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Chuck’s Travel Guitar build
In a very dangerous move, I’m starting on a build with two already in motion. Mind you this one is going to take quite a while as I know there will be challenges along the way. So, what is it?
I travel reasonably often for work and like to spend evenings in hotel rooms songwriting (I know, wild and crazy guy I am). I’ve got one of those very small keyboards I can put in my carry-on, and also a decent little USB mic, but it bugs me to not have a guitar. Now I realise there are lots of travel guitars, but I have quite specific criteria: it must be a full scale length, and it must fit inside a carry-on bag (ie 48cm is about as long as practical, and shorter is better). For overnight work trips I don’t want to check bags in.
The obvious – and only - answer was something that folded or was in two bits. So I had a max of 96cm to play with, but I started looking at the 90cm mark. Given scale length is 64.8cm, that leaves me with about 25cm for a headstock and also a little bit of space behind the bridge. Then the real challenge is halving it. A guitar neck, even with a shortish headstock is still almost 65cm. That led to me thinking about having a neck that was only about an octave long. Given this is purely to muck around with ideas for songwriting I’m more than happy to forego widdling around up the fretboard!
A trip to Anagote timbers in Sydney (my favourite timber place) yesterday, and scored myself a nice plank of rock maple (enough for more than a couple of necks) and a piece or Surian Cedar – a light weight timber that the Anagote guys thought would work well for the body.
And now I’ve roughly chopped them up as 45cm lengths. Next step will be slowly but surely shaping the neck (the heel of the neck effectively starts at the 8th fret, and then joins from the 9th to the 13th fret) - I did consider some kind of hinge, but it got too complicated. I’ll be installing frets direct to the rock maple, no cap. I’ll also be doing without a truss rod, my theory being that I’ll only have it strung up under tension for an hour or so at a time – but we’ll see how that works out! The pic gives you a rough idea of how it compares to a regular instrument.
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Oh, and the body will be shaped a bit but I think I’ll make something that will act as a thigh rest for it – maybe out of an aluminium bar that will slot into holes on the side. Other things going through my mind are a 4+2 headstock and perhaps a single humbucker that I can split.
One more thing I’m thinking is to use a locking nut and a slotted bridge. That way when the guitar is disassembled the ball-ends of the strings can be just pulled out of the bridge, and the locking nut will keep everything in place until the next time it’s used.
Obviously a lot of half-baked ideas in this one so I know I’ll be leaning on the PBG brains trust to help at times! Stay tuned for sporadic updates...
