Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
BUILD YOUR OWN GUITAR
Although I’ve played guitar for decades, and I can spend hours admiring the craftsmanship of a Fender, I’d never considered building one. I didn’t even know I could try. Until I met Jeff.
Over the last three months senior home editor Roy Berendsohn ( Ask Roy) and I have been building a guitar in the Popular Mechanics workshop. With so many roadblocks behind us, we can't wait to finish this damn thing. Now, perched against my knee are two halves of our guitar body – a worn-down clarinet case – connected by a dangling wire. Despite the ragged appearance, the parts are all assembled, the guitar is strung, and it's time for a sound check. With sweaty hands I connect a quarter-inch (6,35 mm) cable from the guitar's output jack to my amp, flip the on switch, wait a minute for the amp's tubes to heat up, and flick the standby. I strum out a big open G chord, Pete Townshend–style, throwing my whole arm into it.
Nothing. Just the muffled scratch of strings resonating against synthetic leather. Did we solder to the wrong post? We couldn't have. We consulted experts, watched videos, sent pictures to the pickup manufacturer. Was our humbucker too low to pick up an audio signal? We'll have to check everything. Again.
Guitar has been my passion since I was 12 years old. As part of my quest to grow as a musician, I've analysed and broken down pieces of music on a molecular level, exploring note for note why something sounds good, how musicians choose the notes they do, and how they achieve desired tones and textures. Why not break a physical guitar down the same way? While I've developed a deep appreciation for guitar craftsmanship, I had never even done any of my own repairs. I was too afraid I'd mess something up. But then one of our writers, Chad Stokes, mentioned a guy he knew named Jeff Conley. Jeff's a designer at Google and a singer-songwriter who, for the past ten years, has been building his own guitars, mostly out of clarinet cases but also salad bowls and hip flasks. I asked Jeff to teach me.
Jeff's foray into guitar building was forced on him, in a way. After playing a club gig he came out to his car to discover that his most precious gui-
tars, a 1960 Gibson ES-125 and a 1963 Gibson LG-0, were gone. Rather than wallow in his loss or buy expensive replacements, Jeff tinkered with a junk guitar for a couple of weeks before getting the courage to build his own.
Jeff doesn't really work from a plan. Since these aren't standard guitars, there's no blueprint to follow. Even on his tenth guitar build, he says, he still made mistakes. “It's a lot of trial and a whole shitload of error,” he says.
My first step was to enlist help. I don't have much woodworking experience, but I do have Roy. And although he's never built a guitar, he has built nearly everything else.
For a week, all we did was plan. We drew diagrams, only to spot an issue, start over, and draw more diagrams. I scoured ebay, Craigslist and Etsy for suitable guitar bodies. Everything seemed to have a problem: too short, too narrow, too many huge cracks. Each time I felt close to buying something, we'd convince ourselves that it wasn't perfect. It wouldn't work. What I eventually realised is that there is a big difference between perfect and workable. We were never going to find the perfect pieces. If we kept looking for them, we'd be stuck in the planning phase forever. What we needed to do was find something close. And then make it work. We needed to start.
BODY AND BRIDGE PLACEMENT
Jeff uses clarinet cases because they're roughly the same size as a guitar body. But not just any clarinet case will do. Many aren't long and wide enough to span our scale length and hold the frame, or short and narrow enough that they would be comfortable to play. I found a decrepit 1970's clarinet case, shipped from France, for R600. The first thing we did was gut the velvet interior with a crowbar and then we added 50x75 mm support beams on the top and bottom of the case (Fig. 1).
For a guitar to function, the strings need to be the proper length, called the scale length, and the distance from the inner edge of the nut (where the strings start to run down the neck below the tuning pegs) to the centre of the 12th fret has to be the same as the distance between the centre of the 12th fret and where the strings meet the saddles in the bridge. Using my Gibson ES-339 as a reference, we cut an opening in the body with an oscillating tool and joined the neck to the body near the 17th fret. That gave us enough overlap for the neck to grip the body, but not so much that we ran out of room to mount the bridge when we accounted for scale length. After that, positioning the humbucker – a type of pickup, the part that converts string vibrations to an electrical signal – would be simple. Specific placement affects timbre rather than functionality. Even if we weren't perfect, it would still work. The closer you put the pickup to the bridge, the more trebly your tone will be.
The guitar didn't look like much at this point. After all that theorising and planning I was starting to feel disheartened. Especially when people would ask me how things were coming. Without something to show them, I felt like we hadn't accomplished much.
“Please work,” I mutter.
BRIDGE ATTACHMENT AND PICKUP
A round the office, we see Roy as this infallible guru. But even he gets frustrated. The difference is, he doesn’t let it stop him. When I couldn’t see past the problem, Roy didn’t just give the solution to me; he led me to it, so it felt like I was building the guitar with his help, instead of the other way around.
With the upper support bar mounted to the neck on the front of the body, we had to deal with the airspace in the back of the body, between the support and the top of the case. Roy grabbed different pieces of scrap from the shop until he found one that filled the gap, then crosscut it to a length wider than the support so that we could screw the bridge through the case and into solid wood (Fig. 2). On the pickup, though, instead of the support bar being too low, it was now too high. We had to cut out a notch in the support with a circular saw, then cut it again (and again) when it wasn’t quite deep enough (Fig. 3). It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I realised the pickup came with adjustable springs, allowing you to control its height (Fig. 4). Like Jeff says a lot of trial, and even more error. If I ever want to adjust my pickup height to alter the loudness of the strings, I can’t do it without significant work, but thankfully we have it at a good spot.
If we'd had a planer and bigger pieces of lumber, I would have preferred to fill out the whole case with wood. That would mean routing cavities for our pickup and electronic connection but it would also have improved the guitar’s sturdiness and sustain. I wasn’t so worried about perfect anymore. I just wanted something that worked. I could adapt to the imperfections.
WIRING
Iwas most anxious about the electronics. I’d never soldered and I was scared I’d create a short, shocking myself if I messed up. The first part was easy enough: We drilled a hole with a bit the size of the output jack and screwed the jack in place from outside the case. Jeff doesn’t use volume or tone pots – the little knobs on the guitar body that give you precise control –in his guitars, and we wanted to follow his stripped-down model. But I couldn’t find any wiring schematics online that didn’t use at least a volume pot. This made me nervous enough that we stopped working for a few days while I searched for an appropriate diagram. When I found nothing, I called Jeff. Like Roy, he doesn’t get hung up for long. He also doesn’t complicate things. All we had to do was solder one point to connect the output jack to the pickup, then create a ground path back to the amplifier by crimping the wire to the fitting post (above).
STRINGS
Jeff had warned me that you don’t know what these guitars are going to do until you string them up. The neck could bend under the tension, rendering it unplayable, or the intonation could be off. So after we’d added the tuning pegs and went to string the guitar up, I was already a little nervous. On top of that, despite Jeff’s advice to use a floating bridge and tailpiece, I’d opted for a Fender hardtail. With a floating setup nothing is screwed down. The tension of the strings keeps the bridge in place. This lets you adjust intonation at any time. I wanted a
hardtail bridge because I’m typically a lead guitarist, and I wanted something that could take the tension of intense string bends and aggressive picking.
Of course the intonation was off. At the 12th fret every note was too sharp. Apparently we’d placed the bridge too far back on the body. You do have about 10 mm of wiggle room to change the scale length if you adjust the saddles but even after screwing them as far forward as they could go, the notes were still sharp. When we measured the scale length, I’d mistakenly measured from the front of the saddle instead of the middle. Even so, the intonation is not horrendous, so I decided to keep it as is. At some point, I’d like to fix it. I’ll have to unscrew the bridge, fill the holes with wood glue, bore new holes slightly forward on the body, and, if the piece of wood filling the gap under the case isn’t long enough, open up the case and adjust it, too. It was an easy mistake but that doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed in myself for making it.
Slightly sharp or not, I finally had a playable instrument. I strummed it a few times unplugged. I was pretty pumped to find that it played at a comfortable action – the string height above the fret board – with minimal fret buzz and surprisingly decent sustain. It was time to plug in. And then, well, you know. Nothing.
WIRING ( AGAIN)
I was crushed. Roy suggested checking with his brother, Paul, who has a background in electrical engineering and has repaired a lot of amps over the years. After looking at a few pictures, Paul noticed that our solder wasn’t sticking properly. He posited that the contacts were plated with chrome and nickel. Their surfaces were too smooth and dense to bond. We roughed them up a bit with sandpaper and tried again. The solder stuck.
This time, the guitar worked. Electrified myself, I hammered out the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode’. With only one pickup and no tone controls, the guitar isn’t super-versatile but the sound is rounder and less tinny than I expected. It’s sturdy. I can wail on it, holding out long notes, and pluck out choppy percussive licks. I can play it soft or hard. The synthetic leather didn’t even deaden the dynamics the way I thought it would. Obviously my guitar doesn’t have the fat, rich sustain of a Les Paul but it does have a raw, grainy dynamism, and that’s pure rock ’n’ roll. PM