Design
Plans from ‘The Electric Herald’ web site were used to make the full body template and also the ‘carve template’ for defining the chamfer edges on the top and bottom. Weight was not thought to be a big problem, as the body is 40mm thick and mainly black and white limba, which is relatively low weight. However, olive wood and wenge are much heavier, so the body is chambered and drilled. The large PRS-style control cavity also removes a useful amount of weight from the body.
A bolt-on neck is used with a modern Wilkinson wrap-around bridge – one of my favourites. Pickups are Iron Gear – Dirty Torque in the Bridge and Rolling Mill in the Neck. Controls are relatively simple – one volume and one tone with a mini toggle for PRS partial splits and another to put the bridge humbucker in parallel.
There were no significant design issues to be addressed although a late design change moved the neck one fret further into the body to help with balance and feel (SGs can feel very different to other guitars with the nut so far away!)
Build
Construction of the body required a number of careful glue-ups. A piece of attractive olive wood was bookmatched for the top panels.
Because of the bolt-on neck, I had to rethink the usual strap button attachment – I decided to use a small bolt into an insert placed on the inside of the neck pocket as seen below.
Finished Guitar
The guitar is finished with the usual oil blend and is everything I had hoped for. An oil finish always transforms the appearance of the wood and in this case the black limba becomes much darker and the olive wood becomes almost golden. The raw limba has quite an open grain and the olive polished up like marble – I love the contrast.
This is the first time I have used a scarf joint for the headstock, so I decided to pimp it with a couple of layers of rock maple. The carved-through effect is quite attractive.
The pickups sound really good. The bridge pickup is quite hot and sounds sounds particularly nice when selected in parallel.
The final result is one of the most resonant and ‘ringing’ guitars I have made.
