LC0002 — tyson hand-did

Back around Christmas 2018, I built my buddy Larry Chicken (aka Scott Rogers) an electric guitar out of scraps I had left over from other projects. That was the first electric I built from scratch. Last month, I was on LC’s podcast - Larry Chicken’s Rock-n-Roll Gumbo - and after that, we talked about building him a “fo real” guitar.

But first, a little backstory.

LC has green, Teisco Del Rey hollow body guitar that is, without a doubt, the worst guitar I have ever played. And yet, we all love it. I think he has had some work done on it so it plays a little better now, but back in the day, it teetered on the edge of unplayability. And we had a lot of fun playing it.

So we wanted to make a guitar that had some old school mojo but with the options and playability of modern guitar. LC picked out one of my electric body designs and a green color scheme but left most else up to me.

I have worked up several electric body shapes and oddly enough this is the one I though LC would be least likely to choose. But there it is. I made up templates on foam board for all the parts to lay things out.

I have had a nice flame maple drop top with some interesting figure laying around for while that I wasn’t sure what to do with. The pattern and grain lines fit this body shape very nicely. Instead of gluing up the two halves of the book matched pair like normal, I flipped one side to create an inverted figure pattern that followed the curves of the guitar.

The neck is built pretty much the same way I make them for my acoustics, but without the heel. This one is a 5 ply lamination with a main mahogany blank - split and one side flipped to reverse the grain and increase stability, a rock maple center strip, and 2 pieces of smoked oak for SHAPOW!

The fingerboard is Indian Laurel, a wood I have used on an acoustic build. It is a little lighter than rosewood and is a bit more translucent. I knew it would fit will with the browns and greens that would be in the final finish.

I capped the headstock with some flamed sapele veneer - one of my favorite woods in terms of looks:

For the body, I started with a mahogany body blank that weighed a TON. I knew I wanted to do a chambered body on this one, so that decreased the weight quite a bit. There is a whole debate about “tone wood” in the electric guitar community and I won’t get into that now. I will say, that different types of woods and body types FEEL different to the player. The mahogany gives a chunky feel and the chambered body gives some snap.

For the color, I did a hand rubbed “burst” with vintage amber, bright green, and antique brown dyes. I will have to do a video of this process - it is magic the way the colors mix and morph into entirely new things as you work them.

For the electronics, I picked out a vintage lipstick style humbucker for the bridge and a classic humbucker for the neck position. The lipstick HB has a unique sound - more like a jangly single coil than a traditional humbucker. In installed mini toggles for both pickups. The lipstick can be split so you get a single coil tone in the bridge. The neck HB switch allows for series wiring for the standard HB tone or parallel wiring which brightens the tone and decreases the output a bit.

In the above pic, you can also see the bridge which is an all BRASS bridge - difficult to find these days. I got this one from Guitar Fetish which has some interesting products - some good, some not so great. This bridge is a great deal for the price.

In the final stages and did some minor “relicing” of the guitar to give it an “already broke in and well played” vibe. All those years of building models and weathering them is coming in handy again.

Also, the final clear coat is my shellac and wax finish. The guitar feels like wood and metal, not plastic.

And a few more pics of the final stages of the build are below for you to peruse and enjoy -