Minotaur No 5 / Tupelo (where no fish can swim)
Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2018 1:32 am
I thought I'd start a thread for this one, as it has become my favorite way to procrastinate all of my other projects at the minute. Lemme warn y'all - NOT AN OFFSET.
As with every single one of my builds, it started out as a 'let's try to do this in 5 days' build - ply body, hardware from the bottom of the drawer (cousin Kevin's Squier bits, drunken buys from AliExpress, unidentifiable scraps of dangerous metals) but things took another turn...
The headstock design was going to be a clunky Wandre-inspired chunk at the end of the neck but it looked too weird with the rest of the guitar. Here's the current version:
25" scale, glued neck with a slight angle, mini-humbuckers. For now...
I blame this piece of walnut for complicating this build:
As I said before, it came from the bin at a friend's workplace. They make massive pieces and their leftovers are usually enough for one or two guitar bodies. They are nice enough to leave them in a shed at the back for people to help themselves...
Here is where the slab is at after thicknessing, cutting, routing, rabbeting and binding:
Now, this will be my first attempt at making a neck. A few fretboard options:
The three on the left are apricot. I hit my dad's stash last time I went down to my parents' and planed down a dozen of these. Apricot is really hard and has crazy patterns. One of the nicest French timbers IMHO. The one on the right is padauk.
I'm planning to make the headstock veneer out of this leftover piece from the body ('the evil eye of the fish'):
Finally, while going through a stack of dusty planks in my dad's workshop, I stumbled upon this:
It is what we call 'cormier' over here, aka 'sorb tree', 'service tree' or 'mountain ash'. I think it is the hardest indigenous European timber, and has been used to make tools in the old days. It is apparently on the verge of disappearing over here, and I think it was the first time I'd seen it in the form of raw-sawn planks.
Those darker streaks on the walnut remind me of stormy skies; stormy skies make me think of Nick Cave's early stuff; and what better song than 'Tupelo' is there about storms and floods and fish?
Right now the main thing I need to do is to make a fretting jig. We started making one with my English mate the other day, using bearings stolen from a dead scooter we found in the bin as rollers to guide the blade.
More to come soon...
As with every single one of my builds, it started out as a 'let's try to do this in 5 days' build - ply body, hardware from the bottom of the drawer (cousin Kevin's Squier bits, drunken buys from AliExpress, unidentifiable scraps of dangerous metals) but things took another turn...
The headstock design was going to be a clunky Wandre-inspired chunk at the end of the neck but it looked too weird with the rest of the guitar. Here's the current version:
25" scale, glued neck with a slight angle, mini-humbuckers. For now...
I blame this piece of walnut for complicating this build:
As I said before, it came from the bin at a friend's workplace. They make massive pieces and their leftovers are usually enough for one or two guitar bodies. They are nice enough to leave them in a shed at the back for people to help themselves...
Here is where the slab is at after thicknessing, cutting, routing, rabbeting and binding:
Now, this will be my first attempt at making a neck. A few fretboard options:
The three on the left are apricot. I hit my dad's stash last time I went down to my parents' and planed down a dozen of these. Apricot is really hard and has crazy patterns. One of the nicest French timbers IMHO. The one on the right is padauk.
I'm planning to make the headstock veneer out of this leftover piece from the body ('the evil eye of the fish'):
Finally, while going through a stack of dusty planks in my dad's workshop, I stumbled upon this:
It is what we call 'cormier' over here, aka 'sorb tree', 'service tree' or 'mountain ash'. I think it is the hardest indigenous European timber, and has been used to make tools in the old days. It is apparently on the verge of disappearing over here, and I think it was the first time I'd seen it in the form of raw-sawn planks.
Those darker streaks on the walnut remind me of stormy skies; stormy skies make me think of Nick Cave's early stuff; and what better song than 'Tupelo' is there about storms and floods and fish?
Right now the main thing I need to do is to make a fretting jig. We started making one with my English mate the other day, using bearings stolen from a dead scooter we found in the bin as rollers to guide the blade.
More to come soon...