Some of the old photographs in the Red Special book by Brian May and Simon Bradley show the guitar under construction.
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| Credit: Brian May Archive / TheRedSpecial.com |
It's common knowledge that the guitar was built by Brian and his father, Harold May, using bits and pieces they had on hand, and Brian's own handwritten notes say that the body was made of blockboard.
Blockboard consists of a core made of wooden strips, placed edge to edge between two layers of plywood, which are then glued together under high pressure. Generally, softwood is used in blockboards. It was often used in furniture and shelving.
I had been searching for blockboard, and the picture above doesn't look like any of the blockboard I had found.
So I searched some more, and found a product named laminboard. This picture shows blockboard on the left, and laminboard on the right:
I sent an email to Brian May, with these pictures, and asked if either of them rings a bell.
I got a quick reply from his guitar tech, Pete Malandrone:
Brian isn't too sure to be honest, as it was just blockboard that was around at the time in their workshop. He did say it looked more like the first picture from memory
A little later, I got another reply from Brian May himself:
I think the blockboard I used was more like the board in the first of your pictures. Maybe not exactly like it, but close. I scooped out many of the blocks to make the acoustic pockets and space for the electronics.
Cheers, Bri
The first picture was similar to the blockboard on the right in the picture above. The second picture was laminboard.
I posted the pictures on Facebook in the Red Special Forum group. It turned out that Matt Netherwood of Yonderbosk Creations was investigating laminboard too. He posted these pictures of the bare wood in the guitar's pickup cavities (emphasis lines added by Matt):
Other people hypothesized that the lines on the edges of the guitar body were chisel marks, which is possible, but doesn't explain the striations in the pickup cavities.
In fact, comparing the pictures from Matt with the ones I sent to Doctor May, it does appear that the strips in the former are slightly wider than those in the latter.
Matt also posted this Laminated Boards guide from the City of Glasgow College, which shows that what many of us thought of as blockboard is actually battenboard:
I did some more searching, and found a brochure from a company called Moralt AG that illustrates their blockboard products.
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| Credit: Moralt AG |
The two products on the right look like common blockboard, and the product on the left is laminboard, albeit slightly wider than shown in the pictures above. It's a dead ringer for the product used in the guitar.
We may never know for sure. Doctor May did say he wasn't too sure, and indeed, the pictures I sent him turn out not to be definitive images of blockboard and laminboard. In fact, they were probably best described as battenboard and rather skinny laminboard.
Doctor May is a busy man, and was very kind to reply to my email message. I'm not inclined to try to engage him in a blockboard vs. laminboard debate.
I've drawn my own conclusion: Moralt Laminboard for the win!