Sixty Six Body

New project... This is hopefully going to be a 66 shaped body to go on my cheapish Squier Strat.
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Its one piece ash, mainly because the local timber merchant didn't have any narrower 2in planks of Ash I Iiked the look of.
The 66 body profile is because my No 1 instrument is a early 80s Tokai Jazz bass, and I thought it would be nice to have a match. I don't rave over the hardware layout on the 66 though, and in any case the Squier already had a pair of Seymour Duncan humbuckers. It also had an old Shadow midi pickup and a middle pickup as well, but I've decided all that was too much of a good thing, so this will be simpler. I failed to draw a JB style control plate I was happy with, so until I change my mind its the simple Telecaster shape that's planned.

The one piece ash bod looks nice. Hard to go too wrong with Tele controls, and the switch may look a bit more "natural" than it would on a jazz control plate. I always think the most interesting builds are the ones where you can't quite tell whether what you are looking at is strange or familiar. This should fit the bill. Offset jazz body, Gibson-style humuckers, tele controls...maybe a hard tail strat bridge? Classic, eclectic and practical.

Love it! looking forward to your progress, love the hybrid feel

I love the pattern on the ash. I looking forward to this build. I hope it goes well.

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Almost finished with 60grit paper. Enough errors on this one that I probably ought to do another, but hopefully I can make it into an adequate job.

Quite a transformation from the rough-cut slab in post #1. Good work!

As for errors, the only thing I can see is a slight routing mishap on the edge of the control cavity. Should be easy enough to fix or cover up I would think.

Is it heavy?

As it stands it's almost exactly 2kg

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As it stands it's almost exactly 2kg

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That'll weigh in at a manageable weight even by the time your done with neck & hardware.

My Ash tele (one in avatar pic) finished up at 3.7kg, and that was after I did a swimming pool route for weigh relief.
Most of my guitars weigh in around the 3.5-3.8kg mark, so it falls within average. (for me)

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More of a pink/purple colour than I was hoping for. It's Fiebing's Leather red colour, but maybe not that red. Their colour chart does show something of a pink cast to be fair.

This is a really cool shape, and coming along nicely. I had a car that color once. I think it had faded from a burgundy... When I would get comments about driving a pink car, my wife would point out that it was really more of a fuchsia. I would usually reply "How does that help me?" Of course the color looks a lot cooler on your guitar than it did on my beater Ford Escort...

Agree, nice shaping work.

The body is currently getting scraped/sanded back a good bit since the dye revealed all sorts of scratches that I didn't see when it was bare wood. When that's done I'll have to make a decision on colour. The Fiebing's dye is pretty good to use and reasonably economical, but man, I wanted a red guitar and I cannot see what in their range would give me that.

Sanding sanding sanding. It's the cutaways that are the big problem, although there's a general pinkish cast in some spots. The next colour ordered is a much deeper red, unfortunately a different brand because I had no confidence that anything else in the Fiebing's range has less blue in the red. I will experiment with a pink wash under the new colour as well as using it on cleaned back wood, I might get lucky.

A panther that is positively pink...
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Ironically, having obtained some "wine red" dye, which to my eyes is more of a reddish brown, my current thinking is to get the pink coloured red out again and put a coat of pink and then a coat of brown.
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The body needed resanding anyway, it wasn't wasted effort getting the first pink off.

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This is where I am at the moment. I really wanted a purer red, but between what the colours turned out to be in the flesh, what colours were available off the shelf from GBR vendors (I refuse to use the multinationals on principle), and how much I was willing to spend (big factor!) I've got here. I'm not unhappy at the moment, it should improve when the tru oil goes on.
It's one coat of pink (Fiebing's Red) and two coats of reddish brown (Dartford's Wine Red) it's a shame about the ugly wide stripe of grain, but hopefully the bridge will do a lot to disguise it.

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I think this is probably where I'm stopping with dye. I wanted to have at least the rear pickup clear of the scratch plate jazz bass style, but my craftsmanship fine shaping the pocket isn't quite up to it, and the odd fact that my two Seymour Duncan pickups have different shaped ears and backplates doesn't help either. The trick, I suppose, would be 3d printed custom pickup covers.
I'm planning to have a custom control plate water jet cut by a local engineering shop. I'm now wondering if I could persuade them to do a scratch plate as well.

It's a cool color. It will look good with some gloss on. I guess I had thought you'd be using a Tele plate on this. Nice to have access to a machine shop that can do that sort of cutting! Will be interesting to see what you come up with. If it were a solid color I'd definitely go for ta scratchplate. With nice grain showing hard to know whether that or pickup rings would be better

The silence has been while I struggled with a lack of talent and experience with finishing in general and dye in particular. There's been another major sand back, associated with problems in the grain filling arena. The result has been somewhat felicitous though, since my struggles, caused by my foolish desire not to shell out for some sort of substantial grain filling product, has resulted in rather more prominent grain., which I think I like. The patch behind the bridge isn't ideal, but it's far uglier under the bridge!

This is a cosmetic dummy setup with a second prototype scratchplate made of paper and a control plate from duct tape. At the moment it just has a few layers of Birchwood sealer filler. I've just done the holes for the string through bridge, which took several hours due to measuring umpteen dozen times and drilling in several stages from both sides, but the result is more even than my normal raggety hole locating. When I've done the holes for the neck screws and deepened the control cavity then it will be tru oil time.
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It's looking great! - love the colour

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Finally felt brave enough to try sanding the tru oil back for the first time. I thought I'd give it a couple of weeks to really cure, but may have been longer than that. It's the first coloured finish I've done so very wary about sand through. It's about half way back which is how I feel comfortable part way through. Now just need some warm enough days to put a few more coats on.
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Looking good!

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Now just need some warm enough days to put a few more coats on.

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Looking good Jim. How many coats you got on there already?

I don't really count, about a dozen I think. Not enough for me to feel brave enough to sand flat. I seem to have got a distressing number of little scratches and things during the protracted dying process, so it's going to take a fair bit to get it level. For some reason I seem to be scratching and scuffing the two solid Ash bodies I'm working on now a great deal more than I did the hollow bodied instruments I've done previously.

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I don't really count, about a dozen I think.

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I might sound a bit pedantic, but when I do hand applied finishes, I keep a little notepad on the bench and mark down each coat as I go.

It's really easy to lose count (especially if you're over 50 y/o :o) and it's hard to tell by eye if you've got 15 or 50 coats... until you sand... and then it may be too late.

With Tru Oil, I do a minimum of 24 coats. I know others that go 50, but I fall short on the patience scale there. However, I have not had a sand-through using my minimum 24. TBH, I've probably gone up to 28 because, even writing it down, I get confused and just go more.

Also IME with Tru Oil, when I start wet sanding, I'm pretty comfortable starting with a pretty fine grit like 1000-1200. Hand finishes just don't get the depth of dimples like orange peel you get from spraying things like lacquer, so there's no reason to go hard at the start.

I wish I knew how much I could sand after how many coats! I don't know how thick a coat of tru oil is, or how much thickness I remove with any given grade of paper, and it's all so up in the air that it defeats me to know where to go with much more than crossed fingers. Completely agree with you about fine grades. I also scrape gently with a sharp blade to knock off dust particles rather than sand them.

Today's been a 66 day. The tru oil still leaves a lot to be desired, but I needed to progress *something* (we are in full lockdown again in the UK). So I fitted the neck, which was a lot more work than it should have been, since it appears that the builders of the donor Squier routed the neck pocket crookedly and then hand fitted the neck to match (and well too). Reluctant to try to custom fit the neck pocket for the neck I spent some time making a shim that tapers both front to back and side to side and seems OK so far.
So, I thought, I'll just print off a print of my scratch plate design to check it's OK, then get on with cutting it out. **at least 8 iterations later** that is definitely the ultimate perfect and wonderful scratch plate design for a HH 66 body, and anyone who disagrees can go and restore early 60s eastern European guitars... Thanks, (I think) to Simon, who suggested that my original plan to have a single straight line in front of the bridge was flawed.
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I think it is looking pretty cool. It has a part Strat, part Epiphone Wilshire vibe to it. Part The color is especially like those USA made Epi's of the 1960s. Having tried to get that color, I know how difficult it is to pull off. The offset does remind me of Japaneze/Czech/German electrics before they decided to just make copies and were coming up with pretty cool shapes of their own. the pickguard, bridge and pup placemen make me think of the old Peavey T-60s. The coolest bit is that it's not *exactly* like anything else.

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Getting there. I need to get the control plate fabricated and all the electrics installed. A set of strings would be good too, but between new year and Covid strings and other stuff for both current projects have been in the mail for ten days. The top string I've used thus far for alignment is two broken mandolin tops wired together!

Looking really nice and the colour scheme is great.

Looks good Jim.

I'm still on a break from builds atm, and waiting inspiration/enthusiasm to return. However I'm considering something "offset" when the time comes. Likely a scratch body. (a first for me)

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It's been a long time, been a lot of distractions, but it's new guitar day with the 66 body. The second pic shows it alongside my beloved Jazz Bass. Do they make a nice pair?

The control plate is custom made by my local engineering shop https://www.cranford-engineering.co.uk).
It's got just the pair of Seymour Duncan humbuckers I acquired, and a fairly simple wiring setup which is bridge/both series/both parallel/neck selected on the rotary switch, and a push pull switch on the volume control which puts both pickups single coil.

Yes, been a while since we've seen Jim. Welcome back!

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Do they make a nice pair?

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Definitely brothers from different mothers! Nice job matching the colours.

Nice to "see" you Jim. Love the colors. They are a "nice pair". Hope no one will be so crass as to suggest that your next project should be to make a "nice rack" for them ;-)

It's funny you should say that... I did want to photograph the pair against the leafy background, but I only have one guitar stand.