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.)

 

The Firewood Special No1 The most enviromentally guitar ever?

In between other projects and having a new arrival in the family. I challenged myself to making a guitar completely out of recycled stuff.  A  rummage through my scrap wood pile destined for the fire and grabbing all the other necessary stuff from my parts bin and scrap metal bin I came up with this beast.

So not quite 100% recycled as the cable pins are new and I used a bit of solder wood stain and of course the glue, but every other part is. even the strings, electric wires etc, I even used some waste paint that I get from my local paint shop.

To make this even more environmentally friendly I used the minimum amount of resources to finish it. It has been sanded enough to take any rough edges off and then given a wood stain and a beeswax polish. most of  the wood is as found.

It has 4 strings.  A bass string and 3 guitar strings. It's a 2nd bass string and 2nd 3rd 4th guitar strings Tuned to D D,A,D.

The neck is an old Fender Starcaster one. The pointy arrow shape which is a terrible neck hence why Ive used it for a slide guitar.

The top bout of the body is from a horrible plywood Strat which I quickly attacked with the belt sander
The rest of the guitars body is made from Mahogany pieces.

I don't know where the Humbuckers come from but they look to be pretty cheap and nasty. I wired them together in effect to make 1 4 coil pickup.

An old volume and tone control attached to a bit of old steel sheet. (tone doesn't do much if anything).

The nut is carved from solid bone found in the hedge.

The bridge is from a brass off cut.

Various old tuning machines.

How does it sound?  Well pretty damn raucous!

I'll be putting this on Ebay as an Auction soon.

 

Just Ugly

Good grief.
Who would of thought that a hybrid between a strat and a tele could look so ugly and plain wrong. It has a strat style headstock if you need to know.
To me it's just pointless.
2011 Fender Custom Shop Masterbuilt Hybrid Strat Tele Closet Classic Beauty | eBay

ShonKy cigar box ukulele No2.

I have the second cigar box ukulele up for sale on my website.
It's a much improved design. slightly slimmer neck (but still much chunkier than standard)
I went back to using a disc piezo rather than a rod as it's much better. If you had a preamp then a rod would be great but that would mean putting an ugly plastic unit into it and totally ruining the aesthetic.

I went for a plain mahogany box this time and re-visited the multihole sound hole I used in This cigar box guitar. I echoed the largest sound hole by putting a little wave at the end of the finger board.

I have also been trying out a water based poly satin  clear coat as I really can't justify using aerosol cans as they are massively wasteful. It does mean I have to brush it on and I thought It would suffer from brush marks. To my surprise it is really easy to apply, no brush marks and it gives a nice very hard finish and very quick curing time. It does suffer from tiny air bubbles which collect in ridges and  joins but these can be sanded out once hardened.

It is available for sale on The ShonKy Website

 

 

Production is again on hiatus but this time due to the arrival of our baby daughter. :-)
  

Marlin Sidewinder. My new favorite guitar

The Marlin Sidewinder. Much maligned and often found lurking in the depths of Ebay where they sell for small change.
I picked this one up with a job lot of guitars. It was dirty. So dirty you could have grown potato's in the accumulated grime. The intention was to break it for parts or to sell it on as it was. However curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give it a clean, fret dress and see how it played.
Usually the sidewinder comes with a two point floating tremolo with fine tuners this one when I picked it up had a weird chunky Japanese 6 screw trem. The saddles of which where all adjusted to be as far back as they could go which for perfect intonation wasn't far enough. mm! someone had changed the original two point for this one but no when I took it apart no extra holes so it was originally fitted with a 6 screw but just not this one so replaced it with a typical squier style one which fitted perfectly and with room for adjusting the intonation.
Also they usually have a bar string retainer whereas mine has the two round string trees.
Marlin also made the Slammer which was a single coil version with the 6 point trem and the round trees so this is some sort of hybrid I guess.
after cleaning I put it all back together strung it up and wow the neck is gorgeous so playable and feels like an expensive neck. The body is plywood. big solid heavy plywood. Now I'm not a believer in saying a particular material is better than another for making a guitar body out. don't get me wrong, I'm sure a rubber body would be pretty awful but some people would have you believe that the best wood for tone is swamp ash or mahogany and anything else is rubbish. this is such a contentious issue. My opinion is that the material a guitar is made of gives it it's own unique tone.
Anyway back to the Marlin. It has a humbucker with big fat bars in it in the bridge position and two Alnico (yes Alnico) single coils in middle and bridge. It also has a mini switch that puts the pick-ups in phase or something.
Sound wise it's just great. it sounds a bit fender but also a bit Gibson but not really you see it has it's own unique sound and I love it. especially in the bridge middle position with the phase (or whatever it does) switch on.
It's not all rosy The machines are rubbish but I will change them when I next change the strings which is a bit of a shame as the retaining lug is not in the standard place so I will have to drill some extra holes. also I find the neck although beautiful to play is not that stable. Some days I pick it up and it plays like my dream guitar then a couple of days later the strings are hitting the frets! I can put up with this as I'm not going to gig with it.
Click HERE for a very good article about the Marlin Sidewinder.
Here's some pics. notice the industrial pickup selector switch!