Simon B's ES-3 build

[Simon Barden]

I'm up to day 51 of my ES-3 guitar build already, although a lot of this has been waiting for stuff to dry, a week's vacation, plus waiting for decent weather (as I need to work outside a lot). So the first few posts here will be some catching up before it becomes live.

Day 1. 11th September 2106. I'd ordered the kit a few weeks before this, and once it came (very quickly considering it had to come half-way across the world to the UK), I then spent some time buying what I thought I'd need to build it (and have since bought an awful lot more!). So day 1 is when I'd finished thinking about things and trying things out and actually got down to it's construction.

The neck/body join when I had first tried it, wasn't that good e.g. there was a gap of around 3 mm between the heel and the bottom of the cutaway. So I was thinking that I'd have to work out what surfaces to sand back and by how much, in order to get a good fit. But as the days passed, the fit became better and better as the wood settled down after its travels, and eventually the fit became pretty good with maybe a 0.5mm gap at worst in places. Also, the angles the neck made to the body came back to what I'd expected, both in pitch and also with respect to the centreline of the guitar, so that by taking a straight edge and placing it along the edges of the fretboard, both edges were pointing at almost the same relative position on the drilled holes for the bridge posts.

The neck pitch is such that there's not a great deal of height between a flat edge placed along the fretboard and the body at the position the bridge will go, which made me decide to run with a fixed tune-o-matic bridge rather than an ES-175 style floating tune-o-matic, as there just wouldn't have been enough height to fit one in (even modified) and get a decent action on the guitar.

So here's the basic guitar body and neck after its initial sanding:





Day 2. Before I went any further, I knew I'd have to shape the headstock. I tried to think of an original design but I'm not so good at that these days, so I drew a loose approximation to a Gibson one, then got the router out, followed by the Dremel drum sander and ended up with something fairly symmetrical and pleasing to my eye:



The general condition of the guitar body was quite good, though there were various areas with obvious grain holes, especially around the edges. So after doing the headstock, day 2 was grain filling time, here are the body and neck hanging up to dry following the application of 'transparent' oil-based grain filler:



This requires several days to dry, so I left it a week before sanding it down nice and smooth (a long day's work!). It was only after applying the grain filler that I realised that there were both water and oil-based fillers and that oil-based fillers weren't supposed to take a stain (D'oh!). But I tried staining a test piece of wood that I'd put grain filler on, and it seemed to take it OK, so I decided to give it a go, starting with the sides.

I must state that at this point I had decided to try and achieve an older Gibson jazz box style gentle yellow > red > brown sunburst on the top and back, but wasn't sure whether to burst the sides or have them a solid colour (like a typical ES-175). I have the StuMac guitar finishing book, so decided to stain the guitar yellow as the base colour, and spray everything else on top of that.

So days 10 and 11 were staining days, with this the end result:



And on to the next post...