MRJ's Personal Guitars

 

I  have been building custom guitars for quite a while now, and I get a lot of questions about them.  These 'profiles' for each of my personal guitars are an attempt to answer many of those questions, and to show people what I use and what has worked for me.  I'd be happy to answer pretty much any further questions about these guitars -- just ask.  I have also included profiles for my guitars that I did not build.  Many of them have been extensively modified, or even rebuilt -- some of them have not, but I'll list them all as a reference here anyway.

 

 

MRJ #XS002 "Gears"

 


This is the second guitar I ever made -- and I started working on it before the X001 was even finished. I needed a test platform for my Sustainer (I was very involved and interested in the legendary PSW Sustainer thread over at Project Guitar at the time), and my old Rok Axe Strat copy was completely falling apart. I really enjoyed working on the X001, so I figured it would be easier to just build a second guitar completely around the new Sustainer design instead of trying to repair the Rok Axe. I originally used the neck and a lot of the hardware from the Rok Axe on the XS002. I got a Licensed Floyd Rose Speedloader and the remaining hardware that I needed and designed what would become the XS002.

I tried to correct as many things as possible that I'd had trouble with on the X001. First of all, the body is much smaller, and much more hollow than the X001, to reduce weight. The body shape itself I drew freehand right on the body blank. All of the odd control cavities, routes, and control placement were added to accomodate the Sustainer system.

 

 

 

Here is the guitar in production. This was way before I was using router templates, so everything had to be measured out by hand. I would not recommend ever trying to build a guitar this way, unless you have a lot of time on your hands, and/or you enjoy being extremely frustrated... make and use templates... don't make it hard on yourself!

 

 

 

More in-production pics. Saying this guitar has had a lot of harware changes over time would be an understatement. I just messed with it until it worked.

 

 

 

Here are some close-ups of the sweet paint job. Many thanks to the artist that did it!

 

 

 

This is the guitar in 2010. It always had a darker tone to it, so I decided to pop an EMG in there and make it my 'metal' guitar. It worked fairly well for a while, but the neck finally gave out in 2011, and I had to retire the guitar. I stripped most of the hardware off of it, and used the pieces on other builds.