230 – 251121 ZT-Tele Bigsby – Pine Tabletop #6 – Zachary Handcrafted Guitars | Bass| Pedals | Strings

Inspiration

This is a very special project. A series of 6 Zachary guitars made from an old pine tabletop I found in someone's garbage.
If you are looking for a kit guitar assembled for you for over $4000, you will have to look elsewhere.

It all started when I was riding my bike one day and people had put their waste out for pickup. I saw this pine table and was immediately upset, as I always get when I see anyone throwing away wood, any type of wood. Why would anyone throw wood into the garbage? It just seems so odd and deviant to me. It should be a punishable crime to throw out wood or waste wood in any way. Wood can always be repurposed or in the worst case scenario it can be used as fuel for survival. Throwing away a beautiful piece of pine tabletop is what a domesticated toddler would do in a boomer neighborhood, who is nothing more than a brainwashed zombie. This is what society has become and what was created by mass arrested development and indoctrination.

So I returned to this place with my vehicle and picked up this table. I knew immediately what I would do with it. This was a beautiful piece to me. I noticed that unfortunately it was thinner than the 1¾" needed for traditional Fender or Gibson-style guitar bodies. I brought it home to my shop and kept it there for over a year just thinking about it, until the inspiration was burring inside of me to give this tabletop a new life and make the finest guitars from it. Guitars for real players. Fully realizing that the same toddler who threw out this table would never buy any guitar which you see in this series. I understand that these guitars have no commercial value in the world we live in and to the type of person who is the guitar consumer. These guitars however are the finest any REAL player will ever play.

As you can see in the pics of the tabletop below, I plotted where the individual guitar bodies would be cut out. So what resulted is a series of 6 Zachary guitars. Thicknesses are a bit thinner than production Telecasters and Les Pauls but it ended up just perfect in terms of light-weight and comfort. I am thinking that 1¾" may be too thick for a solid-body guitar. This Pine Tabletop series gave me the opportunity to try out different pickups that I also build.

I was very careful and made sure that I left the tops undamaged and unaltered, including its original lacquer finish. Tops are identical to what they were when still a table. I can imagine that generations in that family had sat around this table. Kids having lunches on it when they came home from school. Kids did their homework on it and art and crafts (notice the paint marks). The whole family had dinner on this table and lives were spent around this table. I grew up in this neighborhood, so I am familiar with the lifestyles here. It was the typical suburban lifestyle of the middle class in the 60s, 70s and to the present day when this table was finally thrown out. I even forgot which street and which house I picked it up from.

These are my favorite kind of guitars. I really don't like museum-piece, pristine, fancy and opulent, exotic wood instruments. They are just gaudy to me and not for playing. Those are made for the toddlers.

These tops are untouched, preserved and even uncleaned, exactly as they were as the table, but the rest of the guitar, including all of the hardware, I reliced (distressed) to match the vibe of the old table and its history. Notice that the tabletop had a heavy Oak mechanism underneath it, which I had to dismantle and remove. This left impressions in the wood, as well as bolt and screw holes, as evidenced on the back and sides of the guitar bodies. I did plug most of these screw and big bolt holes in the back and sides of the bodies.

This type of a handmade instrument is incomparable to the sterile, mass manufactured, plastic-covered, guitar-looking-objects with bar codes in them, which are what pass for guitars today. Look what passes as humans today. No wonder.

No two Zachary guitars are ever alike.

This Guitar

This is the final guitar in this series of Knotty Pine tabletop wood. I wanted to put a Bigsby on a Tele again. As usual, I want to make these types of guitars versatile and convertible from being either hardtail or Bigsby. The Bigsby unit here is screwed on the body in seconds, not with wood screws, as its usually done but with machine screws, which screw into metal threaded inserts. This way the soft Pine will never wear out from repeated mounting of the Bigsby unit.
If you look closely you will notice that the two outer string eyelets are incorporated as Bigsby mounting holes. The B5 Bigsby unit was cut and modified by me cutting away the string roller, which was too low for this application and would result in too steep of a string break angle, adversely effecting tuning stability. This is usually the problem when a Bigsby is mounted on a Les Paul. So I fabricated my own adjustable roller setup, or actually not a roller at all but a string tension bar, which is adjustable for perfect height attainment. The bridge is a Gretsch pivoting Aluminum bridge, which further aids in tuning stability. It all results, given all the propriety parts, materials and design, in perfect tuning stability with the Bigsby.

The pickups were hand wound and fabricated with 38 AWG wire, making them a hybrid Charlie Christian set.
This is the only guitar in the series with a 25" scale. I just had to use a 3-way rotary switch on my own fabricated Aluminum control plate, for that cool vintage vibe.
Everything is appropriately antiqued to match the theme of this instrument, specifically to match the old table top, which was not altered from its original state.
As usual, 24 high and wide Stainless Steel frets were used on a compound radius fingerboard. Take notice that this guitar without the Bigsby weighs 5.8 lbs.
As usual with Zachary guitars, this all results in a remarkable and very unique guitar.

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