The Full Boat

full boat: n. a full price or total amount of money; generally, all of something; as an adj., having many or elaborate features, options, or functions.

I’ve always loved the phrase ‘the full boat.’ I heard it a lot as a kid; when a friend of my uncle bought a Cadillac, he talked about how he got all the options by saying  ”Yeah, I got the full boat.”

I’m not sure what that has to do with this guitar. But when I was collating (!) the photos for this post, I had to name them something, and Boat seemed a good idea.

I feel bad that I didn’t document this guitar build, but it was very challenging and I really didin’t often have the luxury of stepping back and snapping a photo.

This is a semi-hollow design; the middle of the guitar was a solid wood blank that I then drilled out, leaving just the outline and  a solid middle. In a rough sense, it looks like this:

I realize the headstock may look small.

That’s because I wanted the strings to be as straight as possible from bridge to tuners. I didn’t get them straight, but I got close. However, that means that the headstock looks a little… anemic compared to the body.

I couldn’t get the tuners any closer together; they are touching on the back of the headstock.

The neck is very thick, but that’s because I have big hands and its comfortable that way for me. And I built this guitar for myself.

This guitar has an angled headstock, a 13 degree pitch. It can be hard to cut a 13 degree angle with the tools I have, but I managed. The hard part is actually gluing the two resulting pieces together. but I figured it out anyway! You can see the line through the neck in the photo above.

In case you can’t:

The neck itself is angled to the body. That’s because of the bridge I used. It sits pretty high up off the body, so I needed to make the neck cavity with a 4 degree angle. In the photo below, you can see the angle of the neck where it meets the body.

Hollow bodies guitars traditionally have ‘f holes,’ named after their shape. Here’s a hollowbody with characteristic f holes (and the traditional large headstock):

Well, I’m not much for tradition, so I wanted to try something different. At one time, I was actually going to make this guitar have a sort of pirate theme, but luckily I couldn’t find a way to do it with any measure of tastefulness. But I did manage, in that process, to come up with a pretty good idea  (I think) for the f holes.

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Using the Jolly Roger (that’s what the pirate flag is called), I isolated one of the sabers and simplified the design a bit, and made templates for the f holes. I think they came out pretty well:

The bridge was sitting very high off the face of the guitar. It was still functioning properly, but I didn’t like so much exposure. So I used a piece of walnut to make a bridge plate.

This allows for a better area of contact, and it looks like the old-fashioned bridges on some more traditional hollowbodies:

The top and back of the guitar are made of cherry. I bought it at a hobby shop in Mongkok. Ideally, I should have used a single piece, but I wanted to try and work with what was available. That meant that I had to glue all the narrow pieces together to get one wide piece. It was a nightmare!

But I managed to get it done. I managed to cut the large cavity cover on the back from the actual wood. This is why the grain matched. The smaller cavity couldn’t be done the same way, unfortunately.

The entire guitar has flame maple binding. I did an okay job with it, but if I ever do another, I’d have to get a bending iron, which makes it possible to bend the wood around corners.

This binding looks okay, but if I had used a bending iron it would have been MUCH better.

The guitar has one volume and one tone control. The vibrato is a bridge I bought in Ochanomizu, Tokyo the last time I was there.

The pickups are Seymour Duncan Vintage P-90s.

I used maple veneer to cover the pickup covers. They look okay, but by doing them the first time I learned how to do a much better job the nexttime I do it!

The guitar works, and I really like the sound. I suppose that’s the point. Hopefully I’ll get to play it in front of people, but first I need to find a case for it!