Instruments for my Kid

Adinol

Member
Greetings,

In another thread I posted some pictures of a home made "Gibson" ES-335 that I made for my kid. There were some very positive responses so I decided to share some more photos of some other instruments I've been making for/with my kid.

He saw Bo Diddley on YouTube and immediately wanted a guitar like that. But he had specific requests and changed some details.

It has to have a carver top and rounded corners, and a very specific shape for the pickguard.

Here's a photo.

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You can't see that the guitar has a carved top, so you'll have to take my word for it. It's a neck through body. The neck is a laminate maple/mahogany/maple. Believe it or not, those pieces of wood are from forklift kickers (kind of like pallets). Near me there's a Lumber Liquidator outlet and I noticed that their forklift kickers and pallets are sometimes made form exotic woods. I believe their supplier simply has scraps that are not good for cutting into flooring boards and it simply makes more business sense to cut them into forklift pallets than to pay to dump them. I showed them what I've been building for my kid and now they are happy to give me whatever scrap wood I want.

The fretboard is mahogany from a curb side furniture find, dyed black with India ink.

The side wings of the body are old pine. I've been renovating my kitchen and those are from an old 2x4, dating back to 1908 when my house was built.

The back is just screwed in and it is made from the bottom of an old kitchen drawer. The pickguard came from the same drawers.

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It is a short scale length (19.75") and narrow string spread. So, I wound my own pickups. The flatwork for the pickups are some pieces of acrylic sheets that (you guessed it) someone threw into a dumpster. Polepieces are neodimium magnets (I bought) and I also bought the magnet wire, the pots, stainless frets, tuning pegs, truss rod and two furniture bolts that are used for strap buttons. The internal lead wires are from discarded headphones that I found on the street. I just like the idea of using other people's garbage to build something.

My kid designed the headstock shape. It has a scrap piece of black acrylic epoxied on top. He wanted to write Bo Diddle Guitar on top, so I let him write it with his own hand, then I took a dentist's drill bit and engraved over his handwriting. I filled it with epoxy mixed with some leftover baby powder and sanded it flush.

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My kid participated in most of the gluing, dyed the guitar red and also installed the hardware.

That's not the last guitar we built, but I'll do a follow up post later.
 
Thanks, guys.

I'll post some build photos of the Bo Diddley guitar, then I'll post about some other instruments.

So, my kid has a small record collection and about a year ago he was mostly spinning 45's. Bo Diddley was one of his favorites, very much liking the songs Mona and Who Do You Love.

As I said in the ES-335 thread, I eventually let him watch those performers on YouTube. Here I have a picture of him watching Bo Diddley.

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He drew me a picture as said, "Can we make this guitar?" By that time we had already made two Chuck Berry guitars, so was was already used to the idea that guitars are something we make at home.

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I also enjoyed the past two builds (first guitars I ever made in my life) so I agreed and we got to work.

At that time I was opening up the wall in my kitchen. I live in an old brownstone built in 1908, so I had a few 100+ y/old pieces of lumber that I really didn't want to throw away. Here's one 2x4.

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And here it is cleaned up.

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I also had a few found pieces of maple and mahogany, so I made a laminate neck through, with the side wings from the old 2x4.

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At that point the guitar was going to look like that, but then my kid started having some creative requests to change things. He wanted rounded corners and a carved top (all to make his old man's life easier).

I really had not time to add any levels of complexity to this build so I... well.. I agreed to do it.

I'll post more son...
 
So, here are some more photos of the Bo Diddley guitar build.

Here I routed the truss rod channel. It's a 2-way truss rod from StewMac. On my first ES-335 build I made the truss rod from a scrap U-channel and leftover thread rod and even machined the nut. But for future builds I concluded I wouldn't be saving any money making my own truss rod, unless I was using found materials or leftovers form other projects. This 14-1/4" acoustic guitar truss rod only costs $12 and is perfect length. It is a shorter than a usual truss rod and is perfect size for my short scale length builds.
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Next, roughed the neck on the band saw.
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I used a hand rasp and file to do the neck profile and widened the headstock (that part turned out to be unnecessary). The neck profile is not the usual C shape, but more like a rounded off squarish shape, to go with the guitar look and keep it looking home made.
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Fret slots are cut on a mini table saw using a mini cutoff blade that I usually use for cutting brass tubes on my mini mite saw. My kid wanted only one inlay on the octave and it had to look like an inlay from the J-200 guitar. I intentionally did not want it to look like a perfect factory made inlay. I just carved out the shape with a dentist drill bit on my Dremel tool, filled it with epoxy (mixed with baby powder), shaved off the overflow while it was still curing and next day sanded it flush. The fretboard has a 10.5" radius.
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My kid hammered in the stainless steel frets. At this point the ends are filed to 35 degrees, but I didn't do leveling and crowning, yet. Leveling/crowning was done after gluing the fretboard to the neck. That's because I noticed that the fretboard bends after the fretwire is hammered in. That's because the fret tangs are a snug fit inside the narrow slots.
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This piece of acrylic was also a curb side find (you can find anything in big cities). A friend of mine has a decent laser cutter for his projects and I'm always welcome to cut stuff there. So, I laid out the shapes in Illustrator and laser cut this routing template. Some wood cracks had to be filled with Epoxy, mixed with a dark pigment.
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After routing the pickup cavities.
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Initially the body was flush with the neck. I brought the body level down with my router. Afterwards, I regretted doing that, because the fingerboard raised the neck level altogether further than I had intended. So, now it's more like an archtop. If I make another one I'll skip this step.
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I used a handheld belt sander to carve the top. The picture can't show it, but the top does have a noticeable curve sloping in all 4 directions. I also kept it all rough.
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The fretboard is ready for gluing.
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More photos to come.
 
Might as well finish up the Bo Diddley thread, now.

Another thing I did (no photos) was to hollow out some cavities at the back. Once that was done my kid had the pleasure of choosing the color and putting the dye on. It's just a water based stain.
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On my first two builds I cut the pickup flatwork by hand, but that process it too time consuming. So, I decided to cut the flatwork on my friend's laser cutter. These are 1/16" x 1/2" neodimium magnets snug fit and Epoxied. The material is 1/16" acrylic (curb side find). I found one black sheet and one mirror sheet, so I decided to make zebra humbuckers. I used 42 AWG wire (no photos).
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These pickups have a very narrow pole piece spread (42mm). As I learned, commercially available junior guitars are nor properly proportioned for kids. I believe that's because they use stock hardware (pickups and the bridge) and then resize the guitar around those. It would be to costly for high volume companies to attempt making small hardware and would bring the cost of junior guitars up. Those companies are all about selling the brand name and very little thought is actually put into product development, when it comes to junior electric guitars. For small kids, those guitars will be very difficult to handle and parents will assume it's all due to the fact that the child is still small. That's partially true, but it's also true that those guitars simply don't fit. Imagine playing a guitar that has the string spread of a 6-string bass guitar. And now imagine you don't even know how to play the guitar, yet. I can't imagine any kid saying, "Wow! I didn't know the guitar was so easy to play."

Anyway... here I am figuring out how to mount the pickup coils. So, I made mounting brackets out of scrap aluminum sheets. The 8 black screws are salvaged from discarded electronic equipment, but the springs are from StewMac. Also, my kid didn't want a tail piece on this guitar and he came up with the idea to drill 6 holes through the guitar. This solution already exists in the world of guitars, but to the best of my knowledge he came up with it independently. So, he marked off the exact spot where I had to drill the holes and I bought string ferrules from a Cigar Box Guitar supply vendor.
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due to the tiny diameter 1/16" pole pieces, I had no way to safely mount the coils on the bracket, without risking to drive the mounting screws into the coils, so I ended up Epoxi-ing the pickups onto the brackets. The lead wires are from a set of found earphones. The pickups are wax potted.
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Here's another look at the finished product. I ended up chopping up a scrap wooden dowel for the volume/tone knobs and dipped them into black India ink. The bridge is a Haagen-Dazs ice cream stick (I actually had to force my kid to eat an ice cream so we can recover the stick). The string-height adjustment knobs are two dimes and the bridge is mahogany, dyed black, then carved for intonation to expose the natural wood on one side.
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And the back, once again. The stop plate for the strings is the same that I used for the pickup flatwork. The entire back can be removed, but the way it's made now I also would have to remove the strings. First time I'll restring this guitar I'll also cut out a slot for the string retainer, so it won't rest on the removable back. As you can see I ran out of screws, ah well.
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Plugged in, this guitar screams. I got carried away with some solos and my kid stopped me to inform me that this guitar can only be used to play Bo Diddley songs, and that Bo Diddley doesn't play like that.

One thing I'm not too happy with on this guitar is that I wasn't able to completely get rid of fret buzz. I leveled and crowned the frets many times, but can't get it 100% right. Oddly, this was not the case on any other guitars, so I don't know... I guess I'm not yet ready to re-fret my vintage Gibson L-7, on my own.

This concludes my posts about the Bo Diddley guitar build.

This instrument building just took a life of it's own and now it's kind of what we do, so I'll keep posting more.

To be continued...
 
You are a freak of nature mate! that's just incredible! Your kids gonna be some Luthier one day I am guessing.. I really like that Screw nut by the way, I might try that
 
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