Congratulations goes out to Jared Goertzen for his guitar build, to earn him Guitar of the Month for June 2026.

Jared used our LPK-1JR kit as the basis to create his guitar.

“After starting my guitar building journey with a basic T-style guitar about five year ago, I advanced to building a couple more guitars but making a few minor modifications along the way. But when the idea of building a guitar using wood from the family farm entered my brain, I knew that I wanted this guitar to be special. When I asked my parents last summer (2025) as they were heading out to the farm to grab me some barn wood, I was not exactly sure what they were going to acquire. Obviously some nice, 100 plus year old hardware free of pests that could be made into body blanks would have been the most ideal, but instead my parents brought back a number of wide boards that were used as the trim around the windows. This gave the boards a lot more character with the paint and nail holes, but forced me to think more about how I was going to incorporate the wood into a guitar.

Over the years, I have seen the more common “barn-casters” where luthiers take barn boards and build Tele-style guitars out of them. But because my first build was a Tele-style, I did not want too many “matching crayon colours” in my box of guitars! That’s when the idea of using a Les Paul Jr style of guitar came to mind. Simple body shape. One pickup, two knobs. Hopefully this would result in less hurdles to overcome.

Cherry finish is often the popular choice for a Les Paul Jr style guitar, but I wanted to have an aged walnut finish Junior to start as a base. I knew it would add to the aesthetic of the barn-board style. I simply went to my big box hardware store to buy some stains and mixed some together to get the colour that I wanted. Could I recreate that right now? Nope! Should I have measured and wrote that down? Yup! Lesson learned there. But I used the face of the guitar body as my test piece because I knew the barn boards would be covering that area. Once I had the body and neck stained to the colour that I wanted, I sprayed the body with Oxford nitrocellulose clear vintage formula. I only bought one spray can from Solo. In retrospect, I wish I had bought two because I used every last drop to get the nine coats of nitro on the body and the headstock (I used Tru-oil for the back of the neck, roughly six coats – this was a “season to taste” kind of process.) I did not sand between nitro coats with this build. Because it’s a “relic” style, I was ok with a few bumps and bruises on the guitar along the way. I then reached into my automotive cabinet and grabbed a bottle of polishing compound and polishing finish to bring out the satin shine on the back of the guitar. After the finish was done on the body, I moved to the barn boards. I had to flatten the back of the barn boards so that when they got glued up to the body it would be a flat surface. I did not want the body to be extra thick. I wanted to keep that ~44mm thickness of the whole body including the barn boards.

After running the barn boards over a jointer, I measured roughly the average thickness of the barn boards. They were obviously not fully milled because I did not want to remove any of the paint or character of the face of the boards. So I built a thickness planer jig with my router to take off the top of the guitar kit body so that when the barn boards were glued on top, the total body thickness would be roughly 44mm. It was about 10mm that I had to plane off. That made it tricky to re-route for the pickup, bridge posts, etc. (happy that I chose the one pickup, two knob style of guitar!). One of the final decisions with the body was whether I do a round over along the edge or not. Again, I wanted to maintain as much character of the barn boards that I could. I had to buy the correct round over bit (1/4″) and thankfully still had some leftover barn boards to experiment with. I was glad that I did that because I was happy with the results. So I went for it and am very pleased. In a way, it created a faux-binding look. I even had a guy come up to me this past weekend at a gig admiring the guitar and he assumed it was binding until he looked closer.

For the headstock I learned how to do inlay and did a mother of pearl inlay based on the cattle brand my great-grandfather used on his cattle. I bought the little jeweler saw and some 1″ by 1″ blanks of mother of pearl from Mr. Bezos. Trial and error was so vital here again. Then I used the Oxford black nitro spray can I bought from Solo to get that same vintage black headstock. It was about six coats. I did not want the black to be too thick. Over time I’m hoping for a few nicks and scratches on the headstock. I ordered the custom waterslide decal of my last name from an Etsy store out of Richmond, B.C. Then installed Solo Pro Aged Nickel tuners, a bone nut, and a dogear P90 from GFS Guitarfetish. I learned that the tuners that I bought and the holes were not the right size, so I bought inserts so that the tuners would fit. A quick reaming with the correct drill bit size, the inserts press-fit nicely into there and the tuners look and feel fantastic.

I am really proud of this build. I am proud of what it represents. I am proud that when I encountered problems through this build that I saw them as opportunities to learn something new and not something to get aggravated over. I am proud to be a maker and not a taker.”

– Jared  Goertzen

*You can see Jared explain more about this guitar at this Youtube link: https://youtu.be/Tqpf4SE85k8?si=qP7N9GKOMA3sbVvT