Tiger 12

$2,895.00

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

Categories: 24.75" scale, Hollow-Body, Pro, Standard Scale, Twelve-String Guitar

A twelve-string electric built from a rescued vintage Eko Ranger XII neck and 1965 Emenee Tiger plastic body, with Seymour Duncan Blackouts and a hot-rodded onboard NUX Mighty Air stereo amp.

Eko Ranger XII

Tiger 12 is a twelve-string electric built around the rescued neck of a vintage Italian Acoustic and the molded plastic body of a 1965 Emenee Tiger children’s guitar.

The 24.75-inch-scale mahogany neck required extensive fret leveling and recrowning to correct a pronounced twist and return it to reliable playability. A Gotoh fully adjustable bridge provides individual intonation across all twelve strings.

A matched pair of full-size Seymour Duncan Blackouts replaced the smaller pickup used in the prototype. Their proportions better suit the Tiger body while providing the clarity, power and harmonic detail needed for a twelve-string electric.

The structural beam is reclaimed from one of the last remaining pieces of a futon frame my sister gave me nearly twenty years ago. It carries the primary guitar structure while allowing the vintage plastic Tiger body to become part of the instrument without asking it to perform a job it was never designed to do.

Onboard amplification comes from a modified NUX Mighty Air. The original 2-inch speakers have been replaced by a pair of 3-inch speakers, increasing the speaker area and giving the twelve-string a fuller, more substantial amplified voice. The system retains rechargeable USB-C power, stereo amplification, Bluetooth and wireless operation.

Tiger 12 brings together two very different pieces of guitar history—a serious Italian twelve-string neck that had become nearly unusable and a plastic American children's guitar body—and gives both of them another job.

Additional information

Instrument Type	12-String Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod
Construction	Cantilevered, Hollow-Body
Body	Eminee plastic toy guitar
Beam	Futon Frame
Neck	Mahogany
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	24.75"
Number of Frets	21
Bridge	Gotoh Fully Adjustable Bridge
Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Seymour Duncan Humbucker
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Seymour Duncan Humbucker
Pickup Switch	3-Way Toggle
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Faceted Pointer
Amplifier	NUX Mighty Air
Power Supply	USB-C (Internal Rechargeable Battery)

Tiger 12

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.11 / 10

328 / 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

One Guitar Wasn't Finished With Me Yet

Tiger 12 began with the remains of an Eko Ranger XII.

It was a vintage Italian twelve-string acoustic with an unusual bolt-on neck. The neck had developed a pronounced twist relative to the body, enough that the original guitar was no longer particularly useful as a guitar.

That didn't mean all of it was finished.

The body went in one direction and eventually contributed to TeleDreadBass.

I kept the twelve-string neck.

That's one of the basic ideas behind the Boneyard. A guitar doesn't necessarily become worthless when it stops making sense as a complete instrument. Sometimes the useful question is no longer Can I save this guitar?

It's What in here still has another guitar in it?

The Eko neck certainly did.

Separating it from the original body gave me another opportunity to deal with its geometry. With deep fret leveling, careful recrowning and a completely new structure around it, I was able to bring it back to being a solid, playable twelve-string neck.

Then it needed a body.

I had a 1965 Emenee Tiger.

The Tiger was a molded plastic children's guitar—about as far removed from a vintage Italian twelve-string acoustic as I could reasonably get. Its little archtop shape, f-holes and graphics had survived from a period when manufacturers were exploring what plastic could do as an instrument material.

Putting the two together made very little historical sense.

Which made a certain amount of Rubÿtone sense.

The beam came from one of the last pieces of a futon frame my sister gave me nearly twenty years ago. That became the structural backbone connecting the neck and bridge while allowing the old Tiger body to do a completely different job.

The pickup arrangement took some experimenting.

The prototype used a Seymour Duncan Little ’59 Tele bridge pickup. It sounded good, but every time I looked at it I thought it was too small for the composition. This is one of those cases where solving the electrical problem isn't enough. The part has to belong visually too.

I eventually replaced it with a pair of full-size Seymour Duncan Blackouts.

That was better.

Twelve strings also gave me a reason to push the onboard amplifier farther.

I used a NUX Mighty Air, but I replaced its two little 2-inch speakers with a pair of 3-inch speakers. That gave all of those strings more speaker area to work with and made the onboard system feel more appropriate to the instrument I had built around it.

So Tiger 12 became another kind of Boneyard success.

The Eko didn't survive as an Eko Ranger XII.

It did something more interesting.

Its body helped become TeleDreadBass.

Its neck became Tiger 12.

And the little plastic Tiger that was never intended to be a professional instrument suddenly found itself attached to a rehabilitated Italian twelve-string neck, a piece of my sister's old futon and a hot-rodded stereo amplifier.

One discarded guitar helped make two Rubÿtones.

I think that's a pretty good return on something that was supposedly finished.