COFFIN #2

At long last, here it is. Imbued with a character of supreme Coffination, this thing is rock-ready and good to go. Hand crafted entirely by yours truly, this guitar is the natural finish, one-piece swamp ash body twin to the first Coffin (made of African mahogany).

Specs: swamp ash body and neck, Indian rosewood fingerboard, African mahogany head cap, Jescar evo gold fretwire, Gotoh tuners, tremolo bridge and miscellaneous other hardware, DiMarzio D sonic humbucker in the bridge position with push-pull switch for coil-tap, Reverend USA P-90 (neck)

Finish: Epoxy pore fill, shellac build coats, satin nitrocellulose lacquer on body and back of neck, high gloss buffed lacquer on headstock.

Come see the dual Coffin attack tomorrow night, Friday the 13th, when Rust plays Ash St Saloon, 9:30 pm.

CULTURE SHOCK

One week ago. Houston International Airport. The endless line of wheelchairs on the gangplank as we exited the aircraft was the first sign of things to come. After a week in England, where I literally saw no wheelchairs, people movers, guns or obesity, here in Texas things were different. This was an eight-foot guitar/sculpture entitled 'Final Approach,' and no doubt commissioned for an absurd amount of money:

My alternate title: 'This One Needs Repair.' Note diamond-tread pickguard and high string popping out of the nut:


After writing some scathing impressions of Houston (and by extension the U.S., from being outside for a week) based solely on airport observations, I boarded the next flight, to Portland. A couple of Houston locals I met (on each flight) so defied my juvenile and shallow observations as to humble me completely. This is the importance of travel. But that guitar still needs repair.

My Own Coffin

Ah, a fitting title for a lutherie project. If the wood dust doesn't kill you, the time it takes to build a guitar just might. Like many weirdo semi-artist types, I have to be creative when the urge strikes, no matter how hard I beat myself up or try to adopt a daily work routine. I have a full time job for that. Excuses aside, as the temperatures climb into the hundreds outside, I'm spending some time in the cool basement, carving up the neck for the second Rogers Coffin guitar. The first one went to a shredding player who is quite happy with it - see previous posts. The headstock on this Coffin has the tuning machines on the bass side, a mirror image of the previous guitar. When using templates for routing headstock shapes and drilling tuner holes, it's easy to flip the template over for the mirror image design. And now, back to work.

If you see this, run.

Exhibit A: the Gibson Robot guitar, with broken electronics. Despite our status as a long-time Gibson warranty center, this should have scared me. The new Robot Guitar is not one to practice electronics troubleshooting on. Nor is it a good idea to pull off the protective plastic film from the pickguard without first looking under the bridge (you'd have to take the strings off, then pry the bridge upward to even see these ribbon connectors). Fortunately for me, the customer found this out before I did. Nevertheless, I somehow agreed to troubleshoot it. Possibly out of a sense of duty to the great Gibson company, or possibly just as an act of masochism. I got lucky on this one, but there are always others. Beware the Ides of Gibson!

Slightly More Info

After handing off the guitar to Justin over an excellent dinner that he paid for, I realized that my somewhat lax description of the finished Coffin should probably be added to. For me, it's kind of like recording an album - after being immersed in the details of creating something for several months or more, the tendency is to not want to think about it as soon as the creation is finished. Fortunately for me, Justin posted quite a few pics with good captions - here it is: http://siemprelaluna.com/index.php?itemid=609. Look to your right, above Bruce Lee and you'll find the link to his excellent site, Siempre La Luna. I'll make a few additions or clarifications:

So the neck shaft is actually domestic ash, and the fingerboard is Indian rosewood. Many luthiers would be hesitant to use ash because it is light, a bit punky, and not nearly as strong as maple. I used it for many reasons: tonally it's amazing; for the woodworking challenge of the massive differences in density between early and late-wood grain; and it looked right the way the bare wood absorbed the stain deeply in the visible porous grain lines and almost not at all in the wider portions. In regards to strength, I was fairly confident that I'd be able to end up with a very straight neck after carving the shaft, gluing on the fingerboard, truing the fingerboard in preparation for receiving the frets, and installing the frets. All of these operations can quickly make a neck unplayable if not done right. Also, I used a double-acting truss rod made by Stew-Mac, in my opinion it is an extremely effective one. This was shown to be the case when all it took was a very slight tightening of the rod from the neutral position to balance the tension of the strings, giving the neck proper 'relief' and excellent playability with low 'action' or string height above the fingerboard.

The scale length is the same as Justin's Ibanez's, at 25.5", I'm glad he thought it was shorter. I take that to be the difference between factory (admittedly pretty good) fretwork and a really dialed neck with accurately leveled frets. It makes for excellent playability with an easier feel. Justin is right about the frets - they're .045" tall and .103" wide, still in the "jumbo" category but just a tad smaller than the ones in the S series. Can a good player tell the difference? Hell yes. On the next guitar I may experiment with a hypo-allergenic fretwire that contains no nickel, lead, or other really nasty metals and happens to be 25% harder than typical nickel-silver wire. For someone like Justin, who has excellent technique, plays very light strings, and use no more fretting pressure than necessary, the typical nickel-silver wire is still probably the better choice. That's all for now, if you've made it through this somewhat nerdy discussion, I congratulate you and recommend a future in guitar-building.

Coffin #1 Reality

Congratulations, it's a guitar! Rising from the grave at 8 lbs 6 oz and 42.5", this long, skinny riff machine is ready to see the world in all its beauty and horror. Commissioned and subsidized by my good friend and bandmate Justin, this Coffin will be in the hands of a great player. Interestingly enough, Justin learned much of his technique from a badass who was dubbed the Grim Reaper of Classic Rock Bands.

Summer Tour

My good friend Rich scored a tour this summer as a guitarist for the Psychedelic Furs. I went through these two guitars with a fine-toothed comb to make them road ready. He was worried about a previously badly-broken headstock on the Flying V, whether or not his amateur road repair will hold up to the rigors of a long tour. Upon close examination, his road repair was structurally as good or better than many we see coming from professionals. Rock hard this summer, Rich!

Broken headstock

The truss rod cover is the only thing holding this headstock to the neck. Suddenly I feel like playing Pac-Man.

Finish Chemistry

Putting a nice finish on an instrument often takes as long as all of the preceding steps combined. But, at least for the moment, I'm determined to defy the nice finish conventions of the high-gloss ideal and experiment until I get a satisfactory lower-gloss, non-grain filled finish that is still protective and attractive. It may be a pipe dream, but if there's any possible hope of putting function before vanity and immense amounts of time, this is how it will happen. Currently my recipe, though highly classified, includes dyed shellac and paste wax.

Working on Jennifer Batten's axe. Not only can Batten play all of Eddie Van Halen's solos in her sleep (which earned her 10 years of Michael Jackson tours) but her own abstract shredding is downright mind-blowing. She's also really into pieces of flair on the headstock. Her own invention is the patented fold-down string damper which mutes the open strings for two-hand tapping with a minimum of extraneous noise.

Rajneeshee Strat

There's nothing like working on the very guitar used in the Rajneeshee ceremonies and wondering if I should be wearing a gas mask. In the mid 80's, up the river a couple hours from Portland, the Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh and his followers engineered strains of Salmonella in an attempt to poison the local voting constituents, to send their own candidate to the county court. They poisoned the water supply and 11 local restaurants, but ultimately failed in their aims. Anyway, I swapped out the guitar's black pickguard for a white one (perhaps diminishing its cult power), thoroughly cleaned the guitar and its electronics, and set it up. Notice the awesome finish checking which runs almost perfectly perpendicular to the top, and my dust mask next to the old pickguard. So far, I haven't noticed any ill effects, spiritual or otherwise.

Ah, the early 80's Ibanez Musician. Anyone remember when these things were cheap? I don't, but in the 70's and 80's Japan starting pumping out high-quality electrics to compete in the world market, Ibanez being the best-known. These were some of the only non-American good quality guitars out there, though the body shapes and headstock logo were often Gibson rip-offs. This era more or less ended when Gibson sued the crap out of the foreign Ibanez, issuing endless cease-and-desist orders. It was a time when Gibson quality was at a low, and Ibanez was providing a very viable alternative. As things sometimes tend to work out, I'm guessing that a side effect of these lawsuits was to provide the notoriety to help make Ibanez the mega-company it is today.
This model has more knobs and switches than any sane player knows what to do with, including an insanely loud fire-breathing active-passive switch that acts like another amp inside the guitar. This one came to me with a lot of corrosion on the frets and in the electronics, but the neck looks great for a 25 year old and I knew the playability could be improved quite a bit with a fret level and setup. The electronics cleaned up fine, and the playability is now better than just about anything out there, including those expensive Gibsons from the same era.

Guitar-a-day

I had the idea for these postings last week, when a small storm of very interesting instruments landed on my bench at the repair shop that is my place of employment. I thought of all the interesting and/or hilarious things we've seen there in the last five years, and knew I'd be doing myself a disservice by not recording at least some of them. I certainly do not plan to stick to posting every single day, but when I get the chance to snap a few photos during the week I'll talk about one instrument for each posting. If only five people, including myself, look at this site, I think it will still be worth the minimum of effort to show at least some of the very cool, bizarre, wonderful or terrible things I get to work on.


We'll start today with a guitar I'm building away from work, in my basement. Here is my humble 9' by 16' basement shop. Builders in Paracho or Granada would kill to have this much space. It is here that much time is spent making messes, losing tools, and trying to find places for tools or wood I may or may not ever use. This is where all the magic happens.






And Here is the object of the day, the Rogers Coffin. Some day it will be used for evil, not good. Or at least for evil-sounding riffs at head splitting volume, which I happen to think is quite good.









Look Ma, no neck bolts. The best way for a builder of electric or acoustic guitars to try to dispel some of the stigma associated with bolt-on necks is to build good instruments with bolt-on necks. A tight fit is essential. As is decent playability despite a bulky heel with most bolt on designs. The advantages offered by bolt-on necks benefit the builder, the player, and future repairers. The disadvantages of a well-made bolt-on instrument are few, and sonically are none.