SG jr / GSJ-1 first build

[ukkosparta]

Cheers everyone, I ordered a project for lock down fully expecting that it might take forever to arrive, but in three weeks it was here in Finland. Never built a guitar before, so I expected the experience to be ..educational, and if I'd be both lucky and careful, the end result just might be good enough so that it actually gets played. It's nearly finished now, didn't report here during the process, too focused actual doing, but here's a summary of the process and a few pics from different phases.



All the parts seemed to be there, with the wrong truss rod cover plate and all. The body had pretty nasty looking dents in it on the top, customs people must've mishandled it, otherwise it looked to be in very nice shape with little machine marks or anything.




After a short panicking what should I do with the dents, I found solid piece of advise in this forum, and the soldering iron and damp rag trick worked marvels. Only few of the biggest ones didn't disappear completely. So, onwards with the plan of stain and tru oil finish.

[ukkosparta]

The neck required quite a bit of work. The fretboard was uneven and was thinner high up the neck on the bass side, but to my understanding sometimes this is done on purpose also in acoustic guitars so I decided I can live with that as also fixing it would've been too much work. The neck heel wasn't properly finished and needed some touching up so that it would be level with body. Also the frets were obviously in need of leveling. I didn't plan to invest on costly fret job tools, so like all proper projects, this started with making your own tools.

Sanding block for the leveling made of plank, masking tape and glued on sanding paper.


And a crowning file made by filing down one side of a file and rounding the point.


Otherwise the leveling went pretty well, but I had to sand it down quite a bit, and the 11th fret was still too low. I hoped it would be enough and decided not to keep sanding everything, but in the end it wasn't enough and the 11th fret buzzes on the treble side. So, either a new fret or new thorough leveling is needed, or more likely, I'll just avoid playing those E and B string on 11th...

[ukkosparta]

After sanding the body carefully, it was time to stain it. Except finding stains proved to be surprisingly difficult, especially orange stain. So, I ended up with red and yellow stains that I had to mix. With no previous experience in using stains, I just assumed that the red one would be stronger, and mixed much smaller portion of that in. The result was still very red, so I needed to use all the yellow stain powder, so I ended having stain for several square meters just to get a shade I'd be happy with. Not that I had very strict vision what the tone should be, I tried avoiding forming a too strict mental image so I could go with flow. I also expected the colour to darken a bit when oiling so I tried to avoid too dark stain.



And the stained colour turned out to be really intense and powerful, and more red than I hoped for, but as there was no yellow stain left, this was going to be it.



The tone looks different depending on the photo, mostly emphasizing the reds, but the colour also was very different depending on lighting conditions.

Water-based stain - like a afterwards learned from the forum - didn't penetrate the wood deep enough and the grain was showing up. The original plan was stain the wood, and then sand it down and use the dust together with tru oil to fill the pores, but the stain wasn't deep enough so I could only very lightly smoothen the hair of the wood that had risen up when staining. So very little pore filling now available at this point, it was all up to tru oil from now on.



And like I expected, much darker after oiling. The bright orange tone was gone, good as I was looking for more a vintage tone and style, but also the whole thing didn't look as orange. Oh well, let's see after a few coats. I put around 5 coats, first one heavy coat to let it soak it, the second one with sanding , and the 3 thin coats.

[ukkosparta]

Time to glue the neck. With mock build up it looked like the neck angle and position were within limits and good to go, and the neck pocket was nice and tight, so Titebond and clamps. Except now with the glue, the neck didn't want to go fully in to the pocket and was way tight. With the glue drying up quickly, I ended up using the clamp to tighten in down. And it did work, tight fit in the end. Except that the excess force I had to use was too much for the stuff I used to protect the wood and it left nasty marks on both sides. This was of course revealed few days later when taking of the clamps. First bigger mistake in the project, not too happy about it, but the top side goes under the pickguard, so I could focus on minimizing the damage on the backside.



After some light sanding and a bit more tru oil, the damage was on tolerable level, and now I could just put the strap button there in the middle to cover things up.

[ukkosparta]

Attaching hardware was the easy part. Tuners, bridge posts etc, no problem. I drilled a third pot hole as I wanted a bass cut in addition to volume and tone. Luckily the routing on the back is probably the same as for regular SG so there is plenty of room, and curves in rout even provided a very nice template where to place the third pot so it looks like it's following the same curve as the jack and other pots. As I had to buy an extra pot anyway, I replaced all of them and never bothered with the pots or jack that came with the kit.




With the oil dried up and hardware on, it's starting to look like a guitar! And the orange tone ended up pretty nice, maybe not as orange as I was originally looking for, but very natural and balanced looking, and a good fit for the guitar I think.



However, when stringing it up, it became painfully clear that the wraparound bridge that was too tall and the action was way high even when screwed as down as possible. I quickly googled for affordable wraparounds I could get my hands on quickly that had lower profile. I found Wilkinson with adjustable B and G strings. That fit right in, and it was so much lower that I had to raise the bridge quite a bit to get a suitable action. This bridge though, had shorter adjustment screws length wise and no way to adjust individual strings, and with how the neck is glued, it's very close that the bridge won't go far enough back for proper intonation. Let's see if I have to switch longer screws into it to get it further back. Otherwise, I'm liking the Wilkinson bridge.


So, here we are, final touches and we're good to go. The fretboard needed some oiling, and I searched our summer cabin if there's something usable. I found this, way old, but still perfect, how could I not use it? A little bit of extra mojo.




Some minor stuff still left to do, I need to work a bit with the intonation, adjust the pot heights a bit, and shield the pickup cavity, and find a strap to go with it. But it plays well, looks cool, is incredibly light, has heart-shaped hole in the headstock, and with the volume, treble cut and bass cut, I can get a huge range of sounds out of it. We got recording sessions for our next album coming in July, and this baby is ready to hit it.

[McCreed]

Good job!
You've been as busy today posting your build diary as actually building it!

Cheers

[ukkosparta]

Good job!
You've been as busy today posting your build diary as actually building it!

Cheers

Thanks, now that the real job is done, there's time to post!

[JohnH]

Looks great!

[Andy40]

Wow that's a serious cable and cab!

Also that is not the stock bridge....what is it?

[ukkosparta]

Wow that's a serious cable and cab!

Also that is not the stock bridge....what is it?

That's a kit Tweed Deluxe 5e3 combo in 2x12 cabinet. And the bridge is Wilkinson bridge, with adjustable B and G strings. Quite affordable but actually doesn't feel that cheap.