The Great Guitar Adventure: Disassembly

Yesterday I posted that I plan to "remake" my Squire into a better and unique guitar of my very own. I have recently taken the first steps: disassembly. I've completely taken it apart. The neck, bridge and pickguard have all been taken off. The wiring has been left in with the intention of removing it once I get some proper materials to desolder all the parts that are holding it all in place. I put all of the screws and small pieces into labeled plastic cups, as shown in the photos. I also made some videos with my phone of me taking specific parts apart so I have a reference of how everything goes together after the body is painted and I attach everything back together. The next step is to completely strip the body of its paint, though how that will happen I'm not completely sure of. I'll either strip it chemically or sand it down. Maybe even both.

Anyway, here are the photos of post-disassembly:

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.

Shameless Self Promotion

Now that I have all of my 2012 related posts out of the way, I will begin to sway the topics of this blog into ideas and subjects that relate more personally to me.

www.myspace.com/alexjuddmusic

Yeah, that's where I'm going to post all of my original music. I'm trying to sort out a little problem with my microphone, so right now I'm on a little pause in my recording music. Take a look if you want, let me know what you think, and please try to friend me if you have an account. I know it's a little hard to judge based on one simple demo, but please bear with me!

[1/26/2010]

I recently got some fantastic condenser microphones along with an old drum machine from my guitar teacher that will allow me to record anything I want to my hearts content. Music is on the way!