My Tribute to Jerry Garcia's "Tiger" guitar

The guitar that Jerry used most frequently over the last 16 years of his life was a custom guitar built by Doug Irwin called "Tiger." Being a big Grateful Dead fan, I was excited to see that a guitar manufacturer called Eastwood had just stocked a few more of their reasonably priced Tiger-inspired guitars, so I bought one.

The Eastwood Tiger is a great guitar, but they made some compromises on the hardware that make it not quite look like Jerry's original nor sound as good. Never one to shrink from a challenge, I set about customizing my Eastwood to make it look truer to the original and play even better.

The first thing was the headstock and neck. Jerry's original has gold-plated tuning pegs, so I replaced the Eastwood's chrome tuners with gold as well as the screws on the truss rod cover. The Eastwood needed just a small amount of fret leveling and crowning. It also needed the truss rod adjusted, as it originally had no neck relief. The brass nut slots were not cut deep enough, so that playing chords at the top of the fretboard caused string bending and sounded out of tune. I cut the nut slots down to a uniform depth of .056 inches. Already looking and sounding more like Jerry's guitar!

The biggest functional problem with the Eastwood was that the bridge buzzed like crazy on a couple strings due to the saddles being loose (others noted this problem online). I originally tried inserting springs into the bridge to maintain tension and that worked, but the bridge was chrome and Jerry's was gold and a different style (early Gibson SG "harmonica" bridge). So I bought a gold harmonica bridge from Guyker. Note that the bridge post spacing on the Eastwood is not the standard 73mm for Tune-O-Matic bridges, but rather 71mm, so I had to use a small round file to reduce the spacing. The 71mm spacing may be a clue that the Eastwood guitar may be manufactured by the Korean company Samick, as they are the only company that ever used that spacing that I'm aware of.

The rest of the hardware was also almost all chrome, while Jerry's was a mix of brass, gold-plate and chrome. So I replaced the tailpiece with a gold Kluson JG tailpiece, added gold knobs, gold strap buttons, cut out a piece of brass for a pickup switch plate and put gold nuts and washers on all the switches and jacks.

The final modification was adding a custom tiger oval plate under the tailpiece. Amazon sells a tiger sticker that matches Jerry's and I stuck it on an oval I cut from a 1/16" plastic sheet and mounted it with gold screws.

The guitar sounds and looks great! I'm groovin' on playing a whole bunch of Grateful Dead songs like Uncle John's Band which you can listen to on my Albums page.