Guitar Bookend

Please don't destroy a perfectly fine and usable guitar!

Been said that, sometimes we find guitars that have twisted necks or some holes in the body that were made in attempts to install a new tremolo or pickups.

In this case, this cheap stratocaster copy from the 80's was in a thrift store and was really cheap because someone had installed very poorly a new tremolo in the guitar. This tremolo happened to be an expensive one back in the days (around 80's) so I decided to buy the guitar just for the tremolo. Obviously, the tremolo was removed and sold to a happy person that was looking for spare parts to fix his guitar. And the guitar body was left with two big horrible holes that could be plugged and refinished. But this guitar was made in Japan from plywood, and thus the value of the body is next to zero because it's not real wood and doesn't sound great.

In conclusion, we have a donor guitar for this project and still have the neck, pickups and electronics to make new stuff.

Materials:

• Electric guitar (donor instrument)
• Flat wood
• Screws
• Glue
• Paint
• Felt feet

Once you have a donor guitar, you will need to disassemble the neck and the electronics.

Normally this is very straightforward and you will just need a screwdriver.

I like to put all the parts in plastic bags and classify them to have as spare parts for repairs or new builds. Sometimes I also sell the components separately as there are many instruments of this era that need spare parts to be fixed or restored to their old glory days.

This is a crucial step and as all good craftsmen will say: measure twice and cut once.

Some advice is to cover the area to be cut with masking tape to avoid the chipping of the guitar body paint. This paint usually is very thick and tends to chip easily.

There are 3 basic cuts to be made are marked with yellow lines in the photo:

1. First you need to separate the two horns from the main body, using the end of the neck pickup routing pocket as a reference.
2. Cut the upper horn at 90º from the previous cut
3. Cut the lower horn at 90º from the previous cut

I reused some pieces of wood that I had already saved from some Ikea furniture, so I only needed to cut to length and assemble with glue.

I decided to use a biscuit cutter to do the joinery because it's fast and there is not much force to support.

After gluing the two L's, I fitted the two halves of the guitar body and traced the outline to be able to make holes to assemble with screws. This is very important since we want to do this step before finishing the wood L's.

Finally, I sanded it all and applied two coats of white paint because it looks classy and matches the red colour of the guitar body.

We can use the same guitar pick guard or another one if we like another colour.

Trace the cutting lines using the guitar body parts and cut with a very sharp handsaw. Sand the edges and save them for the assembly step.

Fix the two guitar horns to the wood L's with screws, making sure they don't protrude and are flush with the wood L's.

Glue the pikguard pieces to the guitar body and fix the screws.

Install few felt feet so the wood will not scratch the bookshelf or viceversa.

And find some nice guitar related books to match!