So much to be said on this one.
The “Keef” started out as a slab of 2″ live edge/end cherry I was gifted from my brother in law. It sat in the shop for quite some time as I tried to sort out what kind of guitar I could pull out of it, since it wasn’t really big enough for any of my designs.
I thought about it. And thought about it.
And one late afternoon around Thanksgiving of 2021 an evil idea percolated to the surface. Just use it as-is and make it work.
The biggest challenge was going to clearly be how to mount the bridge and tailpiece, since the wood there was (is) disintegrating and would never hold. A couple folks had suggested what to me was kind-of the obvious choice – fill it with resin and be done with it. BUT… if there’s one thing this beast kept whispering in my ear, it was “Don’t make me a coffee table!” That and I just thought it would make it more of a novelty and less of an instrument, if that makes any sense.
So I carved out the shape on the bandsaw, routed the neck pocket and then mused what needed musing. I wanted the bridge to ‘bridge’ the canyon, and thought about doing a combo bridge/tailpiece, but that still wasn’t quite right. My son and I had been binging “Forged in Fire” episodes on Hulu, and it sparked (heh) an idea. So I ran out to Home Depot and grabbed a 3/8″ steel rod and a blowtorch. Some measuring and cutting and then heating bits til they were glowing and bending the steel into shape with a pair of channel locks, and bam! Bridge and tailpiece sorted, just bored the appropriate holes and cut threads in the bridge uprights so I could have a rudimentary height adjustor and it was done. And it actually works! That was the most surprising bit.
I knew I only wanted one pickup, and as I was mucking about with where to put it and how to mount it, I started looking at my acoustic, and that got me thinking about the old Turner electrics, which combined and morphed in my head and turned into boring a 4″ hole all the way through the body, then routing a recess and installing a steel ring to give it the feel of a sort of steampunk purfling. I put a small backplate on the back and inverted the mounting springs. Bingo.
Lastly was the ‘hovering’ volume control. I picked up a mini pot from StewMac and a relicked knob from GFS, and after some trial and error with a threaded rod, three nuts and some JB weld I was able to mount it in the center of the open hole in the top horn.
To stabilize the disintegrating bits of wood, I drizzled in as much super-light Starbond CA glue into the cracks as I could, and sprayed the whole thing with just a couple light coats of ‘dead flat’ waterbase clear. More to give it a tiny bit more cohesiveness vs. trying to do anything schmancy with the finish. If there’s one thing Keef is not, it’s schmancy.
In the end, I am kind of astonished how amazing it sounds. One pickup, one volume, no tone – on a piece of wood that shouldn’t really work. BUT due to the long open run from tailpiece to bridge, and maybe because of the steel ring around the pickup, there are some bonkers cool harmonics that ring out when playing, even when not plugged in.
It’s been a weird experiment that I didn’t expect to work out very well, and instead has turned into my all-time favorite build.