The Great Guitar Adventure

I've had this Fender Squire for about 5 and a half years now, since I first started playing guitar. It's probably worth $75 by now. I've decided, on behalf of my ambition to make my own guitar, to completely take apart the guitar and rebuild it from the basic parts. The neck, pickups, bridge, and possibly the wiring will be replaced with higher-grade parts that are more in tune with the tone and look that I want.

This is, hopefully, the first post of a series documenting the steps and techniques used to get the unique guitar I would love to have. I will be mainly using ProjectGuitar.com to guide my building the guitar, along with an Instructables post.

I've had my eyes on this David Gilmour pickup set as well as a Stevie Ray Vaughan sounding Texas Special pickup set. While I'm not very concerned with the neck, I am counting on getting one with a maple laminated fretboard. Hell, I might just keep the current neck just so I can experiment with scalloping. Oddly, I've found that I'm much more concerned with how I plan to repaint and finish the body more than anything else. I don't want any typical solid color or burst, not that a well-done sunburst isn't freakin' awesome. Living up to my Thoreau obsessions, I want a design unique to myself. A Steve Vai swirl would be perfect, but having run into some problems in getting it to work (I've multiple times to get a swirl effect on test pieces of wood), I'm not so certain that a swirl finish is the right finish to try. This trippy SG finish (be warned, its a marijuana forum) would be fantastic, but I have no idea as to how that person got that effect.

If anyone has any suggestions for me, especially with what to do with the finish, please let me know! I'll have some more developments posted soon.