A pen-friend of mine had built a Stick copy. Several of them, actually, improving with each time. Considering that he has never touched or ever seen in person a chapman stick, and that he is not a guitar builder, I find the results truly amazing.

I thought this will be interesting to share with fellow stickists, and I hope this won't initiate a lawsuit The instruments were built not for sale, and the builder is not a professional luthier, but merely a guitar teacher from a rural town. He started building one cause he could not afford a real stick, and then went on improving the results.

The first prototype was built in September 2011. He has never learned to built a guitar, so he find the first result far from perfect. It was built from 5 pieces of maple and then dyed dark-blue. He used regular guitar pickups, frets and strings. The headstock plate says "STICK copy".





The second attempt was in December 2011, built from multiple pieces of mahogany, rosewood and similar woods. It was then dyed again to hide the varying wood color. This prototype used stick-like custom-machined triangle frets of stainless steel, which he slided into pre-cut slots, EMG pickups and custom-made saddles. The scale was enlarged to stick-like 36", so he had to customize the strings as well.









The third prototype was exact copy of the second one, except for it was made from polycarbonate, and the triangel frets were now glued-on and had sharper angle. Unfortunately, not that much photos of it exist.





The 4th version had string spacing of a 10-string grand, made in October-December 2012 of 5 pieces of swamp ash. This time pickups were handwound as well. He also installed a rod for beltless playing (we have discussed this feature together, as I also wanted one on my stick, but I have designed a different mount to avoid drilling the wood).









His last stick copy that he has just finished is an siberian ash 12-string grand. It has standard guitar humbuckers.









His plans now are to finally built not a stick-alike tapper. He mentioned that it will possibly be headless.

[Images have been archived on this site's server as attachments since the pics are hosted on a Russian site~Manny]

wow, such a nice amount of publicity for a rip-off artist, all the way down to the nameplate...

If someone copied my music in this way and put my name on it how would I feel? You can guess.

Really touchy...

Touchy?? I don't think so.... Rip off... yeah...

Rip off indeed, yet I don't think it is touchy. The namelate, though alike too, says "copy". Personally I think of his work like of something like car kit replicas.

If it is offensive for the stickists society, I'd rather delete the post, of course.

Personally, I was quite shocked at the rip off nameplate...all the way down to the image of the StickMan. Total rip-off.

Sorry guys...English is not my main language...it's french...I guess I meant something else when I wrote touchy...It's not fair let's say...

Everyone needs to keep in mind that Emmett has spent decades as an innovator, and has gone through more struggles with people looking to make money off his blood, sweat and tears than most of us will ever know. (there's already been at least one attempt on this forum to get sensitive information.) The rip-off artist might not be selling these, but then, he really seems to have gone through a lot of effort to make his copies look like the real thing. (All that time and effort and money...he could have had the real thing.)
This community is very loyal to Emmett (rightly so), and is going to be very defensive on his behalf.
All that said, I personally don't find that guy's copies to be cool; I think they're offensive to a lifetime's work done (and continuing) by Emmett.
I'd pull the post.

It is a rip-off in the making. Even though the plate says 'copy', the use of the Stickman logo is a direct infringment. He might not be selling them yet, but..........
Looking at these pics it occured to me that this guy had access to some Stick parts, the belt hook is a dead givaway. That casts doubt on the statement that he'd never seen or handled an authentic Stick before.
I agree with Luc, as an engineer I can surmise what kind of tooling would be needed to recreate a Stick from scratch, that coupled with the trial and error that's going to happen with any amature project, I'd say that the initial cost of the first instrument was close to that of a new Stick. Certainly more than a secondhand one, even in Russia.
As the Stick becomes more mainstream this kind of thing is going to happen more and more frequently and that is inevitable, and we need to be aware of what is happening out there. This post might just be the first Emmett's heard about this guy so I think Fuzzy did the right thing by posting it.
It's no good deleting it and hoping it'll go away.

Eric

Hi guys,

Just to clarify: I too do not support his idea of copying the stick to every little detail, and the reaction is more or less like what I expected. However, this guy asked me to share his work on the forum (he would do it himself, but he doesn't speak English at all); I don't know why and what kind of reaction he anticipated, but at least one should probably know that such things exist.

As for the cost of making a rip-off, labor costs virtually nothing in rural Russia, and the tools and machinery can easily be accessed in lots of semiabandoned (since USSR times) mills and research facilities, so it sounds like truth to me. He did not share the figures, but told that the total cost of all five prototypes is close to but not exceeding price of the real Stick (I assume some parts have been used multiple times).

If you think that even this thread is offensive by itself, just share your opinion, and if there will be a lot of such requests I guess Manny can help us getting rid of it (I don't see how can I delete a thread myself here).