Saugus students building guitars in wood shop

SAUGUS – The students in Saugus High School?s wood shop class are going against the grain of typical technology education projects by constructing their own electric guitars.?It?s very different from a birdhouse,” technology education teacher Mark Miller said with a laugh.Miller meshed lessons in science, technology, math, engineering and art in his class to challenge his students to “learn the science behind the music,” where they figured out how to manipulate sound waves inside a piece of wood along with the basics of measurement and sanding.?I tricked them into learning physics, acoustics and electronics,” said Miller.Miller created the musical instrument-building curriculum when he was teaching at Gloucester High School and brought it to Saugus High School when he was asked to revitalize the wood shop program last fall.Miller, a guitar player himself, has been building guitars on his own for about four years. Using donated broken guitar parts for electronics and some wood, he shared the fine art of repurposing material with his class.Anthony Coughlin, a senior, designed his guitar to be an exact replica of Eddie Van Halen?s, right down to the scratches, the cigarette burns on the guitar?s head and the 1971 quarter on the body. The design took hours of poring over pictures of Van Halen?s guitar, sometimes with a magnifying glass.The process was not without struggle, as Coughlin described the difficulty in installing the tremolo system with guitar parts that weren?t made exclusively for it.?It has to be correct within one-thousandth of an inch to work and stay in tune,” he said.Coughlin admitted he could have made the project easier on himself, but said he chose to make the replica because he thought building one from scratch was “too plain.”?If I?m going to build a guitar made from scratch, I want something that you can?t buy off a shelf,” said Coughlin.Coughlin said his classmates and friends were shocked that he made a working guitar, with such precise imitation, in only 45 minutes a day in one semester.After posting a picture of the guitar on Instagram, Coughlin had offers for the guitar, including one for $1,200, but he said he will never sell it; he?d rather use it to play.Coughlin was one of three in the class of about 12 who chose to make an electric guitar. Others made ukuleles, banjos, drums, cigar-box guitars and xylophones.Miller will be expanding the wood shop program to include a second level and advanced class.His toughest challenge? How he will top the guitar assignment.