Your finished projects

markblack

Chopped Explorer type. Ash body, milk paint finish. Trent P90's...

markblack

another milk paint and danish oil finish on this - ice man, mariposa, castedosa inspired shape... lollar jazzmaster pickups...

markblack

i've been re-working on some of my older build - trying to fix what I messed up

so this got pulled apart and the body reshaped - i built it before I kew I should make a templet so the sides were a bit uneven - so i straightened all of those and did some re-shaping. 

I put a new neck on - re cut the neck pocket.

Then made new tort plates and repainted in grey and did some relicing...

PeteC

Smoky burst 58 DC Junior tribute   

slugelise

PeteC

Very nice.   Did you silkscreen that headstock ?

slugelise

Yes, it's a custom silkscreen 

slugelise

PeteC said:

Very nice.   Did you silkscreen that headstock ?

The les.paul.part is a silk screen, the not Gibson logo sprayed, see the ngd thread for pics.

markblack

Ash body, @TrentGuitars P90 in the neck. @OilCityPickups raw nickel forces sweetheart in the bridge. and old Fernerdanez neck... a milk paint and danish oil finish. 

xOilCityPickups

That's really cool

markblack

@OilCityPickups Cheers. 

BillDL

I had a maple fretboard Tele neck I had taken off a guitar due to it having a permanent back-bow, so I pulled the frets, sanded out the hump, and refretted it.  I haven't levelled and recrowned the frets yet though.  I was looking for a body for it when this (early 2000s?) Squier CV Mahogany Thinline was advertised here and I bought it (minus the Bigsby) from @JJ72:

The current / newer Nato wood versions have a lighter and more uniform shade with less visible grain. It had a few dings and chips including a sizeable chunk of the thick poly lacquer chipped off near the jack socket, and It had been given an aged patina.  After drop-filling the chips and plugging the holes left from the Bigsby I buffed it back to full gloss. I didn't take too much time trying to invisibly match the filled holes for invisibility, just to make them smooth and level.  I had to remove a bit of wood from the rear wall of the bridge pickup cavity (that daft staggered shape) for my pickup to fit without being right up against it.

A neck came up for sale here for £15 and I decided it was well worth the risk to buy it from @t1000 and see what it was like.  I'm not sure who sanded it and stained it previously, but the stain appeared not to have soaked in uniformly due to some of the lacquer still remaining in the grain.  Somebody had also tried to give the headstock a "scorched" look with a blowtorch or similar.  @t1000 had sanded off most of it, but I gave the neck a deeper sanding and got most of the remaining darker areas out.  The headstock was left with scorching that was too deep to sand out, so I glued on some Andiroba veneer as a headstock overlay.  It has a similar colour and grain to mahogany.  The fretboard and frets were actually very good and there were only two slightly high frets.  After giving the freboard a fine scraping I treated the entire neck with Danish Oil.

Headstock Before and After:

I have found that Thinline guitars with single coil pickups can be a bit noisy, and it's practically impossible to screen the hollow void to the sides of the aperture cut into the top for the controls, so I fashioned s screening cage from copper sheet.  Thinking ahead to any pickup replacement after the box was glued into place (i.e. hard to feed the wires through into the case) I enlarged the holes for the wires, covered some plastic tubing with copper foil, and secured them into place as wire conduits.  I used graphite paint in the pickup cavities and bridged them with copper foil so the shielded pickguard will complete the "cage".

It's now fully assembled and fitted with Tonerider Hot Classics (nickel cover) and a Wilkinson bridge and tuners.  I'm still tinkering with the nut and have to fit string trees, but so far it is a very resonant guitar that has a very nice tele twang and also a bit of grunt when needed.  I'm really pleased with it, but I am not sure about the off-white pearloid pickguard.

BillDL

I've just finished another assembly project.  I didn't actually NEED any more guitars, although admittedly my Tele type guitars outnumber my Strat types so this balances things up a bit.  It's not a great photo and the neck is showing up a bit whiter than it is in normal lighting, and additionally I hadn't yet fitted string trees or the back plate.

Part of my reason for posting and writing about a pretty standard looking guitar is to highlight a few of the unanticipated issues that you can encounter when assembling a guitar from disparate parts.

THIS POST IS IN 3 PARTS DUE TO THE CHARACTER LIMITATION PER COMMENT

I already had a neck along with most of the hardware to build a Strat partscaster, so when I saw @Keefy's black Squier Strat body with bridge and jackplate for sale here for £35 I decided to build a partscaster.  I only have 3 other black guitars (a 339 style, a black paisley Tele style, and a P-bass type) and just felt that I would like a black Strat shaped object.

I knew from the description and photos that the neck pocket had been widened slightly to accommodate a particular neck and had been squared off at the back (maybe for a tele neck), so I was prepared to do some veneer shimming and a bit of jiggery-pokery to get a good fit for the neck, but I hadn't fully planned some of the other issues I would need to overcome with the thinner body (40mm vs 45 or over of a proper Strat).  Some of my choices proved to be quite challenging to execute but it has worked out very well and I have a nice fairly lightweight Strat that's much better than the Squier that provided the body would probably have been.

The body is routed for HSH but I didn't already have any suitable humbuckers, so I just decided to make it an SSS guitar.

Parts I Already Had

• Neck: Guitar Anatomy poly satin finished 22 fret 9.5" radius white maple with separate maple fretboard and quite chunky frets (2.7mm wide x approx 1.1 or 1.2mm tall).  I've bought one of their necks before that required a fair amount of fret levelling and dressing, but this one was absolutely perfect.  I've been used to roasted maple more recently and this white maple one looks very stark and light by comparison, especially the large bare space on the headstock that I may occupy with a decal of some description.  It's a really nice neck though.  I had to file the nut slots a little deeper but that was all.
• Bridge: Wilkinson WOV01 52.5mm spaced chrome trem bridge with full size block, 6 fulcrum screws, and pressed metal saddles.  I swapped the saddles for block steel because I prefer them.  The included Squier bridge was actually OK and had a chunkier block than I've seen on a Squier, but the Wilkinson has a push-in arm that I prefer and it needed to be used for something.
• Pickups: IronGear Smokestack pickup set with parchment covers.  Alnico V with 42/43 AWG enamel wire.  These are described as two coils but not humbucking and with 3 wires that allow you to switch between a reasonably standard output on "one coil" (9, 7, 7.3k DC resistance Bridge, Middle, Neck), and the "second coil" to give a higher output (18.8, 11.8, 12.7k Bridge, Middle, Neck).  I think that their description of Coil 1 and Coil 2 is a but misleading and I just tend to think of them as one really overwound single coil with a wire tapped from the middle of the winds.  Despite the larger or extra coil the pickups are standard depths.
  IronGear recommend 500K Log pots and a 0.047uF tone capacitor.  I already had 3 x 500k Push-Push log pots (I prefer them to Push-Pull especially with Fender knobs).
• Plastics: 11 hole Mint Green SSS pickguard (in between the "almost white but just a hint of apple" and "snot green cheapo plastic keystone tuner button" shades) from https://www.guitarselectric.co.uk
  The supposedly Ivory coloured knobs I had are actually more towards a cream colour and I will probably change them to parchment.
• Electrics: Switchcraft output socket.
  Enclosed 5-way blade 28mm deep switch from Axetec (SW006 here: https://www.axetec.co.uk/guitar_parts_uk_049.htm).  I knew the floor of the control cavity would be too shallow for the 33mm deep CRL type switch, and I've found these enclosed switches to be very reliable.

Continued in Next Comment .......

BillDL

PART 2 ......

The Build Details And Issues Encountered

The neck overhang was quite a thick one on this neck and the heel would not press down completely into the pocket in the body with the pickguard under it, so I sanded off some of the thickness underneath it while leaving enough wood for the tang of the last fret.

I had to shim the sides of the neck pocket with hard wood veneer and do a bit of precision sanding to get the neck perfectly centred.  I suspect a little bit of the wood from the rear of the pocket may have been removed while the original owner was widening the pocket and squared it off, because with the neck heel right back into the pocket the bridge saddles would have been right at the extremes of their rearward movement.  What we used to call "plastic putty" and clingfilm are very useful for jobs like this. 2-part epoxy putty that looks like a Battenberg sponge cake with thick marzipan covering and you just squeeze it together to mix.  Cover the heel of the neck with clingfilm, place the mixed putty against the back wall of the neck pocket and a little around the corners, push the neck into place while measuring to the High E saddle in an optimum position, and secure until it cures.  This created nice hard packing from the back wall of the pocket and filled the space in the square corners where the rounded heel would be.

I discovered that with a Switchcraft socket on the jack plate the spring-loaded tip terminal couldn't deflect enough to get a plug in or out with the plate screwed down, so out came the Dremel with grinding bits and sanding drums to deepen the floor of the jack socket cavity and undercut an area so the socket would work.

While I had the Dremel out I did a dry fit of the pickguard with pickups fitted and the neck in place.  It's a pain when you have to unscrew a neck with an overhang to remove the pickguard because even raising the neck pickup and flexing the pickguard still doesn't work and the neck pickup still catches the back of its cavity.  I sanded away some of the wood at the rear of the neck pickup's cavity into a slope so this could be achieved by just raising the neck pickup.  I also widened the fairly narrow channel between the pickup cavities to accommodate the thicker bundles of wire from the middle and neck pickups (yellow arrows in photo below).

I had already held the shallower 5-way switch inside the control cavity to make sure it wouldn't touch the bottom, and I had done the same with the Push-Push switched pots, but I hadn't taken into account the thickness of the shakeproof washers and the adjustment to get the knobs down as flush as I could.  I realised that they may actually be pressing on the bottom of the cavity or else there was no space between the base of the pots and the floor to accommodate the thickness of a stray wire, so while I had the Dremel and grinding bits out I deepened the floor of the cavity in those areas before screening it all with copper foil.

For some reason the hole for the bridge ground wire was through the middle of the bridge pickup cavity into the spring cavity below it.  The extra thickness of having 3 wires from each of the pickups each twisted into their own bundles made the space under the bridge pickup pretty tight, so I drilled a new hole from close to the top end of the switch through to the side wall of the spring cavity at the claw end (see above photo).

Next came the pickguard modification. Even though I had moved the neck about 1 to 2mm forward in the neck pocket the pickguard still wouldn't fit in against the back of the neck while also clearing the front of the bridge plate, but I couldn't just shave off plastic from the neck pocket end because the bottom horn of the pickguard would have been onto the body curve and the switch would have been too far forward to fit the front of the cavity.  Conversely if I had just deepend the cut-out around the bridge the bottom tone pot would have been too far back to fit the control cavity and the middle pickup would have been hard up against the rear of it's own cavity.  I ended up having to take plastic off both ends to get it all to fit.  A sharp safety blade used as a scraper is perfect for this kind of job.

Electronics

I decided that, while I was putting together a Strat with the option of individual "boosts" on each pickup, I may as well add a micro toggle switch to get the neck pickup into the mix along with the bridge and all three enabled.  I asked a question about this without realising at the time that this is what the so-called "Gilmour Mod" comprises.  I thought I had ordered the mounting plate that is held in place by the front two pots and recesses the switch deeper below the hole in the scratchplate to make it less obtrusive, but discovered I had forgotten to order it.  Instead I simply filed the end of the soft metal chromed toggle lever a bit shorter and rounded it.  The micro switch has a key down the threaded collar and a corresponding washer that has a locating pin which goes into a hole alongside the collar hole to stop the switch spinning.  I used that immediately underneath the pickguard and carefully bored a little hole into the underside of the pickguard (about half way through it) for the locating pin to fit into.  I didn't need no stinkin' fancy bracket? (see my comment here regarding fitting of the mini toggle switch: https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/4312871/#Comment_4312871)

Working with bundles of three rubber insulated wires from each pickup plus the micro toggle switch plus the fact that I didn't have space under the switched pots proved to be pretty finicky work while trying to make it all fit into the middle area between lever switch and pots.  I would guess that Axetec recommend 500K pots because these pickups are likely to have more mids than standard Stratty pickups, but I decided to add 470K resistors at the "ordinary" (IN) position pin of each pot switch so the pickups saw 250K.

Continued in next comment .....

BillDL

PART 3 (final comment) .....

The Bridge

I obviously knew that the block on the Wilkinson bridge was a full length one and therefore longer than the Squier one, but I had done a dry fit and the block had a tiny bit of clearance from the level of the back of the body so it wouldn't rub on the cover plate.  What I hadn't taken into account was that with the bent ends of the springs in the holes in the block it would place them higher, and in this case the holes in the block for the spring ends were a fair amount shallower than the length of the bent section of the springs.  After much consideration I decided to drill the holes a little deeper while maintaining the same angle (they aren't absolutely vertical and you have to be careful of drilling through the front side of the block) and then get the Dremel out again and grind some nice smooth flared grooves from the front edge of the block back to the spring holes so that the thickness of the spring wire was down into the block.  For smoothing metal really finely like this I find the various profiles of Ruby polishing stones are excellent.  https://www.reidtimber.co.uk/ruby-polishing-stones

All lubricated up with teflon grease on all the moving parts and the nut, this is now the most accurate and reliable 6-screw vintage type trem I've had on a guitar.  I would guess this has been done before by laypeople and possibly manufacturers, but I felt quite pleased with myself for this bit of improvisation.

Photo is a bit fuzzy but you should be able to see the grooves ground into the bridge block:

Playability and Sounds

This is a bright guitar without a doubt.  I'm glad I wired it so the bridge pickup is on its own tone control, because it definitely needs it in the standard output mode and I think without those resistors it would have been too ice-picky, and the tones work well to cut back on the brightness.  I'm not so keen on the taper of the volume pot though.  I like it to be more gradual over a greater range, but this is only really operational down to just above 7 and the push-push pots have a fairly low friction which means it's fairly easy to nudge the volume knob.

With the pots in the OUT position for the full output the pickups definitely have more mid-range but are still pretty Strat-like in character.  The problem with having boosts like this is that after you have played on the high setting it can sound distinctly jangly and a bit weedy going back to the normal output.  I kind of wish I had wired the pots so that IN was full output and OUT was the reduced and standard output, because I think I will use this guitar more in the full output mode.  I'll be buggered if I'm going back in there again to switch the poles around though.

The "Gilmour Mod"?  I'm glad I decided on this as a bit of an afterthought because I quite like the bridge and neck pickups together.  With all three pickups on it allows for a slightly different sound option, but I don't think I will use that one much.

A nice project, with it's own complications to overcome, but one that plays really nicely now that it is fully set up.  It did take quite a bit of experimentation to get the pickup heights adjusted to sound their best.

Keefy

Wow, that body definitely went to a good home with you @BillDL!

BillDL

Thanks @Keefy.

PeteC

Latest build -
Mira original inspired 

Black Limba body 
Mahogany neck profiled modelled on my 94 McCarty 
Carbon fibre reinforced with 2 way truss rod 
Rosewood board with Bashkin style fret markers in pink ivory and maple
Neck pinstripe maple and ebony binding with concealed fret ends
25” 24 fret scale 
Double cutaway
Stoptail 
Volume, Tone, 3 way and coil taps
Tonerider Birminghams 
Kluson open backed tuners 
Bone nut
Satin finish 

probably going up for sale in the classifieds shortly - DM for detailed pics if interested 

https://share.icloud.com/photos/07aynDB1we6nKG0pBIc0HTzbw


cheers, Pete 

Acdeezee86

My first partscaster - a P90 tele.  

A bit of a cheat, though, because I bought the body already fully loaded from @ZenOvertone and basically just had to screw in the neck. I did have to finish the neck, ream for 10mm tuners and chose to switch out the bridge for Gotoh In-Tune.  The body is from Warmoth and is very light and resonant, so I suspect it is chambered - my scientific knuckle rap tests seem to confirm this.  The pickups are from Creamery.  

The neck, also sold to me by Zen, was unfinished and is from @GSPBASSES. I shellaced it and I have to say it is a joy to play - I know GSP already gets a lot of love here, but let me just add some more.  Also the shellac finish was very easy to apply and I like how it feels under the fingers, as well as how it looks.

At the next re-string I will add a vibramated B5 to see how that feels and how well it stays in tune.

As a first partscaster project this was probably way too easy and came out too well - a perfect gateway drug.  There will surely be a next one at some point and I am almost certain it will be a disaster!