This is my third electric guitar, but I don’t have good pictures of my first two, so this is the first one I will discuss here. The neck is made from a single piece of kingwood (a rosewood variety from Madagascar). The body is walnut and is semi-hollow, telecastor thinline style. The top cap is also kingwood. I had originally planned to use a wood binding, but I really liked the way the kingwood and walnut looked together, so I rounded the edges and left it unbound front and back. The pickup rings and knob caps are walnut.

 

This guitar has the most complicated electronics package I have used. The pickups are DiMarzio Air Classics (nice vintage PAF tone). The GraphTech Ghost piezo bridge pickup, along with the Ghost internal preamp give a very nice acoustic sound (this is the best solid body piezo system I have heard).

The controls include a five way magnetic pickup selector switch, a mini toggle to select magnetic, peizo, or both, and a series/parallel switch. The wiring in the controls cavity is busy and crowded, but this guitar is very flexible and can produce a wide variety of sounds.

 

This is guitar is a bit deeper than normal (2”), so I put a contoured cutout behind the neck/body joint for easier high fret access. Take a look at the nice flamed maple stripe on the neck.

 

This guitar was finished with Oxford water based spray lacquer over a base shellac sealer and shellac/pumice grain fill.