"Bonez" Electric Guitar

Four months ago a friend gave me a broken Marshall combo amp that wouldn’t turn on anymore… after a week of troubleshooting the circuit board and finding the blown transistors I had myself a killer 50 watt amp… just one problem….. NO ELECTRIC GUITAR!! sheesh I say!!

So I had some leftover 8/4 Alder and decided to build one…. and here is the result.
I wanted something original, fun, and simple(.... well two out of three ain’t bad.)

After having found a free ebook on the web on how to build electric guitars, I read it twice, and went to work.
I rough cut the body on the band saw and shaped it with a sharp 3/4” chisel and a couple of files and rasps. The electronics cavity in the back and the pickup slots were done with a router freehand (next time I’ll make a template for sure…) and the neck pocket was chiseled out by hand (don’t look to closely at this area….).

I bought the neck from a company in Taiwan which sold them “semi-finished”: you just have to install the string nut, string tree’s, tuning pegs and cut the headstock to shape.

Found a music shop in town with lots of used parts that helped keep the cost down to under $120 for the whole project. The cool part is that it actually worked when I put it all together… and it that it sounds pretty good too. I had a blast making it and have another body glued up for when I’m ready for to build my next one.. quite addicting!

Note: I also have a tutorial on Instructables on how to build a Distortion Pedal from scratch for those hard rocker DIY’ers out there with electronics experience… http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Rat-Clone-Distortion-Guitar-Effect-Pedal---The/
It is a clone of the great ProCo Sound RAT pedal…. nice and heavy crunch.

-- Robert Reznik - Albuquerque, NM - www.robertreznik.com