August GOTM

[cristof72]

Hi All

I'd to propose my 335 for guitar of the month...

I've played around with this one, my second build.

She's a pen ink stained (my own mix of yellow and blue inks) quilted maple top 335 with gun stock oil finish - about 40 coats (lost count a bit)

On board there are:
Schaller tuning pegs
Graphtech nut
Seymour duncan SH-4 JB for the bridge and SH-2n Jazz Model for the neck.
I've got 4 Bourne 500k push pull pots: in Jimmy Page style wiring:
Bridge Volume: splits bridge pickup
Neck Volume: splits neck pickup
Bridge tone: puts bridge & neck pickups out of phase with each other
Neck tone: puts bridge & neck pickups in series together
There's a schaller piezo in the bridge
with a flagship preamp.

I (nervously) cut a hole in the back, installed a frame and inset magnets to allow the cover to lie flat without screws. There's a matching 'key' to pull off the cover. Inside is the wiring, the flagship preamp, battery access.

The metal knob is piezo volume, the black rotary is piezo alone, piezo/mag mix and mag.

She plays amazingly, and great thanks to Pitbull guitars for the inspiration to make the guitar of my dreams.. I play in a very varied covers band (Eagles, ACDC, Dire Straits, INXS, Crowded House, Ed Sheeran, Mumford and Sons you know - the guitar needs to do a bit of everything!) and she sounds awesome for all of it.

Cheers all.
Chris

[cristof72]

here's a couple more shots

Chris

[Fretworn]

Nice job Chris.

[Sonic Mountain]

Wow great work on the mods!

[Adam Barnes]

Dude thats a nice guitar

[blinddrew]

Well here we go, a little less adventurous than some of the other entries but here's my effort:





Grover tuners, bone nut, upgraded CTS pots, Schaller strap-locks, home-made knobs, scratch-plate and truss-rod cover.
Pretty happy with it.

[wazkelly]

Nice one Drew. Looks great done in a natural finish.

[blinddrew]

Nice one Drew. Looks great done in a natural finish.

Thanks Waz, mostly down to the sterling advice from you and Simon. Cheers,

[wazkelly]

The Adopted ES-1.....finished in 10 weeks. http://www.buildyourownguitar.com.au...845#post169845

A big thank you to Tony aka VH2580 for offering this kit up for adoption as I had always wanted to do a semi hollow body guitar.

The kit gave me many challenges along the way. First up was stripping back the green stain which turned out impossible to save the micro thin maple veneer. Surprisingly the ply wood veneer underneath had some interesting grain to work with. Downside was the drop in top deck thickness which required a very delicate application of timbermate filler under the section where fret board overhang joins the body. This meant the body and neck had to be joined just after initial stain coats, with a bit more stain required to colour the natural timbermate filler used.

Timber on the back had the weirdest grain structure and was very stringy along the grain and opened up after applying water based ink & dye stain with a bit of swelling in a few places that also required some timbermate filler to disguise.

Next up was the awesome challenge of finishing a whole guitar, not just a separate body & neck, and to try and keep the finish being applied evenly all over whilst avoiding any dreaded runs. Thankfully these are very lightweight with body & neck joined thus making things a little bit easier to handle.

Initially this was going to be a guitar for myself but part of the way in my wife thought it would be a good birthday present for our eldest son who currently lives in NZ. Not a problem as that is mid August except that he was coming over this week for a business trip which cut the time line back considerably. This required a whole different approach to doing the finish, all experimental but with a fair amount of prior knowledge dialled in.

This is the 7th build where I have used Tru Oil for doing top coats and normally would do a handful of full strength, wet sand, then do some 50;50 diluted with turps, etc..... which takes quite a bit longer to get just right. On this occasion it was full strength up to about coat # 6, then 50;50 applied with 1200 grit W & D paper with surplus wiped off for a couple of coats, followed by a few more full strength then same 50;50 wet sand application with 1500 grit W & D paper. This really helped to level the finish back in on itself with excess gently wiped off....very important step as this preserved the level of thickness that was gradually building up. After doing a couple of robust 2000 grit W & D sessions it was back to full strength TO for a few more coats and then a couple more with just a few drops of turps to slightly thin it out which worked better that 50;50 as that ends up rather watery and prone to runs. In the end this was lucky to have about 36 hours curing time from last coat to first final polish, with a second one done the following night. All up, around 20 - 25 coats of TO.

Standard kit hardware used with Bone Nut, Alpha 500k mini pots, real parts 0.022 mini ceramic caps, switchcraft jack, real parts gotoh style 3 way switch, strap locks, push back vintage wire cloth, traditional bell shaped one ply truss rod cover, custom vinyl headstock front & rear logos, ernie ball 10-46 strings. Tony provided me with PUP's that came with his Korean PRS kit and they sound great.

[blinddrew]

:::Applause:::
Incredible rescue job there Waz. I love the way those logos seem to float above the surface.