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Trimming the headstock

6/21/2018

This kit came with a "paddle" headstock, similar to the picture above. (Yes, that's a Rosewood neck, and mine is Maple, but I couldn't find a picture from when I got the neck, so this is from a similar kit.)

Those are of course very ugly, and you are meant to cut them into whatever shape you want. The problem is there just isn't much room to work with. I tried going with a classy mustache-style headstock design, but I wasn't very happy with how it turned out:

I guess it looks OK, but the size was just too small for my taste. And if you look closely, it's not completely symmetrical. That just won't do.

There's not a whole lot of room to work with here, so I ended up with a simple rounded slash cut. You can see I've already marked that out in pencil above, and here's what it looks like after cutting on the bandsaw and sanding it smooth on the disc sander:

That will work for now. It's time to get back to sanding the body...

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Filling the grain

6/21/2018

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I started filling the grain with Ace Hardware Wood Filler. Why not a proper luthier-grade wood grain filler, you ask? Because I want to be able to complete this kit without ordering any exotic fillers, sealers, or lacquers from specialty companies. I wanted to be able to get this done using readily available materials that everyone has access to. And, I can just walk next door to a hardware store. So, I'm a bit spoiled on that.

What you see above is after covering the entire guitar with filler, then sanding it back down and putting a single coat of white primer on it. The primer helps me see exactly which areas need further sealing and or sanding. I had done a pretty good job on the front and only needed a few areas filled.

The back, however, needed a full coat:

This was cheap wood (Basswood, I believe?) that had a lot of rough grain showing. Hopefully this will be enough to get a decently smooth finish...

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Moving the holes around

6/20/2018

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This kit has some problems. It's nothing that can't be fixed, but it will require some work to straighten out. I knew going into this project that I wasn't just going to bolt this thing together and call it done. It would be almost unusable if I tried that.

The first thing I focused on was the neck. I knew if it wasn't right, the rest of the project was never going to work out. So I made sure it was flat, and I leveled all of the frets, re-crowned them, and polished them. I also had to dress all of the fret ends so they weren't' sharp. Out of the box, they were like little razors.

Once that was done, I bolted the body to the neck and checked for fitment issues. There were many.

You can see above where the neck doesn't look straight. It's actually not bad, but there was this little section of the neck pocket that was milled out deeper than the rest. I'd prefer this to be straight, but it will be covered by the pickguard, so I'm not too worried.

The blue lines are the edges of the neck - I used a straightedge to extend those lines down past the pickups to address another issue outlined below.

The kit manufacturer thoughtfully pre-drilled all of my holes for me. Wonderful! Except quite a few of them were wrong. Bummer.

The cutouts for the pickups (that big oblong hole above) are fine, but the four holes with the red arrows are the problem. They mount the bridge to the body, and the strings and bridge pickup are all connected to it. If I use those holes, the bridge is crooked, and too far over to one side.

Here's what the bridge looks like mounted:

Notice how far over it is to the left. With the strings installed it looks even worse. And there are issues with the strings not lining up on the neck OR over the pickup. The neck is actually bolted on straight to the centerline of the body, and the pickup holes routed in the body line up fine, it's just that bridge plate that's not lined up properly. Oh, and the input jack, too.

Here is the hole for the input jack. Notice the mounting screw holes are off quite a bit as well. Here's what that looks like with the input jack plate installed:

Yep, that's pretty crooked.

With the jack plat on straight, only one hole lines up. It's time to move some holes.

Unfortunately, I lost the pics from this step. But what I did was put a little wood glue and a toothpick in each hole that was wrong. I let them dry overnight, then sanded the toothpick down so that it was flush with the body. You can see the results here:

You can see that the holes are now filled. I also filled all of the holes for the pickguard, but more on that later. I could now line up the plates correctly, and drill new holes, like so:

You can see that the holes didn't need to move much, but that still makes a big difference. the strings now line up with the bridge and pickup, and go straight down the neck instead of veering off to the side.

You can also see in the above picture that all of the pickguard holes are filled and sanded. I'm switching pickguards, and the new one has holes in all different places. But I'll cover that later.

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Trimming the headstock

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Moving the holes around

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