The Un-Baritone Guitar

So I had to come to terms w/ something about my baritone guitar: It was cool, it sounded and played OK but I just needed to accept the fact that it is simply not that great. It's a nice first try but that is all I can say about it. I've decided that it is not worthy of my beautiful Warmoth neck so I've replaced it w/ a dirt cheap no-name neck from eBay. It's a load off my mind saying that out loud.

And I'm not kidding when I say no-name. It literally doesn't have a brand name at all on it's vaguely Telecaster-ish headstock:


I have no problem w/ the lack of name-brand and, in fact, I appreciate not having to shill for whatever company imported this son-of-a-bitch from French Indochina. What I do have a problem w/ is the fact that the holes were drilled in the wrong damn place. Not only that, they are too big for a normal neck screw. I filled them in w/dowels and re-drilled them, no problem. It actually fit in the neck pocket better than the Warmoth neck because it was too big.

Of course, that could not possibly be the end of my problems w/ this thing. The fact that it fit better, meant I got it on there straighter which made it a apparent that the bridge was in the wrong place so I had to move it again using this same procedure. And if that was the end of things, I'd have been pleased but it wasn't. Now that the neck was straight and the bridge was in the right spot, the pickups were no longer in line w/ the strings. Blast! There's really not much I can do about it w/o redoing the whole damn thing so I'm leaving it like that for now. I also rewired it so it didn't have all that goofy stereo crap going on, which was always weird and problematical and I never used for anything other than screwing around. I also unhooked the push-pull pots I was using for pickup selection and threw a Gibson-style toggle sort of awkwardly into the mix. Works but it's kind of cramped.

I also had to level and crown the frets to get it playing w/o a hideous amount of buzz. The neck really was a trainwreck. In hindsight I wish I hadn't cheaped out and got something decent. Here is the guitar w/ it attached:


Now that is one fine fiddle! Seriously, it's not that bad. If I ever get around to it, I'll re-rout the pickup slots so I can move them where they need to go and then make a pickguard to cover all the mistakes up. If I really wanna get into it, I can fill the wood and refinish in a solid color. Might be worth it as I can fix some other crap too while I'm at it. It's still pretty fun to play and having the pickups out of whack doesn't seem to affect the tone much at all. The neck is a big fat vintage baseball bat so it's good to practice on. Makes my other guitars feel tiny and insignificant, thusly allowing me to better bend them to my will.

The Warmoth neck is now going to go on the cheapo guitar project. Somewhat ironical but there you go.

I'd Be Finished If I Didn't Screw Everything Up

Well--it's about time I start wrapping this up. I've had a good half dozen layers of poly finish on there for over a week and it seems to have been about as hard and dry as it can get for a good couple of days so it's time I start putting the thing together. At this point in the process, I'm so excited that every minor set back sends me off on screaming rampages throughout my apartment and the surrounding neighborhood. However, it is all working out slowly but surely despite various troubles.

The first thing I had to take care of was the strap buttons. It just slipped my mind entirely to drill them before I started finishing. It was an easy enough situation to rectify. I just put some green masking tape over where I wanted to be (to minimize chipping of the finish) and drilled the holes w/ my hand drill like so:


I did get a tiny amount of tear-out but it was easily covered by the strap buttons and hardly noticeable anyway. I also had to redrill some of the holes for mounting the bridge and mounting the neck as they'd gotten a little gunked up w/ finish--no big deal.

The controls in this were rather close together and it really caused me a hell of a lot of trouble trying to stuff it all into the control cavity. I had to resolder a couple things here in there to fit it all in. The end result works but it's ugly. I'm almost embarrassed to post a picture of it but I will because it's funny:


OK. Not that funny but you have to admit that's about as ugly as it gets as far as guitar wiring goes. Anyway, once I had that taken care of, it was a snap to put the rest of it put together, aside from a few things I noticed that I'll get to in a second.

She looks real nice though:


Once I finish fixing the problems I describe below, I will take her outside and take some pictures in the yard where the sunlight is nice. Then me an my homemade guitar will sit together drinking beer and grilling burgers all afternoon--heaven on earth if you ask me.

The first and most agrivating problem is I lost the screws to install the p90s. This is what made me have a fit. I know they're around somewhere but whether that's in my toolbox or some landfill I will never know. I gave up after an hour of looking and went to my local super depot of orange colored home tools and duct tape to buy something to stand in. Not to my surprise, they didn't have p90 mounting screws. The closed thing I could get were some number four screws but they were only an inch long and need to be more like an inch and a half. This left me w/ not much room for adjustment. Indeed, practically none. Here are the pickups at their maximum height:


There's also a nice shot of the goods for those who are interested what my crotch looks like. It's only a little bit too low but I really spend a lot of time adjusting pickup height and getting it just so (doing this makes a bigger difference in your overall tone than buying more expensive pickups, in my opinion) so it's a bummer not to be able to adjust them, especially since the volumes between the two aren't really well balanced at all. Plus, it just looks funny and I can't have that.

Worse than that but somehow less aggravating is I didn't get the bridge on there quite straight. If you'll notice, there's a lot more room between the edge of the fretboard and the string on the bass side of the fretboard (left in this picture) than the treble. It disgusts me to the very core of my being (you can also see the brass Phillips head screws I used instead of the p90 screws):


Actually, it plays just fine aside from the highest string feeling a little weird but it really irritates me to look at it so I'm going to remount the bridge so it's all straight. The setup right now is somewhat cursory but it really does sound pretty darn good--especially the neck pickup--and feels nice to play overall. In fact, I like it so much that I've changed my mind and decided to keep the baritone neck on this one and build a new body once I've finished my neck (or more likely right along side it).

The Hall of Shame

Yeah. The rumors are true. This is the first guitar body I've built and the first real woodworking I've done in my life so I fucked a thing or two up. Nobody's perfect. What can you do? Well--I'm gonna outline the mistakes I've made in the hopes that doing so will pound them into my head to such an extent that I do not make them again.

The thing that pisses me off the most is I did a round over along the edges of the little nub that sticks out for the neck pocket. I wish I had taken a picture but what happens is that the edges of the metal plate that goes on the back stuck over the edges of the round over just a little bit. I suppose the issue is mostly cosmetic since the joint still seemed sturdy but irritates me just because it wasn't caused by my lack of skill but simply from lack of thought. I probably didn't need to do anything but just for the sake of learning how, I filled it in w/ putty. The stuff I used is called Plastic Wood and fit the bill nicely in my case because it's both drillable and stainable (though it's pretty much impossible to get any kind of filler to match the wood). First I had to build it up w/ a putty knife (in layers so it dried right):


Then I sanded and shaped it with my random orbital sander and just sanding by hand (you can also see another little fill in the lower right):


I redrilled the hole in the upper left after this picture was taken. There were also some minor tear outs from the router that I filled in while I was at it. In the picture below, you can also see the filled-in gouge I made by carelessly lifting the router off the template before the bit stopped spinning. A moment of distraction can really cause a lot of grief in the end.


I didn't get the control cavity quite right so I ended up having to build up some little nubs w/ the Plastic Wood so I could drill little holes for the screws that hold the cover on. I'm not really worried abut these being too strong. Basically, I just want them to hold the screws in for the sake of appearance. I figure the two screws that can go into the actual wood will be plenty to hold the cover on.


These ones are small but they still tick me off because they were caused by carelessness. You can barely see them in the picture but there are a couple small fills there. One is by the pickup cavity and was cause by me marring it w/ the chuck of the drill when I was drilling the hole to the control cavity (which reminds me, I still haven't drilled a hole for the bridge ground). There are also two little crescent shaped ones on the bottom of the guitar which were caused by me not putting anything in between the guitar body and a clamp at some point in the building process.



There's also a couple tearouts just caused by my inexperience w/ the router. I'm not too mad about these--you gotta learn somehow--but they are still ugly no matter how you count it:


I'm using a dark stain on this and so far it looks like the fills are going to be fairly well covered up (though the finishing processes is proving to be problematical in its own right--more on that soon). Still, I have a lot of work to do if I want to start doing more natural finishes and I don't want it to look like crap.