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Pine Paul

This Les Paul shaped guitar was initially designed to have a fully pine body – using wood from my children’s’ old bunk beds.  I later decided to add the red zebra ‘carved-through’ top with olive wood racing stripes.  The back includes beech rails – recycled table legs from a Gloucester Rugby Club bar – and the neck has a wenge central spine with quilted sapele sides and an olive wood fretboard. 

The guitar is finished with a mix of equal parts boiled linseed oil and satin polyurethane varnish thinned with white spirit for application – an ideal easy finish for this type of guitar.

The guitar has a 25″ scale length and is fitted with Epiphone P90 Pro pickups – highly recommended in my opinion.

The finished weight is 7lb 14oz.

Design

This is a relatively simple guitar using the Les Paul body shape.  The neck pocket was cut with a small angle to match the ‘badass’ wraparound bridge  – not too difficult using ramps for the routing.

The main challenge was to design a 3-a-side flat headstock.  As shown below, the Music Man headstock shape was adapted.  The tuner spacing is greater on the lower strings to prevent the tuner bodies clashing on the back.

Build

The guitar was initially conceived to have a very simple slab pine body.  It was a late decision to add a thin red-zebra top and to carve through for the arm contour.  Olive wood racing stripes were included to visually continue the fretboard through the top of the body.

The quilted sapele on the back of the neck was more difficult than usual to carve and shape due to the random grain, but looks amazing on the finished guitar with an oil finish.

A new template set was made for the longer control cavity.  The Crimson universal cavity set was ‘mirrored’ to make the new templates.

Finished Guitar

The finished guitar plays nicely and the Epiphone P90 Pro pickups sound very good.  The wraparound bridge is quite high, so the bridge pickup in particular is near the top of its rout.  Next time I use this configuration, I’ll consider recessing the bridge mounting studs to give an extra couple of millimetres.

UPDATE:  The original “Badass” bridge has been replaced with the Wilkinson WOGT3 bridge – this is 3mm lower and a bit more stylish.  This has allowed the bridge pickup to be lowered and a neck shim to be removed.  The guitar is now set up as I designed it.  I would recommend the Wilkinson Bridge.