Most of my guitars have used the Telecaster outline for the body shape, that's because it suits where I want to neck to sit when I play standing up. The Les Paul shape does that pretty well too, eventually I'll develope another outline for the shape for the body, but most of the design ideas I've used are not about the outline but rather the locaiton of the neck pocket as well as the top and bottom of the guitar body and neck.

This is my main guitar that I play, currently, it seems to do just about everything well.

BigLeaf Maple neck with Honduran Rosewood (slab) fretboard

This neck design has a lot of elements borrowed from Ken Parker's NiteFly design: The width, 22 frets, and back profile make this neck feel a lot like playing a NiteFly, but the straight fretboard radius and headstock outline are borrowed from Fender and I borrowed the truss rod and adjustment access from Warmoth. It's actually an interesting combination of neck features, but it covers all of the things I most liked about these different designs in one.

For the fret markers I used Aluminum and Brass tubes filled with epoxy mixed with sawdust from the fretboard

A lot of my guitars have Aluminum nuts - I like bone too - both are excellent materials to work with.

I like to use the odd figure that happens when you get inside of wood - here is a really cool knot..

This is actually Aluminum - polished - too - weight on a stringed insturment needs to always be factored in.

The humbucker pickups I designed and made for this guitar have a significant asymmetry in the number of wire wraps in each coil: This allows the humbucker to have some of the charactoristics of a single coil pickup, and allows for better use as a split coil if desired, while having a whole different tone than humbuckers evenly wound. The end result is a tone that is clearly a humbucker, but not heavy at all - sort of a cross between a mini-humbucker and a T-TOP humbucker. The pickup design for this guitars factors in the color that my amps and the amps speakers will add to the tone.The neck pickup has a lot less wire on it and the bridge pickup has a lot more asymmetry in the winding. Also, because the overall tone is lighter and tighter on the bass end - using a circuit design that is close to the original 1950's Les Paul tone circuit and substituting in a lower valued tone potentiameter - the tone knob really controls a spectrum of tones that cover most thinher single-coil tones as well as all of the PAF humbucker tones.

This bridge - which I've used for a few years now - is basically a design I borrowed form Leo Fender - though he's not going to get it back any time soon :)

I design my bridges around the idea that the base material needs to be a softer metal - to take some of the attack out of the string response - and the saddles need to be a dense metal to allow the string to vibrate longer: These saddles are made from Brass rod and will not have the parisitic/sympathetic vibration that a lighter metal would have, parisitic/sympathetic vibration of the saddle will subtract from the string vibration and either cancel out the vibration that the pickup will sense or pysically not allow the string to vibrate as long.

Many neck joints are way too bulky and interfere with playing up high on the neck. So my design here is borrowed from the Ibanez AANJ neck joint where I also borrow the position of the neck joint from Ken Parker's NiteFly design: The result is a 22 fret neck design where it's just as easy to play up high on the neck as it is anywhere else on the neck.

There is a slight (113"-64") asymmetric curvature on the top and the bottom of the guitar which is very similar to what Ken Parker used on the Fly guitar design. The big difference on this one is that I have the curvature cover the entire body to make it a very organic look/feel. The curvature allows the guitar to fit onto the player's body if the player plays with the guitar a little closer to their body.

Also, the body design blends in a Fender Strat style of forearm contour with the top of the body contour - the seemless flow of these two lines is one of my favorite parts of this design.

I borrowed the concept of removing a lot of the body wood from "The Handle Guitar" design, but removed wood where I thought it would impact the tone the least while removing a significant amount of wood: The result is a body weight that is less than 1/2 the weight of most guitar bodies.

The end result of the design is a guitar that is very light, covers just about every tone I want, and is quite unique is a very understated way. My favorite guitar to play too.

Here are some pictures of a few of my other designs and projects - some of these are predisesors to the guitar design above

Making a straight forward Les Paul with a lot of weight relief. The weight relief is intended to make the balance of the guitar a lot more like the original design - back in the 1950s they had lighter wood.

Here are some neck related pictures:

I use this jig for doing most of the basic shaping of the back of the neck profile. It defines about 80% of the final shape.

More jigs, here I'm making the slot for the truss rod

The truss rods I make will never break

This one gets an Aluminum skunk-strip

While remodeling my house I found this beautiful old-growth Douglas-Fir beam - took forever to get all the nails out, but it made a great wood for this guitar below - the acoustical tone of this guitar is great: I have to make an acoustic guitar out of Douglas-Fir in the future.

Here one can see that my neck joint design still has a lot of bulk, but what I did is to pull in into the body of the guitar more and moved it back towards the player: What this does is it moves the bulk of th joint where the player is not impeaded in their playing. Also, I did not borrow the Ken Parker NiteFly curved neck joint - that make come in a later project, but this Fender-like rectangle of a neck pocket works really well. The key to it working well, verses a curved neck pocket, is that the neck is thick enough that the transition between the neck back profile and the neck pocket is not that significant. If it was a thinner neck, the investment into experimenting with a curved pocket might make sense.

This was my fist design where I did a curve over the top of the guitar body and integrated in a forearm contour: There are many other aspects of this design that make it a really unique guitar:

I used wild cherry trunck wood that was twisted - really great grain, also if you notice the pickguard comes up over the base of the bridge and the bridge is inset into the guitar on one side. Also, this guitar has a Mardona fretboard - a very interesting wood to work with as it splits very easily, but once finished it acts just like Maple. The fret markers are Aluminum rod, when polished they are way more interesting than Pearl.

Some early projects...

If you look really close you'll notice that the fretboard is a very thin layer of Bubinga - I shaped the top and the bottom of the fretboard to match the curve of the neck.