been liked: 1066 times
My guitar built from a battleship
Looks like this:
I built this at the Men's Shed in Glenfield, Auckland over the course of 5 weekends. It began life as a big sapele plank, maybe 1.2m x 70mm x 50mm or thereabouts. This plank was brought in by one of the guys there along with a bunch of other sapele. This guy was an officer aboard a ship of which I forget the name, it was decommissioned in the 1970s so he took all the timber used in the munitions hold to hold up the racks. This is one of the planks used to hold up the shelves.
Said plank was then chopped into 5 pieces and turned into a (very heavy) guitar body via the wonders of clamps, glue, and a thicknesser. It came out around 47mm in the centre.
The neck is 5 pieces and made of jarrah, vitex, and padauk in the middle. The fingerboard is heart puriri and I used rewarewa for the inlay dots (just made on a plug cutter and glued in) and I used a BBQ skewer for the side dots. It's Gibson scale, and modeled very loosely off a Scott Walker Phoenix.
It's got a beefy neck, what Gibson would call '50s style'. I wanted a huge honker for the feel and toanz. 12" radius on there too. The cutaway is rounded over on the playing side.
I had some sapele left over so turned some knobs and made some pickup surround things. I don't get why the plastic rings are so common, they're ugly and these things are so simple to make:
I made the little indicator position by making a slice in the knob with a saw, then gluing in some maple veneer. Easy. Looks like this when everything is on:
As for the electronics: got the big ass Alpha pots (the good ones) which are both push/pull for some splitting action. The usual Switchcraft switch and the pickups were handmade by a dude in Howick who hand builds these things to your specs.
I built this at the Men's Shed in Glenfield, Auckland over the course of 5 weekends. It began life as a big sapele plank, maybe 1.2m x 70mm x 50mm or thereabouts. This plank was brought in by one of the guys there along with a bunch of other sapele. This guy was an officer aboard a ship of which I forget the name, it was decommissioned in the 1970s so he took all the timber used in the munitions hold to hold up the racks. This is one of the planks used to hold up the shelves.
Said plank was then chopped into 5 pieces and turned into a (very heavy) guitar body via the wonders of clamps, glue, and a thicknesser. It came out around 47mm in the centre.
The neck is 5 pieces and made of jarrah, vitex, and padauk in the middle. The fingerboard is heart puriri and I used rewarewa for the inlay dots (just made on a plug cutter and glued in) and I used a BBQ skewer for the side dots. It's Gibson scale, and modeled very loosely off a Scott Walker Phoenix.
It's got a beefy neck, what Gibson would call '50s style'. I wanted a huge honker for the feel and toanz. 12" radius on there too. The cutaway is rounded over on the playing side.
I had some sapele left over so turned some knobs and made some pickup surround things. I don't get why the plastic rings are so common, they're ugly and these things are so simple to make:
I made the little indicator position by making a slice in the knob with a saw, then gluing in some maple veneer. Easy. Looks like this when everything is on:
As for the electronics: got the big ass Alpha pots (the good ones) which are both push/pull for some splitting action. The usual Switchcraft switch and the pickups were handmade by a dude in Howick who hand builds these things to your specs.
- rickenbackerkid
- Vintage Post Junkie
- Posts: 6700
- Joined: Thu Apr 28, 2005 1:52 pm
- Has liked: 206 times
- Been liked: 651 times
- jeremyb
- Chorus of Organs
- Posts: 40893
- Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2008 9:03 am
- Has liked: 7692 times
- Been liked: 4159 times
Re: My guitar built from a battleship
Super cool man, love it!
Slowy wrote: That's the problem; everything rewarding is just such hard work. Regret takes much less effort.
- NippleWrestler
- Vintage Post Junkie
- Posts: 2891
- Joined: Sat Jan 02, 2016 5:05 pm
- Has liked: 78 times
- Been liked: 1066 times
Re: My guitar built from a battleship
You should see the Phoenix. It's gorgeous:bbrunskill wrote:excellent effort! It's actaully a really pleasing shape
And here's some nicer shots with more accurate colours:
- Lawrence
- Vintage Post Junkie
- Posts: 1485
- Joined: Wed Jan 31, 2007 4:00 pm
- Location: Beta Canum Venaticorum
- Has liked: 37 times
- Been liked: 605 times
Re: My guitar built from a battleship
nice work! I like your creativity on the pickup mounting. Might steal that! I am imagining the mounts countersunk....
GrantB wrote:
“You might be cool, but you’ll never be playing a white Steinberger through a JC120, wearing a white jumpsuit with white shoes and sporting a mullet cool”.
“You might be cool, but you’ll never be playing a white Steinberger through a JC120, wearing a white jumpsuit with white shoes and sporting a mullet cool”.
- Jay
- Vintage Post Junkie
- Posts: 7761
- Joined: Sat Sep 25, 2010 9:35 pm
- Has liked: 1630 times
- Been liked: 1297 times
Re: My guitar built from a battleship
Good work there. Really like the neck. Is that pickup man called Geoff by any chance?
When faced with quality, I recognise it every time.
- GrantB
- ADMIN
- Posts: 15843
- Joined: Fri Oct 31, 2003 9:04 am
- Location: Where I need to be
- Has liked: 1353 times
- Been liked: 2087 times
Re: My guitar built from a battleship
Great stuff...superb effort
"Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible god and destroys a visible nature. Unaware that this nature he's destroying is this god he's worshipping." - Hubert Reeves