Dub's Wacky Project Guitars Thread--we're baaaaaack

[dubkitty]

i’m dumb. today was a quasi-holiday so of course <Bob Dylan voice>nuthin’ was delivered</voice>.

i decided to sand another of the fret spaces on the board that had been sanded first before the filler and it came out much better than the first fret. conclusion: for best results i need to remove (which probably simply means wash off) the filler from the unsanded parts, sand them down, and then reapply the filler and sand it down. not too huge of a pain in the butt considering. what’s unfortunate is that as i go along i’m spotting more small divots/chips, each of which will need to be drop-filled with CA and sanded smooth. if i lowered my standards this would be much easier.

i’m giving the filler on the Hopf more time to dry. it looks and feels dryer than the spots i filled in the walls, but it won’t hurt anything to wait.

[dubkitty]

the sad thing is that i’ll be dead in a few years and nobody’s going to appreciate the stuff i did at all. maybe i could arrange to have some of y’all inherit the stuff with little inherent value (i’m assuming that if Becky survives me she’ll sell whatever’s worthwhile).

[dubkitty]

since my stuff was delivered yesterday, i got the replacement Strat knob and put it on today. i had to ream the aperture out with a 1/4” drill bit so it’d fit the 1/4” shaft on the Tonestyler pot, but the material is soft enough i could hand-ream it with the bit. i didn’t want to risk drilling through or breaking the knob with a rotary tool. it only took 15 minutes. a round of pickup and truss rod adjustments and it’s essentially done so glasses up, everyone! something’s finished.

mods included Fender CS ‘69 Strat pickups, nickel-plated flat jack plate, Stellartone Tonestyler tone switch, Decoboom “Streamline” pickguard and back plate, knobs and tips by Xentric Guitars of Colorado.

[dubkitty]

i also put the Hopf back together. the filler didn’t have the greatest surface either bare or painted with the black lacquer marker, but it turned out not to matter much because with the bridge placed for proper intonation the feet cover most of the holes/patches. i guess that sitting for a few months let the neck settle into its working tension—it had never been installed—and this may have helped make it possible to remove the shims from under the bridge. with them gone the guitar is noticeably more snappy and resonant. i still need to reset the pickup heights and polepieces, but that’s not so difficult. so that’s two, count ‘em two guitars finished today. too bad i can’t keep up this pace.

next thing will be Jetstar finish issues. i’m hoping that the tinted Vintage White on the body and headstock is thick enough to not sand through. whether that works out or not, i have to tape off the edges of the fingerboard where the finish is screwed and put some primer on there and on the finish around the actual break. it would be nice to only have to wait for one more round of lacquer to cure.

[dubkitty]

i’m going to have to buy more hard cases. the Hopf has one, but the new Strat and Jetstar do not. i also need cases for the Gemini Tele and the Esquire should i decide to keep it. pretty much every project coming down the pike will also need one other than the Dyna Jet. i suppose i’ll have to get a Mustang Bass case for the baritone Jazzmaster; i can check with my actual Mustang Bass case LOL. i counted and that's ten cases total, not counting the Jazz Bass.

[dubkitty]

the Hopf is yet another example of how when i get a guitar set up well the bridge or the adjustable saddles line up more or less in a straight line. it used to puzzle me how so many guitars i’ve played had saddle arrangements reminiscent of 60s cartoon character Snaggletooth’s eponymous dentition. when it happens i take it as a sign i got it right. lately this has been the case with the Hopf, the blue M-75, the Jazzmaster, and the Duo Sonic.

the lack of hyphenization in “Duo Sonic” makes my head hurt.

[dubkitty]

i dialed in the Hopf tonight, and it’s so much better than before. it used to sound kind of nondescript and dull, but now it’s positively snappy and sounds like i hoped it would back when i decided on the pickup swap. i could use it in a standard rotation now, though it’s still a bit fragile. if i put a wedge in as a neck shim it’d help a lot, but i’m not prepared for that level of fabrication right now. it could also use a bit of fret leveling, but as long as i can get away without it i will. i did have to sand one fret a bit under the A string so it wouldn’t buzz, but happily that was simple.

next things will be sanding the Jetstar bits and the Höfner fingerboard for the Galaxiemaster.

[dubkitty]

when the GFS body for the Esquire arrives i’ll switch the Esquire neck and guts over to the blue body and mount the mahogany neck to the green body. the Spertzl tuners are already mounted, so once that’s done all that should be needed is installing the modern bridge and ordering the pickups and control plate stuff. the GFS body will need a neck plate or bolt ferrules; i’m waiting to see if the Squier neck plate made dents before deciding on plate vs. ferrules. i suspect leaving off the plate might make the sound slightly “woodier.” when i put that stuff together storage is going to become a problem, compounded when the Galaxiemaster neck is also mounted. the baritone is off in the distance sometime next summer so i’m not as concerned about that. i don’t want to spend project funds on cases, but at some point i’m stuck with it. i guess i could use the multi-guitar stand for the patient queue. i do need to either get a case for the green Strat or evict someone else from their flat case temporarily if it’s leaving the house.

[dubkitty]

while waiting for Becky to be released from the hospital—she needs me to drive her home because she came in an ambulance—i’ve been sanding the parts of the fingerboard that were treated with grain filler but never sanded. four frets in it’s clear that i was wrong about it not working well on those areas…on frets 3 and 4 you can see quite a number of filled cracks, which show lighter on the dark background.

zoom in.

this makes finishing the neck simpler. i can just do the wood down to 2000 (my nicest is 1500 now) and it’ll be sorted, and then level the inlay stripes and knock down the wood on either side a bit. then if i knock out the back of the neck pocket and line it up i could mount the neck. i think i’ll do more polishing on that first.

[dubkitty]

and the GFS Tele body just shipped. so in about a week i’ll have Telecaster questions to work with. that might be an opportune time to get out the soldering stuff and redo the Esquire’s switch. but mostly i want to put the Esquire and the green Tele together. i guess the stuff in progress i have no cases for can hang out on the sofa.

[dubkitty]

almost finished sanding the wood parts of the Höfner fingerboard down to 1000 grit. it’s coming along nicely. i need to get finer sandpaper to finish that part and then file/sand the big inlay stripes to be smooth and knock down the wood along the fret edges that stands above the inlays and is in poor shape.

i got gutsy and sanded the painted areas on the Jetstar. i’m not at home so pictures will have to wait. the last coat didn’t cover everything, but it’s better than i expected. the paint didn’t cover the headstock ding, but the surfaces are smooth and even. the body still shows some bare mahogany, but the original problem area, the big dent from falling down, is nicely covered. i feel good about the Mr. Base primer, which i’ll probably do sometime this weekend.

BTW sanding recently dried paint with 1500 grit from the start makes for a nicer result.

[dubkitty]

photos of the Jetstar work:

here you can see that the original crush dent is completely covered and smooth; you can see a bit of the original fill from the seller near the top on the right, the darker grey-brown. if the primer does its job the remaining stuff should be reasonably easy.

sorry the photo sucks. i tried several times. the color isn’t great, but the curves and planes are smooth. again, primer should help a lot.

i’m not dying to do another coat, and a lazier person would just cut to the neck repairs, but if there’s anything to learn from my saga it’s that little things count in the big picture. hopefully the next pass will be done and sufficiently dry to give me something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving.

[dubkitty]

the GFS Lido import-spec Tele body arrived today. at first glance it seems nicer than the Jazzmaster body i got for the Galaxiemaster. i don’t see the kind of visible segmentation of multiple pieces here, or the same degree of orange-peeling. there are weirdnesses, though. GFS seems to have a real problem with color matching…the Fiesta Red JM body is more like coral, their Daphne Blue is rather more greenish than Fender spec, and their British Racing Green is more like forest green. the binding is also oddly variegated, yellower in some spots than others. i can live with it, but it’s peculiar. i think it’ll work. all the hardware and the Squier neck will get transplanted to here.

[dubkitty]

i decided to work on the Höfner fingerboard some more, and made a lot more progress than i expected. after trying to file down the wood bits on either side of the inlays on the remaining part of the neck with some success, i decided to try filing the entire area between those frets to get the inlays, which shrink at different rates and had uneven surfaces, flat and i’m quite pleased with how it came out. i went back and worked on the 12th fret some more and also got it flatter, with the added benefit of evening out the color a bit. i’ve gone over the inlay fret areas with 800 grit, and will take it down to 2000 tomorrow. when that’s done all that’s left to do with the neck is fill that small divot on the board at the first fret. it’s a bit annoying because i’ll have to clean the carefully moisturized wood with alcohol to get it ready for the CA.

but i’m encouraged by how the Galaxiemaster stuff is coming along. i need to do more polishing on the body to get it as good as possible, and after that—or maybe before—i’ll bung out the end of the neck pocket so the neck lines up properly with the body, redrill the neck’s bolt holes, and mount the neck though it’s going to get disassembled because i have nowhere to put all these half-completed guitars and the GM fits nicely in the storage compartment below the top of the coffee table in pieces. it also doesn’t make sense to have it assembled when there’s still an awful lot to be planned, worked out, and put together. the Esquire and Tele will be done way before that even with needing to wait to order various bits for the Tele, and insh’allah the Jetstar will get finished by Thanksgiving. at the rate i’m going i’ll have to spend some of my year-end bonus on cases for all these fuckers.

[dubkitty]

i had an opportunity to test out the Fender Acoustasonic Standard Telecaster today, but unfortunately i didn’t care for it much. it felt odd, and though i’ve seen YouTube demos where it sounded good i wasn’t impressed by its amplified sound, acoustic or electric. which puts me back in the uncomfortable spot of either getting an Italia Mondial, the only electric with a piezo pickup i like, or trying to do something with a project guitar. i really don’t want to get into the whole Graphtech thing because by the time i’m done it would inevitably end up costing $500-600 between the bridge, preamp, and ancillary shit with no assurance i’ll like the result when installed. the ghetto solution would be 2 or 3 Schaller Oyster piezo elements wired together into my Hotone Acoustic Simulator, so i might try that. but the only platform that makes sense is the Galaxiemaster which as noted above is well off in terms of being finished so that’s down the road. there are less costly Graphtech solutions, but they’d require fucking with guitars i like the way they are.