Evan Kingma's electric 12 string [Pictures]

[John Kingma]

My 16 year old son Evan has been saving his money to by an electric 12 string guitar but I suggested to him that he keeps his money in the bank I we would build one together. Actually, he did 95% of the work... I acted as advisor and supervisor. I did a bit of work on the bandsaw when he was having trouble... and the large bits in the router table scared him a bit so I did that as well... but he did the rest and he did a great job for a first guitar.

He has always like the retro look of the old Airlines so he chose that style. The body has a base of Hackberry and a cap of Spalted Curly Maple and there is a thin layer of Walnut in between.

The neck is Mahogany with a Macassar Ebony fretboard. It has a 25.5 inch scale length.

The three P90s were picked up cheap off ebay. They sound pretty good for 20 bucks a piece. Each one is wired to an on/off mini toggle and there is a master volume and master tone control.

It still needs a bit of set-up and tweaking (which I'm doing) but its close enough that he spent most of yesterday playing it.

Here are some pics.

[John Kingma]

More pics.

[Mark Swanson]

Good job, it's pretty- the electric 12's sure do make a lot of noise don't they?
i can't tell if you used a 12 string bridge, but if you didn't you'll have a hard time getting the pairs to intonate right as you play up the neck.

[John Kingma]

Thanks Mark.

It's a 12 string bridge (and tailpiece) BUT it only has 6 saddles... so he's going to have to live with it the way it works out.

[Steve Senseney]

Lots of nice things there. I like the fingerboard, and the edge on the body.

[julian gifford]

Very cool! I guess I'm not *that* crazy for putting a pair of EMG's on my almost complete 12. 3 p90's? wow!

[david frassetto]

Great job Evan and John, that is so much better than anything you could buy! I love that National Crestwood shape and 3 P90's, man-o-man!

[John Kingma]

Thanks for the comments. You're all making Evan's head swell.

Here are some progress pics.

First... working on the templates.

[John Kingma]

Next, glueing up some lumber for the body... showing the tilted headstock... and the chambering of the body.

[John Kingma]

Clamping the scarf joint... cutting fret slots... and its starting to look like a guitar.

[John Kingma]

Shaping the back of the neck... hammering in the frets... nice neck.

[John Kingma]

Applying some finish... levelling the frets... shielding the cavities.

[John Kingma]

Wiring and assembly.

[John Kingma]

Stringing it up... and giving it a strum.

[Steve Senseney]

Congratulations!

The only thing my son wanted to build in the shop was swords!

[Mark Swanson]

Cool pants too.

[John Kingma]

The three P90s were picked up cheap off ebay.

Evan has reminded me that the pickups were from GFS... so they are inexpensive... but not ebay cheapos.

[Samuel Hartpence]

What did you use to make those templates?

[John Kingma]

The templates were made from MDF.

If you mean "how" did we make them... well we found a couple decent pictures on the internet and printed them off. Knowing that the Airline has a scale length of 24 3/4 inches, we did some math to come up with an approximate size of the body.

We then drew a rectangle on a piece of bristol board that matched the length and width of the body, and with our little projector we "filled" the box with an image of the body and traced the outline.

The neck was drawn from scratch.

[Samuel Hartpence]

Were you able to use the bristol board as an initial routing template template for the MDF template? That's more what I was referring to as I saw he was cutting it out on the kitchen counter with scissors. I recall a thread a few months back saying that you could use poster board as a template if you flood the edges with CA. I should say I'm at a bit of a disadvantage in my shop as of now because I don' t have a oscillating spindle or drum sander, so creating routing templates has been a bit of a battle for me.