Primitive Technology: Building Guitar in The Forest

so to start off we are looking around for some fallen trees something that we can use for a body and a neck this is an old outer tree that fell down into this creek and uh it seems pretty solid still so it might make a good body my buddies come along with me to help with this build and i might see if he wants to saw this thing because it is a pretty big log and it looks like it's gonna be a big brown bowl over there uh we we actually just spooked each other we were like 20 feet away kind of random but i guess it says home too rogue cattle i guess so we got lucky in finding this fallen maple tree um it looks like it's in pretty good shape so we're gonna give it a cut and see how it looks for a neck nice [Laughter] back at the alder and we're gonna give this thing a go [Music] all right let's go find camp uh end of day one uh we've collected most of the wood we'll need so it's a it's a pretty good start tomorrow is going to be a whole lot of sawing so the plan for today is to get that thing resawed into some slabs for the body and then we gotta get this piece of maple slabbed out for nick here goes nothing got a lot more country to cover on this one over two hours to get six inches uh around two hours in the kindness maple log and we've made some insignificant progress it's not soft so we can go for a swim come back to this later all right so burl's over there sawing away at the maple we got the hand plane here just gonna knock off some high spots and try to get it a little flatter i'm calling two and eight so you barely beat me i was a minute and 40 seconds less than you dude yeah we've resorted to uh selling challenges to keep us going boom getting a little bit of a evening fishing in see if i can try my luck day two is coming to an end and uh we've now got the neck blank cut out still have some work to do on cleaning this up and getting it leveled out also have our two slabs of alder that we'll join tomorrow and they'll have this nice book match look for the body so uh yeah there's two full days of work heading out for a walk this morning to see if we can find some wood for a fretboard so we found this nice piece of black oak uh it's got a couple checks in it which is going to make our life a little easier when selling it because we can just kind of saw through a portion of it and pull off that check and then when we resaw it into a fretboard later it's going to be a lot less sawing [Music] i think we might be able to peel this check off i sure hope so it just came across this on our way back to camp and it looks like a black tail femur bone and i'm gonna save this for later i think it may come in handy for something [Music] this so this is that piece of black oak i just finished resawing it the cut came out pretty flat which is good but it it's going to take a lot of rasping and planing to thin it out to the right thickness still [Music] [Laughter] so there was a fire that burned in this canyon like seven or eight years ago and because of that there's still a lot of burned trees around and they've got this charcoal on them and uh so i'm just gonna collect a little bit of this charcoal and i'm gonna use that later for making a glue doing a little bit of a pine sap collection as well we're changing camping locations the last spot didn't have much shade so we are relocating here where there's a lot more trees and we're still only about four or five miles from the trailhead shhh there's a few ladybugs on this log this is that pine sap that we heated up and strained and it's it's pretty hard but we're gonna heat it back up and add some charcoal dust which is supposed to make it a stronger glue all right it's go time what's up oh we're also filling in some of these checks with the glue while we're at it it's the next morning and our pine sap glue is rock solid there's a bit of a gap down the middle so i don't think we got a wood to wood bond but hopefully hopefully the glue is strong enough to keep this thing together well i guess we'll uh we'll see fretboard laid down on the neck blank really well we also had some cam straps that we used to give it some extra pressure when the glue was drying oh [Music] [Laughter] so i just went with a classic telecaster design for this it's the design i felt most comfortable freehanding since i obviously don't have a template to go off of out here it's probably not exact but it's close enough i'm using this little template as a 90 degree it's not perfect but the only other right angle i brought is this little combo square but i can't get this thing to lay down flat on the neck in order for me to get a precise line so i'm just just gonna use this piece of wood instead so yes all right wrapping up uh what is this day day four out here uh we got a decent start on the fret slots i'm gonna keep cutting them out with what whatever daylight i have left and then tomorrow hopefully the guitar will start coming together morning of day five and i've got the fret slots just about done also most of the cavities in the body are almost complete my buddy had to take off this morning he's gotta get back to work so it looks like the rest of the build is gonna be up to me [Laughter] hey [Applause] there so for this piece of bone i collected i'm thinking i can make a bone nut out of it using this sliver right here [Music] so this is my drill for out here no power tools so i've just got this little manual handheld drill and i've got a forstner bit on it right now so we'll see how this works [Music] well it works but it sure is slower than the drill press [Laughter] it's afternoon now been working away all day we just had a bunch of clouds roll in and so i'm hoping it's not going to rain but either way it's uh it's not going to stop me so what i'm going to do now is i've got some linseed oil that i brought and a rag and i'm just going to wipe it on pretty much on every piece here and we'll see how that works for a finish i'm gonna start putting frets on now i got a few coats of oil in the neck and uh i'm definitely rushing this whole process but you know i'm running out of food all right so there's a few coats of oil on the body already i'm going to put another coat on in about a half hour or so but it's it's starting to get pretty dark here pretty soon here we are the day six of the project hopefully i'll be able to get this thing done today because i am practically out of food as you can see i've mounted on the bridge plate uh the neck pickup isn't mounted yet but i'll get to that and then i put a total of i think five coats of linseed oil on the body and it makes the colors pop a bit more but it's it definitely soaked up most of the oil but i'm fine with it i also got all of the frets installed and started a bit of filing on the fret ends and best part of all is that it did not rain on me so things are things are looking up [Applause] just twisting and taping since i obviously don't have a soldering iron out here so i'm using these files to make the string slots on the nut and there's different files for each string size but on my e and a slot i put too much pressure or something and a bit of the nut chipped off it still holds the strings fine it just doesn't look as pretty but at this point i'm rolling with it all right here we are the uh finished product so i'm super pleased with the way it came out overall um i i think the back matchbook actually looks better than the front but uh you know there there are some minor issues with the guitar the neck has a slight back bow and it would be super easy to fix with the truss rod except that i forgot to throw in an allen wrench to adjust the truss rod with so there's a back bow and i'm i'm getting quite a bit of string buzz because of it and with all due respect to me this guitar does play like crap right now but i mean after all i just built this thing in the woods um and i think that if i took it back home i can get it playing pretty good alder body is super light so this thing probably weighs like seven seven and a half pounds at most but it's also super soft so you kind of gotta watch out with things and scrapes if it were up to me the ultimate build out here would be building an acoustic but then i'd probably for sure starve to death before even coming close to finishing it so electric to start off and i know that you're probably wondering how i'm gonna play a demo on this without an amp and to that i say i've got it covered so this amp is battery powered and it uh it sounds not great so i'll post another demo playing this guitar through my amp at home and i'll post that on my instagram which is burles art [Music] [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Burls Art

Views: 156,103

Rating: 4.9722185 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: eqkJXjr0sz8

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jkmumbles]

That’s awesome. Sounded better than I thought it would’ve. I couldn’t probably do this in a wood shop much less in the freakin woods. Kudos.

[u/holycatwomanbatman]

I had no faith in the holding power of sap and charcoal, but dang.