Travel Guitar Part 3 - Final Design

Now is the time to adjust your design to fit with the possibilities of the new electric wiring.

When cutting down the lower part of the guitar body you will find you are exposing the area routed out for the tone pots.

To cover this routed hole I glued a piece onto the lower part of the body. The cut the final shape when it was dry. Wood glue is very strong and as long as you leave enough contact area you can make any shape you please this way.

As I was going for a small size for travelling my design is very minimal.

Improvements

I wish I had made a better shape for resting on my knee. I may go and glue a new peice of wood onto the body below the neck, to stop it sliding off my knee.

Secondly I plan to take the tuning heads off the neck and onto the body. Etribe style. Presently they are causing the head to dip down.

This will be my next design. Possibly basing it on on a Les Paul style bridge. But I also have some ideas of how to rework the Stratocaster bridge. The Stratocaster design takes the strings through the body and this will cause too much tension on the strings. But this design will be for a future blog.

Travel Guitar Part 2 - Making the body smaller

By taking off excess wood on the body we can make it a lot lighter. And probably get a better and more individual look and feel.

Possibly before designing your guitars shape, but definitely before cutting it, look at some other small guitars. Check out the websites of CrocDog and Etribe for creative ideas, as well as some mass produced guitars like the Hohner G3T and Steinberger.

Further considerations I would recommend thinking about are whether you want a guitar that will sit on your leg or only be playable on a strap. and where you rest your wrist when picking or strumming.

Experiment as much as possible in the design stage, sleep on your ideas if possible.

But don’t fry your head, although you can’t uncut the guitar, you can always glue more on!

Now if like me you don’t have a router you will not be moving the electric components around too much. We are limited by the cavities already made in the guitar. But we can reduce the components to take up less space.

Cut down on all those electrics

Now I may be going out on a wing here, but I think you don’t need 2 tone control knobs. I don’t think you need one. Neither does Tuck Andress!

Each tone control consists of one potentiometer (or "pot" for short) and a capacitor. The point I would like to pass on is that these only limit the tone, making it more dull. Now why bother doing that? You can always adjust your tone on your EQ where you can even improve your tone, or adjust on your amp if you are not using an EQ. If you feel you need to adjust your tone on your guitar you can keep it. That is fine with me, but I will presume you prefer size over tone control and explain how to rewire without any tone control.

If we get rid of the two tone controls we can bring up the lower part of the guitar.

This is very simple to do, but it was hard to find the details anywhere. So I’ll present them clearly here.

Do you need a 5 way switch? I asked myself this question also. Now the 5 way switch is not a perfect system. It gives you only 5 out of 7 possible options from your 3 pick-ups. These are

1. Neck,
2. Neck+Middle,
3. Middle,
4. Middle+Bridge,
5. Bridge.

So we are missing Neck+Bridge and All Three. A better solution would be an on/off switch on each pickup, giving simpler wiring and all 7 possibilities. But working just with what comes with the guitar in the s

implest fastest solution, I decided to use the 5 way switch.

Removing the Tone Controls

To get to the main wiring of the guitar you need to remove the scratch plate which is secured with screws around the perimeter of the plate. Don’t touch the ones on either end of the pick ups, or either end of the 5 way switch.

Now you may need to take off the strings to get the plate out. To get it very far off the guitar you will need to unsolder the output jack

and the earth wire connected to the tremolo springs under the back plate

You can re-solder the output jack now as we will be putting it back through the scratch plate.

Now we are going to disconnect the tone pots from the 5 way switch. This is very simple; find the wires that connect the Tone Pots to the Switch and unsolder them at the switch. In the image they are the green and blue wires.

The next step is move the Switch 90º and to cut down the handle.

Work out how much space you have to use in the routed area and fit your elctrics as you would like them. Here is how they fitted best for me.

In this image I am tidying up the wires by rewiring the volume to output Jack to make it shorter.

Earthing the guitar

You need to earth the guitar before plugging it into the electric to test all your soldering and rewiring has worked. The 5 way switch is connected to the top of the volume pot, the volume pot top is then connected to the back of the tremolo springs again.

If you kept any tone pots these need to be connected to the top of the volume pot also.

Final Design

Travel Guitar Part 1 - Making the head smaller

What you will need:

For the conversion:

Necessaries;

One Stratocaster-copy with a bolt-on neck

Jig saw

Screwdriver

Drill

Mallet or soft Hammer

Soldering Iron and Solder

Preferables;

Work Bench

Sander

Circle Saw

Buying the Stratocaster

It is important that the neck is straight, the fret work is OK, and the electrics work. Don’t waste money on perfection as we will set it up well later. You can find one on e-bay from £30, or from an advert in your local area. My total expense for this guitar with new strings was under £50. After the set-up it plays very nice.

Part 1 - Making the head smaller

Cutting down the head

REMEMBER-When removing the neck look if there are any shims (small pieces of paper/card) and note where they were so you can put them back.

The idea is to get at least 2, and hopefully 3, of the 6 tuning-pegs on to the opposite side of the head.

We are limited mostly by how big the tuning-heads backs are, smaller, obviously, is better.

Working on the back or underside of the headstock. First make a template of the tuning-head.

Remembering the line of the strings should be quite straight, and definately cannot cross each other.

There probably will only be a few possibilities, but try everything.

You will end up with something like this.

Remove the 4th tuning-peg from the nut, and push out the bush.

Keep everything in a tidy way, we will be putting it all back on.

Test your drill bit size in the back-side of the hole of the removed 4th tuning-peg.

You must measure from the back-side as the front side will include space made by the removed bush, and therefore be larger.

Drill the hole you have marked for the new 4th tuning-peg, accurately measure the area of the removed 4th tuning-peg from all sides as the hole may not be in the middle of the tuning-peg template. Every mm counts. Go slowly.

To fit the bush you first need to drill out the depth of the bush from the front side, again check the size of the hole from the removed 4th tuning-peg. You may need to use the soft hammer or mallet a little, careful not to damage the bush.

Fit the tuning-peg onto the head.

Hopefully it looks good, mark the edge of the tuning-peg back, especially if it has gone over the template marks you drew before.

Now repeat with pegs 5 and 6.

Mark the new edge of head, when you’re happy with the shape saw it off with the jig saw.

If you can afford the time. I recommend taking all the tuning-pegs off to sand and further shape the head. It is an important aesthetic part of your finished guitar. You could also oil it now, with linseed oil. But you don’t have to bother with all that. I didn’t.

Drill out the tuning-pegs screw holes one size smaller than they were, this will give you a tighter fit.

OK, put it all back together, this will give you a considerably shorter guitar already. My neck came out at 58cm (23”) perfect for carry-on luggage. It fits in a 55cm bag diagonally.

You could stop here, but we’re just getting going.

Part 2 - Making the body smaller

Travel guitar - Intro

This is a very simple step-by-step guide of how to turn any Stratocaster-copy guitar into a travel guitar.

I ended up with a 2 Kg guitar which when you unscrew the neck from the body is only 58 cm long.

Why bother to do it yourself.

There are many travel guiatr’s on the market, but all of them cost more than I wanted to spend on my second guitar.

I am a keen player and frequent traveller. I have a Les Paul which I have been taking with me on my travels, plugging into my laptop and using Logic. My Les Paul weighs about 8 Kg (18 lbs) and is quite long. I was looking at buying a Hohner G3T, but to spend so much on an occasional guitar and leave my favourite Les Paul at home seemed to not make sense.

As I had booked a cheap flight to Europe with Hand-luggage only I was interested in the possibility of making a guitar that would fit into a bag with dimensions; 55/40/20 cm. I decided to look into the possibility of chopping down a cheap Stratocaster-copy into a travel guitar. Most of my final design came out of my head, and the logical conclusion of using just the materials and tools I had to hand or could borrow. I am presenting the information here to show that guitar chopping is a cheap and simple possibility for making a travel guitar. Also I spent some time gathering information from many sources and I want to present the most simple version possible in one place.

Before we get going

A quick word up for the CrocDog and Etribe webpages, check these out for more technicalities and ideas. I didn’t follow their designs as I wanted to complete my project fast and I did’t have enough tools. But they are inspiring.

The project

Part 1 - Making the head smaller

Part 2 - Making the body smaller

Part 3 - Final Design