Jared Tulayan

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Luthery Log 1: Starcaster Build

2022-07-25

#art #guitar #makerspace #woodworking


I have had this dream: to own some kind of semi-hollow guitar of my own making.


A wine red Epiphone Riviera P93

At first, it was going to be an Epiphone Riviera P93, partially because this dream started when I was in high school: I was getting into The Strokes, and Nick Valensi’s P94 was something I’ve always wanted to own. However, it didn’t feel like my style, and so my dream settled on this wine red P93, with its beautiful gold hardware and triple dogear P90 setup. Tonewise, it was bright and airy due to the single coil setup and semi-hollow body, but the tone could also fatten up with the right settings. I found out recently Lucy Dacus also uses it, which had further set this guitar as something of a dream to acquire.


Fender's Modern Player Starcaster in Cherry Red Sunburst

However, I had also begun getting into Deep Sea Diver at the same time, and the lead guitarist Jessica Dobson always rocked this cherry sunburst semi-hollow guitar that I had never seen the likes of before. Research had me find out that it was a Fender Modern Player Starcaster, and my mind had fixated on this guitar as well. Something about the stylings of a Fender in a semi-hollow guitar package was very alluring to me. The hardware wasn’t that eccentric; just two humbuckers and a Tune-o-matic, but the tone and style was unique; I had never seen an offset body used for a semi-hollow, nor had I seen the likes of a stepdown headstock. The tone was unique too: because the body was separate from neck, the transfer of energy between the neck and the body was different as opposed to a set neck, creating a different tone. However, in the hands of people like Jessica Dobson, the tone could shift, change, transform into something more. I fell in love with it when I saw it first used by her.

Somehow, I just never seemed to be able to settle on one, so in college, I planned to make a cross between the two: a Fender Starcaster with the hardware and color of a P93. It is a major challenge: if you look online for any information regarding this guitar, there is little to none; the guitar was largely unsuccessful, so Fender had stopped producing them altogether. You can find Fender Starcasters used, but for extremely high prices. The next best thing was a Squier Starcaster, but I’m not a fan of the Squier humbuckers, Besides, I was hoping to treat this project as my magnum opus, my biggest project yet before I leave the Makerspace.

Today I started with machining out the centerblock, top, and bottom. According to some documents and forums I read online, the starcaster is a sandwich, much like a Thinline Telecaster. Ideally the sides would be bent, but I haven’t been able to get the tooling to make veneer, or the tooling to bend said veneer. Making a centerblock with the sides attached would just be easier from a logistics standpoint.

A split in the centerblock...

Machining the centerblock wasn’t hard; it’s a one sided job, and the body isn’t too thick. There were a couple things I found out:

After machining the centerblock, I had to machine the tops. Earlier, I had jointed a face by using a planer sled that allows me to move a piece through the planer with shims. It yields a flatter result than surfacing it on the CNC, but only if you shim the piece properly.

I began to machine the underside of the top. I had used a 3D printer to print a top prototype prior to machining to get an idea of the topology, so I wasn’t going in completely blind.

This was pretty good, though it took really long–about 30 minutes for both a roughing and finishing pass. For future cuts, I may just stick to only a finishing pass; the delta is minimal


This was all I could finish today; I started at 3:00 in the afternoon, and I ended at 10:00–a couple of hours after my shift ended.

Hopefully future updates aren’t as jam-packed as this; I was trying to fit in a lot of work that I had missed due to COVID.