Things were starting to get somewhat more refined by the time it came to making “The Worm” (you’ll understand once you see the pictures). I’d been making a few guitars in the background and had been furiously pouring over articles, books and videos relating to the art of Luthery as well as the tradition of Cigar Box Guitars. I’d started selling a few online and in a local cigar shop the Paladar Fumior Salon in South Brisbane, if you ever happen to be in the area stop by and have a chat with Filip over a fantastic coffee. My builds were beginning to more closely resemble fully functional instruments more than functional art and it just so happened that a fellow musician interested in more off kilter type guitars had seen one of my adverts online. 

Raf, had called me up asking to come and visit and check out my current stock, not that I had very much on hand but I said sure come on over. I was thinking I was going to make a sale and swiftly make my way to the timber yard to collect some new raw stock to start building some new guitars. As it happens he turned up with more than the want for something I already had, he asked me if I could make a Guitar out of something that wasn’t a cigar box? Not wanting to disappoint I swiftly blurted out that I could make one out of most things. Now, up until this point I had made nothing other than CBG’s and I knew I couldn’t make a guitar out of anything… 

We spoke for a little and he picked up a few of my guitars and then he reached into his bag and asked, could you make a guitar out of, this? 

Raf had himself an effects pedal called The Worm made by Electro Harmonix and he had kept the wooden box it came in. From that moment I knew that Raf and I were going to get along pretty well. 

The box itself was huge, by comparison I had ben working on things around half its size in diameter and depth, this was like a cargo container to me. 

There were a few differences between The Worm box and a cigar box, for one the lid slide out from top to bottom instead of a latch style box for cigars so that would be something to consider, also there was a rather high lip around the walls of the box that recessed the lid so the fretboard would have to be of a hight to compensate for that. Raf also wanted a P-90 pickup in there and for it to be a 4 string model. The 4 string I could do, the P-90, I couldn’t. 

Looking back on it, you know, I probably could have done the P-90 but I just wasn’t ready for that yet and I like to be honest about these things. The plywood used for the lid is really thin on these things, plus it’s not really flat and when you take it out of the box, it’s really not flat! I was worried about it warping, about the timber breaking, about basically fucking up every part of it imaginable that I had to say that I couldn’t do it. What I did do however was create a cover plate on the back of the body so that future mods could be made. 

So The Worm was decided on and I got to work. 

The neck was an interesting timber, Budgeroo if I remember correctly, very very hard and very unforgiving if you goof up with a spoke shave which is what I had turned to to shape my necks at this stage. 

The length of timber had started out at about 45mm and I wanted it shaved back to about 37mm, without a thicknesser, doing this by hand is a task!

So with the neck finally shaped I went about the task of putting it together. As I said the lids of these boxes are rather thin, the sides are not, they are thick laminated pine and take some working through. 

Once the neck pocket was cut I marked out the fret positions and cut them. At this stage I was still finishing parts of the neck before fretting. I’ve stopped doing things in that order these days but, I do prefer the finish you can get on a fretboard while doing it in this order. very smooth. 

Frets on, moving on.

Sorry, I don have many photo’s of the process after this apart form the finished product. Machine heads on, electronics in, controls sorted bone nut and bone bridge in place and shaped, it was time to assemble The Worm

Okay, the bridge wasn’t completely finished here…

Still making stumpy headstocks at this stage.

…just like a strat…

And you know what? It sounded pretty damn good. I’ll post up a video to it. Electro Harmonix even put it up on their FB page, I was blown away by the response to this thing! After this, things started to get busy.