Hi. I'm Simon and I live just outside Reading, England. I'm part-way through an ES-3 build; my first kit guitar.
Last year a friend of mine stated an interest in getting hold of a '60s Harmony H-59, so I was looking on eBay for him when I came across a fairly beaten-up example of one in the US that due to its condition, was going cheap. I imported it, and as my attempts to touch-up the fairly damaged paintwork were only part-successful, I decided to strip it down and refinish it. Here's the original body:
I used cellulose rattle-cans to repaint it, and was very pleased (as was my friend) with the end result:
However, I encountered various problems with inconsistent paint quality with the cans (some fine, some too runny, some too solid and tending to deposit blobs), which caused me a lot of re-work, so I vowed to get a proper air compressor and spray-gun for the next time I did anything like that.
I'd been eyeing up the ES-175 alike kits on the Pitbull website for a while, as I fancied getting myself that style of guitar (having already got a fair selection of the classic solid-bodied guitars), and despite a lot of searching, no-one in the UK seemed to be selling a similar kit. So I went ahead and ordered an ES-3 kit. It took me a while to decide exactly what I was going to do with it (a good thing as the wood took a while to settle down after transit so that the neck fitted nicely into the neck pocket without big gaps - saving me some awkward sanding jobs), ordered a compressor and spray-gun (and then another smaller spray-gun), ordered the hardware (I was going for gold-plated hardware, partly so that I could re-use some Grover machine-heads from a Les Paul that I'd converted to nickel hardware and partly because I think a jazz-style guitar should look quite flashy) and then got down to sanding, grain filling, sealing and spraying.
I'm at the stage of having sprayed the colour finish on the top and back of the body, and am about to spray the body sides tobacco brown (the top has been sprayed twice because I was careless and scratched right through the original sunbursting and my repair spraying looked awful . The neck has its colour finish applied on all but the top face of the headstock, which is nearing completion (took me ages to decide what to do with it). I then plan to glue the neck on, fill in any small cracks around the neck joints, touch those up with paint so that the neck/body colours match at the join, then spray on the clear lacquer coats.
Here's the top (I'm pretty pleased with this Mk2 version as it's just a touch better graduated than the Mk 1):
And here's the back of the neck:
As you can see, I've gone for a Gibson-ish headstock shape, without it being a close copy. The face has an triangular art-deco style MOP shape on it (they seem to be popular on here) but I have no plans to add any lettering.
I've taken photos as I've gone along, so will put up a build diary when time permits.
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