How to Make an Electric Diddley Bow



Tools

  • Jig Saw
  • A Drill with some bits
  • A good chisel
  • Files and Sandpaper
  • Screw Driver
  • Soldering Iron
  • Solder
  • Wire Strippers
  • Some Beers

Materials

  • 1"x12"x4'board
  • An old tuning key
  • Single coil pickup (Fender)
  • 2-tone pots with knobs
  • A capacitor
  • A 1/4" input jack
  • 1 - Small brass doorbell escutcheon
  • An old pickguard
  • Shielded wire
  • Aluminum Duct Tape
  • 1/4" long S.S.screws (small)



















First of all you need to get a 1x12 board of some sort. I used a leftover piece of cedar that we'd used for concrete forms. I marked it out in the general shape of a guitar and cut it out using a jigsaw.
I had to do some wire extensions on this old Mexican Tele bridge pickup before installing it. The new bernzOmatic torch (pictured on the right) worked pretty well for regular wire soldering.





I found a suitable wire schematic in Hideo Kamimoto's excellent guitar repair book and installed the volume and tone pots in the back of the body, which was routed out using only chisels and crude stone implements. The new torch was either about to run outta gas or it just wasn't hot enough to heat the surface of the pots to get a good bond, so I dug out the 40 watt radioshack special and finished the job with it.




For a cover plate, I sawed up an old Telecaster pickguard. I was able to duplicate the beveled edge somewhat on the little grinding wheel in the shed. It ain't perfect but most people aren't gonna be looking too close at this thing.










This is a shot of the completed DiddElectro(less one tone knob, which I gotta go search for). The tone-knob cavity is shielded using aluminum duct tape (the metallic kind) and there's very little buzz noise as I plugged it into the Deville and checked it out. It had less distortion than I thought it would have and actually worked pretty good. I sent this thing off to Mr. Junior Doughty who helped me get this place going by insisting that I learn HTML. Thank you Junior! I figure since I've done lost my senses from making this website I'll let you go nuts trying to figger out how to play a good tune on one string;~)


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