Electric Guitar Build Projects
When I first started playing the guitar at the age of 17, I wanted to build my own instrument. In my 40th year (with my wife's permission) I was finally able to have my dream come true. My first guitar build was the "Black Strat" project.
I began by purchasing a Fender "Made in Mexico" Stratocastor body complete with tremolo hardware. I wanted Fender Lace Sensors for the pickups as these are my preferred Strat-style pickup. I wanted a humbucker double coil in the bridge position with a coil cutting option for tone versatility. However this just wasn't going to be sufficient! An S1 tone switch in the volume potentiometer was going to add a further five pickup combinations. This coupled with the coil cut switch would give me a total of 22 tone settings.
Further tone enhancements include "paper in oil" Russian NOS capacitors – for that extra dose of creamy rich-tone goodness – and a brass tremolo block to improve the sustain over a regular Strat tremolo. It figures that if a church bell is made of brass for its acoustic properties then a brass block in your tremolo will also be a heavenly improvement. Locking tuners, a rolling nut and bridge saddles, and a hipshot tremsetter ensure that the guitar never goes out of tune. It would have made all those tone enhancements rather redundant otherwise.
For a first guitar build I wasn't game enough to carve my own neck so instead I engaged USA Custom Guitars to build it from my specification. So as a first project this was essentially an assembly task and to ensure the neck was well secured and well aligned I employed a well known local luthier to finish it off.
This was such a successful and enjoyable project that I went on to build a second "Red Strat" followed by a chambered Telecaster guitar.