My guitar built from a battleship

Self built and self assembly ;)

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NippleWrestler
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My guitar built from a battleship

Post by NippleWrestler »

Looks like this:

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by rickenbackerkid »

excellent effort! It's actaully a really pleasing shape

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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by AiRdAd »

That's a massive effort !!! It looks fantastic!
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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by jeremyb »

Super cool man, love it!
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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by NippleWrestler »

bbrunskill wrote:excellent effort! It's actaully a really pleasing shape
You should see the Phoenix. It's gorgeous:

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And here's some nicer shots with more accurate colours:

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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by vintage52 »

Very nice!

All those grains in the neck are beautiful.

Well done on an excellent job.
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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by Lawrence »

nice work! I like your creativity on the pickup mounting. Might steal that! I am imagining the mounts countersunk....
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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by Jay »

Good work there. Really like the neck. Is that pickup man called Geoff by any chance?
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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by Zaulkin »

Bloody awesome.

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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by Starfire »

Looks great. And looks like you knew what you were doing when you built it.

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Re: My guitar built from a battleship

Post by GrantB »

Great stuff...superb effort
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