My first guitar builds where I built the body from scratch. Building a old school Butterscotch Blonde Blackguard style Telecaster with pine and one from Cedar that will have a clear natural finish…
For the Blackguard I’m using Fender Blonde color, then amber/yellow tint on top of that..
Still have some sanding/cleanup on the cedar before I start clearing coating it.
It’s like this now, waiting for clear/tinted clear
But it started like this…
Here with Reranch Fender Blonde applied… This is NOT Butterscotch Blonde, it’s Blonde and actually is whiter than this pic looks.
Next comes various concoctions of color to get the neck tint and ‘aged’ Butterscotch to simulate 50 years of smokey bars, sun and yellowed lacquer…
It’s getting there, but I have to decide when enough is enough. This is pretty close to exactly what I want, I think I’m going to shoot some clear, then some LIGHTLY tinted clear. Same for the neck, I’m going to do clear, then decal, then tinted lacquer and clear till it’s right.
I have some sanding and prep before I shoot clear on the cedar, but when I wipe it down it really looks pretty. With a nice polished clear over it, it should come out nice.
What a cool birthday present I got from my family today. Tickets to see Joe Bonamassa at the Plaza Theater!!!
I’ve got a couple of his CD’s and really like them. He’s in his 30′s now, was a child prodigy guitar player, opening for BB King when he was 12 years old, etc. Electric blues guitar, but he puts a pretty heavy Rock slant to it. Really good stuff.
In any event, he’s coming to Orlando in November, and I get to go see him, Thanks Tam/Em/Will/Ash!!!!
I’ve currently only got two of his CD’s but that’s about all I’ve been listening to lately, ‘The Ballad of John Henry’ and “Blues Deluxe”
His DVD from a performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London looks pretty cool, trailer below.
This weekend was the annual, neighborhood Tennessee/Florida party. Our neighbors, (and most of their friends) are Tennessee fans, their son, Terry, played for the Vols at one time. So a couple hundred people, a pig cooked in the ground all night long, and TONS of other food, about 8 big screen TV’s, music, karaoke, games, well, it was a party. As the night wore on, and the band was playing, they asked William if he wanted to play some guitar. I missed some of the first part, but got most of it, though it’s on my digital camera and the sound is aweful. It was all spur of the moment, so he didn’t have any written music or anything planned, he just played a few things he knew from memory.
Then Ashley and Emily got Mandy all duded up in Tennessee colors to give pony rides to the children. They had a great time, and got a lot of laughs with their ‘Gator Entrance’ billboard on Mandy’s butt. Don’t get me wrong, we’re Gator fans, but in honor of our friends, we let Mandy represent the Vols. (click the photo for fullsize)
At least I can’t, not anymore. As much as I love running, over the last few years of ‘only ultra-running’ type workouts, ie. SLOW RUNS, my upper body has continued to get weaker, and my body fat has gone UP. NOT a good thing. So I’ve started a new program with some high intensity running, and high intensity weight lifting. Not isolated, body builder type stuff, but explosive, full body workouts including uphill sprints and gymanstics ring workouts. All it REALLY means is that right now, I am very tired, and very sore, but hey, I’ve lost 5 lbs. (only 25 more to go!)
Update on the HISTORY CHANNEL Modern Marvels SUPERHOT episode, that features the Badwater Ultra, with a few seconds of ME running in the event. It will be rebroadcast Saturday the 28th at 7:00pm Eastern. look for #32, Spiderman shorts and cowboy hat. Shouldn’t be difficult to find, huh?
Ashley, the horse whisperer, has trained another of our Arabians to ride. She did the same with my horse, we got them as youngsters, having never been ridden. And two weeks ago, she got on Uno (TCA The One his registered name, we call him Uno) for the first time. Since then, her and I have done several rides around the property and he’s just doing great.
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Fathers Day has come and gone, and my big present? A pedicure from Emily. Full blown deal, she primped, painted and ground dead skin off my feet with this electric drill thing. Don’t I look pretty in my flaming Superman pajamas and painted nails? Thanks Emily!
OK, I admit, not my first pedicure either! The first was by Tamara the night before 2003 Ironman USA, in Lake Placid, NY. Which was one of my most memorable events, not my best, but very cool, finishing in the same Olympic Skating Oval that Eric Heiden dominated the Olympics with 5 gold medals many years ago. LINK TO REPORT OF THAT EVENT Her and Ashley gave me French Pedicure. Pretty weird, I know.
What have I been up to lately? Building my own electric guitar. William and Ashley both have Fender Stratocasters, and I have bought, then sold a couple different Gibsons to try to find something I like, spent quite a bit of time at Guitar Center playing various axes. Eventually I realized the Strat just seems perfect.
Designed in the early 1950′s by Leo Fender, it is STILL the mainstay guitar of SO many successful musicians. The list of guys that consider(or considered) it their main guitar stretch from Buddy Holly, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pink Floyd, to John Mayer and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. The Strat’s where it’s at.
Rather than buy another of what we have, I decided to build my own from parts I selected myself. It’s still the same guitar, just a ‘custom’ version done exactly like I want. I started with an unfinished body mostly shaped and routed, then started searching for the neck and other bits and pieces I needed. William helped me with soldering, polishing, installing the tuners, and in general, being another set of hands and eyes to help be sure everthing was set right.
Basically, it has become my obsession over the last couple months to get it finished. Of course, it took much longer than I thought, but I really couldn’t be happier with the result. I have a full picture gallery of the complete process here http://daveharperphotos.irun100s.com/GalleryList.aspx?gallery=95730 You can click each photo to read the description of what process I was working on, and also access full size photos.
I used a Swamp Ash unfinished body. A birdseye maple neck, with rosewood fretboard. I wanted to build a pretty much vintage correct Strat, with my own upgrades as I saw fit. The basic inspiration was from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Number One Strat(pictured at bottom of page), thought I obviously did not try to ‘copy’ that guitar, with the enhanced grain, different coloring, different wood, etc. that I used But I used vintage style tuners, tremolo, saddles, string tree, and real bone nut just as would have been on a 1950′s or 1960′s Strat. I did the contouring on the body to be similar to that era. An amber tint to the neck gives that older, vintage, yellowed vibe rather than the bright white maple of a brand new Fender. The decals on the headstock are Fender inspired, but my own take on them. I even stuck a small quote from Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones on there. The finish is old school Nitro Lacquer, just as used back in the day. At one time used for automobile finishes, it’s too toxic for that use these days. I replaced the modern, cool abalone fret marker dots with cream colored clay dots, to also give a more vintage look. I think it came out pretty nice. It’s a joy to play, when I can wrestle it out of William’s hands.
This is the body that I actually started with.
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Above is a copy of the actual Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar that was the starting point for what I was wanting to do. Below is a Fender replica guitar of the same. I wanted to do something like this, but actually build a better guitar than I might buy off the shelf, with my own twist on it.
SRV was killed August 27, 1990 in a helicopter crash following a concert in East Troy, Wisconsin, headed to Chicago. Also on stage that night had been Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, Jimmie Vaughan. (though obviously none of them were onboard the helicopter)
I went for a run yesterday, and I felt that desire to crank it up again. I am about to enter a 100 miler for November, and start serious training for that. Kind of excited about it, after taking several months of rest.
When I got home from my run, Tamara and my daughter Emily were waiting for me to help her complete a homework assignment of measuring how far one of her parents could run in 10 seconds. In her PE class, they had to see how far THEY could run in 10 seconds. So, Emily marks a starting line and sends me off, Tamara monitors the clock, Ashley is down the street to mark the finish spot. I’m feeling like an idiot trying to sprint on legs that don’t do a lot of sprinting these days. While they are screaming wildly for me to go faster like it’s a real race, the neighbors are sitting out on their property with friends, drinking beer and wondering what the heck the Harper’s are up to now.
The measurement was 282 feet and some inches. Not even a day later, and I wish I could do it again, I could go much farther with a better start and quicker accelaration. I slow getting to top speed. Funny how I can break that 10 seconds into 3-4 different pieces just like you might a long distance run. Forget it, I think I’m too old to start training for the 100 yard dash!
I came inside the house gasping for air. WOW, that was hard! I cannot believe how long it took me to recover from that effort of 10 seconds of 100% effort. It’s very different to run like that, to give 100% effort from a complete rest, than it is to do the long aerobic distances, or even to sprint to the finish of something like a triathlon run, or 5 or 10k. It was fun, and Emily was impressed that I went far.
William and I did some riding this weekend. The day before, on Friday, I went riding with a buddy, DirtBikeMike. He had a pretty bad crash while following me. I had to go back and find him, he had gone down hard. Arm was very swollen, he’d had the breath knocked out of him, and his ribs were hurting. We could get his bike to start, but something was broke in the gearbox. SO, we had to leave his bike, and I had to ride him out of the woods on my bike, to get back to our trucks, went straight to get ice and ibuprofen. Then got as close as we could to his motorcycle with our trucks. It left me 1/2 mile by the GPS calculation for me to have to go in and push his bike out. Mike couldn’t do anything but sit in the truck. 1/2 mile is a LONG way to push a 350 pound motorcycle on dirt trails! I ran in, and actually got out pretty quick, but that was certainly my workout for the day!
