Making an Electric Guitar: Part 3

All right, make music, Ginny. All right, that's sort of low volume. Hit your switch there, Oh, that's a little louder. Give us full blow. All right now let's see, go in the middle position and just open 'cause I know people wanna hear how the guitar sounds.

Alright, so what we wanna do, Ginny's got the guitar all done, and in fact has, since we talked last, I already surprised her boyfriend with the guitar. Yes. So we wanna do a little wrap up here and take it through what we did in order to get done. All right, so I'm gonna take this out, so it doesn't kinda interfere with looking at it. All right, so I think the last time they were here with us, there was no lacquer around.

That's a while ago. Yeah. And, what we did for lacquer is we used a guitar specific and instrument specific lacquer, aerosol can, very easy application. Companies that sell Luthier supplies, sell products like this. So you can find that stuff online.

So that worked out really well for us. Now what about the pickguard, Ginny? That's a little unusual but you had some very distinct reasoning there. Yeah, so we decided to do a Plexiglass pickguard cause I really wanted to see the stripes underneath, cause the reason we pick the wood is because of it's kinda cool real stripes there. So I was like, well let's do Plexiglass and then you can really see that.

And I like that idea a lot. It doesn't interfere with looking at the beauty of the wood. And show 'em the back, cause I think last time they were here, we didn't have the covers on. Yeah, so these are with the covers now. And remember what wood those are?

Wenge, Wenge. Yeah, so, we've got access holes here, for the electronics. And then here, this acts as a plate to sort of distribute the weight because we turn this into a bolt-on neck. The original Firebird design, the neck would have been integral to the body, but we didn't wanna, That would be really difficult. You have to get one like giant chunk of wood to curve out the neck for that, And do all the shaping and the fretting, Around it, We were fretting about the fretting.

We were fretting about the fretting. Yeah, so a couple of people have asked about how the neck went on and you remember the, what the assembly looks like underneath here. Yeah, it was like the weird cut. It was like u-shaped. Yeah, we've got a pocket in there, and then what did we put in the back of the neck to catch?

Are these just screws only go into the wood? No, they go into the neck. This part, woods. Okay, woods can be hard, especially when you don't do woodworking every day. So we've used threaded inserts in the back of neck.

It's not uncommon for these to just be wood screws. But we felt a little funky about, you know, if it goes together, comes apart, goes together, comes apart, as we adjust the action and stuff. So we put 1032, Threaded Inserts in the maple and then these are more like stove bolts rather than wood screws that are holding that all together. And the other thing that's interesting, if we can show the folks at home, you can see where the neck meets the body. There's just a little sliver of wood there, and why did we do that?

What's the other thing in there. Well most guitars, they supposed to have the one degree and it's like for playing purposes. One and a half degree. One and a half degree apparently. My numbers are off.

It's okay. Yeah, so we just kind of slipped that in there and you can always take it out or, Yeah, so there's just a shim. And from a woodworking perspective, the back of the neck was flat. We routed the pocket. So then the question was, well, how are we gonna make the neck sit at one and a half degrees?

And it sounded like that'd be really hard to machine in. So instead we made a one and a half degrees shim, put that in there. And that was a very easy way to pitch the neck to the right angle. Tune-o-matic bridge and what flavor pickups? Seymour Duncan's.

And Seymour Duncan, what that goofy name? Golly, I don't know. Whether Humbuckers, Yeah. And then a I'm forgetting, they're like a G2 and a G3 or something like that. Something weird.

They're slightly different. And a friend of ours actually helped wire that in. I know for me, one of the scary things was, we had all the pockets cut. And then you have to drill a hole to connect all the pockets. Like under the thing.

Yeah, at a funny angle, so this to this and this, to this and this to this, And the bridge had to be grounded, so there's a hole that comes up here, so that that could happen. And so when we drill those holes, we kind of measured 18 times and drilled ones 'cause we were very afraid of the prospect of the drill bit coming out the other face of the guitar, was pretty scary. Now I see that the head has been customized ma'am. It has. Tell us a little bit about the customization that you requested, Well, we definitely wanted to do not, are we talking for shape or are we talking, Well, you can, you can talk about both aspects of what makes that headstock unique.

Well, we did the shape, first of all, the head is different and for most it's what the shape would be if it was a genuine Firebird. So I, that's why I kind of really tried to copy. But you did all that free hand. I did that freehand, terrifying. Terrifyingly freehand.

And then we did with the laser engraving. I wanted because I mean, you know, what, if we wanted to make another guitar, you know, you graduate more than once I guess, if you go that route. And so we kind of wanted to think of something that would be kind of clever. So we kinda went with the Vondi, after Von Driska. Well that where that's from, don't worry, And the other thing suggested by another friend of ours, that I was not aware of, are these little metal brackets.

Remember what this thing is called? The string trees. Yeah, and what can happen when you do the tuners in this configuration where these tuners are so far from the nut, is that you can see that here, where there is no string tree, there at such a shallow angle that if you really play the heck out of the guitar, which Ryan does, play the heck out of the guitar. Well I hope so. It's actually possible for the strings to pop out of the nut.

So by introducing the string tree, it pulls those down so that they're coming off at a sharper angle. The other thing you can get here is a buzz, because these strings are not tightly up against the nut. So what happened here is, the day Ginny was actually, going the guitar to Ryan. I was doing the last little bit of assembly, she was already with Ryan. I was gonna meet him and I dropped the components of this other string tree, and they ended up on my floor and I was never able to find them.

So we're still waiting to get that last string tree on, that's why that other hole is there. They'll get screwed in place right there to draw those strings down. You don't need to do 'em up here on the E and the a, No, cause they are too close already. Yeah, cause they are already fine. So really this is our last video, Ginny, any advice for the aspiring young woodworkers at home, who might wanna build their very own electric guitar?

You think it's not going to take a lot of time, but it does. And because there's a lot of details. Yeah, yeah and you're like, oh, well, I mean you just kind of put the body and the neck together, you know, you just kind of shape it out and it's like, no. But now that being said, was it, did it take so long that you would never, ever, ever do this again? I would definitely like, I would do this again, maybe for like another present, but maybe in a while.

It's just you have to have patience because you gotta wait for the parts to get in and then you gotta wait for like the finish till dry and everything to just kind of come together. But now that we did one, we know more, and I can say we had the holes for the electronics laid out for like two weeks. I kept looking at him and Ginny was really frustrated. I'm looking at him and looking at Ginny and say, when are we gonna cut those holes? Well, I really wanna make sure they're right.

So I'd measure again and we'd look at it again, and then we'd look at another plan and then we'd look at them some more. And so now that we've been down that road, once, like we could move a little more aggressive with the next one. Are you happy with the African Black Limba that you chose for the body? Yeah I like a lot. Beautiful choice and the guitar really does sound great.

Now you've given it to Ryan. How has any comments from him about the action, about the guitar? Does he like it? Does he hate it? Can I get to keep it cause he doesn't like or what's the deal.

I I'm assuming he likes it. I haven't gotten a lot of negative feedback. He says the action's really good, and it's like really close on the pickups, which I guess is a very good thing in guitars. It's just kinda gotta wear it, wear down. It's a little stiff and that's cause it's a brand new handcrafted guitar.

So, So, wear down, what does he mean by that? Wear down, just kind of like, because it's so, I don't know, the action is so stiff in. To get everything loosen up. You gotta loosen it up a little bit. Just cause it's a brand new guitar.

All right. Well, so you would advise, people, get a good plan. Yeah, Get it laid out. Say I'm gonna have it done by here and then when you get to that point, it's gonna be like three months after that. Plan, wood selection, we didn't use a lot of really specialized tools, right.

Not really. Table slide, joiner bands, router. The installation of the electrics was definitely the hardest part of it. Cause we had never done it. We had never done it and we'd had to get the guy to help us out.

Yeah, anything else you think people need, for the first time they're gonna do this? I don't know. I think that's, I think that's it Not, they wouldn't need like a really good mentor, who could help them. You know I, I think I really did most of this, All right, well, I had a blast doing this with you Ginny and I hope you enjoyed it too. And I know from the look on Ryan's face, when he was surprised with this guitar.

He was certainly surprised. He was certainly surprised and he really loved it. He sat in the music store and played it for about an hour. He promised us donuts. So I was pretty upset, it was an hour.

Ginny arranged hanging on the rack in a guitar store and Ryan walked in and there it was with a special personal note on it from Ginny. So very cool way to gift it to him. All right. Awesome. Are you happy with it?

Yeah, I'm happy with it. You're happy, I'm happy and I'm really glad we did it for Ryan.