Monthly Archives: August 2012

Special Delivery!

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I delivered the guitar to Ashley on August 3rd. He was in town for a show, so I got to witness him playing it live for the very first time. Talk about a satisfying moment—it was great to see how excited and happy he was to finally get the guitar!

Here’s a couple of photos of him playing it that night. Cheers.

Photos by Justin McIvor

Presenting the Ashley Kingman Model

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Features:

  • Body: Chambered birdseye maple
  • Body Size: 14″ wide, 2″ deep
  • Neck: Birdseye maple
  • Fretboard: Rosewood, 12″ radius
  • Number of Frets: 20 medium-jumbo
  • Scale Length: 25″
  • Width at Nut: 1-11/16″
  • Pickups: 2 custom Munnerlyn single-coil pickups
  • Pickup Switching: 3-position toggle switch
  • Controls: Volume, Tone
  • Bridge: Compensated aluminum bridge
  • Tailpiece: Bigsby® B5 vibrato tailpiece
  • Finish: Hand-rubbed varnish

Photography by Justin McIvor

Bigsby® Guitars and Vibratos is a registered trademark of Fred Gretsch Enterprises, Ltd. Munnerlyn Guitars is in no way affiliated with Bigsby® Guitars and Vibratos.

A Finishing Touch

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When I had completely finished Ashley’s guitar, it was time to make it official, so the last thing I did was paste this label inside. It turned out to be the finishing touch.

Ashley Kingman Model Progress: Part V

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This gallery shows the final assembly of Ashley’s guitar. By this point I had finished buffing the finish, leveling and recrowning the frets, fabricating the pickguard, the jackplate and the pickup surrounds—so all I needed to do was put it together, wire it up and slap some strings on it.

Prototype Pickups

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Here are the first working prototypes of my pickup design. I did a lot of research on pickup construction and materials as well as practiced winding many coils before getting to this point and I’m very happy with the results. They are fat sounding, low-output single coils with a wide frequency response.

I modeled the look after vintage Magnatone Mark V pickups, but that’s where the similarities end. The structure and configuration of the bobbins, magnets, coils and baseplates is my own design. (Audio samples coming soon!)

Pickup Winder

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Time to make Ashley’s pickups—and if you’re going to make some guitar pickups, you’ll need to get yourself a pickup winder. I got a copy of Jason Lollar’s pickup winding book, followed his plans and built myself this homemade winder.

Ashley Gets A Preview

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At this stage I wanted to show Ashley the guitar so he could get a feel for how it was coming along. Even though the guitar wasn’t finished, I put some strings on it, so he could try it out.

Here’s Ashley checking out the guitar while Big Sandy looks on. I was very relieved to hear him say it felt just like his guitar, only better!

Ashley’s Signature Decal

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Since I’m calling Ashley’s guitar the “Ashley Kingman Model” I wanted to put his name on it somewhere. I tried out a few options but they all seemed too obvious—I was looking for something subtle.

That’s when I remembered that Ashley has gotten many famous guitarists to sign the back of his guitar’s headstock. He has autographs from Scotty Moore, Les Paul, Paul Burlison and others on there, so it seemed only natural to put Ash’s signature in the same place on his new headstock. Here’s how it turned out.

Building Ashley’s Bridge

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Because the top of Ashley’s guitar is flat, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to use a standard Bigsby bridge, which has a curved base that fits the top of archtop guitars. After doing some research I determined that Bigsby supplied Magnatone with unique bridges. They had a slightly thicker base, were flat on the bottom and were stamped “MARK V”. I decided to build a custom base out of aluminum and outfit it with a real Bigsby saddle and thumbwheels. Here’s how it turned out.