The kit arrived and on inspection I was surprised at how cleanly machined/crafted the body and neck were. No deep gouges at all and very little glue mess to sand out.
The electrical components were as expected (not high quality pickups and HW) so if the build goes ok, I will replace the switch, pots and jack. I have already decided to put the kit pickups to the side and am starting with a Seymour Duncan Custom in the Bridge and an Iron Gear Blues engine in the neck. Together they can give a nice out of phase tone, as I learned from other installs in the past.
One of the pickup rings in the kit was snapped on arrival, but I have spares here. I also opted for the Grover locking tuner upgrade, so the stock tuners will not be used on this build.
Note: The supplied pickups don't fit the pickup routes in the body, so if you're reading this to glean some insights prior to starting your own build, know that Seymour Duncan, Iron Gear and Dimarzios pickups that I have here fitted the routes, but only just. Greco, Burny and some Epiphone pickups didn't. To resolve you could either file the pickup tangs slightly or slightly enlarge the routes in the body.
Day 1.
Its great working on a project like this with my 88yr old Father, neither of us have built a guitar before and we are enjoying the activity together.
We started with dividing the work and my job is fret leveling and my Dad has started sanding the body.
Using a sanding block and 180, 240, 400, 600, 800, 1200 is the plan.
He is a retired carpenter, so is delighted to see the wood grain patterns coming to light.
I managed to adjust the truss rod and obtain a nice level fretboard, at least in the centre of the radius. (I used a notched straight edge to verify).
Masked up the fretboard, marked the frets with a sharpie and using a levelling beam I started levelling the frets.
Problem: My sandpaper was too short for the 40cm steel beam I bought, so I foolishly decided to go ahead with a smaller cheap beam (aprox 7" long). So I had to address the fret board in sections.
Second Problem, as it turns out my cheap fret rocker only has two straight edges! I verified this against my machined parallel beam. End result is likely to be a terrible fret job. I was unable to get good levels, but still crowned (Baroque Brand crowning file, on the medium frets seemed closest, but was equally cheap and nasty) and polished the frets. Also did the fret ends and at least that aspect came out well. Wont know how bad the fret job is until final assembly and testing. In any event I can redo later.
Day 2.
More sanding of the body, its starting to look very good and feels smooth.
Dad is doing some minor contouring of the edges also.
Neck wise, well it turns out that the tape I used has left residue on both the rosewood fretboard and the sides of the neck. On the fretboard I used a small amount of handsanitizer to good effect to remove the gum. Im not concerned as the fretboard will get a good Dunlop oil in due course..and the neck needs a little sanding anyway.
Sanded the neck with some 1200 Grit. It needed very little, as it was a big leg up to have it delivered so well from the factory.
Day 3.
We made a couple of templates to experiment with different headstock shapes and settled on just slimming down the banana headstock. I think the stock shape looks like a clog
In the end, rather than use the template, we just bent a flexible steel ruler and used that to pencil mark the new shape.
Sanded the headstock into the slimmed down shape, there was only a few mm to remove and it was finished within 40 min or so.
Day 4.
The body and neck sanding is considered good enough at this stage.
We re-test fitted the neck and body and marked the neck and bridge pickup surround screw positions. Noted that one of the screw holes is directly above the wire route and I will shorten the screw that is placed there.
We also marked and drilled for all HW, using a very fine bit and drilling down to a tape mark on the bit to ensure we didn’t go too deep.
Fitted the tuning keys (machine heads), lined them up, marked and drilled.
We had to sand the plastic electronics enclosure cover to get it to fit, but its a good fit now.
Gently and only partially pushed the bridge and tailpiece studs into the body and checked string alignment, intonation/scale length. Removed the studs, just placed the bridge on the body and using a straight edge along the fretboard checked the neck break angle. Its not perfect as the straight edge only slightly interferes with the bridge. (It would clear the saddles if the bridge were about 1.5 mm lower). So not an ideal angle, but hopefully I can work with this and maybe even change out or grind the bridge for a lower height if needed.
Day 5.
Prepared the neck and body for glue. (Put some minor scoring into the wood, to give the glue extra cavities to bind with). Placed tape at areas where there may be glue spread out on clamping. Made a block to ensure the clamp designated for the pickup cavity will reach and operate without binding on the body.
Made a small block of wood for the fretboard area clamp, cut with fret grooves.
Applied the supplied PBG glue and spread with a small artist paint brush right into the corners etc, ensuring all contact surfaces had glue covering. So a thin glue coverage to coat the neck heel areas and body cavity (no gaps in the coverage).
Positioned clamps, tightened the fretboard clamp first and then the one at the neck pickup cavity. Visually checked for gaps and that the neck was correctly seated as it was per dry test fitting,
The rest of the day was spent sanding a test piece of plywood and applying Amber Shellac. So far… hmmm its patchy.
Also designed a decal for the guitar logo.
So far.. its been fun, but my optimism about having a recording worthy instrument (low action, no buzzy frets..) is fading. Dad, still reckons its gonna be a success.
Any tips on when to apply an Inkjet printed decal that has been sprayed with fixative over Bullseye Shellac would be good to hear. Right now the plan is to start that in 3 days time (leaving the neck loads of time to set). We plan to cloth apply a very light coat of Shellac. Sand with 600, 800, 1200 so that the only shellac remaining is in down in the grain. THEN apply the waterslide decal. Then continue with cycles of Shellac and sanding with 800, 1200.
One, fear in the back of my mind is also that on inspection of the small bottle of glue, it seems we only used about 1/5 of it. We did cover all contact areas on both neck and body, but had no seep out on clamping.. So im worried we didn’t use enough… Dad reckons its all good!
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