As a sideline, guitar building is pretty episodic. With only two or three on the go at any one time (dictated by space as much as anything), there tends to be quite a bit of downtime while paint or varnish dries, solder cools and cups of tea are drunk.
Today that time was used to finalise the design for DG15, the prototype of “my own design”. I use those quotation marks, because basically all the best designs for guitar shapes are already taken, all I’m doing is shaving bits off someone else’s. Like many, mine’s a morph between the two classic single-cutaway designs, the Telecaster and the Les Paul. It’s a bit slimmer and shorter than either, but otherwise is like 101 other similar ‘halfway house’ designs (see below for one of my many ‘LP vs TC vs BC’ sketches).
This guitar will, eventually, be all I build once I’ve honed my craft a lot further on the basic templates. The key thing about these models is that they will all (as befits the ‘Derelict’ name) be built from reclaimed and barn-found timber, driftwood and bogwood. I can’t decide between the name ‘Beachcomber’ (there is already a Beachcomber, made by Hutchins, which is a Chinese-made ‘surf’-style Jazzmaster-y triple P90 thing) and ‘Beachcaster’. I’m starting to prefer the latter, despite it sounding a bit like a fishing rod.
Anyway, prototype #1, made from reclaimed driftwood oak salvaged from the Merseyside foreshore (aka Ainsdale Beach) is underway. Initial marking up done, ready to start the shaping using multiple cuts with the drillpress. I expect it to take about a month to six weeks to finish the first.
