Old Guitar Project: The Woody 5150

In 2007 (before I started blogging) I undertook a project that in retrospect was nearly as insane as the Dan Armstrong project. I thought you might like to see the photos I have and find out how I did it.

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One of my favorite guitarists is Eddie Van Halen.

One of the guitars he is known for was a Kramer that came to be called the 5150, which is a  California legal term that refers to the involuntary confinement of a person displaying some form of mental disorder.

“Do I look crazy to you???”

He built it in preparation for the band’s 1984 tour, because his original guitar was becoming too fragile (and valuable) to drag around the planet again.

Actually, the guitar was just afraid of Eddie’s outfit.

The guitar itself is nothing special in terms of woods, and certainly not in terms of paint job, which was done in about an hour.

That’s not the 5150, but Eddie did visit the Kramer factory several times and painted most of his Kramers himself. 

The guitar has, however, become part of the iconic imagery of 1980s music in general and Eddie Van Halen in particular.

 He used the guitar to play his solo in “Beat It” onstage with Michael Jackson in Dallas in 1984 when the two bands’ tours overlapped.

It’s a very simple guitar; 1 pickup instead of 2 and a volume control but no tone control. It also has a Floyd Rose locking  vibrato, which Eddie was instrumental in testing and developing.

Eddie Van Halen isn’t God. Because he plays louder than God.

The guitar is simple, but that doesn’t mean it can’t create an astounding variety of music (assuming, of course, that Eddie is playing it):

I always wanted to create one of them, and on the surface it’s simple.

Everything’s simple on the surface.

The problem is that I didn’t want to just paint a replica.

Oh no, that would be too f@#$ing simple, wouldn’t it?

I wanted to make my replica using wood.

What, I hear you ask, are you talking about?

Simple, really.

Woods are different colors, and finding wood that’s white, red and black is actually very simple.

 

The hard part is putting them together the right way. Just ask these two.

It’s easy to find painstaking detail about the guitar, including the position and size of all the stripes.

But how could I do what I wanted to do?

This project rattled around in my head for almost 20 years before I had the light bulb moment.

In retrospect, you could almost wonder what took me so long, until you remembered that it is me we’re talking about.

What I decided to do was to inlay the stripes into the body.

You’ll see what I mean soon. 

And no, it’s not a euphemism. Dammit.

So I would need a wood for the body that was naturally red.

I chose  Padauk, because it sounds good, is naturally red, and doesn’t need a finish on it.

I have an entire guitar made from Padauk and really love it, so I knew it would work well.

I would need white and black wood too, and the obvious choices were maple and ebony.

Okay, we’re getting there, but the guitar has one detail that necessitated a lot of thinking.

When Eddie painted the stripes, he painted the body white, then used tape to mask off the stripes he wanted to stay white. One of those stripes runs all the way around the outside edge of the body:

I knew there was no way I could inlay that. So I decided that the best way to recreate it was to sandwich a piece of maple between the two pieces of Padauk.

Actually, the maple was several pieces glued together, but no one was going to notice and I wasn’t going to care.

I decided to use flame maple because it looks nice and I thought it would add something extra to the concept.

These are the actual pieces of wood; I apparently saved the auction images.

You can see the ‘flames’ in the wood pretty well here, and when there’s a finish on them it comes out even more.

I asked my old boss and mentor if he could help me out, and he was kind enough to say yes. So I went on the internet and bought a bunch of wood and had it all sent to his shop.

Oddly enough, when the flame maple arrived, my boss emailed me to say that some of it was a kind of funky green color. I contacted the seller to ask about it, and his response was that he wanted to keep his perfect feedback, so he would just refund the $ I sent him.

Wow, free maple.

That’s almost the best kind of surprise you can recieve.

I won’t say what the best one is, because I don’t want to make you think poorly of me.

Thanks, Dave.

My boss was kind enough to make the body blank for me and to mill all the wood for the stripes, in lengths of varying thickness from 1/8″ to 3/4.” When it was all done, he shipped it to me, along with the router bits and other assorted stuff I had sent to him:

Mmmmm…. wood cake.

You can see some of the stripes, both maple and ebony. You can also see the template for the body; I use that to cut the outline.

That’s a lot of stripes! I made sure to have extra, because you always need to make sure there is more than enough.

There are not many black stripes, so I only needed a little ebony. Considering its price, it was a blessing.

In the background is a ‘stripe template’ printed to full size so I can make sure I get the alignment correct.

Getting all the materials collected was relatively easyt, but I would need a way to accurately inlay all these stripes.

Once again, my mentor helped me out with a solution as simple as it was effective.

I built a frame that fit around the body blank with sides thick enough to support a rail that would guide the router in a straight line:

 This way I could line up the rail with the position of whatever stripe I wanted to cut and screw the rail to the frame, making it absolutely immobile.

 The rail also allowed me to cut the stripes very cleanly and, more importantly, very straight.

I started on the back of the guitar, and with the smallest stripes, in case something went horribly wrong. But it’s a simple process.

Once the body was routed to the correct depth, I selected the correct thickness of ‘stripe maple’, put some wood glue on it and tapped it into place:

 The clamps would hold the stripe in place until the glue set, but it wasn’t really necessary; there wasn’t any room for the stripe to move.

The tough part was getting the depth just right; I needed the cuts deep enough to touch the middle but not so deep that the stripe was below the Padauk.

The stripes were made slightly higher than necessary just in case. In the above photo, you can see how they meet in the middle, just like on the real one.

You can also see the photo I used to guide me in laying out the stripes.

It was a simple process, but it took a while because there were a lot of stripes to cut!

I always glued the stripe in before cutting the next one because you can see that some of the ‘triangles’ of Padauk get pretty small, and if I was routing anything less than solid, they would have broken off.

 I made my way up through the thicknesses of the stripes, and the closer I got the more I started thinking it would work.  

The last stripes were the ebony ones, because they were the last stripes done on the originals so they were on ‘top’ of the red.

When the back was finished I took a deep breath and started on the front.

Actually I wasn’t that worried. I had gotten used to the process, and besides, I was reaching so far with this project that if it ended up firewood I would have had to admit that it was probably impossible in the first place.

I didn’t have to carry the stripes all the way to the edge; they just had to go past the edge where the body ended. I added a little extra, but I was very careful about it.

This may help explain a little better:

I cut out the body outline and started to bring it to final shape.

I needed to make the forearm and tummy contours. But with this guitar I had to be careful about cutting into the middle piece of maple; if I went far enough to make the forearm contour really comfortable, it would distort the stripe.

You can see the forearm contour here, where the plane of the body falls away at the upper left corner.

The tummy contour on the back had to be shallow as well, but it obviously wouldn’t be as noticeable.

Speaking of noticeable, you can see where the black stripes on the front and back don’t meet up, as they do on the original.

I couldn’t think of a way to do it, and then I had a brainstorm: “F@#$ it.”

It’s starting to look like a guitar…

Then I rounded the edges of the body with roundover bits in the router.

I started to finish sand the guitar, and here was where I discovered my first… challenge.  Padauk is a very dusty wood, and it gets everywhere.

Especially on anything lighter than it, like socks.

And maple.

There was really no way I could keep the maple purely white; the Padauk just got in it. But it wasn’t catastrophic.

You can see here the guitar is almost done; I still had to rout the rear control cavity, finish the neck pocket area and drill for the neck screws:

 The upper horn still needed some work at this stage too.

I made the rear cavity cover from a piece of thin ebony I had bought just for the purpose:

The other thing I did was to patch some of the places where the stripes weren’t fitting as perfectly as they might otherwise have (like if I used a CNC router) or there was a Padauk mishap (you can see one in the photo above; the missing triangle in the center of the body).

They’re not bad, and considering how small they are, I ought not complain about them.

Once the contours were done, I routed the neck pocket, the bridge and pickup cavities, and the control cavity on the back (sorry, no photos). 

I also decided to use ferrules instead of a neck plate. I thought it would look nicer, and I could contour the area to be more comfortable.

The 4 holes are not square to each other, but that’s intentional.

It doesn’t make a difference in their holding power, I promise.

Put some hardware on it and it really looks like a guitar!

I didn’t want to spray this guitar with lacquer. I wanted the wood to be very obvious, and besides, Padauk doesn’t need a finish.

Maple does, however, so I decided  to split the difference and use Danish Oil, which is a wipe-on oil finish with some  lacquer solids in it.

The change in the wood is as dramatic as it is obvious; it comes to life, especially the maple.

Notice the patches around the stripes where they join each other.

The flame maple really comes out with the oil. As I applied more and more coats, the Padauk became a very rich red color:

An unintended but appreciated thing happened during the striping process: because of the way I ‘scheduled’ the stripes, they have a layered or 3-dimensional look to them. You can see it clearly in the photo below:

 The headstock of the guitar was also painted:

Rather than try to use solid wood, I decided instead to use veneers. After a lot of thought and deliberation, I figured the beast (and easiest) thing to do would be to make the white (maple) part one-piece.

You can see the drawing on the veneer in this photo:

The back of the headstock is all red, so I decided to use a single piece of Padauk veneer.

I only needed a small piece of ebony veneer (there’s only one black stripe), and you can see that too:

The sides of the headstock would be a little trickier. I would have to bend the veneer around some pretty serious curves, but I figured that I’d never done it before, so it would be a good way to learn.

The back was easy, except for the curve near the holes for the screws that hold the Floyd Rose nut (on the right edge of the veneer. 

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Lots of patience and super glue; when the veneer split, I just glued pieces into the openings.

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The back was nice and smooth, and the transitions even looked good.

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It came out pretty well for a first try that violated the rules and philosophy of veneering. 

 That’s before being finished, which is why it looks a bit rough.

Once the back was set, I moved on to the sides, which went pretty easily.

 The only tough part was joining the seams between the back and sides on the curved portions, but overlapping and super glue made it no big deal. 

The maple veneer on the face ended up being more than one piece due to breakage, as seen below (along with the single piece of ebony). When you cut along the grain, wood that thin will just separate on you.

I simply glued the broken bits where they would have gone, and the glue covered the seams really well.

To get it to follow the curve, I used a small clamp to hold down the flat part, flexing the maple against the curve on the left.

I helped it by pushing on the end of the veneer, making sure not to get glued to it.

Once the maple and ebony were in place, I just cut pieces of Padauk to fit into the ‘blank’ spaces. It was time-consuming, but pretty easy. 

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Once the pieces were all well-secured, I used more glue to cover the whole face, making it all a lot stronger and, in some ways, easier to work with. 

I carefully re-opened the tuner holes, trimmed the edges, and sanded it (almost) flat.

I didn’t want it to be too smooth; I had come to like the slightly rough appearance. I feel that it evokes the 5150′s battle-scarred look.

I didn’t forget about the star on the headstock. I just needed to find a way to make one that I could work with. If I just cut the veneer, it fell apart.

  I ended up using… I don’t know what you call it. It’s brown tape that’s sticky on one side and very waxy on the other. It’s not masking or packing tape.

But it would stick to the veneer and more importantly I could peel it off without destroying the veneer once it was in place. See?

 

 Once it was dry, I sanded it smooth. 

You didn’t think I forgot about the logo, did you? I went online and searched for the closest font I could find to the original Kramer logo.

And I think I did pretty well.

But I didn’t want to just recreate the original name. If that was the case, I could have just bought a reproduction sticker. 

That’s not the way I do things. 

I went with something different, but suitable:

Since the experiment with the star went so well, and since I had yet to ruin this project, which had already gone light years past even my wildest expectations, I decided that I would attempt to recreate the numbers on the guitar.

The originals use something commonly known as ‘Space Tape’; you can buy these numbers (and stars, which the originals were too) on eBay, and I had bought a set for reference. 

But this was going to be trickier, because they were much bigger. Still, a test number (shown below) came out okay, so I decided to go for it.

Here’s all four numbers cut:

I could swear I had a good reason for printing the numbers backwards, but now I just can’t remember it.

At least we know why my memory is so bad…

 

But frankly, if I may say so myself, Holy Sh*t that looks great!

That detail is probably my favorite part of the build and the one I am most proud of achieving.

Speaking of details, there is a second star inside the upper cutaway of the guitar: 

 Naturally, the slightly hidden one came out better than the one on the front of the headstock:

So there you have it: an ‘organic’ copy of an iconic instrument. I think I did a pretty good job.