“Eyla”, a Russian word meaning, “Eyla”. It was a late night computer extravaganza for me. It was probably 1 in the morning or so when Pavel messaged me all the way from Mother Russia. “Can you build me a guitar?” was the essential question from my buddy way on the other side of the globe. But what it all turned out to be, was a project that tested me. A lot.
Ya see, Pavel is an electrical engineer and a really good one too. You can check out some of his work on facebook at “Desperate Engineering”. So being the meticulous engineer he is, he auto-cad-ed his guitar! At least the front and the back of the guitar. I get a few emails with the plans, I go to my local printer shop, and like magic, I have full scale drawings of his guitar.
I always do a full scale drawing of the guitars I build, or at least any new idea or aspect of the guitar that I haven’t done yet. So having a to scale drawing wasn’t new to me. But someone else’ drawing was new. Definitely a little pressure was added throughout the whole project if for nothing else, this guitar was being sent to Russia! If something goes wrong, there aint anything I can do about it. And that just isn’t a good feeling.
But enough of that. On to the build!
The main bulk of the guitar is simple enough. An ash body with a beautiful koa top. The neck is a five piece neck, wenge on the outside, bubinga is the next layer and flamed maple in the middle. The fingerboard and headcap are macassar ebony. The tuners are Hipshot as is the bridge. The pickups are a DiMarzio Crunch Lab and a DiMarzio Liquid Fire. Two volume controls and NO tone controls. There’s a push/pull pot to coil split the pickups and a three position blade switch. To “wrap” things up, the body, neck and headstock are done up with ivoroid binding.
This was my first time putting binding around the headstock. It took me a while to figure how on earth I was going to it. If you notice the headstock design, it is quite skinny! There is not a lot of room to even think about putting a router on the headstock to route the channel for the binding let alone attempt doing it! It took me going all the way to Hawaii and laying down on the beach for a few days before I was relaxed enough to have the answer reveal itself to me. (not a bad way to come up with an answer to a question if you ask me!) I built a table top that clamped onto the then square neck. The table top had the cutout of the headstock with just enough room for the router bit to move about. It was a very simple contraption but it did the trick!
Oh yeah, did I mention that was also the first Seven string I had built? Because it was. And it was fun.
It was also my first time installing stainless steel fret wire. I used Jescar jumbo wire. It was fun to install except for the fact that it destroyed my fret cutters. Jeesh….
It got the tung oil finish throughout. The more I use that stuff, the more I like it.
And that’s basically it. I wrapped the guitar about a hundred times with some bubble wrap and beach towels, plopped it into a box, and sent it off to Russia. It was a fun and challenging experience, which in my book is always a good thing.
