All done!

Well after quite a few months of work, and some big learning curves the guitar is now complete!

It has quite heavy strings on it to bring out the acoustics and it works well.  It is, as you would expect, much louder acoustically than a solid body guitar and amplified it has some wonderful warm and or bright classic tones despite being relatively cheap (£17 each or £30 for a pair) Vanson toaster PAF style pick ups - The neck is a '57 spec alnico II, and the bridge is '59 spec alnico IV with 0.022uF polypro capacitors and they are wired independent so you can blend them better when both pick ups are selected.

Here it is along side the Lils Paul kit we made last year.

All in all it has been a fab project built with only a few basic hand/power tools and it proves that if you're willing to give it ago, anyone with a bit of enthusiasm and patience can build a fab instrument!

Here's a video a quick video going through the various pick up selections both clean and dirty.   Bear in mind that it was filmed on a phone so is not massively representative of the actual tone.  My playing, like my building, is more enthusiastic than good so that doesn't really help either...

Anyway I hope you've enjoyed this blog, feel free to leave any comments and I can't wait to start my next project! :-)

Nearly there...

Okay, it's all wired up.  I pre-wired it using this ply template which I used on my previous kit builds.  I had hoped to fit push/pull pots on this project too.  The pick ups are 4 wire ones so I could have had split coil or series/parallel switches on them.  However I couldn't fit them into the acoustic chamber with the top glued down so I had to go for the basic standard wiring.

 

I then carefully fed the controls into the body through the bridge pickup cavity.  It was certainly fiddly but not as bad as I was expecting.  It only took about 10 minutes using a long screw driver through the jack socket hole and a pair of angled needle nose pliers through the f-hole.  The wire you can see in the f-hole got tucked up out of sight against the body using double sided tape.

I got the action all set up nicely and playing well but then BOLLOCKS #2 occurred...  The top E string kept jumping out of it's groove on the bridge.  On closer inspection it appeared that I hadn't quite lined up the trapeze tail properly.  I ended up having to carefully drill out the screw holes, fill them with dowels, fix the paintwork, and then carefully re-lined up the tail.  Once this was done the problems was sorted and it plays really well!  The paintwork is a bit patchy at repair site but it's well out of sight unless you specifically look for it.