duhvoodooman
Addicted to solder....
Here are a couple of guitars I built from purchased parts and am pretty pleased with how they turned out--one Strat and one Tele:
First the Strat, which is a hardtail, i.e. no vibrato block and arm, just a Fender string-thru bridge with bent steel saddles. All my other S-types have vibratos (yeah, I know everybody calls them "trems", but that's incorrect), so I wanted a hardtail for the stable. This build turned out great, and I play it a lot, but it took a couple of changes to get it there. The body is an XGP in Surf Green from GuitarFetish, their best quality bodies. It's actually a "second" due to a couple of barely visible paint defects, so I got a few dollars off on it. I already had a loaded pickguard with inexpensive Wilkinson WOVS pickups on hand, and acquired the rest of the hardware from various sources. The original neck was a "Licensed by Fender" vintage style maple neck from WD Music. After assembling the guitar and playing it for awhile, I determined that (1) the pickups were pretty mediocre sounding, and (2) the neck had intrinsic intonation problems that couldn't be readily fixed. So I replaced the p'ups with a set of Fender Yosemite's, and found a really nice satin-finish roasted maple neck from "samsguitarshop" on eBay. With those two upgrades, the guitar now sounds great and plays very well. Here she is:
The second one is a paisley-finish T-style that is almost completely made with parts sourced from GuitarFetish. The neck is a maple XGP with a rosewood fingerboard that I've been very happy with. Tuners are vintage slotted style and the pickups are GFS's Overwound Tele set. I went with a string-thru bridge with individual steel saddles and a clear pickguard to show off the paisley body. The control plate is fitted with standard 250K pots and a 4-way switch 'cuz I LOVE that bridge-and-neck-in-series tone that you don't get from standard 3-way Tele switch wiring. To fess up, the guitar originally had a cheap blue paisley body that turned out to be pretty much a piece of junk--very light wood with little resonance and poorly/inaccurately machined. I had a hell of a time getting it together so that the neck lined up with the pickup pole pieces. So when GFS came out with the much higher quality XGP paisley body in pink, I jumped on it. This second version came out far superior to the original in all regards--looks, sound and playability. Feast your eyes:
First the Strat, which is a hardtail, i.e. no vibrato block and arm, just a Fender string-thru bridge with bent steel saddles. All my other S-types have vibratos (yeah, I know everybody calls them "trems", but that's incorrect), so I wanted a hardtail for the stable. This build turned out great, and I play it a lot, but it took a couple of changes to get it there. The body is an XGP in Surf Green from GuitarFetish, their best quality bodies. It's actually a "second" due to a couple of barely visible paint defects, so I got a few dollars off on it. I already had a loaded pickguard with inexpensive Wilkinson WOVS pickups on hand, and acquired the rest of the hardware from various sources. The original neck was a "Licensed by Fender" vintage style maple neck from WD Music. After assembling the guitar and playing it for awhile, I determined that (1) the pickups were pretty mediocre sounding, and (2) the neck had intrinsic intonation problems that couldn't be readily fixed. So I replaced the p'ups with a set of Fender Yosemite's, and found a really nice satin-finish roasted maple neck from "samsguitarshop" on eBay. With those two upgrades, the guitar now sounds great and plays very well. Here she is:
The second one is a paisley-finish T-style that is almost completely made with parts sourced from GuitarFetish. The neck is a maple XGP with a rosewood fingerboard that I've been very happy with. Tuners are vintage slotted style and the pickups are GFS's Overwound Tele set. I went with a string-thru bridge with individual steel saddles and a clear pickguard to show off the paisley body. The control plate is fitted with standard 250K pots and a 4-way switch 'cuz I LOVE that bridge-and-neck-in-series tone that you don't get from standard 3-way Tele switch wiring. To fess up, the guitar originally had a cheap blue paisley body that turned out to be pretty much a piece of junk--very light wood with little resonance and poorly/inaccurately machined. I had a hell of a time getting it together so that the neck lined up with the pickup pole pieces. So when GFS came out with the much higher quality XGP paisley body in pink, I jumped on it. This second version came out far superior to the original in all regards--looks, sound and playability. Feast your eyes:
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