Accidental Participant

After my former employer decided to pay me a bearable sum each month not to turn up at the office I found myself with time, if not huge amounts of money.
My background as an amateur includes a bit of building of racing dinghies, both epoxy/plywood and epoxy/foam, and music wise playing electric bass, mainly folk tinged, although I dabble with other instruments.
The first thing I did was to write a book about railway history, as you do, but with that in the shops I thought I'd pick up a long submerged ambition to build an Appalachian/mountain dulcimer. So I ordered this kit up, and when it arrived took a look and thought ****, that's beyond my pay grade. Epoxy boatbuilding, you understand, tolerates a degree of imprecision with the use of high performance fillers etc which would be unacceptable on an instrument.
So I thought I'd build a crude cigar box guitar for practice and to acquire some skills, and bought a very cheap secondhand Peavey guitar as a cheaper source of components than buying new. This turned out to have a surprisingly usable neck (if a truly appalling body) so the cigar box guitar turned into a very small bodied semi, but unfortunately I spent about 2 minutes designing the body shape which is ugly beyond belief.
Anyway that worked, and has turned out to be quite usable as a thing to work out arrangements with, and the dulcimer followed.
While thinking about another project a good mate presented me with a hardly started ESB4 kit that for complex reasons he wasn't going to progress, which is what brings me here.
Sorry about the essay, I fear I'm prone to that.
I'm in SE England BTW, but am technically an expatriate Australian although I've been here since early childhood.

Welcome Aboard, make sure you start a build diary so you can share your progress and ask questions.

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Sorry about the essay, I fear I'm prone to that.

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Well, you did write a book on railway history... just sayin'...

Just jokes btw!

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Originally Posted by McCreed

Well, you did write a book on railway history... just sayin'...

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Fair comment: I'm proven to have a tendency to write books.

Congrats on your retirement (if I'm reading that right). Have fun with the build.

Welcome Jim. Would love to see photos of the cigar box guitar and the dulcimer. It doesn’t matter if they are rough. We all start somewhere.

Its more that its just pig ugly. I didn't feel confident about bending the ribs into the sharp curves of a 335 style cutaway with just an old steam iron to assist, so I went straight across the end of the centre block, but it didn't occur to me that I would actually have been better off with no cutaways at all. And the mould for the body shape wasn't drawn at all, just sketched by hand and cut by eye with a jigsaw. The problem, really, is it turned out a little better than I thought, I was expecting it to go straight in the scrap bin.
The back and ribs are 2mm ply left over from a boat building project, the front is spruce which I actually bought!
Attachment 32321
Attachment 32322
Attachment 32323
You can see I fabricated the centre block from various odd bits of hardwood lying about, I didn't have a router, although I ended up buying one when it was time to do the pickup cutout.

Welcome. I think your guitar has a groovy art vibe about it. I kind of like it.

When you said "cigar box guitar" - that was not what I expected!

Very cool. Kind of has a retro-Danelectro vibe to it. Well done!

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Originally Posted by JimC

Its more that its just pig ugly. I didn't feel confident about bending the ribs into the sharp curves of a 335 style cutaway with just an old steam iron to assist, so I went straight across the end of the centre block, but it didn't occur to me that I would actually have been better off with no cutaways at all. And the mould for the body shape wasn't drawn at all, just sketched by hand and cut by eye with a jigsaw. The problem, really, is it turned out a little better than I thought, I was expecting it to go straight in the scrap bin.
The back and ribs are 2mm ply left over from a boat building project, the front is spruce which I actually bought!
Attachment 32321
Attachment 32322
Attachment 32323
You can see I fabricated the centre block from various odd bits of hardwood lying about, I didn't have a router, although I ended up buying one when it was time to do the pickup cutout.

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Dude! That looks great.