This is my custom telecaster style semi-hollow guitar. Body is made of reclaimed oak cabinet and the cap from oak flooring. The body is routed with two large chambers with f-holes. The neck is from a squier stratocaster, refinished and dyed, and painted with my logo.

The body was dyed with aniline dyes from Keda. The oak doesn’t soak up the dye as much as the instructions indicated. The maple in the neck took the dye very aggressively and turned a deep blue with a few brief coats. The oak required the dye to sit for several minutes, and required many coats. The denser tubules in the grain didn’t take the dye well. After letting it soak in, the grain turned blue, albeit still fairly light. The result is a somewhat weathered look.

Finish is polyurethane. The surface has a nice tactile texture from the oak. Without grain filler, the surface doesnt have the glassy finish most guitars will have, but the feel is still good.

Despite being oak, the weight and balance are quite good. The guitar actually weighs less that my Les Paul style ESP.

The hardware is all in chrome. I added a set of Grover tuners as the neck had none. The bridge assembly is from a Gibson SG. Pickups are jury rigged from the cheap pickups I got with the neck. Bridge pickup has a metal plate holding up the pickup to emulate a telecaster configuration. Real pickups will come eventually. Pickup plates and the control plate are 3D printed for prototyping. I am currently machining plates out of stainless steel.

The chambers produce a very subtly different sound compared to my solid body. There isn’t nearly as much resonance as I had expected. The cap is a quarter inch thick, and acts as a soundboard. I was concerned about the tension from the strings and the strength of the body. The center axis is solid and the chambers are routed on the sides. This doesnt transmit as much vibration as expected.

There are a number of changes i want to try for the next guitar. The strength of the body was not as much a problem, and more material could be removed from the body. The soundboard could be drastically thinner than the quarter inch flooring. A larger chamber would mean the bridge could be mounted over the chamber to increase the transmission to the soundboard. The side of the guitar was made up of endgrain. The endgrain of the body ended up being a patchwork due to the variety of size pieces in the glue up. The end grain was much more difficult to finish. The body started out solid and a large amount of waste material was routed out. The more traditional technique would be to steam bend the sides to shape then glue the top on. This would be nice looking and allow sides to be thin yet strong. I enjoy working with oak, especially given the ready availability of high grade wood panels with decorative grain. While not a traditional tonewood, the results have been most satisfactory.

This is my Wampler ‘65 overdrive clone. Using the 5457 jfet does not provide enough gain at 9 volts to get a really saturated overdrive. J201 jfets provide a higher gain. Running a much higher voltage would give a larger operating range for the transistor.

Successful attempt to do a minimum waste glue up for bowl turning using polygons. My first attempt resulted in a few gaps, primarily caused by the strips of wood not being of a consistent thickness, creating error in the required cut angle. This glue up was significantly better, and the octagon turned out nicely without any gaps. I glued each layer one at a time, and decide to not alternate the octagon. There were slight offsets between the two polygon layers, not noticeable unless you are looking closely. Gluing the two strips together then cutting the polygon segments would result in a better edge.
This is turned from oak salvaged from cabinet doors from the Habitat Re-store. I’ve done nearly every wood project from reclaimed wood.

This is a Hammond T-400 series tonewheel organ. The organ was in fairly good condition, but required some restoration. The spring reverb needed replacing, and the vibrato drum was seized up. One of the keys had a broken spring mount that required disassembly and a little super glue. Many of the components required a tuneup, and the whole thing was filthy with dust. Once everything was restored to working order, I made some modifications to the circuit to get a close sound to a traditional B3 based off of information here. I also added in a send/receive loop between the output of the tone circuit and the power amplifier. Sending the signal into my Orange amp sounds great.

This is a Mu-tron III style envelope filter. The circuit is based around a state variable filter. The circuit has some novel variations of the basic filter. There is a send-receive loop so the envelope can be extracted and the filter applied further down the signal chain. The filter can be toggled between three frequency ranges. The attack and decay responses are independently adjustable. The output is mixable between the wet and dry signals. Finally, the filter can be switched from envelope control to an expression pedal to allow use as a pedal wah

Named the “Space Boob” by Miranda, this is a Big Muff fuzz pedal clone. The enclosure is a steel bowl.

My workshop. Garish paint courtesy the 1960’s.

This is what happens when you drizzle honey into liquid nitrogen.