OffsetGuitars.com

Hello my OSG friends,

It's been a long time since I posted anything here. Between Photobucket deleting everyone's photos, moving multiple times and Covid it's been a quiet few years on the projects.

So, 8 or 9 years ago when I first joined the forum I tried my hand at building my very first guitar body:



This was intended to be a thin pancake Jazzmaster style guitar with a lipstick pickup and back painted pickguard. I got about this far with the project and then gave up because I made a rookie mistake and realized the body wasn't completely flat after I finished it. This stayed in the garage for a few years.

Fast forward a few years and while in Montreal I acquired an old Hy-lo guitar project for $50 on craigslist. The pictures below are just as a reference to what style of guitar it was:





The guitar was the one pickup version (missing the pickup), the tailpiece was screwed in with stripped hardware store screws and the body was plywood and a bit cracked and split. I figured I could use the parts at some point for another project. I then realized I had the pancake Jazzmaster body kicking about and I could use that.

Also, in this time I managed to get my hands on a thickness plainer. The original white paint job was already wrecked from the extreme hot and cold of the Canadian weather so I figured it was worth trying to fix my mistakes.

The thickness plainer was a bit too narrow for a Jazzmaster body so I reworked the shape. I believe I drew around a Strat on the lower part of the body. I then rerouted the cavity and the neck pocket. Then, I refinished it in a metallic root beer brown colour:



(Sorry for the lack of photos and all the fingerprints on that last one, I didn't take that many through my progress.)

I also cut the Hy-lo metal pickguard to make it more like a control plate. For the actual pickguard I bought a pearloid Jazzmaster pickguard with no pickup bridge or control routs for $17 on eBay. I then reshaped the area around the neck and where the control plate would be with a coping saw.

As the project was using old parts I bought a low rider gold foil off reverb to go with the overall vibe. I also had an old OEM Jazzmaster tailpiece that I made into a hardtail. Below is the almost finished project:





Overall I am very happy with this fun little guitar. I can't believe it took me so long to finish!

Looks cool!
I'm pretty keen on Metallic brown.

Looks great! I think you did well with the shapes and parts you had to work with, it's all judged very nicely and comes together as a whole. Sometimes these hacksaw modification jobs end up looking like a bit of a dog's dinner, particularly where Strats are involved (I was a little concerned when you mentioned the Strat outline!) but your approach has resulted in something that looks more like a "copy" catalog guitar from the '60s that has its own style, I think it's very successful!

I love it... but do you just play it as a five-string?

Cool, it has a slightly Coral Hornet vibe to it (to me at least). I like it!

countertext wrote: ↑

Sun May 09, 2021 7:59 pm

I love it... but do you just play it as a five-string?

Haha! Well spotted. I actually just broke a string on my other guitar so I only had 5 strings to use!

I really wanted to make it look like an old teisco/60's Japanese guitar, because of the parts I was using- I like the fact a lot of those old guitars look like whoever built them needed to make the parts fit. From the original Hy-Lo guitar I used the neck & tuners, the bridge, the pickguard (modded) and the knobs.

With regards to the usage of the Strat- I actually did a mock up on my iPad a few times before I went ahead with the chop.

I thought this might be a bit of a wall hanger but so far it is a really fun guitar to play. The neck Has a non- adjustable truss rod and is like baseball bat.