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27" Baritone PVC Tubulum Guitar

I made a git for the Plumbers Challenge and decided to post the build here.

Awhile back, I had thought about building a guitar that was made out of PVC for a "Tubulum" acoustic effect. So the build challenge was the excuse I needed.

The body was made of schedule 40 PVC pipe and fittings. I used a 1 &1/4" piece over the 1" piece on the neck so that the fretboard would set evenly.

I used a electrical box cover for the control plate. I used a 500k pot for volume and a input jack. I had some left over tuners from other projects(CBGitty Tuners). 3 tuners for the 3 strings on the git, mounted in the ends of a 4-way fitting on the end of the neck. 1 tuner is used for a heavy string running along the back inside of the neck and acts as a trussrod, tighten to add relief and loosen to let the neck ramp some.

The Pickup is a hacked hand drill motor part. The coils from the motor have magnetized metal pole shoes holding wire coils that are wired in series. Thought to myself that this might work as a humbucking pickup, it does. It was a little weak, so I added a couple round ceramic magnets that also came from the non-working drill(had a bad armature). The fretboard and strings run through the "Pickup"(one coil on top and one coil below) and the pickup slides along the through fretboard towards the neck for bass tones and towards the bridge for treble tones. Similar to the old "Monkey On A Stick Pickups".

It does well for fretless guitar or slide and has good acoustic volume and tone. The pickup works and bucks the hum, but it isn't very loud(suitable for bedroom volumes).

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by 3qt17g550yh6r on June 26, 2017 at 1:18pm

I have a question Paul, if you would have made the pipes one big long run, and ended it with one sound hole. Do you think it could have been a bass?

Permalink Reply by Paul Craig on June 26, 2017 at 9:55pm

The neck is connected to the center connector of the body, allowing the "truss string" to run the entire length of the guitar. The ends at the bottom and top are open as well, but they have tuners stuffed in them. The forward sound holes do well since the whole thing is hollow and connected.

Bass is usually 28" and up and this 27" is using the 3 lowest strings in a 6 string set tuned to D/A/D and 1 octave low. So it gets some nice Bass tones, especially when the pickup is slid towards the neck position. Some heavier gauge strings would definitely get you into bass territory.

Permalink Reply by Paul Craig on June 26, 2017 at 10:00pm

This was fun and I wanted to do a practical test for this "Pickup". The results weren't great, but it does work. It could be better with some stronger magnets.

The pickup is acting like a large low output single coil wired to a dummy coil. Nice clear tones.