ShonKy S-Honk 6 String

I just realised I neglected to post a blog about this one. It's quite hard to keep up with listing them on Ebay, my website, here and my facebook page
It has been sold and migrated to California the second of my cbg's to do so. maybe they will start an owners club there soon haha!
Here was the listing as it was from my website.

It features a Cohiba Cigar box with added re-claimed Mahogany body bouts. They are not just for show they are designed specifically to make the S-Honk a very comfortable and ergonomic guitar to play and to add weight.

The neck is a re-used Squier Strat maple neck with a rosewood fretboard. The headstock has been re-shaped. The neck is straight and the frets are virtually wear free.

Brand new tuning machines

It has a single re-used humbucker of unknown origin in the bridge position which has a volume and tone to control it.

It also features the "S-Honk" control which makes the tone more honky. It actually is 2 piezo discs attached to the underside of the box lid with there own volume control. The Tone control also works for the piezo's. Turn it up and you get all the acoustic tones of the box you can even hear your fingers on the fretboard.

The neck is attached to a solid Mahogany core which runs the length of the box. The lid of the box (guitar top) Isn't fixed to the central core so It can resonate. This means the S-Honk can be played acoustically albeit at a quiet volume. Ideal for late night noodling. It has a boxy tone as you would expect from a box!

It is not possible to open the lid access to the electronics are via 2 panels on the rear.

Hardwear is all re-used but very good condition and good quallity chrome.

The body has been given an aged but not too battered finish to offset the shiny chrome.

 

 

ShonKybox Tenor guitar

Here is my Tenor guitar made from an Aurora Preferidos cigar box.
This was a nice big cigar box and I wanted to make an instrument that would benefit from the volume.
Unfortunately I had to lose the lovely artwork as it had an MDF lid which doesn't make the best soundboard so I thought I would make my first tone wood topped instrument. I got  some Cedar of a seller on Ebay. Why cedar and not spruce? I have made a few CBG's out of boxes with cedar lids and I love the tone. whether spruce would be much different I don't know.
The neck is made fom my dwindling pile of exotic wood offcuts from a retiring wood turner. I don't know what wood type it is but it has similar grain and structure to the wenge which I used for the fingerboard.
I made extensive efforts to make the top reverberate and keeping the rest of the box still. recent CBG's and my last ukulele had the problem of the whole box sounding rather than just the top thus when resting against the players body muffling the sound of the guitar. The trouble is the top is generally thicker and stiffer than the the rest of the box particularly the back which is usually made from very thin wood.
I ladder braced the back and X braced the top.
Instead of having the neck going through it is attached via a tenon joint to allow the whole of the body to be an open space. I don't know anyone else doing this with CBG's.
The rest of the box is re-enforced along the inner corners and around the neck joint to provide stability.
The end result is a great sounding instrument. Better than I expected. The bracing has worked beautifully. No muffling. The top rings out with a clear crisp tone and extraordinary volume.
I have tuned this standard Tenor tuning (GDAE) with the correct gauge strings from Clifford Essex Music which unlike most CBG's is suitable for folk rather than Blues.
Now available on the ShonKy website

Here's the pics and Spec.

Specification:

Body: Aurora Preferidos cigar box, Cedar tone wood x braced top.

Neck: Unknown exotic hardwood.

Fingerboard: Wenge.

Dot markers: Wenge and Aluminium

Bridge: Australian Walnut.

Nut: Brass and Paduak.

Tuning machines: Gold plated Sealed. Heart buttons.

Finish: Brush applied water based satin polyurethane lacquer

Length: 760mm

Width: 205mm

Depth: 100mm

Scale length: 560mm / 22"

November Update

You may of noticed if you are a regular reader (Do I have any? Still no official followers sniff). That I have changed tho look of the blog. I felt it looked a bit stuffy serious and formal which just isn't me so I have a play around. Please let me know if you like the change.

Today I realised it's going to be difficult to work in my workshop as it was so cold. I have no heating in it though so I'm looking for a cheap mini woodburner. It will make good use of all those offcuts.

On the table at the moment is a First act Sheena which had a seperating fret board, broken machine head and missing bridge. I've repaired the neck and I am just waiting for the bridge to turn up. Typically I have a box of tunomatic bridges but none of them fit. It has slightly bigger post holes and slightly wider spacing. I can't wait to get it finished as I'm quite keen to hear it. They are lovely looking guitars, however, this one is still going to look a bit trashed.

Also on the table and not far off finished is a mocking bird copy, a new 6 string cigar box guitar and a tele-esque guitar Which I am doing a stained glass type montage with pictures of classic 70's Album covers.

Remember my Yamaha Pacifica. Although I had restored it, after a couple of weeks the novelty had worn off and it had been relegated to the back of the guitar rack again. I decided the neck for me had  past it's best. I had a neck from a Yamaha RGX 121z (3 a side) and all the cosmo black hardwear.
one thing that had never occured to me was the fact that my Pacifica 112j has got an ash body yes that's right an ash body. I have not seen another one. I sanded it to get to the bare wood. Given it a dark woodstain. put the 121z neck on and all the black hardwear and it looks so much nicer. and plays a lot better. the newer neck feels a lot more lively.  I still have to tidy it up and I'm going to get a black scratchplate. Once3 that's done I'll get some photo's up.
by the way as testament to Yamaha's build quality the 121z neck fits perfectly the neck holes where spot on although I had already filled them.

ShonKy Graffiti

When I first starting making guitars I made up a pine body blank with the intention of making myself a Telecaster. (Pine is easy to cut and route for a beginner and cheap if it goes wrong. I never made that telecaster but the other day I found the blank which was made from 8 or so 40x40mm lengths laminated together. Since then my guitar making journey has gone on a much more artistic direction as soon as I was re-united with the blank I knew I had to do something wacky with it.
My aim when making a guitar is to not follow any preconceived ideas what a guitar should look like. I would almost like to say I'm a freestyle Luthier! Of course it should play well and I also believe it should be comfortable to play seated as well as standing up.
I came up with the shape by drawing straight onto the wood. Once I had this shape and fitted a neck to it It was soon apparent that a neck with a standard strat shaped headstock was going to look pretty rubbish so I cut of the Strat contours leaving a straight edge and spliced a piece of plywood to it which I then shaped to echo the body's wackyness.
Of course having such a bonkers shape just leaving it natural was not going to work so it needed some shouty colours. These where all hand applied acrylic and the top coat is 5 coats of sating water based varnish which leaves a lovely finish. It also makes the neck very smooth and slippery.

The Scratch plate is made from some old oak furniture laminate. It is Shielded with aluminium foil.
The Control Knobs are again  made  from plywood and they are seated on an aluminium cover plate.
The electrics are all new apart from the capacitor which is from an old phone socket.

The pickups are re-used. The neck is a USA Fender Strat Pick-up and the bridge is an unknown fibre bobbin, cloth wired Alnico Strat pickup. I think I'm going to swap them around as the Fender pick-up has a much fuller sound than the other one and be better suited to the bridge position.
It has  a new skeletal style hard tail top loading bridge and re-used but very good condition Jin Ho tuning machines.

Once I had put it together I thought it looked like a graffiti drawing of a guitar so hence I have called it the Graffiti. I have really enjoyed the whole process of making this guitar and I am over the moon with the finished product. Lets face it if you had this amongst several guitars on the wall this is the eye catcher despite its glorious Shonkiness. I have a feeling this is the first of a Graffiti series!

Anyway Here's the pictures. Now for sale On my ShonKy website. Or if you prefer Ebay

 

Very old Primitive handmade american guitar. Hopefull price tag!

On Ebay right now and for a very hopefull $78,520 (£48,736.89) is this charming little primitive handmade guitar with primitive carving. As a guess I would say this was either built as a love token due to the abundance of hearts or for someones daughter as it's a small guitar.  I wouldn't like to estimate the true value of this but I'm fairly certain that it's a little bit overpriced considering that it's incomplete and would be very hard to restore authentically.  An old primitive Cigar box guitar that I featured on the Blog Here went for a couple of hundred dollars as a comparison. 

CIGAR BOX GUITAR - Made By Rat Scabies, The Damned | eBay

CIGAR BOX GUITAR - Made By Rat Scabies, The Damned | eBay

On Ebay is a cigar box guitar made by Rat Scabies drummer from legendary Uk punk band the damned. I'm just a little too young to have got into the damned but I always loved the fact that He had that name.
 

ShonKy Beatnik

This one came into my possession a couple of weeks ago. I had the intention of taking the pickups of it and selling the other parts. But I felt a bit sorry for it and decided to bring it back to life.
It was just about playable but the faults where the plywood body had a big split along right through the middle layers. The scratchplate was cracked and broken and the pots had had it.  It also had selector switches which didn't work very well. I'm not sure about the original make and model of this. The pickups look like Guyatone ones and on dismantling are quite unusual and no they are not humbuckers.

Far from it. they measure a feeble 2.3k output! They do however have a very unique sound. nice and honest on a clean setting. softly fuzzy with gain turned up.  When I took them apart they where packed out with what looked like bits of brown paper envelope!. I replaced this with some foam sheet.

 The neck looks typical teisco kay etc but I'm not sure about the body I can't find one similar. It may be a homemade affair as the paintjob wasn't particularly good. If anyone knows then feel welcome to enlighten me.

I made a replacement body out of an Oak bed headboard. I used the original one as a template. It has had a couple of coats of woodstain. There are a couple of filled areas where the router decided to give me trouble.

The neck was in a bad way. lots of dents and the fretwork wasn't the best. I played with the idea of re-fretting but for the money I will get for this It woudn't be worth my while so I gave it a fret dress and filed the edges down filled all the dents in the back gave it some old squier machine heads as the original ones where useless.  I haven't repainted it as the sanding only went down to the sealer and again it's not financially in my interest. There is a truss rod but It is missing a nut and I dont have one that fits and enables me to adjust it. It is reasonably straight anyway and quite chunky and if it ahsn't moved much in 40 years I can be reasonably confident in saying that it's going to be ok for a few more years.

I also made a replacement scratchplate with a gold and silver scratch effect. This is screwed on with small aluminium spacers to make it float above the body. I made the control cavity a little too big so the bridge extends over it and under the pick guard. It doesn't affect the tuning.

I also made a new saddle out of Aluminium to fit in the original bridge.

I replaced the pots with new ones and put a 3 way switch instead of the slider switches. The knobs are little aluminium ones from an amplifier these where on the guitar when I got it and I quite like them.
It has the tailpiece that was on the original guitar.

So I've put it all back together and it's not an unatractive guitar.
Playing is very light and easy as it has a 24.5" scale a zero fret and the string spacing is very close (8mm at the bridge). It has a suprisingly low action ok there is a bit of fret buzz here and there but hey! I'm not a miracle worker! It is liveable with.

I really like the body shape so I'm keeping the original to use as a template.

Wesley Zephyr

 

Check out my latest acquisition.

It's a Wesley Zephyr.
Wesley where a company that sold budget guitars on Ebay for about 10 years. but are no longer in business. John Wesley is still operating a guitar tech business.
From what I can gather they seem to have been reasonably good quality for the prices they went for.

I saw this one on sale on Ebay a few weeks back and I just HAD to have it. 
Having found no information about it I wrote to John Wesley at Wesley Guitars who kindly replied telling me this is one of "about" 12 they did as a test run but never proved to be very popular.

I have also found out they did another model called the Doppler. (pictured below) which had the same body shape but with 2 humbuckers a standard hard tail strat style bridge and a less snazzy Scratch plate.

It plays as good as it looks. It's very comfortable and easy to play. It has a slim neck with a very flat radius. The Pickups deliver in every respect. I haven't had it apart yet but will do when I change the strings. If the pick-ups allow it I might install some push pull pots for coil tap and phase options.
It's also a very well made guitar. The Inlays are Tidy The neck socket is tight and the whole guitar feels solid and resonant. There are a few flaws in the paint work like some bubbles and a touched up bit in the carved ledge just above the bridge which isn't very noticeable and seeing as they where test models one can forgive them of these shortcomings.

I love it. I'm chuffed to bits I have a very rare guitar (for peanuts) and I'm going to have to sell something else to make room for it! (I only have room for 8 personal guitars at a time. I don't need any more as I always have guitars I'm making or refurbing and customers guitars in for setups and repair so as a guitar lover I'm generally satisfied.

Update 27/03/2013 I have now sold this on. (I'm going to regret it.)