Pete Halliday's Latest Noisemakers

[Pete Halliday]

Here are the most recent toys to come out of my workshop.

The guitar:

Haggerty Thinline

Northern ash semi-hollow body with forearm contour and tummy cut
Black walnut neck
Ebony fingerboard
Golden Age Tele pickups (I like the sound of these a lot and the customer is very happy with the sound)
Gotoh bridge
Sperzel Trim-Lok tuners (my first time with locking tuners and I may not go back)
Allied Lutherie dual action truss rod
Mother of pearl inlay
Black fiber binding and peghead overlay
KTM-SV over shellac seal coat with Timbermate grain-filler

The amp:

Trumble 5 Watt

Circuitry based on a combination of Dave Hunter's Two Stroke and a Fender Vibro-Champ
Gain, tone, speed, and depth knobs
Voicing switch for first preamp stage tweed, british, or american
Weber transformers
Eminence Ragin' Cajun speaker
Baltic birch case with contour made of two layers of kerfed 1/2" plywood
KTM-SV clear over ocean blue pearl coat from Sik Custom Paint in SV over seafoam base coat with Mixol tints in SV over Zinser BIN

Rumor has it there is a guitar with similar specs but with a seafoam pearl finish that'll be done in a week or so and staying around my house.

[Jim Bonnell]

That's great looking Pete. Wish there were more and bigger pictures.

[Jason Rodgers]

Say what?! That's one dynamic duo!

[Pete Halliday]

A closer shot and a couple construction pics...

[Pete Halliday]

Amp and in-progress shots...

[Steve Senseney]

I love the amp!

Guitar is nice also.

[Darrel Friesen]

I love the amp and the guitar. Great stuff. Very original.

[Jim McConkey]

Ellie would be proud of that amp! Cool retro vibe.

[Jason Rodgers]

Is that what we're calling "clam shell" construction? I'm always interested to see how folks go about chambering. That's pretty clean work. I'll take one of those amps in riveted aluminum.

[Pete Halliday]

I guess that clam shell is as good a term as any. I like the fact that you can build starting with 4/4 lumber which is a lot easier to find in the widths we need. The first time I did this a few years ago was actually using a 3/16" walnut layer down the center to get the body thickness to where it needed to be. I ended up liking the idea and then figured it would be easier on the routing to work with thinner pieces as well.

I wish I was set up to do metal working!

[Chad McCormack]

Hi Pete. Nice work! Is that center contrasting stripe a laminated plate then? When I do mine, I route a channel and inlay a 1/4" binding. As you said, finding 4/4 lumber to work with is much easier! That's what got me doing chambered bodies this way when I first did mine. Oh, and that amp looks absolutely killer. Would love to see and hear those pieces together in action!

[Pete Halliday]

Chad, in this case it is binding--I was able to surface the ash to 7/8" and then used in this case a black fiber strip. I had seen your Equator post and thought it pretty cool that totally unrelated you had come to the same basic solution. I have had quite a few people comment on how they like the "stripe down the side" on guitars I've made like this so it ends up being a somewhat unusual design feature that grabs people's attention.

[John Kingma]

That is a GREAT looking set!!

[Matt Madden]

Those are really cool!

It'd be tough to put your beer down on that amp, though.

[Markku Nyytäjä]

Pete, those are SWEET!

[Neal Carey]

Wow, simply wow!

[Dave Locher]

Really cool stuff.
I'll throw this out for your consideration: that body style guitar would look really awesome in the same color you put on that amplifier! And if that's vinyl on the amp, an auto-paint supplier should be able to scan a sample and mix you up paint in the exact same shade. I'm just saying...

[Pete Halliday]

Dave, the finish on the amp is paint and the matching guitar is not pictured only because the moron rubbing out the finish (read as I) went through on the face of the peghead and needs to re-spray this weekend.

[Dave Locher]

Awesome! I more carefully read the first few posts and realized you'd already mentioned a matching guitar on the way. I cannot wait to see that one!

Your neck is a bolt-on, right? Can we see a photo of the back of one of the assembled guitars? I'd like to see your shape there, which looks unique from the front angle you posted.

The guitar I am very s-l-o-w-l-y building has a very similar body shape - just for the record I designed it 2 years ago long before I saw yours and didn't try to copy you. (I am serious, though, it really is nearly identical including the cat-eye f-hole, dept, etc.. Similar enough that I stared at yours for a while thinking "so that's what mine will look like when I get it together!")
I went with the more traditional construction, though: hollowed out a mahogany slab and capped with 1/4" maple top. Seeing your makes me realize I could have had the flame grain extending around the edges which would have been really bitchen because I started with a piece of maple that was 3/4" or 1" thick. I love learning new ideas, but hate learning them after I would like to have!

I came up with my shape by tracing a Gibson Marauder body, tracing parts of a Tele copy over it, and then staring hard at a photo of a Gretsch Gentleman while freehanding the final curves for the lower cutaway. Is that kind of the approach you took, combining elements from existing designs? Or was it just a freehand invention straight from your head?

[Pete Halliday]

Dave, the neck is glued in so that the heel could be smoothed right into the body, but the joint is basically the same as a bolt-on. Here's a shot down below. In coming up with the shape, I had traced a Tele and a Les Paul for reference and then free-handed what I liked around those for reference and modified the horn quite a bit to make it competely un-intrusive. That last bit was a lesson learned the hard way ona different body shape. The body length was stretched a little so that a Bigsby B7 could go on the first guitar I made in this shape and then when I re-made the templates for routing these ones I shortened the body from the original paper shape...which ended up matching almost exactly how the previous guitar was finished. I must have shortened it back a bit as well although I had forgotten that.

That's pretty funny about your design being so similar to this. You know what they say about great minds and ours must work that way too!