[:project guitar:]

I realised I hadn’t updated this in a while with the final stages of the guitar assembly so will be adding more pictures and detail on here soon. The blog unfortunately suffered a bit of an accident for a while (dodgy update) but I have recovered it now and as well as the original guitar build this is a good home for various music theory, guitar tutorial links etc and I now have a lot more time to work on this so updates should be a bit more regular.

Also not content with the one guitar (which is now actually finished!) I’ve plans for building another..

Now that the parts mentioned in the previous post are done, we can start on the assembly of the electronic parts.

The kit comes with some of the bits pre-assembled such as all the parts on the control plate etc. For various reasons I have decided to replace these so was starting from individual parts. These are:

• Control plate itself (black in my case)
• Output jack plate (black) and socket
• Neck and bridge pickups
• Volume and tone “pots” (potentiometers) – “audio” type for the volume and “linear” for the tone. (I’ll go into this in a bit more detail in a future post)
• Capacitors – one 0.001 uF and one 0.047 uF. (The u should be a ‘micro’ symbol like the Greek mu – it is microFarads)
• 3 way switch for selecting pickups (switch towards bridge = bridge pickup only, towards neck = neck pickup only, and in middle = both pickups active)
• Knobs for the volume and tone pots, and for the switch
• Wire

With the help of some wiring diagrams and abstract thought it was “relatively” easy to put together. In the abstract it’s quite a straightforward concept – in practice it is quite hard to solder accurately all the time and make sure everything is connected properly, as it requires a lot of patience and attention to detail (2 things I’m not very good at!) – Have a look at this link if you need more information on soldering: Soldering 101. As there are only 2 pickups, one tone and one volume it’s a much simpler concept than a Strat, for example.

We partly assembled everything onto the control plate to keep it in place whilst doing the wiring – no knobs etc, just the essential parts to keep it where it should be – including masking tape for the switch!

In the next post I’ll go into a bit more detail on the actual wiring scheme etc in a bit more abstract way (moving away from the actual detail of soldering)

Once the wiring was mostly done, the output jack could be fixed in place on the body, with the plate. It needs to be mounted securely to the plate, otherwise any time it moves around it will be moving the wires around inside the body, eventually loosening some of the connections. So to keep everything where it should be it’s quite important to make sure it can’t move around too much when the lead is in there.

I’ve now got most of the assembly done and a lot of the electronics, as I now have the final bits I needed to start on the electronics (capacitors and extra wire!)

All the parts that can be put together have been now, so we can get an idea of what it looks like overall and just work on a few details later. The tuners that come with the kit seem quite cheaply made (!) and I’m not sure if they will be any good yet, but will try them out for a while before replacing them given the amount of money I’ve already spent replacing other things in the kit! (mostly for personal preference, but still…) These can be put on the neck either once it’s on the guitar, or before putting it on. I did it once it was on there as it was already partly assembled last week!

The transparent pickguard (which I got to replace the white one that comes as stock) is also on now. To get the neck pickup under this, the neck pickup has to go in first, and holes need to be drilled in the neck pickup cavity to mount it using the screws. There’s a pair of springs that go between it and the body, over the springs, to mount it correctly.

As the pickguard is transparent you can see part of the wire going from the pickup to the control cavity. This could probably be moved around a bit so it was less visible if you wanted – I quite like it as it is!

The bridge pickup can’t be installed yet though as there is more work on the electronics to do first.
Holes needed to be drilled for the pickguard, as it comes with none (presumably because they think you will want to put a different one on there… as the stock white one isn’t that good IMO!) – this was done by having a “test run” of assembling everything (without the electronics: bridge, control plate and with the neck on, to determine exactly where the pickguard should go. Then holes can be drilled using a very small drill through the holes of the pickguard. I tried marking it with pencil first but it wasn’t visible on this paint job!

After about 8-9 coats total the lacquer is finally done (not least because I’ve now finished up the can and that is a pretty substantial amount!). It does have a nice sheen to the surface, I haven’t sanded/buffed it to an ultra-shiny finish as it looks better slightly matt due to the design.

I left it quite a number of days for the lacquer to ‘cure’, as even though it appears to be dry it’s still possible to make marks in it by doing things like putting the control plate on too soon “to see how it all fits now” (I made this mistake!).

Now the neck is attached and it’s starting to come together and actually look pretty good! There’s still a couple more parts to get, but a trip to ebay will deal with that quite quickly!

I’ve done about 6-7 coats of lacquer so far and still ongoing with it – it is getting harder and more glossy but still a bit more to do. (I’ve got through most of a can of the larger size of Halfords lacquer already though!) So there’s not a lot of progress to report really, it doesn’t look that different to how it did a few weeks ago, but the paint is getting there slowly. Unfortunately as it is wet and windy I haven’t been able to do as much as I wanted to. But there’s a few more electronic bits to get etc and then once the lacquer is finished (whenever that is!) it should come together quite quickly.

The transparent pickguard arrived (quite a few days ago actually!) and is much better with the paint than the original white one they supplied. I might ebay the white one – nothing wrong with it at all, it just doesn’t really go with the paint as it would end up covering up a lot of it! – so better for someone else to be able to use it probably, otherwise it will end up just sitting around gathering dust.

This is the new one:

It’s a slightly different shape and size to the one supplied – only a few mm but enough to make a difference that they are not exactly interchangeable – as the body doesn’t have pre-drilled holes though, it is just a case of drilling the holes for the new one instead of the old one.

There are now 4 more (thin) coats of lacquer on the body and it finally looks like it is getting there – actually shiny/glossy on parts where it wasn’t before – still needs another few coats but is definitely better.

Before starting on the lacquer I’ve taken some pictures of what the body looks like “so far” and with the neck placed on (not actually attached) to get more of an idea of what the overall thing will look like.

Here are some results:

I’m pretty pleased with the result so far, even with a lot of stuff not finished you can see it’s starting to come together and in the way I had expected. There’s still a number of things to do, but it’s good to be able to see progress as it happens! Obviously there are no strings attached (!) yet and the hardware isn’t screwed on and the switch isn’t there (didn’t want to screw it to the control plate just to take a rough picture!)

Here are some close ups of the paint… click on the second one for comments on the blobby bit!

The white pickguard that came with the kit is OK but is just a generic white and it seems a pity to cover up about 1/3 of the area of the paint job (on the front) so I have decided on a transparent pickguard instead!

It’s from ebay and coming from the Netherlands to the UK so may take a little while to arrive but hopefully will be here soon! In the meantime I haven’t drilled the holes for it as I think they are slightly different to the ones on the pickguard supplied.

Hopefully I’ll be able to do the lacquer for the body this weekend and make a bit more progress towards finishing it…

Finally we’ve had some decent weather again and I’ve been able to finish the spray paint job on the body! After painting the darkest squares (previous post) and masking the horizontal stripes only to do half of the “medium” coloured squares – I removed the horizontal stripes, put the vertical ones back on, and did a similar light-ish coat of paint to fill in the other medium squares. It was much easier to put the vertical ones on this time, as there were already lines separating the squares, so it was just a case of getting it to match up.

The finished paint job is as below – there is some slight variation in colour and texture which just makes it better, I think. Too uniform would probably look a bit odd.

Not bad when you compare to the prototype in the GIMP

The pattern goes all around the sides as well (which I managed to neatly avoid having to deal with on the prototype!), which was a bit of a nightmare to mask – difficulties of putting flat tape on a curved plane! – but came out well in the end:

The next step with this (once the paint is more fully dry – it is “touch dry” within 15 minutes so no chance of it getting marks on etc, but they recommend 24 hours to be fully dry enough) will be to put the lacquer on – several coats eventually. I have already lacquered the headstock and neck, so that is pretty much ready.

Some of the searches bringing people to this site seem to be about how to do a sunburst, or any other “burst” (cherry burst etc) effect on a guitar – probably due to my initial ramblings on this subject. I decided not to go with this idea but in case it helps you, please see a list of links below to pages where people are talking about how to create this effect and where to get the materials etc. If you want your page linked here please comment and let me know.

It is possible to do a successful burst effect using spray paint e.g. from a can – don’t necessarily need a compressor or airbrush etc to do it. Based on the results I have had with spray paint (for my design) it can actually come out pretty well but preparation is the key. Proper filling, sanding etc plus if you are doing a translucent burst (or any other translucent finish) you ideally need to be starting with a decent grain on the wood – if it isn’t very good there will be a limit to how good the results can be!

• Manchester Guitar Tech – “How to create a sunburst using aerosols” – in this case using nitrocellulose lacquer (sold by the site but also available elsewhere) to do the effect. Most of this could be adapted for an opaque finish if required. This site also includes a page on how to assemble some of the “kit” guitars.
• Guitar ReRanch -”Sunburst” – details on how to replicate a ‘traditional’ 3 colour sunburst as seen on Fender and other guitars; including low-level detail on technique.
• StewMac – “How to spray a sunburst using aerosol cans” – Step by step guide with details.
• Premier Guitar – “Mean Gene’s Guitar Chronicles: Painting Part 2” – Details on spraying (using some more ‘professional’ equipment rather than aerosol cans) including a couple of paragraphs specifically about burst effects.