I've had some interesting repair jobs over the last few months.
This Kiso Suzuki is just about 50 years old, hand made in Japan. Many of their guitars are copies of US made instruments (there was legal action), and while this one is very D45-esque it more than holds its own and sounds fantastic.
I've been tasked with making a custom model, built to spec. Combing elements of both Tele and Strat: the body is a mixture of both, with a hard-tail bridge and a pickguard mounted with a humbucker and two single coils. The plan/template looks like this:
This is an Ambler Hound Dog guitar that I was tasked with making some fairly serious modifications to. These are lovely, well made instruments, with great finishes, but the owner wanted to make some changes. First of all this is what it looked like originally:
Instagram is both a blessing and a curse. It's altogether too easy to take pictures and upload to there any interesting or unusual jobs I take on, which has made me lazy and starved my website of any updates! So with that in mind here's two of the larger projects I've done recently:
Done. This one still has semi-hollow construction, just without the F-hole, heavily chambered sapele body with a flamed maple top finished in a sunset fade and natural binding. Five piece sapele/maple/walnutneck, chunky as requested, 25mm all the way down just like they did in the early '50s! The eb...
The latest Domino build is done, this one has an English walnut top on a padauk body, with a 7 piece sapele, walnut and maple neck complete with an ebony board. Body and neck are finished with shellac and hand rubbed oil-based varnish. The board has a 12" radius, mounted with 22 Jescar EVO Gold narr...
Some jobs are bigger than others. This USA deluxe strat was sent to me from the other side of the country, and I don't think a new set of strings and a polish is going to get it done this time. This is what I started with:
The body had most of the finish removed by the owner, I'd already filled the...
A good customer of mine wanted some brutal, and uncompromising pickups for his Gibson SG. After talking over the options he went with a custom order from BKP:
Warpigs are one of the more extreme pickups in the Bare Knuckle range, heavily overwound with powerful magnets they produce massive outpu...
Or to give them their full name Bare Knuckle "Pat Pend '59 Slab Board" pickups, just rolls off the tongue that one. They're A5 single coils wound with formvar wire, and a relatively low output. With a little give on the attack and a surprisingly smooth top end they're not particularly similar to man...
This guitar came into the workshop looking like it had gotten into a fight and lost.
It's seen plenty of use, often sighted entertaining the crowds on Church St. in Liverpool City Centre. It recently got itself a new hole in the top and the badly worn frets and kindling-dry board were in dire need of...
