It started with a neck...
This is the story of my Hot Rodded Hollow Bodied Monster (see photos below).
I have never built a guitar before and I didn’t really intend to.
I bought and Epihone Les Paul Standard which I planned on doing a Peter Green mod on, reversing the phase of the pups.
The more I looked into the various mods, I found that most of them were electronic switching mods.
Well, electronic wiring is easy for me as I have spent most of my life installing electronic equipment of various kinds.
I decided that I didn’t want to strip down the Les Paul just yet as I was having too much fun with it as it is.
 A friend had a Fender Telecaster neck which he had taken off his guitar to have re-fretted (for some reason with Gibson frets) and some other mods; while his guitar was in bits, his dad threw out the body thinking it was just an odd shaped piece of wood (eghh!!).
So, I thought what the hell I’m bored and need a project.
I swapped a backpackers travel guitar (which I didn’t use) for the neck and started looking online for the other parts I needed.
I bought an Ash hollow body (no f hole) and routered it out for humbuckers
I fitted it with a thinline deluxe scratch plate, a chrome neck pickup ring, a chrome humbucker bridge plate and I cut the scratch plate to suit.
I dropped in a Seymour Duncan Hot Rodded set of humbuckers; SH-4 JB for the bridge and SH-2n Jazz Model for the neck.
I fitted 4 x DPDT push pull pots and a chrome 3 way pickup selector switch.
I wired the switches with the Jimmy Page style modification as per the drawing on the Seymour Duncan web site:
- Neck volume cuts coil on neck pup
- Bridge volume cuts coil on bridge pup
- Neck tone puts pups in series or parallel
- Bridge tone puts pups out of phase
I assembled the guitar and played with it for a while before stripping it down to make some adjustments
There was a loud hum when strings where not grounded by touching them; so I painted the pup cavities with conductive paint, fitted a ground wire to the body connecting to the conductive paint and I fitted aluminium foil to the back of the scratch plate. The hum is now completely eliminated.
I finished the body in Tru Oil.
Everyone who has played this guitar either wants to buy it or steal it.
It has a great tonal range with the switching options and the hollow body adds a deep resonance of its own.
Unfortunately I have been playing guitar on and off for over 20 years and still can’t play particularly well and this monster greatly outweighs my meagre ability; so I have sold it to a friend who is a music teacher and plays in several bands, he is going to use it as his main gig guitar, because of the range of tones it generates it allows him to take fewer axes to a gig.
I will be spending the money on my next project.
I still can’t believe that I managed build something, on my first attempt, from a box of assorted bits that a serious musician wants to buy.
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