First post... want to share a few photos

[Eric Kasten]

Hi all.  Been lurking here for some time.  Lots of good info here, good discussion and good people.  So thanks! 

I've been building for about 9 months no.  Have about a dozen or so under my belt.  I started with the license plate guitar on Make dot com and learned a lot from that first one... like raising the neck over the sound board (face of the guitar)... but she's a good guitar nonetheless.  Just have to play it with a slide...

I made a lot of acoustic guitars with piezo pickups.  Below is the one I made for my wife...

I've moved back to the electric ones again.  I made my own pickup and installed it in the latest guitar...

I'm in the process of winding another handmade pickup and thinking of a good tool to help the winding process at the same time.  I'm doing my own fret work, wiring, etc...  I've even sold 2 acoustic guitars locally on craigslist.  I enjoy building them and I need to do something with them now that I've reached 100% saturation in the house.  I've given one to my dad, one to a neighbor who's let me use a few tools.

I've been using how-to CDs from Keni Lee Burgess.   I can play 3 songs now... Yay! 

Thanks for looking.

Eric

[Ron "Oily" Sprague]

Congrats, Eric! Keep up the good work.

[Eric Kasten]

Thanks Ron. 

I'm open to suggestions to make my builds better... if anyone has a suggestion.

[Richey Kay]

They seem to be evolving very well. Can't believe you've been making them 9 months and never shared them before.

Also - it was a MAKE article that got me started as well, the 'Cake Pan Ukulele'.

Good luck and welcome!

[Eric Kasten]

Didn't see the cake pan Uke one.  Will go look for that.

[Dan Sleep]

Looking good. I suggest you keep building em.

[Eric Kasten]

Thank you and I will...  I have another electric CBG being built in the garage right now.  I'm very intrigued about the build process and the almost unlimited possibilities around the build process.  I expect I'll be building for a long time.  :)

[Gary Reichel]

All look great! Looks like cigar box label applied to the headstock. How did you affix it? Tell us about the headstock on the license plate guitar.

[Eric Kasten]

Cool headstock, yes?  I really like how those came out.

The license plate guitar headstock is red and white veneer applied to represent the stripes on the flag.  If I did it again, I'd do two stripes of each.  Was going for the red/white/blue theme like the license plate.  My neighbor makes custom pool ques and I got the red and white pieces from him.

The Flor de Antilles guitar headstock uses the label from inside the guitar box lid, which I got of in one piece.  I used spray adhesive to apply it to the headstock after staining and before polyacrylic clear.  I did another like this more recently and wrapped the label all the way around leaving a seam down the middle of the back of the headstock... instead of just applied to the front.

The Padilla (lion) is a little different process.  I couldn't find a good image to use on the headstock so I printed one from the internet onto photo paper.  The I used the same spray adhesive process to attach it to the headstock.  Once applied, I trimmed it with a razor.  The photo paper leaves a white edge (the thickness of the paper... but visible) so I used a permanent marker on this one to hide the edges... I used black stain on the one I'm working on now, which is another Padilla but the headstock image is a large lion head (looks great so far!). 

I like the headstocks like this... I haven't seen any other like it so it's something I can do to set mine apart and make them even more unique.

Thanks for looking!

[Gary Reichel]

Thanks for the info. Those are clever ideas. Keep posting. And that is a nice looking cbg amp too!

[Eric Kasten]

Thank you sir.  The amp is supposed to be 7watts (board came from china).  Is definitely louder than the 1 watt amp I built.  A secret... the box was too small so I had to angle the speaker and put the battery on the inside of the lid (which you cannot see behind the overlaid photo).