Simon B's Custom ES-1/ES330 style build

[Simon Barden]

I've scraped and sanded and it's looking a bit better, but I do think I'll have to get the paints out. I might give it all a spray with some tinted clearcoat first, otherwise it's going to be difficult to match the colour properly. I did spray some on in a patch and it made it a lot redder and brighter.

Now stripped the neck down and stained that as well. . I'm grateful for the good weather we're having at the moment, but it's hot work sanding in the sun. About 26°C in our back garden in the shade, so not bad for early May.

And the smell of BBQ is coming from all directions, and with me on a diet. It's very distracting.

[Dedman]

you could always put a small logo over it. I'm thinking more of a character than a brand.

[Wayne.Mumford]

You could always put your logo or signature over it, I have seen initials in gold in that area on a couple of guitars over the years.
Wayno.

[Simon Barden]

Well, the binding is all scraped back, but the consequences of using coarse sandpaper to get the worst of the Tru-Oil off have come back to bite me on the binding. It's made deep scratch marks that have absorbed the stain. Maybe the spirit-based stain is more penetrating than the water based-stain.




It's either that or I've discovered a secret message in Chinese from the builder hidden under the outer layer of the plastic.

Some of the marks I've been able to scrape away. I've tried using metho on them and it's helped a little but not a huge amount. And it was getting too hot to do much or think clearly. We've had three days in a row of cloudless skies and temperatures in the upper 20s - over 28°C today. Which is a lot, especially when you're out sitting in the sun trying to make some vitamin D (and a week ago it was down to 1°C at night).

So I'm not sure what to do with it at the moment. I'm tempted to try masking around the binding and painting it, though I'll probably try some other solvents first. You may have noticed in the top picture that I've managed to scrape away at the glue layer in the sand-through patch and the ply beneath had absorbed the stain, so it's looking better than it was, though it's far from perfect.

Tomorrow I'm off to the Great Western Railway centre at Didcot (a few miles south of Oxford), assisting my friend, Jim Champ who's just had this book published:



He wants to take some photos of locomotive parts as he's had an idea for another book, and I'll be taking some publicity photos of him holding his book with some steam engines in the background. Well, that's the idea anyway.

Then Wednesday, it will be back to the guitars and a bit cooler weather, so the brain should start working again.

[blinddrew]

There is something slightly horror-movie-esque about those stains on the binding. You sure your string of curse words hasn't summoned any demons into the guitar?

[Simon Barden]

I may have to find an elf, a dwarf, a roaming uncrowned king, an old man with a big white beard plus three hobbits, and journey into Mordor to destroy it in Mount Doom.

I'm told it translates as:

One string to rule them all, one string to find them. One string to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. And another three strings to play an open D on, man.

[Dedman]

[FrankenWashie]

Beware Saruman! He has fallen to evil.

[Wayne.Mumford]

You guys crack me up.

[Simon Barden]

In a flurry of activity brought on by good warm weather and my two SG builds, I've also been working on this ES-1 build again. What I did haven't shown here that I did last year was paint the binding white, then spray on a coat of vintage amber lacquer and couple of coats of clear on top of that for the body.

At the beginning of the year, JimC took the neck away and treated the engineered rosewood fingerboard with a thin stabilising epoxy compound. Lockdown then occurred before I could get it back, but we were finally allowed to meet up (whilst still keeping 2m apart) last week, and I got the neck back.

The headstock got the fibreboards and new abalone inlay treatment that the SGs got, the neck has just got its binding scraped and a coat of vintage amber on it to tint the binding, and I've just glued the neck on.



You can see that the binding is certainly now not the brilliant white it started out as. It is a bit yellower than I wished, but I was at the mercy of the lacquer tint. But some Gibson 330 vintage reissue models have binding just as yellow, so I can live with it.

The white curved line running from the neck pickup rout is just a reflection.

The body has picked up a couple of small dings whilst sitting around since last year, but nothing some more coats of clear lacquer won't cover up. I have tested the neck dog-ear pickup with the neck in place, and the cover butts up to the end of the neck nicely.

So once the GSJ and GSM have had their heritage red coats applied, it will be out with the clear lacquer and onwards!