Crabapple Tele

Final Photos

Progress Photos

This project came with a lot of challenges. The wood for the body of the guitar came from the crabapple tree that was in the front of parent's house for my childhood. The tree was diseased and needed to be chopped down. I saw the opportunity to commemorate the tree by building this guitar. The wood had a lot of voids in it, so I needed to use epoxy to make the slab of wood homogenous. My first pour of epoxy ended up failing and never properly solidified, so I spent months scraping the uncured, extremely sticky epoxy from the voids. After scraping as much as I could, I poured another final pour which turned out much better. After cutting the shape and working with the slab, there was continual residual leaking of uncured epoxy that I had to contend with. Ultimately, I was able to utilize some epoxy topcoat to seal in the remainder of the epoxy in the guitar. The result is now my favorite guitar I've built so far and it feels great to be able to take a piece of my childhood and repurpose it to something I hope can be cherished for a very long time!