(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.
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| 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.
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| 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:
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| 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.
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| 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:
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| I used copper tape to make the dam. |
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| 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.
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| 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:
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| 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:
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| 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:
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| 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!
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| 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!
