Home made ES-335 for my kid

[Adinol]

About a year and a half ago my kid wanted to have a guitar like Chuck Berry. To make a long story short, we made one together out of a piece of plywood and an old floor beam. That guitar had no frets, was tuned to open G and my kid was strumming with a pick an using a slide. And after I realized that he spent a couple of hours each day, for about a month, strumming and strumming, I decided he earned an upgrade. So, I decided we would build a proper "Gibson" with frets and all that proper stuff.

Here it is.





It is completely made from other people's garbage, dumpster finds and some of my own scraps. It's a 18.25" scale length, with home made humbuckers, stainless frets and pieced of maple and mahogany glued together. The body was made like a multi corner box, then trimmed on the band saw. The neck is from a 100 y/old floor beam from a house someone was gutting. It has a bone saddle with a piezo in it and the pickups are floaters attached to the pickguard.

Here are some photos of the work in progress.

 

[Tim64]

That is very cool I bet he will enjoy the upgrade.

 

[Adinol]

Oh, this upgrade was finished about a year ago. Now he already has a couple of more home built guitars and a few more in the making.

 

[GearHead454]

That is an amazing amount of effort, craftsmanship and ingenuity. Wow!

 

[Joe Roberts]

Good job! I'm my kid's custom guitar builder and guitar tech too!

No semi-hollows yet but P bass, Jaguar, plus he stole all my best guitars.

 

[Farmhand]

Holy crap, that is so cool. I love the Stanley bench plane cap tailpiece!

 

[Adinol]

Holy crap...

That's right! The whole guitar is actually made out of crap, glued together and cut into a final shape.

The center piece of wood on the top is made from firewood. We had a maple tree in the back yard that we had to cut down and I kept some logs for BBQ. When I was building the guitar I ran out of scraps and when looking around I realized that I could just make a plank out of one of the firewood logs. It's spalted maple because it was sitting in the rain for 2 years, so I had to use wood hardener. But it's a piece of a guitar now.

Speaking of firewood, as far as I'm concerned all the Chinese made guitars that the Guitar Center sells ARE just firewood to me. I honestly wouldn't take one home if they gave it to me for free. No personality in those mass produced guitars. No joy to play.

I'll soon post pictures of other guitars we made, as my kid had specific requests that I had to fulfill. Ad they're all made from scraps and dumpster finds.

 

[x3workshop]

That's just awesome! I'd love to see more of your work.

I agree with you about Chinese mass production. The only maker in China that produces anything of quality is Eastman. They do most work by hand using good materials. They are a very good value, high degree of playability, and have a very nice tone.

 

[Adinol]

...I'd love to see more of your work...

Thanks...

I actually just started another thread where I started posting instruments I made for (and with) my kid. I guess I can keep posting new ones in the future, as we make them, as my kid had a lot of requests.

This is him playing his home made "Gibson".


Here I tuned the guitar to standard tuning. Sometimes it's tuned to standard and sometimes to open G.

As you can see, this is an ES-335 shape that is quite proportioned for a small child. He's only 5 y/old in this photo (although he's always been tall for his age).

 

[x3workshop]

That's just great! My son latched onto piano at age 3. Been playing ever since, but I'm not a piano builder.

 

[valvenator]

That is so cool, and who knows, someday your little 'Brian May' might be on the cover of some guitar mag telling the world what a awesome guy his dad is.

 

[Adinol]

Thank you, once again, for your comments.

Since I see people seem to be liking this thread I'm sure no one will object if I post some more photos.

In my initial post I mentioned that we first made a "Gibson" from a piece of scrap plywood and an old floor beam, from a dumpster. Here's a picture of that guitar.



The "frets" are just drawn with a marker and the "pickups" are empty Altoid's boxes. Somewhere along the way I mentioned that we couldn't make a real Gibson but my kid (at the time 5 y/old) insisted that it had to be a real Gibson, so, I wrote "Gibson" on the headstock and that ended the debate about the authenticity of this guitar. However, I do have to mention that an expert eye could probably spot right away that this Gibson is not authentic.

Anyway... at that point I thought that was that. But for the next few weeks he wouldn't put the guitar down and I was looking at my kid strumming and strumming at a plank of wood with 6 strings, of which one might have even stayed in tune. At some point I thought he earned an upgrade. So, at this point two things happened. We started building another one and we also upgraded this prototype and made it into a real playable instrument, with real frets.

The story of how it all started is a bit humorous.

My kid had been spinning old 45's for about a year and a half. One of his favorites was Chuck Berry. So, one day I decided to show him Chuck Berry on YouTube.

First question: "Papa! What kid of guitar is that?"
"That's a Gibson ES-335." (I believe it was actually a 355, but whatever...)
"I want a Gibson ES-335."
"OK, when you grow up, you'll be able to save some money and buy one."
"I want a Gibson ES-335 now."
"Now you can't, 'cause you're too little."
"I'm not too little..."
"I want a Gibson ES-335."
"When can I have a Gibson ES-335?"
"Why can't I have a Gibson ES-335?"

You get the picture.

He kept watching the videos and asking me what each part of the Gibson ES-335 was called.

Then he started drawing pictures of the Gibson ES-335 and telling me all the details of what it had to look like and that it had to have: two f-holes, this headstock shape, two cutaways, two pickups, a pickguard, six strings, six tuners, and so on... And each time, "When can I have a Gibson ES-335?"

I have a stack of drawings that he made. I believe this was the first one.



His drawings gave me the idea to make a Gibson ES-335 at home. What I had in mind, at that time, was a toy. So, I told him he had good (and expensive) taste in guitars and asked him if we should make one.

He was so happy and enthusiastic that it immediately became clear that this was the point of no return. We had to go and make a Gibson ES-335, right now.

I believe it took me about an hour to print a sized-down outline, trace it on a piece of scrap plywood, cut around with a jigsaw and make a neck from an old floor beam. I installed two large wood screws for the strap and hang the guitar around his neck.

"Where are the tuners?" was the question.

So, I mounted six wood screws on the headstock to make it look like tuners.

"Where are the strings?" was the next question.

At first I tried to talk him out of this idea and said it was impossible to put strings on this guitar. But my kid never gives up, so I had to figure out how to put strings on it.

I had a extra bridge and six tuners, laying around, from an old guitar. So, I removed the six faux tuners, mounted real ones, installed a bridge, put strings on and tuned the plank of wood to open G. The neck was so flexible you didn't need a whammy bar.

Here you can see the holes at the side of the headstock, where the faux tuners used to be.



At first I didn't think I was going to put any strings on, so later I had to figure out how to raise the bridge. Here's a view.



The action was really high, the neck got a bit bent, but he just kept strumming, at first using a slide and eventually without one. He even had to take the guitar to bed a few times. It became his favorite thing.

I don't have a habit of posting photos of my kid, online, but here's one where you can't see his face.



I took many more photos of the build and since this thread now has some readers I'll post more at some future time.

 

[x3workshop]

Keep it coming. Great story about one determined kid and his dad trying to not disappoint.

 

[Adinol]

While making the final ES-335 guitar I started upgrading the prototype guitar. One thing for sure, it needed a real neck.

The upgraded neck was also cut from a 100+ y/old floor/ceiling beam. I selected a piece with good grain and decided to experiment with a headstock V joint that I learned about on YouTube.






The V joint turned out OK, but intuitively I felt that it might not be strong enough, so I decided to reinforce the joint with splines.






I had a scrap aluminum U channel, from an old shelf, and I also had a scrap threaded rod. All I had to fabricate from scratch was the nut. So I decided to make the truss rod by myself.






The truss rod fit just fine and it's the kind of truss rod you can loosen up and completely pull out of the neck, in case it even needs servicing.

I rough cut the neck contour on the band saw and I used a hand saw to rough in the heel contour.



More later....

 

[Adinol]

Adinol-- That is amazingly outstanding work and you must be the coolest dad around!

I would love to hear how it plays. Could you post audio and/or video sometime?

Thanks, GJ. I'm actually just a workaholic by nature and I've always built or fixed stuff for myself and my parents, and also for a few close friends. When I finally got a kid he was just born into an environment where there's a guy that always building something. I actually never thought I'd be making guitars but since he really wanted that specific model it just occurred to me that I could make that, too. And I usually work on 10 projects at once, so it always takes forever to finish.

I guess I could make some videos but I actually want to improve the sound of the ES-335. The problem are the Altoid's pickup covers. They look cool for a kid's guitar but they really don't do wonders for the sound.

I have a couple of ideas I want to experiment with. One is to make custom covers out of empty soda cans. I've already made rough forms ad it basically works, but I need to improve some details.

The other idea is to see what would happen if I used much stronger magnets, so that more of the magnetic field would reach the strings.

Since I do all this for fun there's no hurry and I never know when projects will be finished. But if I make a video I would really prefer to make this improvement, first. I'm sure you can understand.

However, the other guitars don't have this problem, because I didn't use those pickup covers.

 

[Adinol]

I was thinking about your request, GJ... Perhaps I'll finish up all my posts about the instruments I've built (including the other thread I've started) and then make a couple of videos.

So, continuing with the upgrade of the prototype ES-335, the guitar had to have pickups, too. As you can see I like building everything from scratch, so it was very likely that I was going to wind my own pickups. But this time it was not just my passion to experiment, in fact there was another reason why I decided to make pickups from scratch. I've come to the conclusion that commercially available junior guitars are not suited for small children because they use stock hardware (to make them cheaper). So, the string spread is too wide for kids on those guitars. If I wanted to make a guitar better suited for my kid I couldn't buy the right size pickups even if I wanted to, which I didn't, BTW.

So, here I documented my first attempt at making guitar pickups.

First I took a piece of steel rod (scrap, of course) and chopped it up to rough size. Then I made a jig for my milling machine, that would hold a bunch of pole pieces, so I could mill the tops and bottoms to size.



Below you can see how I finish the ends on the milling machine.



This was just an old steel rod, so there was rust to be removed.



I decided to use The Must For Rust for the job, cause that's what I already had on hand.



Look how much comes off in one wash.



I can't remember how many baths I did, but I believe after 3 baths the slugs came all nice and clean.



I also had some leftover nickel plating solution, so... First a coat for copper plating, then nickel plating. This is a makeshift warm bath. Worked OK but not great.



Here's one finished slug.



Here are all 24 of them (plus a couple spare). I know there are some spots, but that's due to the makeshift setup and not being able to control the amps and so on. I'm not worried about the appearance. As long as they are protected against corrosion is all I care.



GJ, you can notice my hand in this photo. So, to answer your question... no, I'm not really invisible, ha, ha...

This is as far as these pickups were built, so far. I was upgrading the prototype guitar at the same time as we were building the final guitar. So, the final guitar was actually completed before the prototype was fully upgraded. I also made home made humbuckers on the final guitar and discovered that the Altoid's cans were a really bad choice if you wanted good sounding pickups. That didn't come as a total surprise, of course, I knew they were ferrous metal and that they would interfere with the magnetic field, but I still wanted to do it, to see what happens. So, I set aside the completion of the pickups for the prototype and I just put a couple of empty Altoid's cans on that guitar, to make it look good. Then I got carried away with other projects and my kid also wanted some different guitars, so there was no time to really finalize the prototype. But one day I will. Perhaps this spring.

I'll post the rest of the pictures showing the prototype upgrade, then I'll explain the build of the final, too. So, in another 5 or 6 posts this thread should be completed.

 

[PureQuill]

Brian May of Queen plays a guitar his father built…He did ok with a homemade instrument!
Good fun for both of you!
The boy has the passion..you cant teach that!
I’ll bet if we could fast forward 20 years he is going to be a player!
PQ

 

[jsixis]

awesome job!!

 

[Klappco]

Very nice!

 

[onwardjames]

What can I add to this faint praise?? Amazing. And having fun with your child? Priceless.