How to assemble an electric guitar

Posted by kenshin03 on Jan 17, 2010 in music | 0 comments

Note: For those interested in getting one of these kits, head over to ebay and search for “otona no kagaku” (name of the magazine).

People swear by it. Millions have had their lives transformed by it. The instrument that has changed history is, at its core, a relatively simple set up of wood, wires and stones. Any dirt-cheap cell phone nowadays contains parts with sophistication a million times greater.

Coming across this japanese magazine, I finally had a chance to do the impossible feat of putting together the axe, albeit a much simplified one with 1/5 of the original size and the E and A strings absent. Nonetheless it served as a wonderful weekend project, especially for an electronics dummy like myself.

Unbox & Assembly

The kit itself is rather tiny, but the shots were so well done they made the finished product convincingly playable enough.

The design of the mini-guitar is a bit like the Frank Krocker’s framworks guitars, with a reduced neck and minimalistic body. For good measure the did include a teeny amp with internal speaker too, which is a surprise.

The unboxed package and parts.

Putting the neck in place was easiest. Somehow it was more reminiscent of a Gundam plastic model kit than a musical instrument though.

Strings winding remain a huge pain…on guitars large and small. To me the pain is occasionally physical as well as somehow the steel ends like to find their ways into your fingernail gaps. The little bastards.

Moving to the heart and soul of the guitar – the pickup. And it can’t be simpler – a single chunk of ordinary magnet wrapped around by copper wires. The wrapping took a good 15 minutes by hand (Imagine what it would be like to hand-wire a real pickup with its standard 7600 cycles), and when it was done, a silly decal resembling Fender’s pole pieces was slapped on top.

Some textbook recap of what a pickup is – The magnet generates a field upon itself, though which the strings pass. Any vibration in the string moves some of the lines of force that make up the field. These movements in the field create tiny electric pulses in the coil, which is then picked up from the coil. In other words, striking a steel string next to a magnet would cause its strength to fluctuate, and that triggers a response in the rings of copper around it. The tiny spark gets amplified a thousand times and eventually transformed into audible waves. Or something. Hope my understanding wasn’t too far off.

Slapping the heart into place and voila – a rock-n-roll axe ready ready to melt faces.

The finished product:

The only thing was that it produced NO SOUND…so some expert inspection was eventually inevitable…

Here’s what the mini guitar would have sounded (if the strings don’t constantly crap themselves out and the coil becomes dumb every few minutes)…still…what good fun it was.

For those willing to part with HKD $400 can take a look at the various auction sites here to get a taste of what hand-wiring a pickup is like.

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