When Seattle’s Eric Daw was just seven, he was gifted an electric guitar. The first thing he did was take it apart and put it back together to see how it worked. As time went on, he started taking care of his friends’ guitars and eventually he found his full-time profession. These days, Daw serves as both the in-house repairman at Seattle’s Emerald City Guitars in Seattle as well as the builder behind Pin-Up Custom Guitars, handmade electrics based on classic models from the ‘50s. Since he’s in the FJ’s backyard (and we actually own one of his instruments), we felt compelled to check in with him for this week’s Bench Press.

Fretboard Journal: What’s on your repair bench at the moment?

Eric Daw: I’m working on a vintage Jazzmaster for Bill Frisell. It’s a ‘63, with a super slim neck. He loves the guitar but he doesn’t like the neck profile, so I’m putting a custom neck on it, made to his specs. I’m just doing some finishing touches on the neck before I spray finish on it. On my other bench I’m rewinding a vintage Fender Wide Range humbucker for a local guitar shop.

FJ: What’s the strangest repair you’ve agreed to do?

ED: I’ve worked on some pretty amazing vintage guitars recently. Lots of ‘50s and ‘60s Gibsons and Fenders, and lots of vintage Martins. That’s always fun. The strangest repair that comes to mind at the moment is probably when I installed four Danelectro lipstick tube pickups on a Japanese koto. That was pretty crazy. You wouldn’t think that it would be a good idea in theory, but it really sounded amazing.

FJ: How does your benchwork balance between repairs and building?

ED: Well, I’m the full time, in-house repair guy at Emerald City Guitars. I don’t do any building at Emerald City, only repairs, 40 hours a week. All kinds of repairs – electric, acoustic, minor and major repairs of all kinds. All the building I do takes place at my home shop, and mostly at night or on weekends. So I repair by day and build by night. Sometimes I take a break to kiss my wife and child and eat a sandwich. I really like my home shop, other than it being a little too small, but I can do a lot at home that was never possible when I was an apartment dweller. Having a house with a home shop has really opened up a lot more possibilities with what I’m able to do.

FJ: When did you start working on guitars?

ED: I don’t really remember, it’s been so long. The first thing I did when I got my first electric guitar at age 7 was to disassemble it to see how it worked. My first guitar tech gig was to set up Ibanez guitars in the Ibanez distribution warehouse for the western half of the United States. Any Ibanez guitar that went to any store west of the Mississippi went through that distribution warehouse. An order would get pulled from the shelves, and each guitar would get set-up for shipping. I set up thousands of guitars there. They must’ve liked my work because they moved me to the repair center, where I and one other guy did all of the Ibanez warranty work that was sent to us. We also did customer repairs for the general public. I probably started there in ‘95.

FJ: Can you tell us about the wood and construction techniques you’re using for the Pin-Up guitars?

ED: Mostly really traditional stuff. Swamp ash bodies and maple necks. Some alder. Even a few pine. I’ve also made a few Danelectro-style Masonite-on-pine bodies. I literally made those from stuff I bought at Home Depot. Good old Masonite over a frame made of pine. That’s fun. I like the utilitarian aspect of the Danelectro-style guitars.

I also wind my own pickups for all of my guitars, and I’m really happy with the way they sound. I’m just really, really tickled about it. The pickups are such a huge part of an electric guitar and I didn’t want to use factory pickups, so I started making my own about five years ago. There was a learning period, for sure, but I’m so happy with the results I’ve been getting these last few years.

FJ: Do you have general design philosophies?

ED: Not that I’ve formally etched in stone, but I suppose I could sum it up with “keep it simple.”

FJ: Do you have any favorites among the guitars that you’ve built?

ED: There are a few that I’d like to get back someday. I always figure that I can build a better one tomorrow than the one I built yesterday, but that’s not always necessarily true. Sometimes there’s just a little bit of magic that happens in a certain piece of wood, or the combination of a body and a neck. It’s 97% replicable, but there’s just sometimes an element that’s not up to me. Sometimes it’s up to the wood, or the guitar gods, or something. I can only take it so far. You find the same thing in vintage guitars: two identical Fenders from the same year should feel and sound pretty much the same, but one will usually just have a little something extra that seems to be missing from the other one. It’s that X factor. I’m chasing that X factor and I’m getting better at replicating it, but sometimes it’s just not up to me.

FJ: I seem to recall you’ve also built a stand-up bass or two…

ED: Yeah, just goofy projects I made out of vintage soda crates and re-purposed old wood, not anything to write home about. Just silly backyard jug band hillbilly instruments. The idea was to forget that you know how to make instruments and try to make something out of found objects, like folk art almost, but functional. Functional Hillbilly Folk Art.

FJ: Anything coming up in the future you are particularly excited about?

ED: I’ve got a lot of new ideas and guitar projects on the horizon that I’m excited about doing, but I don’t know when I’m going to get time to finish them all. I’m doing a podcast about guitar repair and guitar building, and I’m excited about that. It’s a lot of fun and people seem to get a kick out of it. My line of ‘50s replicas, Pin-Up Custom Guitars, is something that I’m still really excited about making. I really have a process down to make sure that the tone is there, not just the look, which is what a lot of guys making replica guitars miss. If the tone isn’t there, what’s the point?

FJ: Where is your shop located? Anything unique or interesting we should know about your space?

ED: The repairs happen in downtown Seattle, in Pioneer Square at Emerald City Guitars. The home shop is in my backyard in Burien, Washington, about 10 miles south of Seattle. I share the home shop with my wife who makes leather goods like guitar straps and stuff. She makes these really elaborate, hand-tooled designs. I’m really impressed with how good her guitar straps are, and if I tell you to check them out at Melcoleather.com then maybe she’ll make one for me someday.

FJ: What’s your wait time at the moment?

ED: Repairs run pretty consistently about one week, but if it’s an extensive repair it will be longer. Start to finish on a custom build is a few months usually, but I generally don’t take custom orders. I want to make guitars that I would personally love to play and own, and then have a customer organically fall in love with it, just like what would happen if they found “the one” vintage guitar. Just like how people meet and then fall in love.

Custom orders are funny, they’re like arranged marriages or something. I find the idea of trying to make a guitar to match this intangible idea of the perfect guitar that exists only in the mind of the player, I find that to be a bit distasteful. I don’t really want to make a guitar to somebody’s specs, to fit into their idea of what a perfect guitar is going to be like for them. It just doesn’t work well that way. I’m going to make guitars that I would personally love to play and own, and use that as a guide for what others will also want. I may offer custom orders again, eventually, if I start to make a lot more guitars, but it’s worked out great so far.