Maccaferri

$3,495.00

Tags: Amp Cabinet Abbreviated, Bluetooth Amp, Boneyard, Found Object, Integrated Speaker, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument

Categories: 25.5" scale, Hollow-Body, Pro, Six-String Guitar, Specialty, Standard Scale

A rare never-assembled Maccaferri G-40 body rebuilt around an oak whiskey-barrel beam, Epiphone Les Paul neck, Fender Telecaster pickup and rechargeable NUX Mighty Air stereo amp.

Maccaferri is built around an exceptionally rare, never-assembled Maccaferri G-40 body that I had saved for years, waiting until I had the right idea for it.

The original G-40 was an unconventional instrument in its own right, using a plastic neck and an ingenious neck-mounting system. This Rubÿtone version takes the body in a different direction with a 24.75-inch-scale mahogany neck with rosewood fingerboard and a structural beam reclaimed from a futon frame.

An ebony archtop bridge and trapeze tailpiece retain some of the visual language of the original hollow-body instrument. A NUX Mighty Air provides rechargeable onboard amplification, with USB-C power and integrated speakers.

The bridge and pickup are carried by the structural beam and pass through the top of the Maccaferri body. The body can therefore remain visually dominant without being asked to carry the primary structural components of the electric guitar.

Maccaferri brings a rare piece of unconventional guitar history into the Rubÿtone system without attempting to restore or reproduce the original G-40. The original body remains immediately recognizable, but everything around it has been reconsidered as a modern, self-contained electric guitar.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod
Construction	Hollow-Body
Body	Maccaferri G-40
Beam	Futon Frame
Neck	Mahogany
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	24.75"
Number of Frets	20
Bridge	Ebony Archtop Bridge
Tailpiece	Trapeze Tailpiece
Neck Pickup
Middle Pickup	Fender Telecaster Bridge
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Faceted Pointer
Amplifier	NUX Mighty Air
Power Supply	USB-C (Internal Rechargeable Battery)

Maccaferri

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.64 / 10

347 / 360 points

playing

Fun to Play

The first test is whether the guitar makes you want to keep playing it. A high score means the instrument feels inviting, responsive, and rewarding rather than merely interesting to look at. The best examples have enough soul that you forget you are evaluating them and simply keep going.

Playability

Measures how naturally the instrument responds to ordinary playing technique across the neck. Action, fretwork, neck feel, access, and setup should work together without asking the player to compensate for the design. A strong score means the unusual construction never becomes an excuse for compromised playing.

Ergonomics

Considers how comfortably the instrument sits against the body, hangs from a strap, and positions the hands. Weight distribution matters as much as total weight, especially when found objects or onboard amplification shift the center of gravity. The most artful solutions make an unconventional shape feel surprisingly natural.

Tone Quality

Judges the character, clarity, richness, and usefulness of the instrument’s core sound. The goal is not one supposedly perfect tone, but a voice with musical identity and enough detail to reward attentive playing. The highest scores go to guitars whose sound has real soul rather than merely acceptable frequency response.

Tonal Versatility

Measures how many genuinely useful sounds the instrument can produce rather than simply counting switches and settings. Different pickup combinations and controls should create musically distinct choices that a player would actually use. A clever circuit scores higher when its versatility feels purposeful instead of complicated for its own sake.

Amplification

Evaluates how convincingly the guitar performs through its intended amplification system, whether external or built in. Output, clarity, noise, feedback behavior, and usable volume all matter. For self-amplified Rubÿtones, a high score means the amplifier feels integrated into the instrument rather than attached as an afterthought.

build

Fit & Finish

Evaluates the precision and care visible in joints, edges, fretwork, hardware installation, surfaces, wiring, and final setup. Handmade character is welcome; carelessness is not the same thing as character. A strong score shows experienced workmanship while allowing the object to retain the marks and soul of its previous life.

Portability

Measures whether the instrument’s mass and dimensions make sense for the way it is meant to be used. A guitar with an onboard amp may reasonably weigh more, but every added ounce should earn its place. High scores reward designs that are easy to carry, hold, busk with, or live with without sacrificing the idea.

Reliability

Rates the likelihood that the guitar will keep working properly through normal playing, transport, and repeated use. Structural joints, wiring, controls, hardware, and power systems should feel dependable rather than experimental in the risky sense. A high score means the wit of the design is backed by experienced engineering.

Repairability

Considers how sensibly the instrument can be serviced when something eventually wears out or fails. Standard parts, accessible wiring, replaceable components, and understandable construction all help. The strongest designs are inventive without turning a future repair into an archaeological excavation.

Solutions

Scores the quality of the solutions used when unconventional materials create unconventional problems. Beam placement, neck angle, pickup clearance, feedback, balance, and internal packaging are all opportunities to demonstrate experience. High scores go to solutions that are technically sound and artful enough to look inevitable afterward.

Integration

Measures how successfully all the unrelated parts become one coherent working instrument. Neck, beam, body, hardware, electronics, amplifier, and found objects should cooperate mechanically and visually. The best integrations have a kind of soul: the parts stop looking assembled and start looking as though they found each other.

design

Innovation

Measures whether the guitar introduces a genuinely fresh idea, solution, relationship, or way of thinking about an instrument. Novelty alone is not enough; the innovation should improve the object, deepen the concept, or open a useful new possibility.

Shouldn’t Work

Rewards designs that appear improbable but succeed because the underlying engineering is sound. The wit comes from the gap between what your eyes expect and what your hands and ears discover.

Beauty

Judges visual appeal without assuming that beauty must mean polished, conventional, or expensive. Proportion, material, color, age, texture, and restraint can all create beauty in very different ways.

Sculpture

Considers the guitar as a three-dimensional object even when nobody is playing it. Silhouette, negative space, depth, structure, and the relationship between functional parts should reward viewing from more than one angle.

Coherence

Measures whether the many materials, colors, shapes, and components read as one intentional composition. A Rubÿtone can be busy, strange, or witty without looking accidental.

Relic

Rates the visual and emotional value of genuine age, wear, patina, scars, repairs, and evidence of earlier use. Authentic history carries more weight than artificially manufactured distress.

concept

Stage Presence

Measures how strongly the instrument communicates from across a room or under performance conditions. Silhouette, scale, color, movement, and unusual construction can all contribute before a note is heard.

Stands Alone

Judges whether the instrument feels complete and compelling without requiring a long explanation of why it matters. The story may deepen the experience, but the object should already make a persuasive case visually and musically.

Material Story

Considers how much meaning comes from the history and previous purpose of the materials themselves.

Transformation

Measures how completely the original object has been given a convincing second identity without erasing where it came from.

Boneyard Score

Rates how deeply the instrument embodies the practice of building from saved, secondhand, leftover, or previously overlooked materials.

Necessity

Asks whether each major component has a reason to be there. Extra hardware, controls, decorative pieces, and technology should contribute to function, story, balance, or visual composition.

personality

Story

Measures the strength of the narrative carried by the guitar’s materials, development, accidents, people, places, and decisions.

Surprise

Rates the number and quality of discoveries the instrument offers after the first glance.

Conversation

Measures how naturally the guitar makes people curious enough to ask questions.

Cool Factor

Captures the difficult-to-measure quality that makes an instrument desirable before every reason can be itemized.

Identity

Measures how immediately the guitar feels like itself rather than a variation of something more familiar.

Rubÿtone DNA

Rates how clearly the instrument expresses the recurring ideas behind Rubÿtone: reuse, structural invention, functional sculpture, irreverence, and serious playability.

impact

Humor

Measures whether the guitar contains genuine wit rather than a joke pasted onto an otherwise ordinary object.

Punchline

Judges whether the concept resolves into a satisfying final idea—the moment when the viewer suddenly understands why a particular object, material, or decision is there.

Disdain

Measures the willingness to question inherited rules about what an electric guitar is supposed to look like, contain, or be made from.

Rules

Rates how effectively the instrument departs from established guitar-building conventions while remaining musically and structurally convincing.

Copy Potential

Considers whether the central idea could inspire a new custom build without requiring an exact duplicate of the original.

Evolution

Measures how much useful creative territory remains in the idea after this particular guitar is finished.

THE STORY

I Had the Body. I Just Needed the Idea.

I had this Maccaferri G-40 body for years.

I bought it after learning about the original guitars, because they were already wonderfully strange instruments. They had plastic necks, unusual tuners and an ingenious way of mounting the neck to the body.

This particular body had never even been assembled into a guitar.

I knew I wanted to do something with it, but this was one of those times when having the object wasn't enough. It was rare enough that I didn't want to start cutting holes and attaching things just because I could.

So I kept it.

Eventually another guitar showed me what to do.

When I built Atlas Bass, I worked with the neck-mounting idea used on the original Maccaferri. That project made me look at this old body again differently.

Now I had a way in.

Rather than asking the Maccaferri body to become the structural center of the new guitar, I could run the Rubÿtone structure through it. The beam could carry the important loads, while the old body could remain what had attracted me to it in the first place.

The bridge and pickup mount to that structure and protrude through the top.

That turned out to work extremely well.

One of the continuing challenges with a self-amplified Rubÿtone is allowing a speaker and an electric-guitar pickup to live very close to one another without creating unwanted feedback. With this arrangement, I could turn the onboard amp up to the kind of volume I would actually want for busking without the guitar becoming uncontrollable.

That was a roaring success.

The rest of the instrument came together around the body rather than trying to imitate what Maccaferri had originally built. I used a mahogany neck with a rosewood fingerboard, an ebony archtop bridge and a trapeze tailpiece. A NUX Mighty Air gave me rechargeable stereo amplification in a package compact enough to integrate into the guitar.

What I like most, though, is that the old Maccaferri body still gets to be the star.

I didn't restore it.

I didn't build a reproduction of a G-40.

And I didn't have to disguise it to make it useful.

It spent decades as a guitar body that had never become a guitar. Then it sat with me for years because I hadn't yet figured out what it wanted from me.

Atlas Bass finally gave me the answer.

That's one of the reasons I keep things.

Sometimes the object isn't waiting for parts.

It's waiting for an idea.