Eternal "Dave Hill" Replica
Eternal “Dave Hill” Replica Guitar
This one may need some introduction. I have to confess that I’d never seen the original before being asked to build one for a lovely chap called Brian that I made the “Meteora/Red Special Hybrid” Custom for last year.
Brian is a huge fan of the British Rock group “Slade” and the band’s criminally underrated guitarist Dave Hill has owned the original Sam Li built guitar since the late ‘60s when as a young man, he travelled down to London with his Dad who bought it for him as a gift.
According to Dave, the guitar can be heard on all of Slade’s biggest and best known songs, and it has certainly been well used over the decades.
As there is absolutely nothing commercially available that is even close to the guitar, Brian asked me if I could build something similar - not an exact replica, but something in the spirit of with a few of the key aesthetics in place. Brian pointed me toward a fantastic article on guitar.com written by UK Luthier Steve Clarke who had the opportunity to closely examine the original guitar just a few years ago. It was invaluable help and I’ve included a link to the original article below.
Brian also provided his “stash” of images collected from lots of different sources, and it was time to nail down a spec. and make a start. The various reference materials revealed that the original guitar has undergone a few changes over the years - a bridge swap and modified control layout - plus the usual re-frets and running repairs expected of such a heavily gigged instrument.
It began life as a salvaged neck from a Gibson ES-345 mated to a hand-carved solid maple body with a very distinct shape, control layout and pickups. Using a solid maple body on our replica was ruled out early on, for weight reasons - maple tends to be heavy with a very bright tone, so we settled on a far lighter, easy to carve obeche which retains a distinct bright and open tone.
I didn’t have a vintage 345 neck lying around sadly, so I’d have to make that - including the double parallelogram pearl inlays on the bound rosewood fingerboard. Brian is a fan of BIG necks, so we went with a three-piece laminated (for strength) mahogany neck, 43mm nut width and a deep, soft “V” carve topped with a 12” radius and 6130 medium jumbo frets and a hand cut bone nut. I politely ignored the zero-fret as found on the original, as who needs the grief?
The body was a little trickier. Modern small run or one-off guitar building commonly relies on off-the-shelf router templates for accuracy and expediency, but naturally no templates exist of the original so I had to make my own. With nothing but some pics to go by, I hand drew the outline and placement for the hardware and got - I believe - reasonably close. Template making can take almost as long as making a body, but it’s worth the the effort as once complete, cutting and routing the initial body shape is very straightforward.
With the basic shape complete, I could turn my attention to the unusual “stepped” top and forearm chamfer. Again, without any real spec. out there to reference, I took my best guess as to dimensions and got stuck in. It may not be identical, but I was very pleased with the result.
Another important feature is the pickguard which blends beautifully into the body horns and houses both pickups, with a separate smaller section for the electronics. As usual for my builds the pots are all top-notch brass collar CTS with Orange Drop capacitors and a 3-way toggle and jack socket from Switchcraft.
I wound a vintage-style Jaguar pickup for the neck, and like the original we jettisoned the metal “claw” and it sat very neatly in the pickguard rout. For the bridge pickup, I kept it in reasonably low output PAF territory - the original was most probably a “T-Top” from the late ‘60s so we’re in the right ballpark.
A set of aged Grover Rotomatics looked the part, and I found a fantastic Gotoh unit that allows easy stringing from the top that looked good and (as ever with Gotoh) worked perfectly.
The original appears to be a light yellow transparent lacquer that has darkened patchily over the years with much of it now missing. Brian decided against having the finish as heavily worn so I used a more opaque TV Yellow-inspired finish, adding in a splash of orange and brown in places all topped with a tinted clear coat, which will age beautifully over the years.
Overall, it was a fabulous, one-off build, and I’d like to thank Brian once again for being such a pleasure to work with and for keeping things interesting!! : )
https://guitar.com/features/dave-hills-sam-li-custom-guitar-workshop/?fbclid=IwAR1k1fYaAMZjtfbWnZeg2S__11FQ3Yn-D3jWlnIQxEsiN4GnmZFisVfbvWw
