Matthew Kitchel, a sophomore at Lake Forest High School, points to the neck of an electric guitar he built in a new class at Lake Forest High School.
“I finished it in mid-December,” Matthew said during a Guitar Building Gala at the school the evening of Jan. 7. “I play it in my church band. It sounds great.”
Matthew said he had never built a guitar or even done any sort of woodwork, but when the music and applied technology departments at the high school started a course last September, he signed up.
“I love playing,” Matthew said. “I thought it would be a really cool experience to make an instrument.”
School officials said he was just one of 20 students who built electric guitars, varying in style and color. At the gala, a display showed the finish instruments, which ranged from natural wood to one that resembled green and white marble. One guitar was even modeled after the head of cartoon character Homer Simpson.
For Braeden Anderson, a senior, the biggest challenge was using a variety of tools including a belt sander, a pole sander, a rasp and “a host of woodworking tools.”
“There was a lot to learn,” he said.
Four days a week, he and the other students would work with Todd Johnson, a teacher of industrial technology. One day a week, the boys – no girls signed up for the inaugural class – would head to the music department, where teacher Brian O’Connor would teach them to play.
“We had a few kids who had never picked up a guitar in their lives,” O’Connor said of the makeup of the class.
Johnson said the idea for the course started a couple years ago when a student asked if he could build an electric guitar during Johnson’s woodworking class.
“It wasn’t part of the curriculum, but I was able to walk him through the process and explore it,” Johnson said. “A couple years later, I had another student approach me and say, ‘Can I build a guitar in class?'”
About that time, Johnson said he found out about the national STEM guitar project. The program, which is funded through the National Science Foundation, aims to teach students science, technology, engineering and math in the process of building guitars. Johnson said he attended a summer institute on teaching STEM guitar-building in Ohio.
The guitar-building course fits in with the direction the high school has been taking, Johnson said.
“We transitioned a little bit more into focusing on engineering and technology,” Johnson said. “Now we have computer-aided design for drafting, 3D printers for prototyping and CNC machines for woodworking. This year we added a robotics program and guitar-building.”
Students use manufacturing software to lay out the design of the guitar, Johnson said, program a CNC machine to cut out the shape of the guitar body. They put together the electronic components of the guitar and learned about surface tension while painting.
“It’s a pretty in-depth process,” Johnson said.
Michael Rourke, a sophomore, found creating the neck of the guitar most challenging.
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“Every single fret had to be cut across the neck, then we cut fret wire and pressed it into the fret board then file it down,” he said.
Michael, though, said the hard work was worth it.
“It was probably the class I looked forward to the most during the day,” Rourke said. “I found I really liked building stuff.”
His father, Rob Rourke, said he also had reason to be glad his son took the class.
“He gave me the guitar for Christmas,” he said. “It was the surprise of the year.”
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