My First (Partscaster) Guitar Build!

(Click on any picture to enlarge) 

Real talk: with the amount of effort and learning I put in, this should be considered a Partscaster+ build.

Presenting: BB!

While I didn't make the body from a block of wood, I did make additional carves and routs. I completely restained it and did the finish on my own, and custom wiring as well. But I'm getting ahead of myself....

Last year, Lance Gregory of Rebirth Guitars posted a pic of a guitar body on the Amateur Luthier Facebook group, asking if he should start over from scratch. It looked amazing. I joked that he should just mail it to me to throw in the trash for him! We started a conversation, and he sold it to me at a good discount along with some hard ware. It arrived in great shape. I knew about the stain errors as he already sent me multiple photos.

Stain seeped a little past the masking tape in a few spots

I got to working on the clear coat. I've done some woodworking around the house, so I just started with Varathane. I didn't realize it at the time, but it is one of the harder coatings to get a mirror polish from.

Here's the tripod jig I made during the hand brushed coating stage:

I knew it would need sanding and polishing, but this was bad.

After spending a few weeks coating this and letting it dry before adding another coat, I went to polish it. I went through the polish in a spot and took out some of the stain. Lance gave me repair some tips, and I fixed those areas. So, a couple of weeks later and... again I burned through the polish. In retrospect, I think some of the stain lifted into the polish. It should have been fixed with lacquer first. I had no idea at the time! After all that work and after a long and exhausting day, in a fit of desperation I threw the body on the ground. I shouldn't have done that and I won't again. First and last time for everything. But its good to own your mistakes, so you can learn from them and do better.

Hey, at least I found out it's a semi-hollowbody!

 
I immediately set on gluing it back together. I intentionally carved out the breaks to make them more noticeable. I sanded off the rest of the finish and stain, and then glued it up (my first guitar glue up)

While I was at it, I carved the horn for comfort with hand chisels, and then painted the gouges gold as would be done on a Japanese vase.

I tested a tested on a board to make sure it would work:

And then I applied the same technique to my guitar. Almost... I should have stained it first:

I used copper tape to make the dam.

Before additional sanding

I then did some additional stain tests with the new clear coating I chose. Crystalac was recommended by several luthiers because of how well it polished. It's a small business too, so that's a bonus. But, it was causing the TransTint stain to act like watercolors on my tests:

 
I contacted them, and they immediately gave me a tip on how to prevent this: spray lacquer over it first. 

After that, I was able to get my staining and clear coating done! This still took a long time. After the lacquer, there was a grain filler, then over ten airbrushed coats of Brite Tone, with at least four hours between coats.

You can still see the epoxy trough lines. That grain absorbed less stain

I then gave it a couple of weeks to cure before polishing. At the time, I just had a random orbital sander, and I had no idea at how bad it was for this job, even with the foam pad attachments:

I got to wiring it up. These are Lollar Imperial pickups, handmade in Tacoma. I decided to keep all the wiring, in case I want to put them in something else:

I got a laugh out of this temp rig!

I then cut, stained, and clear coated the body cavity cover, using red oak ply. Around this time, I found a buffer attachment for my drill. It worked so well I repolished as much of the body as I could:

Cover is buffed with drill, body was buffed later. What a difference!

I got a Solo guitar neck with a paddle head so I could make my own shape:

Sketched these ideas on my phone!

I settled on this design. I created the logo based on how I've signed hundreds of video game posters, then printed it onto decal material. It was also covered in several layers of Crystalac... and I had to try this technique twice to get it to work. Turns out if the decal is on a matte surface, when gloss goes on top of it, there is a visible line. I'm glad I took the time to fix that problem!

I then worked with my friend Josh Jones at TablePlay to get the serial number engraved. While his main business is laser cutting and UV printing things for the table top world, he was also happy to take on a custom job!

BB stand for "Bar Brawler" since it looks like it survived a big fight

The second to last thing I needed to do was to either get a new 3-way switch or fix the one I had. It's a brand new Fender switch, but it was designed to be mounted on much thinner material. Wanting to wrap this up before the holidays, I found some square stock in my garage, hacked off a piece, and soldering iron 'brazed' it onto the existing switch. Works! I'm not planning on selling this, so I don't mind it having a few quirks.

The final thing I did was talk to my friend Dagna at Silesia Guitars to show her my first build. In the time it took to bring it there, the cold in my trunk threw off the neck and the frets were buzzing a lot more than I expected. She gave me some tips on how to do a proper fret level and crown.

There's a lot of other tangents on this journey. I put a new nut in the neck, I tried a lot more stain and coating experiments than were shown, and there were wiring problems that were later fixed

This was a fun journey. I've already got a couple of friends that want a custom guitar built by me now, and I'm looking forward to making them something even better!

Exhibit: Star Spectra 2.0

Star Spectra 2.0 with Designer Stephanie Delancey and myself

Quick note: Opinions expressed on my blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the Pacific Science Center.

I've been in the Exhibits department with Pacific Science Center for over a year (come visit!!), and finally finished my first redesign of an older exhibit.

If I remember the schematics correctly, Star Spectra was designed in the late 80s or early 90s. It was designed to teach guests that cold stars are red, and hot stars are white. Because this was before the advent of  blue LEDs, they left out the fact that blue stars were the hottest of them all. It was built using incandescent light bulbs. Here's a shot of it:

Original Star Spectra

It had seen better days, and the circuitry was eating incandescent light bulbs like popcorn. I was ecstatic to be asked to work with our design manager, Stephanie Delancey, and create the new version! This would be my first time working with an Arduino to make something. I've done other things in Circuit Python, but Arduino is more responsive and takes up less memory. So, I got to learn Arduino from scratch. I'm very happy to have the support to do things like that on the job.

The First challenge was to find a way to make a gradation that went from red, orange, yellow, white, and blue, while skipping green. There is a TON of code for rainbows online. And why not? Rainbows are awesome and they look pretty on just about anything, and they show off what RGB LEDs can do! But green stars don't really exist, so it couldn't be part of our exhibit. Coming from an art design background, the easiest way for me to solve the problem was to start by making the gradient in Affinity Photo and then observing what was going on in the gradient by using the eyedropper. I then turned that image into a graph for each color. Here's the result:

Art Major Does Math! (typo on right, should say 1024)

After that, I was able to figure out several ways to make this gradient in Arduino. I first did it with a series of if statements, but then a FX professional friend in the game showed me another way that used a lot less lines of code.

Afterwards, I experimented with illuminating spheres. I was able to find some opaque Christmas tree ornaments that lit up really well from an Adafruit ringlight. Results:

Cheap Ornaments cut in half. Lego characters for scale.

But ultimately, Stephanie wanted to go in another direction. She was hoping to have a flatter display. So, I tested the same LEDs with Lighting White from Tap Plastics. I used a PVC pipe to prevent light leak, and the results were really good!

Scissors and Hersey's Kiss wrapper for scale

With this knowledge and Stephanie's design notes, I built a protoype in TinkerCad. It's free, I know how to use it, and we had limited time to get this done. With it, I was able to overcome most design errors. (If I was to redesign it, it would still add certain reinforcements to the box so it doesn't sag when I open it up for maintenance)

From this, my coworker Alexa Lewis started building the box, and I started working on the code and circuitry. Arduino is a lot more strict than Python! But, thanks to help from a coworker, friends, the internet, and yes, even ChatGPT for two sections (I had to correct its mistakes, but it told me why it wrote things a certain way which was super helpful!), I was able to to get the code done. I got to borrow an empty office while coding, and was very happy to find my very own mini ducky in there! Good Omen:

Inspirational Ducky. Great for debugging!! Arduino Uno for scale

Afterwards, I moved onto wiring everything up. I had some practice soldering together guitar parts, but this was a lot more delicate! I was REALLY happy to find a single power supply that output 5 VDC for the LEDs and 12 VDC for the Ardunio Uno. Total win!

I was nearly done, but still had to make the control knob. I was planning on using a guitar knob, but I knew that it would wear out or break quickly. I was mentioning this to a friend at their going away party, and their friend offered to donate a rotary encoder from a decommissioned CNC router!! This thing is built like a tank. It took a little more code, but it was SO worth it! It feels great and is very sturdy:

Donated Rotary Encoder

Encoder in its new housing with a Molex connector

And with that, and a bunch of more work building onto the removable board, and we were done!

Almost... Turned out that the graphic's words were dark (see top image), and needed backlit. With very little time left, I went to a local craft store and bought LED fairy lights. They plugged right in:

All the things. Glove, stapler & gaffer tape roll for scale

Back side of board. Power supply is on this side to protect LEDs from heat

I was honored to be asked to build this and am looking forward to making more exhibits soon!