Tiskit86's 2013 Challenge Build - Chestnut, posting on a forum wire...

Back to the pickguard while I wait for the lacquer on the body and neck to cure.

Except - I can't find the template I started a few days ago!




Looked inside, outside, everywhere I could think I might have placed it.

Find it yet?

 

Doh! Found it. Half hour later. Yep - top of the drill press.

File, file file. Sand, sand sand. Emery board works great for smoothing the template edges.






Test fit to make sure the pickups fit...






Punch for holes and drill...





Get out the garolite.




First effort: Why do I use the thinner double stick tape ever? You know that sense when you feel the router bit slide a little into your work? Don't like that.




Eventually got a good one...




Looks good:






Had to make some minor adjustments so had to go over the whole thing w/ 800 and then 1000 grit paper to get a few tooling marks out. Then outside for some lacquer.

 

Fret work...

Figured I could do the frets while waiting for the lacquer to sufficiently cure.

First get the fingerboard flat as a board and tape it off.




Level with the machined aluminum sanding block, crown, and polish with 800, 1000, 2000 and finally 0000 steel wool w/ a dab of chrome polish.

Tried to get some decent shots of the frets...











Nice and straight.

 

I'm at Frampton's Guitar Circus!


Review tomorrow...

 

Guitar Circus...

Not a circus really, unless you count some of the folks in the crowd. I kid!

It was fun. BB King's set wasn't really a set. He sang a couple of songs, played guitar on one, maybe one and a half, but mostly hung out at the front of the stage talking with the middle of the front row. He gets a pass. He's 87 years old. He's BB King for God's sake! My wife summed it up best in the car on the way home… “I suppose he could have played a little more and talked a little less.”

Richard Thompson can play. Wow. I've never seen him before. Complete command of the instrument. A dakota red Strat with a pearloid guard. Sweet.

Frampton was great too. Played his newly found/returned LP Custom a bunch. Felt kind of historic right up until somewhere in the middle of his talkbox bit: “Do you feel… like we do, Sacramento!....... and surrounding areas!” Jolted me right back to reality.

The finale was While My Guitar Gently Weeps - with Frampton and Thompson jamming back and forth on the solo outro. That alone was probably worth the price of admission.

 

Time's a wastin'

I know it's 3 weeks away but it feels like the deadline is coming fast. I'm waiting on some wire and 500k pots I thought I already had, so figured I'd wet sand and polish the body and neck in preparation for the set up.

I didn't want to do too much wet sanding because after all, the weathered wood is the point of this guitar. And I didn't want to have to deal with getting a bunch of junk in all those worm holes! So, after the last coat of lacquer - I sprayed on a liberal amount of Behlen's Blush Eraser on the front and back and let it flatten out. Worked out nice. Needed very little sanding and polishing. The neck is looking good too.

So, tuners and string ferrules. Done. Bolted it together for the first time since I started applying finish.




Get 'em straight...




Punch for the holes...



A little soap on the screws and voila.







Also time to drill and countersink for the pickguard screws. It's a nice tight fit so I drilled using the drill press with the pickguard right on the guitar. I did the countersinks by hand because there was too much chatter for some reason on the press and I couldn't get control.








Time to make a nut and get some strings on it.











I'll let it sit overnight and then do some fine adjusting. This, for me, is the hardest, most labor intensive part of making a guitar.

 

Tweaking the set up.


First get the intonation and the radius set...








Cut the nut slots down to proper depth - I'll finish shaping and polishing the nut after I get the rest of the electronics in and give the whole thing a clean up.





Luckily, I can access the truss rod w/out the pickups in so I can get the relief set right too...









Hmm. Really close! This took me less time than usual. Plays pretty smooth at the moment all up and down.

 

Package from Angela Instruments arrived today.... without the 500k pots!!!

Sorry, all this mail order makes me crazy.

Guess no electronic work for another few days at least.

 

Ready to Rock and Roll...

Wiring and set-up finished! In order to be able to keep all the brightness if I want it, I used the 50's LP wiring scheme and .015 caps instead of the .022's or .047's so the tone pots don't roll off as much of the highs. Plus it looks cool to have that ground wire circling all the pots like an old LP. I can't decide whether I want a treble bleed or not. It does roll off with the volume. It's interesting, each guitar is it's own little identity that needs to be tweaked and prodded in order to get the best out of it.

Very comfortable weight - a few ounces over 7 lbs. The neck feels very good. The nut width is closer to 1 and 11/16ths than 1 and 5/8ths. Contour is a standard U-shape. .94" deep at the nut to .99" at the 12th fret. The Lollar WRHB's sound like they should. Lot's of clarity and bite. I should post a parts list; maybe later.

Here are some glamor shots.



























Too many??

You can get a sense of how the color changes a little depending on the light. It's interesting how the insects ate their way mostly going with the grain. Easier, I guess. Just like sawing.




Now I need to put a quick video together. I'd really like to show something with good sound quality using a nice mic, amp and pre-amp, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to go back East very soon to help out w/ some family stuff and don't want to accidentally miss the deadline like I did last year. That was a bummer!

 

Did a quick video last night, obviously I'm going to have to edit it down to 2 minutes for the official challenge build video, but I wanted to give a sense of how it sounds in all the positions and with various gain levels.

I played it through the franken-tweed princeton I picked up during the challenge, and used my iPhone to record. Maybe at some point I'll be able to do a proper sound recording.








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