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EG02: Boardcaster 2013
No,
that's not a typo. The body of this guitar was made from a piece
of a pine 2x12, just cut with a scroll saw and router from a hand-drawn
modified Telecaster outline. The neck and knobs came from the
first electric
guitar I owned, a mid-1970s Montgomery Ward model that I rediscovered
in the attic. The body is 85% of the size of a Telecaster, while
the neck scale is 24.625 inches. All the hardware was picked up
pretty inexpensively from GuitarFetish.com. The pickups are their
thin humbucker
Lil Killer calibrated set. Each has a DPDT On-Off-On switch to
serve as pickup selector and to choose between series or parallel
humbucking. The 4th switch allows for single coil output from the
neck and bridge pickups, while the knobs provide master tone and volume.
The body and headstock finish is a little old leftover eggshell latex, rubbed with red clay from a fire ant hill to color it a bit and cut the gloss. It was then etched with a Dremel tool in the pattern of a cracked desert clay pic I found; the resulting pattern was then filled in with a combination of red copper metallic latex and red mahogany stain. The tiny headstock logo was hand-scripted using a crow quill and a thinned version of the same paint mixture. This was all sprayed with 15 coats of polyurethane.
This all resulted in an extremely lightweight guitar with a broad assortment of tones that lean toward "punchy," though the series sounds can get pretty fat with enough gain. It cops Strat "in-between" sounds pretty well, and all of the individual pickups present usable tones in series or parallel that are fun and distinctive. The neck pickup in particular gives you a nice non-muddy, Stevie Ray shuffle sound. Not bad for a cheap project that salvages a piece of a 4-decade-old learner guitar.
In retrospect, I'd simplify this if I had it to do over, by dropping the single coil options. They're just too thin and noisy for my taste, and you can find nice-sounding, inexpensive single coil pickups if that's what you want. The magic is in having both the series and parallel humbucking options--26 humbucking sounds that are all very musical, clean or distorted. Also, I've got so much crammed in the tiny instrument cavity that there is a little inductive bleed, such that the guitar still has a little sound even with all the pickups off, unless you roll off the volume. I've contemplated trying to fix this, but it has such a neat vibe like it is that I don't want to mess it up. But making the cavity a little bigger and dropping the single coil options would help.
The body and headstock finish is a little old leftover eggshell latex, rubbed with red clay from a fire ant hill to color it a bit and cut the gloss. It was then etched with a Dremel tool in the pattern of a cracked desert clay pic I found; the resulting pattern was then filled in with a combination of red copper metallic latex and red mahogany stain. The tiny headstock logo was hand-scripted using a crow quill and a thinned version of the same paint mixture. This was all sprayed with 15 coats of polyurethane.
This all resulted in an extremely lightweight guitar with a broad assortment of tones that lean toward "punchy," though the series sounds can get pretty fat with enough gain. It cops Strat "in-between" sounds pretty well, and all of the individual pickups present usable tones in series or parallel that are fun and distinctive. The neck pickup in particular gives you a nice non-muddy, Stevie Ray shuffle sound. Not bad for a cheap project that salvages a piece of a 4-decade-old learner guitar.
In retrospect, I'd simplify this if I had it to do over, by dropping the single coil options. They're just too thin and noisy for my taste, and you can find nice-sounding, inexpensive single coil pickups if that's what you want. The magic is in having both the series and parallel humbucking options--26 humbucking sounds that are all very musical, clean or distorted. Also, I've got so much crammed in the tiny instrument cavity that there is a little inductive bleed, such that the guitar still has a little sound even with all the pickups off, unless you roll off the volume. I've contemplated trying to fix this, but it has such a neat vibe like it is that I don't want to mess it up. But making the cavity a little bigger and dropping the single coil options would help.
