A custom guitar for bluesman Tim Williams

I've been working on this guitar for about three years. It just so happened to get delayed by my shop moving, beginning fatherhood, etc. I'm so happy it's finally complete, and I'm sure Tim is to.
If you have kept up with my blog, you may remember a guitar similar to this that I had built for bluesman Brother Ray Lemelin. Brother Ray provided the design and direction for where he wanted things to go in the construction and I put all of those things together and built it for him. Ray spread the news and now I've had the pleasure of building another Creosote Slide for bluesman Tim Williams. Tim is a 40 year veteran of roots music and it was an honor building a guitar for him. You can check out a bio of him here: http://www.telusplanet.net/public/belzners/timbio.htm
The body is Honduran Mahogany with a Flamed Maple top cap. The neck is maple harvested from a 90+ year old telephone pole from British Columbia that at one time had been soaked in creosote, so Ray named it the Creosote Slide. It is made for slide guitar playing with two growly, brash vintage Teisco Gold Foil pickups taken from Ray's vast collection of cool guitars. The banjo tuners are all Schaller Drop D tuners so that various tunings can be created. The finish is old school nitrocellulose lacquer. Master volume and two tone controls with a three way toggle switch make up the controls. The control cavities were customized to take away as little wood as possible.
Here are some pictures of the finished guitar for you to enjoy.

-James

New Guitar with hand carved rosewood neck

I did a custom neck for a customer who wanted a VERY wide profile neck. He's got big hands and needed something in a category that's only offered by manufacturer custom shops at very high dollar amounts. The neck would fall into the category of an acoustic guitar neck profile, so you can imagine how hard it would be to special order. I sourced out the body from a great little company in New Jersey called Musikraft. They build their parts there on site. I chose a '65 Strat body design built from one piece of very light swamp ash and built the neck to fit the body. The body was finished in a very thin amber tinted finish. All of the hardware I hand picked and installed. The neck I carved from a chunk of East Indian Rosewood to the customer's specifications. The pickups are Seymour Duncan Alnico 2 Pro for the neck and middle position and the bridge pickup was a Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates. It was wired up like a standard strat except the bridge pickup had a coil tap option at the middle position tone pot. With the all rosewood neck the pickups sounded warm and had just the right combination of brilliance to them for what the customer requested. It was a really fun project to do.