I’ve always loved Eddie Van Halen’s iconic striped series of guitars, so I decided to build an homage to this classic style. Rather than painting the stripes onto the body, I constructed the guitar from solid pieces of padauk (red), maple (white), and wenge (black). The guitar is based largely on Eddie’s custom 1986 Kramer striped guitar that he played during the 5150 tour. My name is also Kramer which is a happy coincidence .
Here’s an album with some of the photos from the build.
I’m currently auctioning this guitar on eBay with 100% of proceeds going to my favorite charity, camfed.org.
Nicely done looks the part
I think any of us guitar builders would like to hear a bit more about the process, did you machine it all as parts the headstock joint looks interesting or just saw and make an Eddie patterend blank. Always interested in learning how the experts do stuff. Again nice work and offering to charity is a real nice act of kindness.
Awesome job. I remember years ago watching a video of Eddie himself showing step by step how he made his Frankenstrat. So far, I have been unable to find that video.
Sure! For the body, I did all of the cuts and glue-ups until I had a complete, stripey body blank. I then resawed it in half and glued a maple panel in the center to give it the white stripe all along the outer edge (think Oreo cookie). Then machined the body as a single piece in a two sided operation.
For the neck, I wanted the v-shaped transition from maple neck to padauk headstock seen here in the original:
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