This is the Formicaster. The only thing about it that's remotely Strat-like, however, is the arrangement of three single-coil pickups, with the angled bridge pickup. The body shape looks like a cross between a Les Paul and a Danelectro, but my starting curves for the lower bout were from a 3/4 size acoustic and some of the upper bout from a busted-up, half-sized guitar I pulled out of somebody's trash. The slightly elongated, narrow waist felt right when I made a cardboard cutout of it and held it against my rib cage. The aesthetics of the guitar somehow dictated that the neck and body would join at the 16th fret.
The goal was to make a knockabout guitar with a unique look and a unique sound that could take a lot of abuse, hence the high-pressure laminate body panels. Almost everything about the Formicaster is an experiment or a first for me: the HPL body, the neck joint, the stacked heel, the volute, making tuner buttons, the circuitry, the bridge.
The headstock is either inspired by a blowing candle flame or Casper the Ghost. The nut is Corian, as are the tuner buttons and the knobs for the sliding pots. I got the tuners from eBay, but the buttons were heavy, cast metal and made it feel neck-heavy. The dots are tiny mother-of-pearl buttons in two different sizes that I harvested from a huge box of buttons that we'd inherited from my mother.
Click here for information on building the neck.
My first design had the plate above the guitar top, but I decided to put the plate under the top for a cleaner, unique look. I decided that intonation adjustment screws were a waste of time, since you basically only have to set the intonation once during a setup. With this design, you slide the saddle to the intonation point and lock it from below.
The plate extends from the bridge pieces to the holes for the ball ends. The mahogany bridge block is then glued over it to further stiffen the area and to kill resonances that could cause feedback.
The pickups are cheap ceramic single-coils, courtesy of eBay, loud and not particularly subtle.
I could have/should have tinkered more with the slide pots. I used 100K audio taper pots, but tests indicated that 50K or perhaps as little as 33K would have been sufficient to control the pickups, and would have given me an expanded adjustment range. These are a little abrupt, but the continuous adjustment makes it easy to dial in just the right amount of twang or thickness.
The electronics are star-grounded, and the guitar is very quiet, surprisingly so for single-coils. The slide pots are wired as variable resistors, not potentiometers (single-ended). Grounding or floating the "far" end of the resistors made no difference in hum, so I let them float. I'll take one more step in quieting--shielding the insides of the pickup covers and grounding them to the bridge.
The reverse-wound, reverse-polarity pickup is at the neck, so that I can have humbucking in neck-middle and neck-bridge. The neck pickup also has a phase-reversing switch for a full repertoire of twangy, boingy, and hollow sounds.
| In Phase | Out of Phase |
| neck middle bridge neck-middle neck-bridge * all three |
neck-middle neck-bridge all three |
The above recordings were made with a GuitarPort at its default/bypass settings (no amp emulation), with the guitar volume on 10 and the tone control at 10, except for neck-bridge *, which is played through my Fender Blues Jr. Amp.
No fancy playin' here; just some simple guitar sounds.