The Hatchet
Guitars are sometimes called "axes", right? So this must be a "hatchet"!
Travel guitars have been around forever, seems like. I liked the idea of them, but many of them were short scale or took special parts (making them difficult to upgrade) and sometimes they looked like kids' versions of more popular guitar designs.
When I decided to build my own version of a travel guitar, I wanted it to be as compact as possible while retaining a full scale and also using readily available "universal" parts.
Headless guitars and basses have been around for a time as well, and I thought that would be a good place to start, since it lends itself to being compact. I bought an old Egmond solid body guitar at a flea market for $5.00 and chopped the headstock off. It had a zero fret, which I liked, and my first thought was to just make a plate to cover the end of the neck and slot it for the ball end of the stings. I had a Kahler locking nut laying around and decided to use that instead. I then made a small aluminum plate, which serves three purposes. One, to cover the end of the neck, two, as a truss rod access cover, three, as a place to bolt on a banjo bracket to use as a hanging device.
I was given some chunks of mahogany by a repair customer, and one was large enough to make the body. I kept it as small as it could be, just barely wide enough to hold the tune-o-matic bridge and humbucker mounting ring. I shaped the "headstock" (tailstock??) somewhat like the reverse of a Flying V, mainly so the strings had more of a direct shot at the tuners.
It's not perfect alignment, but the "break" angle is kept to a minimum, while using standard tuners and keeping everything as compact as I could.
It's routed for a standard humbucker in the bridge position. I then drilled from the side for the output jack and control plate. The output jack is VERY close to touching the base of the pickup. I made the control plate and output jack plate out of scrap brass.
I feed the strings through the tuners and then to the locking nut, where they are snipped, so there are no pointed bits of string anywhere.
I originally made this guitar sometime around 1995. It hung on the wall of my shop for a few years where the roof leaked and it suffered some water damage, mainly the metal. The frets turned green and the controls froze up. It's had several different pickups in it. It currently has a Dimarzio X2N. A few years back I refretted it, then it hung for a few more years until a few months ago when I refinished it completely, installed the Dimarzio, new gold Tele knobs and Grover reissue tuners.
The neck is okay, but my next move is to make a duplicate neck completely from scratch, so I can finally say I built "all" of it. I will likely make the neck from maple with a contrasting strip down the middle, which will be the exact width of the truss rod, thereby saving me the routing process. I will likely use an ebony board, bound, and I may try my hand at inlay as well.
Overall it is 31" long and weighs just under 4 lbs. I carry it in a Ruger carbine bag, the pocket of which holds the headphone amp and bud headphones.
