Someone I know is very much into his guitars – and he’d started to experiment with doing the ‘setting up’ himself (things like lowering the action and fixing the intonation). His next step? To build a guitar from a kit! However, not only was he not terribly interested in the visuals of the guitar (more the process of building it) but he is left handed! Left handed guitars are hard enough to find at the best of times, and kits even more so – so I was to get a guitar out of this, and one that I could decorate as I pleased.  Voila!

So, to cut this long story short – I had decided on a steampunk guitar. Primer, gold spraypaint and fake patina was purchased, sprockets were dissassembled from bike gear cassettes, and 15mm gate valves were found and taken gleefully apart. And that was just the beggining. It took a couple of weeks to do the painting – several coats of primer, many coats of gold and some experiments on rough pieces of wood to find the best means of applying the patina. (Use a sponge.) Put almost a whole can of laquer on that beast too! Sprockets were attached using brass screws, and upholstery pins used to keep the gate valve tops (the red things) on the volume and tone knobs.

In no particular order the other tasks – a vinyl skirt was cut up and glued onto the scratchplate, the pickup switch was replaced with two toggle switches, the string trees were replaced with gold coloured ones, the control plate and bridge were replaced with gold ones of the same. And last but certainly not least, I had a small brass nameplate engraved for the headstock – “The Professor”.

This is an oldish photograph (before the switch switch) but I will repost with other photographs in future. I love my “Professor”, he’s a wonderful guitar!