This post doesn’t have anything to do with the RV lifestyle or our new place at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort. It’s about my guitar project, so if you have no interest in guitars, no need to read on.
I wrote a post in June where I mentioned meeting Curt Mangan and touring his guitar string factory in Cortez, Colorado. Curt planted a seed when he said every guitarist needs to have a Stratocaster or Telecaster guitar. My first “good” guitar was a Fender Stratocaster I ordered in 1976. I sold it a couple of years later (I wish I hadn’t done that). I’ve had a few Strats over the years but never liked them enough to keep them. Fender and Gibson make great guitars, but they are different in design, philosophy and construction.
Fenders typically have single-coil pickups, bolt-on necks and a 25.5-inch scale length. Gibson uses humbucker pickups, set necks which are glued to the body and a 24.75-inch scale length. This makes the guitars feel, sound and play differently. The longer scale Fenders have higher string tension and slightly more space between the frets than the shorter scale Gibsons. The Fender single-coil pickups can really produce some nice tones, but they’re prone to electro-magnetic interference (EMI) which can cause noise or humming from the amplifier. Humbucker pickups are inherently noise cancelling and to my ears have a thicker, richer tone. So, I’ve been a Gibson guy for a long time.
Having said all that, Curt had me thinking – I should take another shot at playing a Stratocaster. You can find very affordable Strats in the entry-level Fender Squier line (usually sourced from Asia) or step up a little and get a Fender made in Mexico. The premium level Fenders are made in Corona, California. The low line in that series starts at around $1,400 and goes up to around $2,500. Then there’s the Custom Shop offerings – the team built guitars are the next price tier. And, finally there’s the Masterbuilt series where one luthier builds and finishes the entire guitar and these run anywhere from about $7,000 up to $20,000 or so.
I didn’t want an entry-level guitar but at the same time I didn’t want to spend $2,000 + on a Strat. I started researching guitar kits to build a Strat. There are several kits available, ranging from cheap Chinese sourced kits around $200 up to high end kit makers like Warmoth in Puyallup, Washington. A high quality Warmoth would be in the $1,500 – $2,000 range and would require a lot of work to finish.
I found a company in Amherst, New Hampshire called BYO Guitar. They have a full line of kits ranging from affordable entry level kits up to their Custom Shop offerings where they make the guitar body and neck to order in-house. My goal wasn’t to see how cheaply I could build a Strat, rather I wanted to see if I could get a higher quality instrument within my budget constraints. BYO Custom Shop seemed to fill the bill.
I arbitrarily set a budget ceiling of around $1,000. I spec’d a Strat with a two-piece swamp ash body, a black limba neck with jumbo frets and rosewood fret board and quality hardware like Grover tuners and Wilkinson bridge-tremolo unit. At BYO they could build to my spec, including my choice of finish stain and even include a hardshell Gator case for just over $1,000. I went for it.
They needed about two months to complete the work – I had them hold the parts until September when we returned to Mesa. The kit arrived last Tuesday with everything in the Gator case. The book-matched swamp ash body was so finely made, I thought I’d received a one-piece body at first. I had to really look to find the seam. Well done! I started working on it right away. I don’t think it’s fair to say “I built my own guitar.” It was actually more of an assembly task – after all I didn’t cut and shape the body from a blank or carve the neck. It was a matter of fitting the parts, soldering the wiring harness for the pickups and controls and installing hardware.
My first step was to paint the body cavities with a carbon-based conductive shielding paint. I mentioned how single-coil guitar pickups are prone to EMI. By shielding the body cavities and grounding the shielding, some EMI can be blocked. It’s like a Faraday cage, but a guitar can never have a true Faraday cage – the pickups are still exposed and there are other points like the control shafts that can’t be fully shielded.
Then I went to work on the neck – I was pleasantly surprised to find the frets leveled, crowned and nicely polished. I thought I would have to do some finish work on the frets but it wasn’t necessary. I went straight to installation of the Grover tuners on the head stock.
I ran into trouble on Wednesday. I soldered the output jack, ground wires and controls. I tested it and it worked. I installed the pickguard and jack plate onto the body. Now it didn’t work. It was a real headscratcher and I can’t tell you how many times I took it apart and checked everything. I finally figured out that I had contact between the pickup selector switch and the conductive paint creating a short to ground. I added a piece of black electrical tape and tried it again. It worked. Then it didn’t work. What? I found the tip of the jack on the guitar cable would sometimes touch the shielding in the jack cavity creating another short to ground. Again, I confirmed it by adding a piece of black electrical tape. Now everything worked right.
I didn’t want to leave a band-aid on the problem, so Thursday morning I used a Dremel to carve a trough under the selector switch and carve out a bit of the jack cavity. This meant I had to repaint those areas with conductive paint. After the paint dried, I re-assembled the pickguard and jack plate – bingo, everything works.
Next I had to install the nut at the head of the neck. This is a critical step. The vibrating guitar string has two points of contact to impart vibration and resonate with the wood in the neck and body. There’s the bridge where the strings attach at the body and the nut. The nut can be made from bone, synthetic bone material or plastic. Higher end guitars will use bone or synthetic material while entery-level guitars have plastic nuts.
I used a Tusq synthetic nut which is impregnated with PTFE. It came over-size for the nut slot. First I had to carefully thin it. I did this by sanding it with 320 grit sand paper on a flat surface. I took it really slow – it needs to be a snug fit with solid contact with wood slot so vibrations (sound) can transfer. It was a matter of sanding a bit, then trying to fit it. Once I had a good, snug fit, I put the first string (high e) and the sixth string (low e) on the guitar and measured the string height at the first fret. It was way too high.
Once again, it was a matter of sanding carefully and trial fitting it. Altogether I probably spent an hour sanding and trying before I was satisfied. At that point, I put the rest of the strings on and started the set up process. I set the trem-bridge assembly to float so the whammy bar can vary the pitch both up and down. Then I set the action or string height over the frets. The relief or bow in the neck was next – this can be adjusted by tightening or loosening the truss rod. Pickup height adjustment was next. Lastly I set the intonation by making sure each string went up in frequency by one octave when comparing the open string to the 12th fret. This is adjusted at the bridge saddles.
Now it was time to play! I had set it up with the unbranded strings that came with the kit. Turns out, I didn’t like them much. They were a really light gauge – too light for me. The guitar played fine, the neck is excellent but I was missing the tone I was after. It didn’t have a sparkling clean sound and seemed a little off balance. I played for a while then put it away.
Friday morning I changed the strings to a new set of 10-46 gauge strings. This meant going through the setup process again as the string tension changed and everything else changed with it. It was better, but still lacking the bright, clean tone I expect from a Strat. Then it occured to me. The pickups are wound pretty hot and I had them set too close to the strings. I reset them so the bass side was 7 or 8/32″ from the bottom of the string and the treble side at 6/32″. Much better! I’ll probably continue to tweak it bit here and there, but I like it. From the Fender Stratocasters I tried at Guitar Center, I would put this guitar on par with a $2,000+ made in America Fender Strat.
EDIT – I forgot to mention, this is the quietest single-coil guitar I’ve ever played. No hiss or hum unless I hold the guitar within about two feet of the amplifier where there’s a strong electro-magnetic field from the transformers.
We’ve had overnight rain the last two nights – really heavy rain on Thursday night and a lighter shower last night. The weather is cooler with highs expected in the low 90s today and down in the low 80s starting tomorrow. Donna is enjoying her trip to New England and will return late Tuesday night.
*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!
