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I have absolutely no need for this and my painting skills are lacking and yet this calls to my (rock) dinosaur brain.... £150?

Four humbuckers, two tune-o-matic bridges, two necks and an enlarged body. This thing must weigh... 2 tons

Complete no-brainer. Get it bought.

sunshiner wrote:Four humbuckers, two tune-o-matic bridges, two necks and an enlarged body. This thing must weigh... 2 tons

You forgot 4 neck plates

NickS wrote:

sunshiner wrote:Four humbuckers, two tune-o-matic bridges, two necks and an enlarged body. This thing must weigh... 2 tons

You forgot 4 neck plates

gusman2x wrote:Complete no-brainer. Get it bought.

Definitely this

Yesssss.

Don't bother painting it, stain it and oil it.

They are notoriously heavy. Some of the '70s ones when they first ditched Honduran mahogany were like 15lbs. Even the hardshell cases for them are competitive with the weight of modern Teles/LPs.

It was either Marnie Stern or Alex Lifeson that I read say in an interview if you have one strapped on and actually raise them up for the Jimmy Page poses they sort of send you staggering a few steps in the opposite direction.

The weight would worry me a bit too, but those kit builds probably don't use the same wood for the bodies as branded guitars. I doubt that it would be the same sort of mahogany as a Gibson or an Epi.

The kit-built JM I bought second-hand for instance is noticeably lighter than my CIJ, despite the body shape and thickness being very similar. So yeah. It's gonna be heavy, but maybe not as bad as it looks?

Concretebadger wrote:The weight would worry me a bit too, but those kit builds probably don't use the same wood for the bodies as branded guitars. I doubt that it would be the same sort of mahogany as a Gibson or an Epi.

If that guitar is even trying to be mahogany is a whole other discussion, but in my experience cheaper "mahogany" guitars are usually heavier, not lighter. This is not always the case with Fender style bodies because a lot of alder alternatives are lighter than alder. A lot of bolt-on kits like that use maple necks too, which adds more weight to the Gibson-type designs.

Epis are generally heavier than Gibsons these days, partly due to having thicker bodies on the SGs and no weight relief on the LPs but also because aren't technically made out of mahogany anymore, they use laminated Lauan which is sometimes referred to as "Phillipine mahogany" but not the same genus/species of woods used for mahogany guitars. It's a plywood made from a gigantic southeast Asian rainforest flowering plant genus (tall skinny trees) known as Shorea. Epiphone just still list it as mahogany because toanwudz.

This is more a cost issue than a sustainability one; a majority of the 196 species of tree that fall under Shorea are critically endangered, but most import "mahogany" guitars are made from them these days.

Another common name for this wood is Meranti: while the name Lauan is commonly used when referring to plywood made of this type of wood. (It's also frequently called Philippine Mahogany, though Meranti/Lauan bears no relation to what is considered to be “true� mahogany in the Swietenia and Khaya genera.)

You see this a lot in the import guitar industry. Squier don't use anything like the maple used to make American Fender necks (and they're now rolling out "Laurel" fingerboards made of laminate fig tree wood), and there are about 20 different variants of lime trees referred to as "basswood" by guitar manufacturers.

On their red SG-type guitars nowadays, Epiphone use a veneer of nicely grained mahogany on the front for the benefit of the translucent cherry finish, which is easy to spot at the bevels. My 2004 MIK EB-3 is like that and you see it a lot on DIY kit SGs too (though I can only find an example with a flamed maple top, the construction is the same)

Weight is definitely a big consideration as I do get problems with a nerve in my left shoulder. Someone offered me an Ibanez double-neck a while back and 1. It was heavy 2. There was a neck pocket crack 3. I wasn't convinced it was actually his; so I didn't go for it.

There's also a thing with wood that all different parts of a trunk weigh differently. Closer to the root density of the wood is much higher than in the middle part of it and boards made of that part are usually much heavier. One and the same tree can really give feather weight boards and the ones weighing a ton. Or you can have a whole tree with very dense and heavy wood.

Among the cheap guitars and kits paulonia wood seem to make the lightest guitars, though I had a paulonia strat that was easily the heaviest guitar I had.

I had a paulownia Strat body that was nice and light but unfortunately whenever I was around it I'd feel weak and couldn't fly anymore.

NickS wrote:Weight is definitely a big consideration as I do get problems with a nerve in my left shoulder.

Might be worth thinking about rigging up some sort of double shoulder strap or belt strap for this. I'm sure I've seen them.

So they do.
http://www.gear4music.com/Guitar-and-B ... Black/1MF4

Fuck spending seventy quid on a strap though.