Start
Sooooo, at some point my friend Arvid and I knew that we were going to build an electric guitar from old skateboards. Well actually, in the beginning we were just hoping we would. After one fateful night of getting hyped on the idea, I began to think about the hole operation a bit more.
Two strange dudes in a garden
… both seem excited to craft a guitar from old skate decks.
What you need
inspiration
excitement
priority
Imagine you know roughly how to play a guitar and what parts make the thing work. Additionally, look at the final product from a woodworking perspective and really try to figure out how to recreate what you see.
Some things are obvious. Others may seem like rocket science - maybe not literally. That’s about the vantage point I had on the project at this stage of the process. A lot was left to be figured out.
Let me state one thing right off the bat. I saw no reason to get overwhelmed. After all, motivation and priority within a time budget is most of what it takes to get going. Of course, picturing yourself having to solve all at once can be daunting.
Divide and conquer
This mantra does make sense, not only from a computer science perspective. Any problem can be divide into chunks that seem reasonable for a step-by-step solution. You don’t need to know all it takes before starting something. Knowledge can and will always be collected along the way.
Be real
We should cut ourselves some slack not to push too ambitiously. Especially for a sparetime project, factoring in some time for laziness and failure just makes sense. That way it’ll be much easier to avoid frustration and boost confidence. At the same time, setting a simple overarching goal as early as possible helps to keep on track. For the Skate or Don’t guitar it was something like:
I am building an electric guitar from recycled skateboards. If it looks cool, plugs into an amp and produces sound I’ll be happy.
Plan immediate next steps
As stated before, this plan should have several milestones, not all of which I fully sketched out right away. Thus, without knowing the first thing about building a guitar, it felt reasonable to assume I would need a block of wood to shape the instrument body from.
Get going
I needed to collect some boards. I know - how obvious. But it is worth considering that crafting sites like Etsy are filled with skate wood projects. If you aren’t surrounded by a community of skaters or have collected a ton of boards yourself, it may be really difficult to acquire raw material. I had 3 left over decks at home. None of the skate shops around me offered old boards. And there simply is no space on the web that I could find, which sells used skate decks. So raising awareness for my plan around my circle of friends and waiting for support to arrive was all I could hope for. Thankfully, it did.
Huge thanks to the supporters, who supplied me with decks!!!
After approximately one month, Arvid and I had collected our base inventory:
13 full decks
3 decks with the nose cracked off
5 half decks
2 noses
It took another two days of looking at this beautiful pile of storytelling wood to fuel up enough excitement to proceed. So I jumped online and started my research. Youtube is filled with amazing hobbyists sharing their expertise, yet it surprised me to see that even Prisma guitars had a few videos showing exactly “How It’s Made”. Check out the list of resources at the end of this post and bow to the power of free knowledge exchange.
Factoring in these inspirations, I arrived at the following plan to construct my body blank.
(This is my original design document, not a full execution plan made for this website)
