Just received my first kit - a JZA-1.
Have always wanted a jazzmaster - looking forward to building my own!
I went for the ash body as I have an ash strat that I love. Interesting that this body is much much heavier than my strat. I hear that ash has dramatic differences in weight - I guess this is true! I'm not too bothered by a heavy body though.
At this stage I'm thinking a sherwood green finish, which I think will go nicely with the red textured pickguard.
Anyone with experience want to share about the advantage of a nitro spray finish? Is it worth it, or would a simple spray paint suffice? I'm not expecting a perfect result!
Will use my day off on Thursday to do a mock build - perhaps start on some fret work.
Hi LiamD, I used nitro on my first kit build and I love how the finish turned out https://www.buildyourownguitar.com.a...ead.php?t=8396
Since then I’ve done one in standard acrylic and one in an oil based finish. The main drawbacks I found with the nitro finish is that it was super messy - I don’t have any kind of proper spray set up, so I used nitro spray cans and my entire garage floor was covered in surf green! The acrylic I’ve used since then was far less messy.
In addition the nitro is quite toxic and more expensive.
I still don’t regret the choice ... but won’t go back to it unless I put together a decent spray setup.
The other bonus of the acrylic is that it gives you more colour options - whereas there doesn’t seem to be many places that stock nitro spray cans. For the acrylic I just used standard Bunnings stuff, but later found out super cheap auto had an even bigger range of colour options.
Here’s the thread for the other two - one done and the other one close, but still has a bit of work to be done.
Good to hear, my wife gets 50% off super cheap auto! I’ll head there tomorrow!
Today I did a mock build, everything looks good. Scale length seems spot on, and as long as the neck is right up against the top side of the pocket, everything is straight.
The pre-installed nut seems well high. Any thoughts? I don’t want to have to shape my own (I think I would fail) so any tips on a nut that should just drop in? Or should I shave this one down to size?
I also shaped the headstock. As someone with next to zero jigsaw experience, that was frightening! But I’m happy with the result - just a standard fender jazz master shape.
Everything is sanded to 120, I’ll step up the grades tomorrow.
Nice work! I’ve replaced all the supplied plastic nuts with pre-shaped bone nuts - they’ve all had the opposite problem so far and the high end needed to be shimmed up a little, but that was easier than sanding the plastic ... plus you get a bone nut!
I’ve made some progress.
Went for a blue spray paint, about 5 coats, then about the same of clear.
I left the ash body unfilled on purpose, hoping the grain would show through. It has done that, but also some of the edges took the paint a little funny and don’t look neat. However I think overall it’s come out nice.
Taught myself to solder today to get it all wired up. Everything works ok but I have some issues:
1. Some strange earthing issues. Touching the pickup selector or the volume pot causes lots of noise...
2. The volume control works backwards to normal. Not sure how I managed that!
Still need to shield the cavities, cause it seems noisy at the moment. And waiting for my neck finish to arrive to get that done.
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The high nut....
