Elecy-Ukey-Layley

When I was at Shrewsbury Folk Festival, I just couldn't resist this cute little electric ukelele!

Yet another thing to do - now I need to learn how to not be as crap at that as well!

The Next Big Thing ......

I really enjoyed this little mini-restoration and started thinking about what I might do next. I've been looking on and off at the acoustic guitar kits that companies like Steward-MacDonald do and thought I might try making something like this mahogany dreadnought.

Then I though I might look at their little Ukelele kit first, the logic being that I could try out the techniques on something cheaper first before committing to the full thing. But when I looked at the process for this, the "hard stuff" like the bindings and purfling doesn't occur on the uke, so there didn't seem to be a lot of value to doing it.

Lots of internet research later and I kept coming back to a few blogs about people that had built their own acoustics from scratch. These weren't guys with huge workshops - one was built pretty much on the kitchen table! 

Looking at the process in detail, I decided that I'm pretty handy and have done a fair bit of woodworking in the past (nothing as fine as this though) and individually there is nothing in each part of the process that really terrifies me, so I'm thinking of building one from scratch!

Two books are constantly referred to:

Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology - A Complete Reference for the Design and Construction of the Steel-string Folk Guitar and the Classical Guitar (Guitar Reference) - William R. Cumpiano & Jonathan D. Natelson

and

Build Your Own Acoustic Guitar: Complete Instructions and Full-Size Plans - Jonathan Kinkead

I have bought both of these as research to help the decision before I commit and I'm currently deeply absorbed in them! The first book is very much the set text - there appears to be nothing it doesn't tell you about making a guitar, but it is quite dry. The second is more like a Haynes manual by comparison, with lots of colour photos showing each step. Between the two, it is fairly easy to get a good grasp of the processes involved.

There are some fairly consistent messages coming out of all of this research:

1. you will probably spend as much if not more on tools as you do on materials the first time round.
2. It's not worth doing this just to get a nice guitar - I think this is going to need about a £600 investment in tools and materials for the first one; that money will buy you a very nice guitar.
3. as long as you take your time and are careful, your first guitar will probably sound very good compared to mass-produced, but the detail finish may be a bit lacking.
4. you are unlikely to just build one, as it can become addictive.
5. by the time you get to the 3rd or 4th one, they should be pretty good!

I have quite a lot going on at the moment with a new job etc so, unusually for me, I'm not going to rush into this. I am thinking that I might try and do a trial of the bit that I'm most nervous about, which is constructing and carving a mahogany neck and building the dovetail joint between the neck and body. If I can make a decent job of that, I reckon I'll be OK to go for the full thing.

Watch this space!

Meanwhile, I'm keeping up the guitar practice - still trying to do at least half an hour for 4 days a week, and I am definitely still not as crap today as I was yesterday :-).

Update

Well I guess I should post an update on how this finished, as I got so carried away at the end, then lost the progress photos off my camera, so can't really detail anymore of the restoration.

The neck ended up really nice after about 6 coats of the oil. I left it for a week after the last coat, then gave it a good rub down with a cloth and it turned out like all the internet wisdom suggested: a nice smooth satin finish which was very playable.

The body was finished then and I had to decide whether to make and fit a scratchplate. I made a couple of card templates and it just didn't look right with one, so I decided to leave it off for now. I was growing quite used to the battered look and didn't feel the need to cover up the scrapes and bumps!

Next job was to make a saddle from a new piece of bone that I'd bought. This was a fairly simple exercise. First I glued the old one back together with superglue and used that as a template to mark out the approximate shape on the new blank. This was then sanded to shape and also the thickness reduced so it would fit into the carrier on the bridge. Lesson learned from this was that I assumed the original one was the right size - actually I could have made it 3 or 4mm longer and it would have been a better fit, but it's worked out OK for now.

That was it then - refit the electrics and tuning pegs and string her up!

I am delighted to say that all of the bracing repairs etc held together when the string tension was re-applied and she played nicely for a £50 guitar! The overall character was exactly as I had remembered the current model APX500 when I tried one of those, which was a bit of a "thin" sound compared to a full dreadnought size guitar, but the body is significantly smaller. These are really designed for the electro-acoustic side I think. I had some fun playing through the amp too. It actually turned out exactly as I thought, which was nicer to play than the basic entry level F310 I have (a much nicer neck on it), but with less bottom end sound due to the smaller body.

The action was a little high so, after letting it all settle for a couple of weeks, I reduced the height of the saddle to give about 2mm clearance at the 12th fret and this made it much nicer to play. No need to go into detail of how to do this here - there are loads of YouTube videos etc about it. Just take it easy and don't take too much off at a time.

You might remember that one of the reasons for getting this was to be able to take it to festivals without worrying too much about it getting damaged. In the end, when Shrewsbury Folk Festival came around in August, I just couldn't bear not to take my "good" guitar, which is sounding better and better the more I play it (I'm sure IT is getting better, not ME!) so this one stayed at home.

But the story has a nice ending, as my son started making noises about getting a guitar to take to Uni with him, so it has found a happy home at Lancaster University :-).