I made a guitar in homage to the Halo game franchise

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

Yeah, so any game fans here? Specifically Halo.
A good while ago a mate tagged me on a facebook post where someone had made a guitar in the style of a sword on said game, naturally we thought it was cool af so we cam up with the idea of doing one in the style of another weapon on there called a Gravity Hammer lol
So here it is;

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

Poplar body
Walnut and Mahogany neck
LEDs (obviously)
Sustainiac rip off (never again, unreliable)
Silver leaf on the 'blade'
Halo logo on 12th fret glows in the dark

Image: https://www.hilditchguitars.com/uploads/1/2/7/4/127450217/hilditch-guitars-halo-gravity-hammer_orig.jpg

Springywheel · July 2023

That is stunning!!

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

Here's a bit of the process story if you fancy a read to help you sleep tonight haha.
I made a mood board type thing with images of the weapon from the game and from that worked out the best scale to suit a guitar. Then transferred the outline to some MDF for my template

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

This was when I was still terrible at pictures so I didn't get a huge amount and they are a bit choppy
But here's the LEDs for the fretboard, ready to go in.
I used 5mm flat top LEDs in blue and started by marking all the centres where I wanted them to go. Then the process is fairly straight forward, drill a 5mm hole to take the LED and a tiny 6mm step on the back to take the shoulder. I used a forstner bit for the 6mm so I piloted with a 2mm first to give the forstner tip a guide, and did my small shoulder rebates on the back before drilling right though with the 5mm. I set the rebates deep enough so the tops of the LEDs were flush with the fretboard, which also left enough room to keep the legs away from the truss rod.

Supportact · July 2023

I'm a bit too old to know about Halo but that is bonkers! In a good way. What do the two little switches do, I imagine they're grenade launchers?

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

Then came the fun part of carving the body.
I had to make a lot of the depths of details up based on the source images I found online

Supportact · July 2023

That must have taken hours...

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

When it came to paint, I wanted to catch the colours but also give it a used and abused feel, so didn't want it to look super shiny. I used silver leaf for the 'blade' and metallic paint for the gray areas. I even dry brushed a little silver paint on some black areas to add a metal feel to it. Then clear over everything. I used some matte clear acrylic for the blue lights

Image: https://www.hilditchguitars.com/uploads/1/2/7/4/127450217/s155917283286166602_p25_i5_w4128.jpeg?width=2560

KDS · July 2023

yh that's cool

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

Then it appears I stop taking pics until it was finished so I can't detail the sustainer and lights wiring. It's been shared on the Halo facebook page recently so I'm getting a lot of enquiries about orders so if any come to fruition I'll do a detailed write up and maybe a YouTube series.

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

Supportact said:

I'm a bit too old to know about Halo but that is bonkers! In a good way. What do the two little switches do, I imagine they're grenade launchers?

It's gone nuts on Reddit and Facebook. You're close with the little switches, but they actually control the sustainer - one for on/off, one for mode

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

Supportact said:

That must have taken hours...

I couldn't actually tell you, but was a long time haha

SteveF · July 2023

That's brilliant

digitalscream · July 2023

@HilditchGuitars - we can't see the photos. If you can, then they're probably not set to "public".

Supportact · July 2023

digitalscream said:

@HilditchGuitars - we can't see the photos. If you can, then they're probably not set to "public".

Weird, the photos were definitely there yesterday.

MARVlN · July 2023

Looks pretty amazing, cool to see something different aside from the usual.

The main finished photos are working for me, but not the ones in subsequent posts. Would be good to see some of the details

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

MARVlN said: Looks pretty amazing, cool to see something different aside from the usual.

The main finished photos are working for me, but not the ones in subsequent posts. Would be good to see some of the details
@digitalscream and @Supportact they've gone for me too. I wonder if it's because I thought I was clever using my google photos to upload them and they change url when it updates? The finished photos are off my website gallery

HilditchGuitars · July 2023

Fixed. Managed to get back into my Imgur account and uploaded them there

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I made a guitar in homage to the Halo game franchise

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