Coffee House Videos!

Here are the first round of coffee house videos from the Lenten Coffee House! There will be more coming soon. (Sorry for the poor lighting, we are still new to this video thing...)

A Router and Space

After the two bodies were fused the next step was to route out the space for the keyboard to fit in. Doing this required a tool that I don't have, a router. Now since this is a rough economy and I don't have a lot of cash to throw around on tools I'm only going to use infrequently. Enter Chicago Electric, cheap tools in both sense of the word. This router is basically holding an electric motor in the palm of your hand with some cheap plastic casing. But it was only $20 and this project has been mostly eyeballed, so no complaints.

Next I set up a gate so that the sides would be straight. The gate was clamped down, and the body was lined up and clamped down as well. Finally the guard on the router, even though it's a cheap piece of aluminum, it got the job done.


And the resulting product:


Stay tuned next time for refinishing the body!

Building a body

The instrument creation continues!

When we last checked in we had just finished taking apart the keyboard and doing some minor soldering. The next step on our list is to build the body of our instrument.

As a base I'll be starting with two cheap Fender Starcaster bodies these are the guitars they sell at Target. I picked them up on ebay for $15 a piece.



The top 1/3 of one body is going to serve as keytar portion which will sit on the top of the instrument and the bottom 3/4ths of the other body will be the guitar portion. I measured out the height of keyboard and marked the body.


Cutting a straight line with the table saw was going to be difficult because of the non-straight edge of the guitar. In order to make it straight, I put together a few pieces of scrap wood to even the side out and keep it flush to the gate.



Since one of the sides of the body was going to be a throw away piece I attached it to the scrap wood with a short screw, making sure that the screw was not long enough to be in the path of the blade!



Once that was done it was time to fire up the table saw, cut and repeat for the second body.




With the two bodies cut the next step was to get them attached together. In order to have the most stability I figured that dowels were the way to go. Using a drill and a place marker i drilled for a total of 10 dowels, probably overkill, but I don't want to take any unnecessary risks.




Finally using a guide mark the spots on the other side of the body, apply the glue and clamp it together!







Because I just eyeballed the angles of the dowels getting the sides together with those clamps took a lot of work, but after a lot of effort the two bodies were clamped together, and there was only one step left for the evening:

The Journey Begins!

I was having dinner and drinks late one evening with some musician friends. As we were talking about various musical instruments I was struck by an idea that I believe was at once both pure madness and sheer brilliance. A new instrument, a double necked instrument. I wondered what happens when you take two of the most ridiculous, and therefore awesome instruments, the double neck guitar and the keytar, and combine them?
Surely the ridiculousness and the awesomeness would be off the charts. I believe that after having such a flash of inspiration I have been given a grave moral obligation to bring this monster into existence.

So after a few late nights on ebay, the project is ready to begin!

First I will start with the keyboard. Fortunatley one of my roomates had an old Yamaha Portasound PSS-140, which is the perfect size for this project. The first step was to seperate the keyboard from the body.

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This step required a bit of soldering because the white connector you see between the keyboard and the drum pad was far too short to set the keyboard in the body.

Next will be to construct the body of the guitar. I've gotten two cheap bodies on ebay, and I'll keep you all posted as it progresses.