Well, the first build didn't turn out half bad... just not half good, either. I took an old 60's Japanese twelve string and replaced the electronics, bridge and neck on it. The neck pocket was too big, so I filled it with a chunk of pine for the neck to sit in, but I never got any sustain out of it and the playability was awful. It sounded anemic with no body and no sustain.
This was the result:
Ugly and anemic, so I scrapped it.
The last one, the body turned out not to be a "strat" body, but some weird old knockoff thats body cavity didn't line up with pickguards, necks didn't fit and neither did bridges. (actually, this build was supposed to be fairly grandiose, the body was very heavily relic'd and I was going to mate it up to one of those cheap, beaten up strat necks off Chris' guitars, a vintage style bridge and put a humbucker and a lipstick tube SC in it with a custom cut pickgaurd... maybe I'll go back to this before I do the esquire).
I've had bad luck with "builds" in the past, and I'm just looking to make a simple, clean build without all the crazy issues I've come across. I've installed bridges, tuners, pickups, nuts, electronics, pickguards, replaced necks, done setups on guitars requiring shims under the neck. I'm well versed with each individual piece of the installation, I'm just having trouble getting parts that will easily match up and make the build painless.
I've also got jack skills with wood working (ya'll don't want to see the HB route under the pick guard of my 70's Ibanez....), so I was hoping to avoid having to do any wood work on the build.
My main concern is: do GFS bodies really match up like they claim they do? Has anyone on here used one?