Hacking the Gibson: Pickup Cover

I've been working on building the pickup cover lately. It's slow but I'm really happy with how its coming along. Ebony is really hard. Its like carving plastic. I tried routing this with my dremel at first but it was just making a lot of smoke without actually removing very much wood. I opted to use just a wood chisel and its working well. I have the cavity carved out now, I just need to make it about twice as deep and it will be done. The inside doesn't really need to be pretty since no one will see it. I also need to shine up the pole pieces on the pickup so they are nice and clean looking. It appears that the previous owner had painted them black. Once this is done, then all the woodworking is done and I can begin getting the rest of it together.

Fender M80 Chorus

I've been working slowly on the pedal steel, so I don't have much to post right now. I took some time to reorganize my work shop, and now I'm deciding how I want to do the rest of the work. In the mean time, this is the last project I worked on:

It's a Fender M80 Chorus amplifier, I believe from around 1989 or so. Originally this amp was covered by grey carper, so ugly that I didn't even take any pictures before I ripped it off. I bought this amp from a guy at work for $35. He said it didn't work. I'm still not sure what he thought was wrong with it, but I've since used it to play a full show at a bar without any problem. I refinished it with Western Tolex from Mojotone and I was really happy with it. Chrome corners to protect it from damage. The amp cabinet is made from some of the cheapest particle board I have ever seen. It was literally coming apart when I was working on it. I hope the corner pieces hold it together.

It still needs some work. The wiring isn't right. Someone replaced a bunch of the pots with different ones, which is why some knobs are missing or the wrong color. I'm not even sure if they are the correct values but it works right now and sounds great, so I'm not going to mess with it until I need to.

Welcome first visitor!

Its official...6 posts in and I've just received my first hit from somebody searching for "gibson electraharp". As far as I know, thats the first hit to this blog that wasn't a link from my facebook or someone I know already (or a hit stolen from my redirected stype.org). I'm currently the 16th link on google when you search for "gibson electraharp". Its honestly a pretty unpopular instrument so maybe I'm crazy for fixing one, but its fun.

Hacking the Gibson, Part 6

I finished cutting the fret slots today and made the strips with which I will fill the slots. I originally was going to do all white and use mother of pearl inlay to mark certain frets, but I decided I don't really have the proper tools or experience to do inlay correctly, so I'm going back to something I've done in the past. Alternating strips of black and white maple purfling to make patterns. In the picture above, I haven't glued anything yet. Everything will be sanded flush and the effect will look pretty nice. I did the same sort of thing when I did my fretless Les Paul conversion a few years ago, and if I could find pictures of that, I'd post them. I'm going to use cyanoacrylate (super glue) to glue the strips in. Hopefully I'll get that done tomorrow.