Inspired by the The Great Guitar Build Off, an experienced builder challenged himself to turn a live-edge piece of cherry wood into a masterfully unique, grizzled beauty.

Guitar: Live-edge Cherry Swamp Monster, nicknamed “Keith Richards”

For the past five or six years, I’ve been slowly building my guitar-building chops starting with a couple kits and then moving into my own scratch-built designs under the name Tunguska Guitars. Lately I’ve been intrigued by some of the builds I’ve seen featured on The Great Guitar Build Off run by Britain’s Crimson Guitars, and I’ve tried to start thinking outside of the norm.

My brother-in-law has a bunch of 2" slabs of cherry wood that have been drying in a shed behind his house for a couple years. When we were down for a visit, he took me up to collect a few. This particular live-edge piece wormed its way into my heart, and I grabbed it, knowing it was probably useless for a guitar.

But once I got home, I kept thinking about how to solve the problems. The entire bridge/tailpiece area was completely unsuitable, and one thing I knew I did not want to do is fill it with resin. This thing needed to stay as raw, beat-up, and un-shiny as possible. There was barely enough wood to get a body and neck out of it, but I managed to get both.

I decided the only way to solve the bridge issue was to fabricate something myself (if you can call it that), so I picked up a 3/8" steel rod and used a blowtorch to heat it up and make the necessary bends in the bridge, far enough apart that it literally “bridged” the canyon of disintegrating wood. I put threads on the mounting ends so I could install nuts on the top and bottom as a basic height adjustment. The 2-piece tailpiece was less drastic, but also did the trick by boring deep into the good wood for support.

I decided the pickup mount would emulate an acoustic, boring all the way through the body and countersinking a steel ring for decoration with pickup mounting holes on the backside instead of the top, and I wanted a single volume control to hover in the upper horn’s decorative hole. This took a while and involved a short, threaded rod, three nuts, and a little bit of J-B Weld to get one of the nuts on the mini-pot.

Once I got far enough into the process, I was calling it “The Nameless One,” but my friends started calling it “Keith Richards”­–a grizzled, beat-up, true rock ’n’ roll survivor. I came to be completely okay with that assessment: It just feels perfect!

The pickup is a hand-distressed StewMac Golden Age Parsons Street humbucker. The fretboard is ziricote and the relic’d tuning machines and control knob came from GFS.

The thing sounds amazing—it’s very open and organic. Cranking up the distortion just a bit gives it a lovely swamp-’70s vibe. It completely surpassed my expectations, and I’m sure it’s Keith’s fault.

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Straight from the builder’s bench: Here are some tools that might just make your life a little easier.

Straight from the builder’s bench—these are the cool tools you need to keep your workflow moving along smoothly.

Guitar gear, by nature, regularly requires a bit of maintenance. So whether you’re a guitarist, builder, or both, having good tools makes it easier to stay on top of seasonal or technical changes. Any endeavor that requires mechanical or electrical maintenance is subject to what I call the 80/20 rule. This axiom refers to how we can spend 80 percent of our time fixing and 20 percent enjoying the fruits of our labor. You probably have a screwdriver or some wrenches, but there are a few neat little bits that make life on the workbench more pleasant and maybe shift the percentages of that rule.

Not everyone has perfect vision, and little things like guitar parts can be hard to see. Eyesight—which includes the brainpower to decipher what the eyes register—is one of the most energy-intensive things we do. Scientists say that vision uses somewhere between six and 20 percent of our brain’s resources. Even if you’ve got eyes like a hawk, it’s important to be kind to your system when manipulating tiny guitar parts like screws and strings. At the risk of sounding like your parents, I suggest you invest in some good lighting and a headband magnifier like the one Leo Fender wore. If you’re concerned about looking like a dork, remember that Leo invented the Stratocaster. I’ve got a few of these scattered about my shop at stations where vision is critical to the task, like adjusting intonation and bridges. They’re great for checking frets for high and low spots, too.

One of the most inexpensive and brilliant tools you can buy are good tweezers. Don’t bother with the junk from the health care aisle at Walmart. Go straight to McMaster-Carr’s website and get a couple differently shaped industrial-quality stainless steel ones. Once you get used to them, you’ll never turn back. And, of course, they also fit into your guitar case. I have a pair on almost every bench and desk in my shop—but then again, I’m a tool addict. The bent-tip tweezers are extremely useful for all small jobs including handling small screws. The ones with serrated gripping surfaces are great for threading strings through bridge and tuner holes. If you have champagne taste, go for the titanium solder-resistant pair for ultimate bragging rights.

I could be recommending old-school biker jeans from the ’60s, but this is about shrink tubing. I’ve been using this stuff for all kinds of jobs since before Jimi Hendrix played with Wilson Pickett­—and I still haven’t run out of new uses. Basically, it’s rubberized tubing that shrinks 50 percent in diameter when heated. It’s made for insulating wire splices. You slip it over the splice and blast it with a heat gun (another great tool) until it shrink-wraps itself around the joint. But that’s not the only thing it can do. You’ve probably encountered high-dollar guitar cables with shrink tube reinforcing the ends. You can upgrade your everyday cables for pennies by adding those reinforcements yourself. I’ve also used it to protect parts from abrasion. The material is tough and can also be used to prevent scratching on certain parts. Buy an assortment of diameters so that you have the proper size for any job. You can also layer diameters to get a custom fit. There is even a shielded version, which is perfect for audio wiring. This miracle part is available at vendors from Amazon to Zoro, in sizes up to 2" diameter. If you want to get into the weeds with this stuff, McMaster-Carr is once again the rabbit hole of choice.

We’ve all had our lives improved by drywall screws. Anything and everything you need to assemble quickly can be done with these little black wonders. Still, I’ve a new love, and its name is Spax. This German-designed, multi-purpose fastener is the Acropolis of quick-screws. The secret in each screw is three-fold: superior strength, multiple thread pitches (one for drilling, one for fastening), and a self-countersinking head. From hardwood furniture building to use with medium density fiberboard, these superior fasteners are self-drilling and reduce splitting when used without a pilot hole. After discovering these wonderful screws, everything else is Mickey Mouse—they’re great for repairing cabinets, cases, pedalboards, and more. Builders will love it for temporary tooling.

I hope a few of these items make your repair and build time more enjoyable. Nobody likes to have to fix stuff when they’d rather be banging out a tune. I still struggle with the 80/20 rule, but I have the tools to fight back. I’ve spent decades looking for the easier way around, and so should you.

In a message posted to its website, Electro-Harmonix has stopped taking any new orders and fulfilling back orders on all Russian vacuum tubes. This is due to a ban that Russia has imposed on over 200 types of goods.

Here’s the statement from EHX founder Mike Matthews:

On March 11, 2022, Russia imposed a ban on the export of some 200 goods in response to the sanctions imposed on it over the current conflict in Ukraine. We have confirmed that the ban applies to our seven brands of Russian tubes. Currently, the ban is set to remain in effect until the end of the calendar year.

Given this export ban, we will not be receiving any further tube inventory for these brands. A myriad of pressures — including continued strains on the supply chain, escalating internal expenses, mounting inflation, and an ever-evolving legal landscape (particularly in light of the Ukraine conflict) — have created a very fluid and ambiguous environment. Until we can properly assess the impact of these factors, we will not honor any new orders or ship any more Russian tubes on back order.

The brands affected by this ban include Svetlana, Sovtek, Mullard, Tung-Sol, Electro-Harmonix, EH Golden, and Genalex Gold Lion.