
It is named after the most beautiful song ever written:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rdm8LItAHs
...because of how it looks on the inside (is that stretching it?):

(note that I scribbled the lyrics to the song onto the guts of the guitar prior to gluing the top on for extra mojo; but I can't post pictures of that, otherwise that mojo will evaporate



Technically speaking, it has a 24.625" scale maple/padauk neck with a 12" radius, Jescar medium frets, pine sides and an antique bit of cherry I salvaged from a closed-down sawmill last year in the middle. The tremolo is a Hosco unit, which is pretty much exactly the same as the MIJ trem (I had both in my drawer and compared them, they are perfect twins but for the 'Fender' engraving, and to be fair, the machining of the Hosco is better than its Fender brother, on which I had to correct the slot with a file to get to work properly). Pickups will be two mini-humbuckers encased in unplated Firebird covers, wound to the old Epiphone specs. The tune-o-matic is a cheapo Kluson (12 euros!) which feels solid enough for the task and on which I intend to do a bit of work to get it to work with the tremolo (those V string grooves are just silly, how have they been going for so long?)
This guitar started as a reaction to the Catfish (see previous build), which took me a year to complete, partly because I had to do most of it outside of my flat (cutting stupid-hard stainless steel in the kitchen anyone?) but mostly because it was so badly planned out. I wanted to finish the Lungs within a month and not spend more than 24 hours' work on it. Needless to say I am going to go overtime with it as I already spent 22 hours working on it. Yup, I did time the operations just to see what took me the longest in order to plan ahead better with my other builds. Guess what? Trying to find my mechanical pencil and my one reliable square (which I am now going to paint bright orange) is where most of my time disappears.
Here's the latest pickugard design - I think I'm going to lose that small plate under the knobs and make a rear access hole:

Now, I might need to make a string tree for that thing. The neck has a straight, Fender-style peghead and my calculations tell me the break angle at the nut might not be sufficient, even though the D and G tuners are located where the G string tuner would be on a Strat neck. My hope is that the extra sideways angle will help (the string is not going in a straight line from the nut to the tuner hole) but I'm not sure. I don't want to go overboard with friction since the trem will already have a non-rocking bridge to cope with. Any thoughts on that?