4.52am Issue: 008 13th November 2016

May I ask when the body and neck
come from?
“Of course, I have no problem admitting
that I outsource the woodwork and indeed
the spraying.
I know that a lot of builders tend to fudge
the issue of whether they actually start
with the raw wood and actually 'carve' the
guitar. I think it's important to be upfront
about it. I do have a background in guitar
building, I actually trained in the guitar
workshop of the (now defunct) London
College Of Furniture under Dave Whyteman
and even then I couldn’t see a viable way
of setting up as a guitar builder in the
conventional sense. The amount of
investment involved along with the need
for a full workshop with extraction & heavy
woodworking machinery kind of closed that
door for me for a number of years.
You could always buy in necks and bodies
but back when I started I didn’t have the
connections here in the UK and assumed
that everything would have to come in from
the US which would make things a bit
pricey.
However, over the last couple of years I've
found that the quality of off-the-shelf stuff
available in the UK has risen dramatically so
its relatively easy to furnish a more generic
build with stock components. In the
instance of this guitar the body is from
Guitarbuild and the neck is actually a repurposed
Squier Classic Vibe Strat neck. But
further to that I've had the good fortune to