Another Bamboocaster Demo

Here’s my brother playing the bamboocaster at my parents’ house in Nashville:

Bamboo Guitar Pics

Bamboocaster First Demo

Andrew Cunningham of Tonerider tries out the bamboocaster with his Vintage Plus pickups:

Bamboo Guitar (Part 2)

The guitar project was on hold for the past week, but today I finally had a chance to get a little more work done. First, we mounted the routing templates on the rough-cut bodies and cleaned up the outlines. The big pin router made short work of the first body, but halfway through the second one the bit started to chatter and tore a huge chunk out of the side. I was worried, but after gluing it back on and re-routing the body (with a new bit) I can’t even find the damaged spot. Somehow I didn’t get any pictures of the bodies in this state. Next, we drilled out the pickup cavities and neck pockets before cleaning them up on the router as well.

With the bodies basically done, we moved on to necks. Last week we’d ripped some pieces of the horizontally laminated board and glued them together to make the bamboo strips vertical, which I think looks better. Today we cut out the necks on the band saw, then ran them through the pressure planer until they came out at 21mm. The fingerboards will be the same 5mm thick bamboo board I used for the tops and backs of the bodies.

We didn’t have time to finish routing the necks today, so I had to use a spare maple/rosewood neck to test out the body. Starting to look like a guitar…

Bamboo Guitar

For the past couple of years I’ve been telling anyone who’d listen that I want to build a guitar out of bamboo. Well, I finally got around to starting the project. I’d already done some research into the manufacturing processes involved in making bamboo boards, and knew what I wanted for body and neck blanks, so I contacted several bamboo flooring factories around Anji in Zhejiang. Eventually I found one that makes boards to the appropriate specifications and were willing to provide me with small quantities. There are a few different ways bamboo is made into boards, but the kind I’m using is made up of long strips with a rectangular cross section laminated together. I ordered pieces of both vertical and horizontal lamination, and prefer the more “wood-like” grain of the vertical type. Stranded bamboo boards look even more wood-like, but weigh nearly twice as much as the already heavy laminated boards.

My friend Wang Qin, a luthier who makes basses under the name KuanChi7, offered to let me use his workshop and walk me through the process of making a guitar. He had templates for several guitars, but I wanted a Tele — its utilitarian simplicity makes it the perfect platform for testing different woods and hardware — plus I just like them. I downloaded Terry Downs’ drawing from TDPRI and modified it slightly, then had routing templates laser cut from 15mm acrylic. Anticipating possible weight issues, I made an additional template for routing Thinline-style chambers as well.

I decided to use 5mm thick vertically laminated pieces for the top and back, with a center section of 35mm thick horizontally laminated board. The picture above shows the body parts after being rough cut on the band saw. Next, we hollowed out the center section with a jigsaw:

Then, the jigsaw cuts were cleaned up on the pin router (sorry, no pictures), and the top and back were glued on.

To be continued …

Nanome

Tiny buttons + Monome = Nanome

Red Eye Boost

Red Eye Boost: Thickens up your sound without getting boomy, rounds off the sharp edges for creamy tube amp overdrive, and adds just a bit of germanium fuzz at the highest gain setting.

Twins

Sinolectro Peacemaker
45 Watts of tube rectified push-pull power
Updated vintage design
Single-channel with Master Volume
3 12AX7, 2 6L6, 1 5Z3

All hand wired point-to-point and built to order

New Old Speakers

These were a best seller for Diatone / Mitsubishi back in 1973, so there are quite a few in the secondhand markets now. They couldn’t be called transparent, but they are very nice to listen to — they have a distinct sound that I can only describe as smooth and liquid, with a chunky low end. Reference recordings don’t sound as good as on a reference system, but average recordings sound good, and even bad recordings are listenable.

Diatone DS-251 MkII Specifications:
Alignment: 3-way sealed cabinet
Woofer: 25cm paper cone
Tweeter: 5cm paper cone
Super Tweeter: 3cm aluminum cone
Crossover Frequency: 2000Hz, 10000Hz
Frequency Response: 40Hz – 25000Hz
Nominal impedance: 8Ω
Power Handling: 40W
Sensitivity: 91 dB/W
Size: 315 × 525 × 240mm WxHxD
Weight: 12kg