Old guitar, new pics

[bancika]

It's not *that* old, but turns a decade this year. My father and I built it for me and it grew into being my #1 electric. We originally built it to be solid white, but later sanded it down, installed the top, stained and did the sunburst. It's 1000% better looking now. I recently got interested in photography and started taking photos of everything around me

For those interested, it's ash body with maple top, relatively thin maple neck with ebony fingerboard. DiMarzio Fred and PAF Pro pickups, schaller floyd rose bridge, jumbo frets. For more info, full build log is here http://diy-fever.com/guitars/bancika-mk1/

before



after

[Dru Edwards]

What a beautiful top! How cool is it to have you name as the logo on the headstock too.

Have you built any others?

[bancika]

thanks! Yes, we built a few.

We did a travel-sized les paul. Full scale but smaller body and headstock. More info here http://diy-fever.com/guitars/mini-les-paul/

I used it for about a year, but couldn't get used to all mahogany electric guitar with LP scale, so I sold it to buy the all mahogany GS Mini that I love



Now we're building a headless travel telecaster. It will look something like this. Again, full scale, smaller body.





Then, there's one that my aunt hand painted. We built it about the same time as my #1 and although it's beautiful I never got to play it. Just last year I got a pair of awesome pickups for it, recorded few demos and left it on the side. It's great, just similar to #1 and I hope someone buys it one day, so I don't feel bad for not playing it

[dagobert]

Your refinished #1 is a beautiful guitar.

[southof8]

Dude, that is righteous!!! What a beautiful guitar.

[bancika]

thank you!

The thing is, it was a gorgeous one-piece ash from the start and back then we didn't know how to do the transparent red finish I wanted all along (I even bought a black/red strap to go with it), so we did the boring white finish I never liked. All those years I felt bad for covering that beautiful ash...so at one point I decided to do a makeover.

If I were to do it again, I'd probably do the two tone sunburst on the ash alone. It's a shame not to show this.

[Dru Edwards]

What a great hobby! I wish I would have had a chance to have played that Les Paul "mini".

[bancika]

Mini LP was pretty good, but I'm having high hopes for the mini headless telecaster (I call it the travelcaster) we're making now. We'll put together everything we learned so far and taking it a step further -

• headless design for even better portability and better weight balance (mini LP was a bit headstock heavy)
• completely different neck profile than what I'm used to (I mostly play shred style guitars with thin but wide necks, this will be the opposite with soft V shape)
• quartersawn maple for the neck with a separate fingerboard piece for better stability
• largest EVO gold frets and 12" radius.
• Dimarzio chopper pickup with tone and volume push/pulls, one for series/parallel, the other for control bypass

It will be a mix of traditional and modern, looking forward to it

[J.R. Rogers]

Very nice looking, and great photography too! I love the guitar your aunt painted - that took a crazy amount of time, I'm sure.

JR