Guitar projects

I may or may not have mentioned that I'm a bass guitar player. I started around 30 years ago. Mostly I have 30 years experience in not being good at it, though I have appeared on stage a couple of times - once playing for a country band despite neither really liking or knowing any of the music they played. The 20 year old version of myself was much better suited to spending Friday and Saturday nights doing that than the current version.

I decided recently that I want to have a crack at putting together a kit guitar. Basically it's a guitar, in pieces. The timber is already cut and routed (I can't do either) but it's otherwise raw and not finished. The components will mostly be garbage. 

This is a bit of a rabbit hole, because I'm experienced enough to not like cheap components on my guitars. There are some things that you just don't skimp on. 

The process

1. A lot of sanding, then sanding some more. 

2. Staining. I'm using an Australian made stain called Dingotone. I'll be using 2 colours - a red for the base colour that will cover the entire body, and a black that will be used around the edges and that I'm going to attempt to have the red fade into. A lot of unknowns here as there is likely to be a fine art in getting this to work, and I don't know what it is yet.  Other than trial and error, this bit isn't a huge job. Should be a couple of hours.  Then I need to wait. If it was summer, that'd be about 4 days. I live in Ballarat, so that might be a week or two.

3. Intensifying coat. This is where things get serious and the mistakes made above will start to stand out.  Yet again, we're back to waiting.

4. Final coat. The Dingotone method has a final coat that is fine, but a lot of people have been complaining over the past couple of years has been problematic in drying. An alternative is to use Tru-oil instead. If you're a shooter, you've probably used that stuff before. More waiting. 

5. Neck preparation. This is possibly the scariest part. If the neck that appears is good, the frets will be all level and well dressed and I won't have to touch it. Reality is that I'll need to put to work a whole lot of skill that I don't yet possess to get it right. This is the make or break of it being a playable guitar. The ability to get a good action out of it happens right here.  I need some practice to get this under control (see below). 

6. Put it together then do the electronics and hardware. Quite simply, Bolt on neck, install machine heads, bridge, pickups then wire to the pots and output socket. Throw on some strings, plug in to amplifier and see what happens. 

By this point, a month or two will have passed. It'll be a process. 

5 subnote: I remembered that I had an old guitar floating around with a buggered fret (mostly due to a pre-Google era attempt at repairs), lack of levelling and some electronics dramas. I've been carting it around for 20 odd years despite never using it, and never really looked after it. 

This has become my test candidate that I've decided that I want to return into a completely playable state: replace the fret, level and dress the entire fretboard, replace the electronics and see what happens.

If you look at the fret you can see some cuts into the metal. This was from me trying to get the fret down with strings on, then loosing one string right as I hit it. You can also see where I'd flat filed the fret and scratched the board.

The entire guitar. 

I've stripped the machine heads out as the originals were garbage. I'll replace them with some quality ones. When I pulled out the output socket I discovered a really, really bad soldering job I must have done at some point in the past.

The white pickguard/pickups are rubbish. The electronics are noisy. I found a seller who was selling a black loaded guard with all electronics from a Squire Affinity - basically the budget Fender brand that produces affordable Stratocasters. I could put genuine Fender gear on here, but the cost of those parts vs the value of the guitar would be like fitting a Porsche engine into a Hyundai. This guitar is a knock of brand. It won't be a direct fit - the pickguard dimensions will be different, so I'm going to have a couple of holes on the body.  The guitar is beat up, so what's another hole?

Given the change away from white, I decided to cut the white plastic tip off the end of the whammy bar and bring it back to chrome. A little ghetto, but shouldn't look so bad. 

The body has polished up pretty well despite a few dings here and there. It's good enough to work with. Assuming I don't destroy the fretboard once I commence work on it,  I'm hoping that this will produce a playable guitar. If it's playable and I like it, it can go on the wall. If not, the kids can have it. The neck itself is bolt on, so if I do damage it beyond the point of return, I can just replace that part. 

Like everything I do these days, there's a lot of waiting involved - especially on Australia Post, so this pair of projects will be things I can tinker with here and there as time permits.