The Guitar Is Done!!!

I remember when my children were little I thought I’d have so much extra time once they got older and more self-reliant .  WRONG!!!!!! Now there is baseball, softball, basketball, piano lessons, drum lessons…I’m sure there is more but right now my addled brain can’t think of everything they are involved in.  I love that they are into so many different things, it’s just I now laugh at my younger self for being so wrong.  With that little blurb out of the way I can now update you on the $10 guitar project. 

I have to say it took a lot of time and work to bring it back to life but I enjoyed every second of it.  Even the insanely long and painstaking process of getting the frets sanded, leveled, crowned and polished was fun. 

So here is the journey I took with the poor neglected guitar that hung up in a music store collecting dust.

As a reminder…This is how the poor orphan looked when I brought it home.

It was like Christmas the day the parts order showed up.  I was so excited I’m surprised the picture isn’t blurry from my jumping up and down.  Just kidding, I played it cool because Joyce and the kids were in the room.

Look at all those goodies!!! There are new Fender pickups, locking tuning keys, new electronics, new pick guard, a new bridge/tremolo with a heavy brass block for better sustain, a new nut and lots of other little parts and pieces.  It’s at this point I started to get nervous and started to pray that I hadn’t made a mistake taking this project on.  Oh well, no turning back now.

The patient is on the operating table.  It’s about to get more than brain surgery.  Oh yeah snuck in a brain joke, go me!!!

It is now in pieces, let the games begin! Look at how organized I am with the little Ziplock bags.

You may remember from my last post about this project that I purchased a glue injector to get the glue into the cracks, it turned out that I didn’t really need it for the largest crack.  You see, my 14 year old daughter is much stronger than anyone thought.  I had her using a tool that’s used to spread the springs on GM cars with drum brakes to spread the guitar body apart so I could get the needle in the crack so I could inject the glue.  Things were going as planed when suddenly there was a loud snapping noise and the guitar body split into two pieces, hence the need for the extra clamps.  It actually worked out for the best, I was able to get more glue onto the pieces for a stronger bond.

Ta da!! The clamps are off, the body has been sanded and is ready to be finished.  As you’ll see in the last pictures I liked it this way so I left it looking like this.

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I didn’t like the original headstock design so I decided to give it my own “custom” look.  It looked way better in my mind then in the final outcome.  I’m still not happy with it but for now it’s staying like it is.

Well, it’s all back together now, the string height has been set to Fender specs, the intonation is dead-on and it has that David Gilmore look I wanted.  The only thing I did differently than planned was that I “decked” the tremolo instead of floating it because I decided I didn’t want to use the tremolo on this one.  This poor orphaned guitar now plays great and sounds terrific.  As a matter of fact it has become my go-to-guitar when I’m practicing, mostly because my Les Paul has got a case of fret buzz and I’ve been too busy to fix the problem.

There has been a lot of stuff going on that I need to tell you all about so as I get time I’ll get the stories posted.