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