A nod to Doug Irwin and Jerry Garcia

Hello, I haven't posted on hipforums for a few years now. About the time I stopped, I was just getting into woodworking as a hobby. Now, it's what I do everyday and in my spare time. But along the way, I developed the desire to build a really nice guitar that also "tipped the hat" to Doug Irwin, the builder of Jerry Garcia's 'Wolf", and "Tiger" guitars. I wanted to incorporate elements of both in my guitar. But I was stuck with a bolt on neck due to being broke, lol. But I figured if anyone here would dig this thing, this would be the place. And no I don't build guitars as a business or anything, just wanted a nice one to play, is all. This has the same general setup as Garcia's, without the unity gain buffer, midi, and a different neck pickup. Every note sounds crystal clear, and the sustain is amazing. There is one 6" wide piece, that runs along the entire guitar from top to bottom, that the neck, pickup bolts and bridge bolts are anchored to, and that the strings go all the way through, giving this guitar a superb amount of resonance. You can feel every chord vibrating through the entire guitar. This was the cheapest guitar I've ever owned. All the wood was given to me. 2 weeks of hard work and 2 years of planning on doing it "one day" was all it took Feel free to move this to another place if it's not in the right forum. If you would like to check out a gallery of each step this took to complete, you can go here to my website.

 

that's beautiful

 

that looks really awesome, ive always loved jerrys custom guitars and you did an incredible job with your custom and you can definitely see the jerry/irwin influence in it. ive always been interested in building/customizing guitars but never had the money to build one from scratch...yet ive built a strat from spare parts and gave it some really nice custom wiring. eventually i play on building a replica of jerrys alligator strat that nash gave him and he played in '72 as i love his sound then. i found a site that sells all the stickers and brass parts for it. the site also sells replicas of the custom parts on jerrys irwin guitars(brass pickup rings, jack plate etc) if i can find it again ill post it back up here

 

thats nice.. ;D

 

amazing

 

thank you, i have just updated the guitar with an old alnico humbucker in the neck, with a coil tap switch. As well as a very unjerry'ish killswitch. It's weird, because as I first learned to play lead work, I tried so hard to learn to sound at least a "little" like jerry, but now, I play completely different.

Haha, if you can imagine funk rock being played with this guitar.... but it fits. I use an autowah alot, and primarily have a "les paul" type sound, but lately I've been using the single coils to get the strat sound, which it does well also. All in all, it's the most versatile guitar i've ever had. And the shapes of Irwin's guitars are by far the coolest I've ever seen.

 

wow thats an amazing guitar, nice finish man

 

It's really sad what happened to Irwin though. A few years ago he was hit by a car on his bicycle and had to sell all of his Luthiery equipment to pay for hospital bills and rehabilitation. Last I heard he was living on 6th street in SF. Which if you don't know is one of the nastier places in SF.

 

what about Steve irwin?