My Yamaha Pacifica 112j

This is my Yamaha Pacifica 112 (I think j but not sure.)
I bought this new early 1994. It was my second guitar, my first been some crappy black Les Paul copy that I bought secondhand which I ended up burning.
The Pacifica has been my main guitar since I bought it. For a long time it was my only guitar.
It's had a hard life. It's been gigged and transported with no case at all.  painted on, stickered to death left lying around and generally not been treated with any respect. Up until last year it had become quite unplayable due to fret wear and dodgy control pots and I had replaced it with an Indie Guitar. But I missed it so I decided to restore it.
I  saw a complete electric assembly including G&B pickups from a Sterling (By Musicman) Silo 30 on Ebay for a tenner put a bid in and won them. Bargain considering this is fitted to a £400+ guitar.
I also redressed the frets sanded the paint and removed all the stickers. (The band I was in was a bit punky so stickers on your guitar are a must!) fitted the new pups and controls and wow! It always was a very nice guitar to play but with the better pups it now sounds awsome although I loved the sound  the old pups had real scratchy and shreddy.
It's also common practice to upgrade the tuners However I'm leaving the stock ones on as they are perfectly good. believe me I use the whammy a lot and do a lot of bending so if it's going to go out of tune it will. The Grovers on My Indie don't hold up as well as these.
You can see from the pics that the lacquer has yellowed leaving lighter patches where the stickers and paintings where.

(Click on Pics for larger image)

Cigar Box Guitar No1

Here is My first Cigar box Guitar  which I completed a while ago. It is also one of the first Instruments I made.

It is completely handmade using a small very old cigar box (It had some damage to the front hence the lighter marks from the filler) and wood from some broken furniture including an old wardrobe that went into mainly making a 3 string upright bass. (To be featured soon)

The nut and saddle are roughly carved from an old cow or pig bone that I found in the hedge. The tuners are banjo tuners which are a bit tricky to keep in tune also they are a bit close together really.
I decided to have a go at putting the frets on. I think I might need some better equipment as the intonation is pretty poor.  however it makes a nice little slide guitar.
The Shonky plate on the side Hides an access hole to a Piezo.
It sounds pretty good and quite loud acoustically, plugged in it sounds pretty raw which I like.

The Big and the Small

I can't believe Ive never seen this before. Actually sounds pretty good. I would have thought a scale length as long as that must have to have fairly haighly tensioned strings or they would be flopping about all over the place. Kudos for the guy playing it too it can't be easy. (sorry it won't alow me to embed)
Giant Flying V

On the other end of the scale Here's a tiny guitar which sounds terrible.

Cheers!

Volkswagen Commercial: The Force

Great ad Saw it yesterday and it's made me chuckle all day today.

20,000 dollars equates to around 12,000 British pounds the cheapest you'll get a new Passat here is 18,000 Pounds!

Talking of Cars got my tax reminder today £112 for 6months!
Now apparently I am paying this much because my car is old (20 years this year) and uneconomical. That may be fair enough but I must protest. I am not particularly rich and can't afford a new car that is supposedly more economical and will save the planet so I pay for Green Insurance with the Green Insurance Company
Who offset ALL my carbon emissions by planting trees. Using there carbon calculator I worked out they plant around 11 trees a year to offset my carbon emissions wow! Every little helps I suppose. It doesn't make my car tax any cheaper. It's all a little bit annoying as I'm actually being more environmentally friendly by keeping my old car on the road.

First Blog

This is my first ever Blog. Having thought about what I'm going to write about and not coming up with anything relevant I'm just going to ramble on with whatever pops in to my head just to get this damn thing going.
This Blog wil be mainly about my instrument building so I should have done a Blog about One of my instruments but that will come soon. I have just opened a website http://www.shonkymusicalinstruments.co.uk/ to go in tandem with this blog, again the website has no instruments on it either but will have as soon as I get some decent photo's.

I decided to start building musical instruments a year ago when I had an old stove top kettle that had broken. I was going to take it to the tip but then it occured to me that it would make a sound basis for a resonator guitar so I knocked a crude one up and it sounded ok but not brilliant but the Idea is sound and it will be redone at some point. since then I have made an upright three string bass out of an old wardrobe a diddley bat (Diddley bow from a cricket bat). A three string cigar box banjo/guitar. and rebuilt several custom guitars from orphaned guitars there are of course several more nearly finished project which will be unveiled shortly.