Faith Part 3 - Introduction - Time to Get Radical!

This Faith has been great value so far to get me used to the anatomy of the guitar and some of the repair techniques, but at the end of the last project, I mentioned that the neck still wasn't 100% and I had concerns about the strength of the repair. I was leaning toward making a new neck as a practice for starting to build a guitar from scratch. 

As an aside, I've started teaching myself to play the irish bouzouki to give a bit of variety to the rhythm section of our "band" (I use the term very loosely!) and bought myself an entry level Hora (Romanion) bouzouki last year, something like this one:

It's OK, but not the most refined sound in the world.  So I started thinking that I might like to get a better bouzouki and maybe that would be a good first build project? After a bit of research, I ordered the "bible" for building bouzoukis by Australian luthier Graham McDonald, and this includes plans for a scratch built one.

Reading through the book, it mentioned various different designs, including a "guitar-bodied" bouzouki, which have the advantage of being an easier shape to play sitting down and also having a bigger body so gives a better sound projection. Essentially, this is a guitar body with a bouzouki neck, which is about 10mm narrower and has 4 pairs of strings instead of 6 single strings. Something like this:

Doesn't look too dissimilar to my Faith does it? (Can you see where this is heading?):

In a blinding flash of inspiration I decided that I could use the great all solid wood Faith body and build a new neck to suit a bouzouki instead of a guitar and bingo! I'll have my very own  guitar bodied bouzouki! Once I started googling this, I found out that it's a fairly well trodden path, but normally done by modifying the existing guitar neck, rather than building a completely new one. These are commonly known as "gouzoukis".

So the plan is:

1) strip guitar and remove fingerboard (again!)

2) remove the neck and use this as a pattern to build a new neck, but to a narrower design

3) modify the existing fingerboard to reduce the width

4) build the head plate shape to suit 8 machine heads in 4 pairs

5) include a new head veneer with a custom inlaid logo?

6) install neck and fingerboard

7) fill in the existing holes in the saddle for the 6 pegs and drill out for 8 pegs in new layout

8) make new nut and saddle from blanks to suit the new string layout

9) refinish saddle and new neck

10) answer lots of questions from people saying "what exactly IS that?"