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Gigantar

It's a gigantic 6+ foot guitar.  After finishing the precise and painstaking work on the Lou Harrison Resonator, I celebrated by doing the opposite: A dirt cheap, extremely strange guitar built in a couple days.  I found this $2 hand railing at a junk shop and screwed it onto this strat body.  Then, I added frets for harmonics 4-32.  The scale length of the hand-railing fretboard is 5 feet, spanning three octaves of playable fretboard.  Lots of room for microtones.

Since it's so hard to reach the low frets, part of the design concept is that you would only need to play these few frets once in a while and they are easy to hit because they are huge.  The first fret is 5:4 and it's a foot long!

Of course, I've never seen 6.5-foot guitar strings for sale, so I made these out of a spool of dulcimer strings which I added the ball-end to. 

 

One must be careful not to keep too much string tension, since the tendency toward neck bowing is amplified with a long neck.  The light wood of the handrailing does allow this guitar to be a manageable weight, but it wants to bend even more than the hardwoods used in traditional guitars.  To counteract the neck tension, I designed "Truss Strings."  I used two braided 0.22" steel dulcimer strings and a single-string bridge installed on the back of the headstock which run under a string retainer, *through* the body of the guitar, and into a string winder on the back end of the body.  Though the Truss-Strings are not audible, they do resonate the body, so it may be advised to tune them to a related pitch with the guitar strings.  This may be an original invention and contribution to giant-guitar lutherie.  Three of the images below show the "Truss-Strings" that I designed and installed.

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