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Hi. My name is Perry. I'm an American who lives most of the year in Taiwan where I teach college English. While in the States, I spend most of my time in Michigan.

I recently completed this guitar. It isn't my best build or the most ambitious. I wanted something quick, easy, and inexpensive. I'm planning to take the guitar into work tomorrow and let a colleague use it for about a month to see what he thinks of it.

The neck comes from Warmoth and was my first and only attempt at putting together a guitar from a "kit". (Not that Warmoth sells kits--I had put the kit together myself.) I've had the neck for about 15 years and decided to use it on this build. Over the years, many things about it have been changed. The headstock shape at the top was rounded, the spacing for the second through fifth tuners was changed, and headstock has received two caps, with the first one ebony and now bubinga. The back of the headstock is also backstrapped in bungina. This covers the plugs for the tuner holes that were repositioned. The neck was also changed from a bolt-on to glued-in.

The top of the body is bubinga and the back cypress. Working with bubinga was something new for me. I eventually found using a cabinet scraper achieved the best results. Sanding with around 240 grit paper seemed to burn the wood. As hard as bubinga is, cypress is just as soft. Again, using a cabinet scraper gently seemed to provide the best results.

The bridge is top loading, fitting with my intent to keep this as simple as possible. The humbuckers are a Duncan Distortion in the bridge and a Gibson 496R in the neck position. The electronics are a single volume control with a three-way switch.

Here are several pics. The body from several positions.



Another angle.



The headstock front.



And the back.



Comments and questions welcomed.

That's beautiful. Makes me want to try building an electric.

Nice clean lines and very well executed, but the body looks like a 'lefty' to me, did you design it that way?

Bob

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http://www.bobmatthewsguitars.co.uk

Glen and Bob, thank you for your comments.

Bob, the body shape is based on the Mosrite Ventures (or probably better the Ramone) model and the Robin Raider, which itself was based on the Mosrite.

This is actually the third guitar I've built using this body shape. For this build, the lower bout was streamlined a little. The other two builds had a rounder lower bout. These are photos of those other guitars.





I've also flipped the body over for another build, but I haven't completed the guitar yet. It looks similar to a Gibson MK lll. This is a photo of that guitar.