In the fifth and final year of the Middle Years Programme, students are given an assignment called the Personal Project. As the title suggests, this assignment requires the students to design and create a project that has a close personal meaning to them and helps to teach them skills that can hopefully be used later in life.

For my project, I undertook the task of designing and constructing an electric guitar. My ultimate goal was to create a guitar that meshed together guitar inventions of the past with my own new innovations to fit my personal guitar-playing preferences.

I had my first inspiration to do this project when I was researching a guitar that I saw Edward Van Halen playing. While researching, I discovered that he had, in fact, built his guitar himself when he was a teenager. After a few years of playing the guitar, he had decided exactly what he wanted out of it, and simply put all of his preferences and ideas into one guitar that was entirely his. This was my first exposure to the concept of actually building an electric guitar; the idea had never crossed my mind before.

As I researched the concept more and more, I became more intrigued by the fact that doing a project like this makes the product entirely yours, fit for you and only you. Naturally, when I was told to pick a project to do for the MYP, this was an easy choice.

I was really excited to get started with my project, but the first step I had to take was lots and lots of research. There are many little pieces that make up a guitar, and I had to learn all the new terminology if I was going to ask experts for their help. I had the opportunity and travel to London, England and Toronto, Canada over the summer and I went into many guitar shops to talk to the pros about the most efficient ways to go about building a guitar.

Once I had a very clear idea of everything I wanted to make my guitar out of, I contacted a wood cutting company and gave them the specifications for the pieces I would need them to cut for my guitar. When they delivered the pieces to me, they were literally two pieces of bare wood: one in the shape of the guitar body and the other in the shape of the neck.

I cleaned the wood and began the painting process. This took many different coats, including primer, white, black, and clear coats, and thus this section of the process took about three weeks after waiting for everything to dry. This was a particularly stressful process because the paint is highly toxic, and I had to wear a suit and a respirator mask every time I was handling it. After the painting was finished, I spent about a week buffing the guitar body, making it look as shiny and professional as possible. When the buffing was finished, I used my very small knowledge of electric circuitry along with some diagrams that I printed off the Internet to help me put all of the wires together and connect all of the electronic pieces. I also added any small metal hardware that had to be added, and bolted the neck to the body.

The next morning, I strung the guitar, and the visual aspect of my project was complete. I could not have been happier with how it looked and felt, but the real satisfaction came when I plugged it into my amplifier and heard a deep, rich sound coming from the guitar. My project was complete and was a huge success in that I had built a working electric guitar that represented everything I personally wanted out of a guitar.

I learned a lot from this project; I learned about wood, paint, and electronics, and I also learned how to use many unique tools such as spray guns and soldering guns. The most important thing I can take away from this project, however, is that I now know that no matter how good and precise a plan is, you should always leave room for flexibility because more times than not, different variables around you will change and this will also call for changes in your planning.

I'd like to thank my family and my teachers for supporting me in this project, especially my father for helping me along in the harder steps and offering advice whenever I needed it. I play my guitar every day and could not be happier with the way it turned out.