A Blast From the Past!

I was in the loft getting the Christmas decorations out at the weekend when I happened across an old cardboard guitar box.  When I opened it I was shocked to find my very first guitar... and also my very first attempt at customizing a guitar! Inside the guitar I wrote 1983 so this was 30 years ago when I was 15!  I found a gold ring in the street and been a good citizen I went and handed it into the local police station and when it wasn't claimed a month later they said it was mine so I went into Birmingham and traded it for this guitar.

  It is a very cheap guitar nylon string guitar and looks like its made of plywood.  After a few months I decided I wanted to fit steel strings to the guitar and went about modifying it and also painting it.

I attached the steel strings to the existing bridge and they pulled it off so I made a 'floating bridge' out of meccano. I also modified the head by adding a couple of extra bits the the side of the head to make individual machine heads fit replacing the existing 3 a side all in one tuners.

You could drive a truck between the gaps in the nut and I also painted the fingerboard with white spray paint including the frets! I eventually scraped the paint off the frets but they are almost buried in paint and varnish!  It used to have a clip on pickup in the sound hole which I still have to this day.  The pick guard is strange as it actually stands proud of the body.

I sprayed the body blue and then hand varnished it with the red flash added for impact!  What was I thinking!!!  Still, that was my first venture into any type of luthiery and i'm pleased the guitar never got thrown away!  The biggest problem at the time was that I didn't know what a truss rod was... so after a couple of weeks the neck bent making the thing totally unplayable!

It looks like my girlfriend of the day was called Karen (Kaz) and my brother and I made a band called 'Take 4' along with 2 other boys from our road.  We practiced our 2 songs in my dad's garage and I have a tape somewhere where you can hear my mum calling us in for tea!  Maybe I will restore it one day, or maybe I will just hand it on the wall in my garage as a reminder... and a lesson!!!