New Project: the 'Less Paul'

This is Les Paul.He's on the left. The woman is Mary Ford. He invented the guitar with the same name.He's holding one.You could say he's holding himself.

Which is a pretty racy concept for the 1950s.Lots of people play Les Pauls. Lots of famous people too: SlashJimmy PageDuane AllmanPete TownsendAnd even Edward Van Halen, though only occasionally.

So even if you've never heard of Les Paul, or heard a Les Paul, you probably recognize his handiwork.

You've definitely heardat least one Les Paul, unless you've never heard rock music in your life.

If that's by circumstance, well, my condolences.

If it's by choice, f@#$ you.

So we've established that you've heard a, or heard of, Les Paul.

But I'm fairly certain no one reading this has ever heard of a guy named Dave Petschulat.

In 1981, during Van Halen's Fair Warning tour, he waited outside the band's hotel to give Eddie a guitar he had built, a 1/3 size Les Paul.Eddie  liked it. He used it to write a song on the next album, Diver Down, called Little Guitars.

The song was part of the set list for the next tour, and since it was recorded with the little guitar, Eddie had to use it live: The guitar or the pants: Which make Eddie seem... 'bigger'?He even played it at the US Festival in 1983:Clothes as loud as the band... or louder? Eddie commissioned another miniature from Petschulat, though this one is a different color and has normal size pickups. It was used on the 1984tour along with the original: Eddie sees his reflection in a mirror."Get these f@#$ing pants off of me!!!"Closer than anyone should be to Edward's crotch."I have no bottom teeth!""These clothes will be cool forever... or not.""My f@#$ing guitar tech put my Les Paul in the dryer. I'd be angry, but I have to drink a lot to prevent my pants from making me sick."Dave: "Can you believe the pants on this motherf@#$er???" Ed: "If you wore pants like mine, you'd drink a lot too!"

I always liked the guitar.The pants I could do without.

I decided to build my own version of the miniature Les Paul. I've wanted to build it for years, but never had the means to do so.

I also never figured out how I was going to do it before, either.

So here we go with yet another project.

I've just started the process, and thought I'd share it with you. It should be a fun project and a useful guitar for traveling.

Besides, I need to do something with what little spare time I have other than watch Pauline Chan movies.

We start with a 'body blank,' a rectangular piece of flame maple and mahogany: You can see the flame in the maple. It will be a lot more visible with a finish on it.

The maple is 'bookmatched,' meaning it is sawed down the middle and opened like a book so that there is a line in the center and both sides mirror each other. Like this:

  That way, the finished guitar will look like this:

Pretty, huh?

So here's the body blank with the guitar laid out:

I'm not making a candy-striped guitar. Those lines are guides for when I carve the top. Les Pauls have tops that are two-dimensional:This is a Les Paul 'Gold Top'

This is a Gold Top imitating Amy Winehouse's liver.

Next up we have the neck, a mahogany neck blank from (where else?) Warmoth:The peghead (where the tuners go) is angled.

I know how to do this, but it is easier, faster and cheaper for me to buy it from Warmoth already done. So here it is laid out with the dimensions and the headstock design:It still needs to be cut to shape, but you get the general idea. The hard part is that this neck has to sit at a 3 degree angle to the body. But I have ways of achieving this...

Last but not least, the fretboard. I will put in 'trapezoid' inlays like you see on the Gold Tops.My guitar is closer to 3/4 scale than 1/3, but that's because I'm a lot taller and bigger than Edward Van Halen, and the length of the fretboard was dictated by the available truss rod I could get for the guitar.

A truss rod is inside the neck and helps counteract the string tension: The rod for this guitar is actually made for mandolins, but it will work just the same. However, it is still long enough that I had to use more of the guitar fretboard than I wanted. Most guitars have 22 frets. I wanted to get rid of the lowest 7, but the truss rod was too long, so it was just the lowest 5. But, as I said, I am not a little man, so a not-so-little guitar will still look pretty friggin' little...

More updates as progress... progresses.