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

[dubkitty]

well, the annoying finish problems are almost sorted. some gentle and careful polishing toned down the aging tint on the Duo Sonic made it more realistic, and feel better to the touch as well. matching the blue didn't work, but i was able to get the added paint off with careful use of swabs and rubbing compound. so it's as done as it's going to get.

the Jetstar results are mixed...most of the primer and off-white sanded off, but i used a small block from a nail care kit that has four levels of polishing and managed not to further screw up the original paint. the good news is that it occurred to me to test the blond StewMac marker and it's an almost perfect match for the original color, which means that it should be as simple to finish off as the Kondor body black paint fixes. imagine my relief. i'm fixing to go out to Becky's, but will finish off sanding and prepping tomorrow. i would be so happy to be done with it.

[dubkitty]

worked on the Duo Sonic some more. it needed heavier strings so i went out to the local shop and wound up with D'Addarios .012-.052 with a plain .020 G string. i'm generally not a fan of their strings which i find a bit too hi-fi, but they sound absolutely wonderful on the DS. perhaps due to the short scale, the sounds of the pickups are less drastically different than on longer-scale guitars...the transitions from one position to another or from bridge to neck are much smoother. the guitar's oddly mellow sound and switch-position consonance ironically would make it perfect for jazz, and it makes me look forward to getting the Byrdland done. the one hang-up is that the distance from the mounting hole to the saddle of the low E string is shorter than the amount of extra winding at the ball end, so that string was impossible to intonate. i solved this using a trick i'd used on acoustics before, placing a trimmed-off ball end over the string at the ballend, creating that extra 1/8" of room needed for the wraps to stay safely behind the saddle. it doesn't look too stupid. here you can see how the finish was brightened up a bit by polishing out some of the aging tint.

low E extension.jpg (81.58 KiB) Viewed 137 times

the guy who did this did certain things i wouldn't choose to do to one of my builds--i wouldn't do a fake logo or the kind of relicing seen here throughout--but he did a good job for a home builder. there are way too many wrong things (truss rod adjustment at head, 3-layer pickguard, visible fill of 2d string tree on the Mini Strat neck) for it to pass muster as a real fake job, but from more than 5 feet away it's utterly convincing.

[dubkitty]

those compensated saddles are the bomb...i would still prefer individual saddles for all 6 strings, but the designers got it spot-on in terms of how much the strings would need to differ.

[dubkitty]

i think the Jetstar is about ready for a try of the StewMac lacquer marker. since it does really thin coats i decided the best course was to sand everything down to a smooth surface, which entailed sanding off layers of previous attempts. using 1000 grit and the nail filing block i got most of the old stuff off--there are places where it filled low spots--and got a very nice smooth surface everywhere. using the filing block took forever, but didn't damage the existing finish any more. i'm particularly happy that careful sanding was able to eliminate a little divot at the apex of the scarf joint arc that i expected to have to fill in some way. i need to not fuck with this any more today because i spent 3 hours sanding and my hands hurt, but if all goes well this'll finally be an acceptable level of "done." interestingly, i found that i could tell when the layers were almost off because the feel of the sandpaper doing back and forth changes. if this dosn't do it, i'm either going to find some way to live with it or strip the entire thing, which looks to be made of rather lovely mahogany under the paint.

in other Guild solidbody news, the flat fret filing block from StewMac is supposed to arrive Friday, so soon i'll also redo the fret leveling and crown/dress the frets properly. then i get to compare/contrast it and the Bird. i swapped the positions on the Jetstar to deal with the problem of Gulid mis-speccing the pickup set with a weak bridge pickup and think i like that sound better than the stock setup in the Bird, but since the wiring is so complicated i think i'll take the bridge pickup out and send it to Fralin for a rewind. they're VA local and my friend Charlie deals with them a lot.

i finally unboxed the soldering station as part of my attempts to straighten up the apartment, but haven't done anything with it yet. once i'm up and running some projects will get done fast, the Esquire and M-77T in particular. i really want some of this stuff sorted...i spent the entire last year working on guitars as opposed to doing anything else with them, and though i'm glad i have some skills because it's allowed me to have a large number of guitars without paying full cost, it's not something i actually like much and i'm eager to do less of it.