I built a GUITAR out of CONCRETE. How does it SOUND?!

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This is my build! This was a super fun project and further reinforces how insignificant "tone" wood is on electrics. Also, the final weight was right at 20 lbs!

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/jbrookeiv 📅︎︎ Sep 06 2020 🗫︎ replies

Tell me again how "tonewood" is the most important aspect of a guitar...

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/Vedorias 📅︎︎ Sep 06 2020 🗫︎ replies

I bet it’s great for heavy metal

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/SoyMurcielago 📅︎︎ Sep 06 2020 🗫︎ replies

Apologies, that's *Crafted* Workshop!

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Vedorias 📅︎︎ Sep 06 2020 🗫︎ replies

R.I.P shoulders.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Sep 07 2020 🗫︎ replies

Queens of the Stone Age would like a word with you.

Good for playing heavy rock or perhaps stoner rock?

I like the way you did the control cavity, but that's not written in stone.

Good idea to use concrete. If you had hand carved it out of stone (as they did in the Egyptian era (4000 BC)), it might have taken somewhat longer to build.

I hope you waited 28 days for the concrete to cure, so that it reaches maximum compression strength (to resist the pull of the strings).

Outstanding rock solid build, thanks for sharing!

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/sertanksalot 📅︎︎ Sep 07 2020 🗫︎ replies
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I started this concrete guitar project almost a year ago, when I was out in Joshua Tree for the Makesgiving get together put on by Ben Uyeda from Homemade Modern. Unfortunately, I kicked off my trip to California by crashing hard while riding a OneWheel, so you’ll have to try and ignore the severe lack of skin I have in these shots. Anyway, the first step in building the concrete guitar was creating a silicone mold for casting the concrete, and I purchased a cheap guitar kit to use for creating the mold. Since the silicone would flow into any of the holes or cavities in the guitar body, I needed to seal up any areas I didn’t want as part of my final casting. I sealed the tremolo hole with heavy duty packing tape and then sealed the other holes with epoxy putty. That said, if I had to do this again, I would have used the putty for the tremolo hole as well. But we’ll get to that later. After sealing up the holes, I needed to create the form for the silicone, and I did this by adhering the guitar body, backside down, to a scrap piece of melamine using silicone caulk. With the guitar stuck to the melamine, I could then trace an offset around the body, where I could use some aluminum flashing as the walls of the form. The flashing is too flimsy on its own, so I used a technique I learned about on the Smooth-On YouTube channel, and used pieces of cardboard to reinforce the sides of the flashing. I attached the cardboard to the melamine using hot glue, which was a little tricky as the hot glue didn’t set up as quick as I needed it to. After seeing me struggling with the hot glue, Ben’s sister Jessi lent me her hair dryer which I used to help encourage the hot glue to set up more quickly while adding the flashing, and this worked great. I used plenty of hot glue here, as the glue not only provided the structure for the sides of the form, but it also acted as the sealant around the bottom edges of the form, to keep the silicone from leaking. Looking back, I should have tried to get the sides of the form a lot closer to the guitar body, and I had to use a lot more silicone to create this mold because of the spacing I ended up with. Once the form was created, I could spray it down with mold release, which would help the silicone release after casting. Speaking of silicone, next I could get my silicone of choice, MoldStar 30 in this case, mixed up, and I used this entire gallon kit of silicone for this mold. This kit cost close to $200, so you can see why making the form smaller would have been beneficial for a cost perspective. Anyway, after mixing, it was time for the first moment of truth, pouring the silicone into the form, and there were definitely plenty of spectators in the house for this. This was my first time making this kind of silicone mold but, based on what I’d read, pouring the silicone in one corner and letting it slowly fill in all of the voids really helps to avoid air bubbles in your final mold, and this seemed to work well for me. After pouring, I kept an eye on the form, looking out for any leaks, and luckily there were only one or two, which I was able to easily plug with more hot glue. Once the silicone had a chance to cure, I could demold it, which was another spectator activity. Also, that hot glue was way stronger than I expected. Anyway, luckily the mold turned out pretty much perfect and, needless to say, I was pretty excited. The first guitar body I made after creating the mold was made from TotalBoat’s ThickSet epoxy, but I’m going to save that for a future video, so you’ll have to stay tuned for that. After demolding the epoxy guitar body, I moved on to the concrete body. I started by mixing the concrete in a bucket but, of course, I added way more than I needed, so I moved the mix to a plastic mixing tub so I could add enough water to get the concrete to the right consistency, which was something akin to pancake batter. Next, I could get the concrete added to the mold, and I did this slowly, making sure to fill in areas where large voids could create air pockets. I scooped the concrete into the mold using a mixing cup, and this really allowed me to take my time and add concrete where I needed it. After filling the mold, I came back with a reciprocating saw with no blade installed and ran it along the outside edge of the mold, to help vibrate out as many bubbles as I could. Finally, I screeded the surface of the concrete with a straight piece of wood, which just helped to remove any excess concrete and level out the surface. After that, I let the concrete cure for a few days and then I had to fly back home, and I shipped the concrete guitar body, still in the mold for added protection, back home to Asheville as well. Once the guitar body arrived safely, it was time to demold it, and the concrete looked pretty incredible right out of the mold. As you can see, the concrete was still wet, so I left it to cure, and I unfortunately got busy with other projects and let the body sit for another 10 months. After taking the body back out after its long hibernation, it luckily still looked great and was certainly well cured at this point, so I could move on with getting the rest of the guitar finished up, starting with a quick dry fit of the parts. The first thing I wanted to get out of the way was flattening the area where the tremolo cavity was located on the original guitar body, which ended up as a slight hump on this concrete body. Fortunately, it was extremely easy to knock down this area with a diamond sanding block, and I just sanded the area until it was nice and flat. With that done, I moved my attention to the neck, which came as part of the guitar kit I had ordered. I first wanted to shape the headstock which started as a large rectangular shape, and this gave me plenty of room for shaping. I decided to go with a classic design and just traced the headstock of another Strat I had, and then I rough cut the shape with my jigsaw. I used my oscillating belt sander to clean up the shape, swapping over to the spindle attachment to shape the inside corner of the shape. If you don’t have a spindle sander, you could certainly do this shaping with a rasp, and this is one of the few tools you’d really need for this project. After getting as close as I could with the spindle sander and belt sander, I switched to hand sanding, and I pulled out these little Rockler contour sanding grips, which were perfect for this. Once the edges were cleaned up and sanded, I sanded the faces of the headstock and then I could prep for finishing the neck by taping off the fretboard. I decided to try Tru-Oil for the finish on this neck, which I’ve heard is a great option, and it turned out really nice. Tru-Oil is super simple to apply, I just wiped on a light coat using a shop towel, let it dry, and then repeated the process a few times, scuffing up the finish with some synthetic steel wool between coats. While the finish cured on the neck, I could work on getting the various components mounted to the body, which was a little tricky. I tested the technique I came up with on the two mounting screws for the input jack plate, and this involved first drilling holes with a masonry bit and my hammer drill and then using some TotalBoat 5 minute epoxy to glue the dowels into the holes. I should mention that this 5 minute epoxy was the real MVP on this build and I used it a ton, as you’ll see, and I’ll link to it in the video description below, as I was super impressed with how well it worked and how strong of a bond it created. After the epoxy had a chance to set up, I used a self-centering drill bit, also from Rockler, to pre-drill the holes, and then I drove in the screws through the jack plate. This worked like a charm and, as long as I didn’t drill the holes too large, all of the extra wooden areas were covered by the components themselves. I could repeat the process for the pickguard, which obviously has quite a few screws, and I also had less wiggle room since the screw holes were so close to the edge of the pick guard. To help with this, I swapped to a smaller masonry bit to drill the holes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any dowels that were small enough for these holes, so I whipped up a quick dowel plate by drilling a series of holes in a piece of scrap steel. After drilling the holes, I rounded off the end of the dowel with my belt grinder, cut off a length with my flush trim saw, and then pounded the dowel through the hole, which scrapes off any wood larger than the hole opening. As you can see, this worked extremely well and I ended up with a dowel that was perfectly sized for the holes in the body. I continued creating more dowels using this method, but I did figure out that I needed to add a few more holes to the dowel plate so I could ease the dowel down to its final size, which helped keep it from breaking while I was driving it through the dowel plate. After creating the dowels I needed for the pickguard holes, I repeated the process of gluing them into place with the TotalBoat 5 minute epoxy, and then, after the epoxy cured, I trimmed the dowels flush with my flush trim saw, adding a piece of painter’s tape to help keep the teeth of the saw from scratching the concrete. Next, I needed to locate the hardtail bridge, which I chose to replace the tremolo bridge that came with this kit. To help add more strength, I bumped back up to the larger masonry bit for these holes so I could add a larger dowel, and made sure to drill the holes deep enough so the screws could be driven to full depth. I created more dowels using my homemade dowel plate and then epoxied them in place with more 5 minute epoxy. The last two mounting locations on the body were for the strap buttons, and I repeated the same process to add dowels to those locations, again using the larger drill bit since these strap buttons would be supporting the pretty sizable weight of this boat anchor of a guitar. The last hole to drill in the body was a simple through hole between the electronics cavity and the cavity for the input jack, and this didn’t need to be very precise, it just allows the wires to run to the jack. With all of the mounting locations dealt with, I could start on finish prep on the body, starting by cleaning up the front of the guitar with a diamond sanding block. My main goal here was to blend in the area where that piece of tape had left a seam near the bridge, and I ended up having to sand the entire face of the guitar to get this to match. After sanding the front, it was time for the moment I had honestly been dreading, cleaning up the back face of this guitar. To clean up this ridge, I used a diamond cup wheel on my angle grinder and I was expecting this process to take forever but, much to my surprise, this wheel cut through this concrete like butter and I was able to feather in that edge between the back and edges of the guitar fairly easily. The inside edges of the horns were definitely a little tricky and I didn’t get these as clean as I wanted, but I was able to really blend those areas with that diamond sanding block. All in all, this whole process took less than 10 minutes start to finish, and then I could go home and take a much needed shower to clean off all of that concrete dust. The next morning, I could work on getting the concrete sealed, which will help it resist staining but will also give it a more even color and sheen. I used this Cheng countertop sealer and starting by wetting the entire body with water, so the sealer wouldn’t be absorbed too quickly. Next, I diluted the sealer with water and then soaked the surface of the body with it, keeping it wet for roughly 5 minutes. As you can see, this process is a huge mess and I’d definitely recommend doing this outside if at all possible. After soaking the surface with the sealer, I wiped off the excess and let the sealer dry for about 20 minutes before repeating the process. In total, I applied four coats of sealer, and I let the body dry for 24 hours after the last coat. As a final layer of protection, I added a coat of countertop wax to the guitar, which I just wiped on with a damp paper towel and then buffed off. I did make sure to avoid getting wax into the neck pocket, as I’d be gluing the neck in place with epoxy. Speaking of which, now that the neck and body were finished, I could get the neck glued into the neck pocket. I started by scuffing up the heel of the neck, where it would come into contact with the epoxy, to help with adhesion and to remove the Tru-Oil from that area. To glue the neck to the body, I once again called on the TotalBoat 5 minute epoxy. I then slid the neck into the pocket, cleaned up some of the squeeze out, and then clamped the neck in place while the epoxy cured. I did make sure the neck was coming off of the body nice and straight, which it was, and then I could let the epoxy cure for a few hours. After the epoxy cured, I could start to get the guitar put back together, starting by adding the bridge. I had waited until the neck was glued in place to do this, as I still had a little wiggle room due to the size of the dowels I used. Once I located the bridge, I started the holes with the self-centering drill bit and then drilled the holes to full depth with a longer bit. Before mounting the bridge, I added a little paste wax to the screws and went ahead and ran them in and out of the holes, to essentially pre-cut threads into the holes. Finally, I mounted the bridge, which looked pretty much spot on thankfully. While I had some much nicer tuners and electronics on order, I couldn’t help myself and decided to get the guitar partially strung up to make sure the neck and bridge had ended up in the right place, so I installed the crappy kit tuners and strings, consequently breaking two of the strings in the process, but I could still try out the guitar and was super impressed with how it was playing even with no setup work. Next, I got the strap buttons installed, and I made sure to use locking buttons here so I don’t have to worry about my strap losing its hold on this guitar. I did go ahead and weigh the guitar and even before I installed the electronics, it clocked in at over 19 pounds. Speaking of which, next I could work on getting the electronics dialed in and I decided to go all out on this project and upgraded to this awesome loaded pickguard setup from Mad Hatter Guitar Products. Ed over at Mad Hatter makes a really cool system of pots and switches he’s dubbed the “Terminator", and the system is totally solderless, making assembly super simple. Before getting the Terminator system installed, I needed to drill one more hole for running a ground wire to the bridge, and then I also added copper shielding tape inside of the cavities, which helps reduce interference in the electronics. With that done, I could get the pickguard and electronics installed. I started by loosening the two set screws holding the two wires coming from the input jack, and then I fed those wires through the hole between the input jack and control cavities. After that, I just put the wires right back where I had just removed them, tightened down the set screws, added the ground wire from the bridge to another location with another set screw, and the wiring was done. No soldering, no mess, and it’ll be super easy to adjust things later if needed. Unfortunately, I ran into a little bit of an issue fitting the electronics into the control cavity, probably because the guitar kit I used doesn’t match Fender specs, but after a little tweaking, I got the pickguard installed, and then I was in the home stretch. Next, I oiled up the fretboard and got the strings installed, realizing I hadn’t installed the string trees yet. As with the other hardware that came with this kit, these string trees were garbage and I ended up replacing them after this. Finally, all that was left was a little setup work, and with that, it was time for the moment I’d been waiting for for close to a year now, trying the concrete guitar out for the first time. I know a lot of you are probably asking how a guitar made of concrete sounds vs. a guitar made of wood and, honestly, I don’t think it sounds any different. I’m in the camp of people that think tone wood doesn’t really make any difference in electric guitars, it’s all about the pickups, amp and the player. I’ll have a longer sound demo video on my second channel if you want a more in-depth look at how this guitar sounds. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video, I had a ton of fun building this project. If it’s your first time here, go ahead and get subscribed and ring that little notification bell so you don’t miss my future videos. Also, I’ll have links to all of the tools and materials I used in the video description below. Last, while you’re here, why not check out another video of mine that YouTube thinks you’ll enjoy. Alright, thanks for watching everybody and, until next time, happy building.
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Channel: Crafted Workshop
Views: 3,046,626
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: concrete, concrete guitar, diy guitar, kit guitar, guitar kits build your own, diy guitar kit, workshop, guitar kit, guitar kit build, guitar kit build strat, how to build a guitar, guitar build, woodworking, diy, electric guitar, homemade guitar, building a guitar, fender stratocaster, how to build an electric guitar, custom guitar, electric guitar build, how to build a guitar from scratch, guitar kit finishing, concrete finishing, Crafted workshop
Id: LDyzABbHcEY
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)
Published: Sun Sep 06 2020
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