The Friendly 12bar Blues Guitar Forum

I like guitar building, luthier's work is something I appreciate.
There are so many nice woods to use and so many guitar shapes you can design.
Well, wood working is unfortunately not possible when living in an appartment mostly due to noise issues.
So I grab the parts over the web and I build my projects.

So everything strarted when I saw a bargain on Epay and I got the body.
Then I found a loaded scratchplate with a mid boost and vintage noiseless pickups in the classified section of a guitar forum.
A vintage spec neck, soft V and 21 frets, I think it's called the Fender "classic 50's" series.

I had to route the cavity for the mid boost extra electronics.
And the battery cavity.
As you can see the wood grain is mismatched and a natural finish is not really possible.
So I went to an automotive store and in the tuning aisle there was some "custom" paint.
I bought a can of dark metallic red with its dedicated black primer and of course the
clear to give some gloss to the finish. This paint has some pigments in it that change of
color depending on the light source.

After applying the primer, sanding, applying the color, applying the 1st clearcoat, sanding
and applying the 2nd clearcoat, sanding and buffing it looks like that.

It goes from copper gold to an almost blackish cherry red.

Nice!

This is looking very, very good. The colour is really effective. Very neat job of the extra routing of cavities.

Cool color. Can't wait to see the finished guitar!

Brilliant job on the routing an painting Nice collection of pieces to. It is gonna be a killer strat i guess

Thanks for the comments, really appreciated

I put the parts together and everything went OK.
Just had a ground noise when I first tried it. I did resolder some original ground connections and it seems
to have fixed the problem. It's dead quiet now.

Here is some pics:

That HAS worked out really well. Great finish and of course I'm biaised in fvour of maple necks.

If it sounds as good as it looks you must be overjoyed.

Damn all soldering jobs. I can understand why the Seymour Duncan Liberator (solderless volume (or tone) pot) for easy quick change pickups with no soldering has come into being.

One pretty guitar !!
well done !!

Thanks, really appreciated!

That is beautiful. I love that tinted neck and of course the finish is one of a kind. Very impressive. I bet it sounds lovely too. It inspires me to try and build one myself. Not from scratch like yours but maybe a frankenstrat like Eric Clapton's old "Blackie".

Shine on you crazy diamond.... Or maybe rather : Awesome piece of work

bluesfreek wrote:That is beautiful. I love that tinted neck and of course the finish is one of a kind. Very impressive. I bet it sounds lovely too. It inspires me to try and build one myself. Not from scratch like yours but maybe a frankenstrat like Eric Clapton's old "Blackie".

Thanks It sounds good though these pickups are two stacked single coil, so they have some kind of humbuckerish tone in high gain situation.
Building a guitar from parts is a lot of fun

HalfBlindLefty wrote:Shine on you crazy diamond.... Or maybe rather : Awesome piece of work

Thanks Hans

man that's an awesome paint job that you've gotten onto that thing. In all the guitars I've built the paint is always the hardest bit, to be able to get that right is a sign of someone with true patience (i don't even bother painting the bodies anymore... I know it will turn out crap when I do it.)
I really love that 'aged' neck too is the neck genuine fender?
What kind of pups do you have in it?

Thanks!
I've been lucky with the paint job, sometimes it can be a tremendous ordeal
The neck is from a Mexican Classic Series 50s Strat.
http://www.fender.com/products/search.p ... 0131002304

The pickups are the Fender vintage noiseless with the mid boost preamp.

Hard not to love a beauty like that! Great job.