{"id":82,"date":"2023-11-07T13:07:26","date_gmt":"2023-11-07T13:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/18.135.216.134\/?p=82"},"modified":"2023-11-11T13:59:35","modified_gmt":"2023-11-11T13:59:35","slug":"making-a-custom-guitar-from-a-diy-kit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/?p=82","title":{"rendered":"Making a custom guitar from a DIY kit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For the Christmas of 2017 I got a kit for a Stratocaster guitar and after the holidays I started assembling it. This project was quite a while ago so a few details might be a bit fuzzy.

Here’s the original kit looked in the picture below;
including everything you need to make an electric guitar:
-body (un-stained and un-varnished)
-neck (un-stained and un-varnished)
-faceplate
-rear cover
-bridge
-electronics (low quality pickups and strings)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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this is a similar kit off of gear4music.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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After laying the body on the kitchen table I sanded the body a bit to remove the rough spots before prepping it to be stained:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The second step in this build was to paint\/stain the body of the guitar to either the colour or wood texture that I want, I decided to stain the body and neck to what I believe was a dark mahogany shade. It took a few weeks but in the end of the staining phase, the body turned to a beautiful dark shade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And after taping up the fretboard I started the neck!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After another few weeks of painting coats and sanding down I then sanded the varnish all the way up to wet-sanding with I think around 2000 grit paper.

I then lined up the faceplate I got to figure out where to place the bridge:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And then attached the bridge and screwed down the original faceplate for the first time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After the excitement of being nearly finished I coated the pockets in the body with metal tape for EM shielding and prepared the pickups.

The pickups I chose were black “hot rail” pickups almost exactly like the ones below; I used two of the single’s at the neck and middle position and one of the double’s at the bridge position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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All in all, the final guitar looked like this!
I later added a new strap with a securing rubber washer since the previous strap was too short and too worn out making it fall off.
If I was going to do this project again though, I would use a varnish with less friction for the neck and make sure to put the plastic nut the right way round!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thanks for reading!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the Christmas of 2017 I got a kit for a Stratocaster guitar and after the holidays I started assembling it. This project was quite a while ago so a few details might be a bit fuzzy. Here’s the original kit looked in the picture below;including everything you need to make an electric guitar:-body (un-stained … Continue reading Making a custom guitar from a DIY kit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[9],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/IMG_20231107_124834827-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/samhayes.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}