This dulcimer was on my list of things to make for a long time. My lovely Emily is a mad Joni Mitchell fan so i thought it would be a perfect birthday gift. I foudn some sections of Meranti for the back and sides, some Alder for the headstock, Spanish Cedar for the neck and some Spruce for the top and bracing. I didn't have any plans to go off and ended up just eye balling a few designs off the net and freestyling the rest. I had never bent Meranti before so the outcome was a

This one came with the description, "Recently refurbished, re-fretted and restored" from another shop. Nope. Absolutely fucked. The list of stuff done to this little parlour was long and none of it w as close to right. I know everyone has different way to do stuff, but there is some butchers around. Beware. I found it to be strung up with some heavy guage PB strings, a new oversized bridge had been poorly glued on, a neck reset had been attempted with a bunch of blow out and

I was having a chat with my highschool Guitar teacher Nick about a guitar he wanted to put together. We went through all the bullet points of what it needed and i kind of just wanted to build it instead of modifiyng a bunch of Warmoth bits. It was standard strat with 24 frets, compound radius, Floyd Rose, EMGs, access heel and a neon blue paint job. This was the first guitar i had built where i used threaded inserts for the neck screws. One lesson learnt was to make the holes

I got lucky on Gumtree three years ago and managed to nab myself a Ripper with a snapped truss rod and a Grabber with a DiMarzio Mudbucker bolted to the body. Once getting the haul home i had hoped the rod had just snapped at the headstock and i could move the threads further down and add some washers. Sadly, no. The neck also had a massive bow from years of string tension with no working rod. Just like the white LP this was back in it's case waiting for me to gather the cour

This one came in covered in Dirt and nicotine with a decapitation and the truss rod showing throught the back of the neck. Luckily no one had tried to repair it before, so the surfaces were both clean and getting the headstock back on was fairly painless. It was going to be striped and resprayed back to the original Alpine White after the repair so i chose to use maple for the splines and the cap to go over the exposed rod section. I just prefer to work with it, it carves eas

A big old chisel route for some new pickups. I stripped it back and filled the J bass hole. I ended up just enlarging the cavity under the guard and making it square, i figure a future owner might favour different pickups so this avoids the need for any future routing. I was just going to spray it black but i had purchased some Ice Metallic Blue aerosol from an auto shop as a test for an old Jag. The colour was good but spraying with aerosols just sucks. You have no control a

This one was destined to be black for quite awhile. When i picked it up from Tony, it had a snapped headstock and a some deep gouges across the top. It's a early 2000's faded Les Paul, really great guitars but the burst paint jobs looks a bit like clown makeup. The plan was to spray the top black, fix the headstock and add a phase switch. The split was fairly favourable, a long break that had more than enough grain to make a strong bond. There was a lot of blow out around the

I've always loved Danelectros, The Neptune Bound book is a great resource for all the innovations Nat Daniels came up with. My old Silvertone U1 still has the most comfortable and stable neck off all my guitars. This project came up while talking to Don Tony about mushing a 50's style P and a Danelectro together. It would have the slab body style with all the Dano trimmings, Long scale and a Coke Bottle headstock. It has a body construction similar to more recent dano reissue

A friend came to me asking for some possible recommendations for a purchase of a nice old flat top acoustic. I don't usually favor the Gibson from 70's, i have about six of them in the workshop is various states of fucked. The bridge plates are huge, the 3 piece maple necks usually falling apart, the binding is always half missing and overall they're usually disappointing. Sometimes you get proven wrong! Evan found a lovely sounding one at Echotone in Melbourne, however the o

I bought this guitar from Japan as an experiment in making easy money. It didn't work. I think i ended up snagging the guitar for $500 by the time i got it in the country. The description and photos were fine but failed to mention a couple of things. All the binding had started to rot and was falling off and the pancake body had started to separate. I'm never really a big fan of natural finishes so i think i had it in my head that i would refinish the guitar from the start. I

This custom came to me strung up and looking like a perfectly good good guitar. When i looked at the headstock something looked very very bad. It had obviously had a headstock break and had been repaired but at the first fret the neck buldged out where the repairer had obviously tried to add a volute to the notoriously weak spot. I started to peel back the finish with a razor blade and uncovered some pretty amazing stuff. they had cut all the way through to the truss rod and