This four string guitar is Diddley Bros second licence plate guitar. This time we went electric and cut into the plate to accommodate a single coil pick up. The main body of the guitar is a beech wood craft box onto which the licence plate is bolted. The volume and tone controls are located on the upper corner, out of the way of the front of the guitar.

The neck is a profiled poplar (tulip wood) through the box design. It has a 25” scale length; with flat wound strings (to minimise string noise) stretching over a machine bolt bridge up to a jumbo zero fret acting as the nut.

The fingerboard is made of European oak with fifteen 1.5mm silver nickel frets. The 3mm inlay dots glow in the dark; a quirky feature that just might prove helpful while sitting out playing round the fire at night.

Machine head screws behind the zero fret maintain the string spacing’s over the fingerboard.

The headstock design of course had to be consistent with the last licence plate guitar we built and because it looked so flippin’ cool.

Route 29 though it is an actual route in the state of Virginia was not picked at random. It was chosen because it passes though and nearby some significant parts of Virginia in relation to blues music; in particular Western Piedmont Blues.

Blues musicians such as Herb Richardson, Rabbit Muse, Clayton Horsley and John Tinsley all hail from Virginia and are worth looking into if you’ve not heard of them already.

The link below led us on a road or route to discovering such musicians; it really is worth a look check out some of their music on YouTube.

http://media.smithsonianfolkways.org/liner_notes/bri/BRI00003.pdf