Request for help... -guitar drawing/designing competition.

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For anyone who doesn't know...

I like to play the guitar...
I also have a degree in electronics, and a keen interest in music technology.
I've been making amps and speaker cabinets for some years.
and I've been something of an unoficial guitar repairer and modifier for some years now...
(I have a strat with 27 possible selections of pickups).
and have done a few custom paint jobs and such on guitars...
changed electronics and such...

anyway... now I've decided that I simply don't have enough guitars. no matter how much I customise my guitars from their original stock... it's just never good enough.

and so I'm going to make one... yep... I'm going to try my hand at being a luither... actually guitar maker is more accurate... (I don't think electric guitar makers should be reffered to as luithers -just because there is very little skill in making an electroic guitar compared to say a spanish guitar). I've spent a few weeks researching the techniques available to construct a guitar...

and here is what I've decided...

I'll be making a simple guitar body to start with, I could make the neck, but I think I have a spare neck somewhere... I might re-profile the neck cause I seem to remember changing it because it was very thick and uncomfortable to play.
the neck is a near copy to a 6-a-side fender strat neck.

The hardware that I've already bought (had to buy) is as such...
6 regular chrome machine heads. (nothing special there).
1 large silver single coil pickup, (vintage style single wound bar magnet) encased in a chrome rectangle.
1 small silver (lipstick style) pickup, (like used in Telecasters).
The sound of these pickups will be and plucky, and a little muddy, but I'm hoping should give an overall good tone...

I'm going to make a bridge piece from some chrome, and an thinking of making something a little like the original telecaster bridges simply because it's reasonably easy to make a mechanism for changing action and intonation with these designs.

The body will be made of a medium dense wood that will hopefully lend it'self well to being light but also have some good sustain properties.

unfortunatly the wood I have isn't all that pretty, so I'm not going to be frech polishing, I'm just going to paint and laquere the guitar. perhaps also carve a design into the guitar, but I'm not decided yet...

anyway... I had orignially decided to make a telecaster copy...
but then i decided that this would be an insult to a great guitar...
so I want to make a custom shape...

so... assuming that you got this far an are still interested...
here's what I want help with...

Try as I might... I've been completly unable to design a body shape that I'm happy with...
so, can someone draw me a rough outline... of what they think would be a good guitar... (just somethign in paint would be grand...)

(I thought I'd highlight the important part of the post as it did go on a little!)

And, assuming that I do put a carving or design onto the guitar, can anyone design a good graphic of design to go onto the guitar...

remember, this will be the first guitar that I've actually made,
thus far my custom paint jobs are restircted to solid colours or stained wood showing grain... so nothing that would require skills of a master air brusher.


once I've made this guitar... I'm going to move onto perhaps trying to make and fret a guitar neck for the purposes of making a guitar entierly from scratch.
(for that guitar, I've already sourced some true mahogany... (this wood is very old 30+ years naturally seasoned, the piece I have is about 2 inches thick... you can't actually buy this wood anymore as it's a protected endangered species of tree, so naturally, that guitar will not be painted or stained at all... just polished, and I'll buy some seriously mean pickups for that!)
 
wow sounds great, put a pic up when you've done it :p i've got a fender telecaster and its just plain... i wouldnt touch it because i'm most likly to break it if i try and modify it haha
 
i love the guitar and wish i would have learned to play it...i can't get enough of a good rock solo of a guitar. one of my favorites is Carlos Santana.
 
Put some LED's in the fretboard

2006-07-26_060954_RG55r_3_copy.jpg

2006-07-26_061106_RG550rfretboard_copy.jpg
 
I had already thought about that... (led fretboard).
but I decided not to... at least not just yet...

I had thought that I had a neck from another guitar sitting around at my parents house... but it appears not... (bugger) -they threw it away thinking that it was useless... so I'll be making the entier neck myself as well... though there is some good news... I did at least find the pickups that I thought I had... so nothing changed on the hardware front...

and it does turn out that I have a lot more decorative hardwoods at my easy disposal than I first though, (oak, enough mahogany to make three guitars, laburnam, and apple tree).

and I also found a saw mills near swindon in the UK that speacialise in hardwoods, they useually sell to construction, so I imagine that I'll effecivly only want offcuts, making it a very cheap place to purchase things... only 40 or so miles from my house as well...
 
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