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.
