Comments on: Guitar Build

By: JJ

JJ — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 13:32:15 +0000

I have a Gibson les paul double cut away with the whip stop bar tailpiece. What I would like to do is add the tuno’matic bridge. I think the holes that are there will work for the bridge but I would need to drill holes for the stop bar tailpiece. Is that possible?

By: Araz

Araz — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 15:57:08 +0000

Hi Tim,

I think starting with a kit guitar project is a great idea, it will get your feet wet…

A few things about building from scratch:

1. When you say “short scale” I assume you mean “short scale length”… Unless you know how to calculate fret distances and properly cut fret slots in a fingerboard, I recommend to go with standard electric guitar scale lengths and buy a pre-slotted fingerboard. The big manufacturers have standard scale lengths of 24.75″ for Gibsons, 25″ for PRS and 25.5″ for Fenders (see a great description of scale lengths here http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/Fretting/a-scalelength.html ) You can create a guitar with a different scale length for sure, but it also means a lot of work.

2. The Melvin Hiscock book is good but I don’t necessarily think it’s very practical for finding information in an easy manner… It’s written too much like a novel with no separation of subjects… The book that I highly recommend is Building Electric Guitars by Martin Koch. It’s highly detailed, easy to read, many diagrams and more of a step-by-step approach.

3. The approach outlined in this article should work for finding the bridge position on any guitar. Just make the necessary modifications for the specific hardware of a Fender bridge type.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 12:08:57 +0000

Hello. I found you doing a google search on locating a bridge on an electric guitar.. I’m putting together a kit soon, but I think I’ll actually build an electric short scale, or shorter than normal scale electric guitar in the future out of wood from Indiana. My brother has a bunch of Walnut / black walnut for bodies and a bunch of birdseye maple for necks.. as well as a wood shop.. So, I’m going to try my hand at building a very simple short scale (23″ or 24″) single cutaway guitar with 22 frets.. Medium tall, etc,.. Thanks so much for this info on the locating the bridge. I have the Melvin Hiscock book on building guitars and it helped a lot, but this is a better way of finding where the bridge should be. Does this work on a Fender hard tail bridge as well ?