Finishing the neck

It can be a frustrating time waiting for the lacquer to dry on your cool new guitar body, so this is the perfect time to do some work on the neck.

If you buy the neck (which I did), then there is very little work to do really, other than finishing it off. In fact, here is a list of work you will need to do:

1. Make sure that the machine heads fit in the holes, and if not, enlarge the holes (remember to remove the machine heads after making sure they fit).
2. Do any final sanding, etc.
3. Apply any decals/transfers to the head.
4. Lacquer the front of the head.
5. Lacquer the back and sides of the head and the neck.
6. Fit machine heads, string retainers and a nut.

At the top of this post, you can see a picture of the neck after applying decals and a few layers of lacquer. The packs of letters I used for the logo are there too. They're just standard Letraset (although the brand I used is actually called "DECAdry"). This neck has a rosewood fretboard, which does not require lacquering, so it needs to be masked off. After this stage, the masking paper is removed totally and the neck is then laid face down while lacquer is applied to the back and sides. I found that this method worked really well.

Here is a nice picture of the head of the guitar after all the hardware had been added. I'm pretty happy with it. My surname is Morrow, so I tried to play with this word a little. The upside-down R means that whatever way up the logo is, it looks the same. It's very satisfying to be able to put your own name on the head of a guitar, I have to say.

The finish (part two)

Before you spray your guitar, you should really apply some sort of sealant, otherwise the lacquer (or whatever) will get sucked into the wood like you wouldn't believe. This will make life much more difficult for you and can even affect the tone.
So after applying some stain, that's what I did. Just one layer of sealing varnish, followed by a bit of light sanding.

Next, it was a case of applying layer after layer of spray-on lacquer. This will probably take longer than you think. I lost count of the number of layers I added, and this was probably due to my not applying the sealing varnish correctly. The wood just kept sucking that lacquer in.

Every few layers, you should do some very light wet sanding to try to keep the surface as perfect as possible. If you manage to remove some of the stain by accident, just re-apply it. It's actually not as serious a problem as you might think (or at least it wasn't in my case).

Here's a picture of the guitar with several layers of lacquer applied (as well as some preparation work for the electrics installation, which I'll discuss later):


Even after many, many layers, you can see how the wood is sucking that lacquer. After this photo, I removed the metal parts and kept going with the lacquer until I managed to get a nice smooth finish.

Here are a couple of pictures of the body after the lacquering was completely finished:

The finish (part one)

Finishing a guitar is pretty tricky. I suppose if you just want to paint it, then that would be a lot easier, but I wanted to stain mine, then lacquer over the top. This is how I did that.

Firstly, I had to construct some sort of holder for the guitar. I did this with an old broken wood plane I had lying around, which fitted the neck joint nicely. I then made a wooden handle for it and drilled a big hole down it so that I could mount it on a spindle. Badly as this photo turned out, you can see the stand holding the guitar up. It is sitting on a spindle poking out of the top of a big block of wood, held down by a vise. The theory was that I could freely rotate the guitar body this way, and even lift it off the spindle and hold it by the handle.


The first thing I did was to add some water soluble stain. This is just wiped on with a cloth and immediately adds a lot of character to the wood. Here it is after a layer or two of the stain. You can add as many layers as you want. Each one will progressively make the guitar look darker.

Checking that it fits together

At this point I decided to assemble the guitar, just to check that everything fitted together correctly. Obviously I would have to take it all apart again to add the finish. I had only acquired one pickup by this stage, but that’s OK. Here are a few pics of the assembled guitar.


I plugged it in and it sounded absolutely fantastic. Really, really beautiful sound.

The electrics (part two)

OK, here are the schematics for the electrics (click for bigger image). It is viewed from below.
Remember that this is based around two single coils and a humbucker and that all three pots incorporate push/pull switches.

The three toggle switches allow you to use any or all of the pickups at the same time, and even switch them all off, so it has a sort of muting function too.

The booster is based on a Vox Treble Booster and the battery negative wire is connected to the middle ring of the output jack so that it only ever completes the circuit when the lead is plugged in (to be able to do this, the jack socket must be stereo, giving you that extra middle ring, although the actual output signal will, of course, be mono). That way you don't need to worry about storing your guitar and leaving the booster turned on. Also note that this means the battery is ALWAYS being used when the lead is plugged in, even when the booster is not switched on. The reason for this is that otherwise you would hear a loud popping noise when you switched the booster on. To be honest, I'm assuming you understand a certain amount about making small circuits if you are thinking of copying this circuit.

You should be able to print this out in good quality (300dpi) on an A4 page.

The electrics (part one)

I decided to try some fancy stuff with the electrics. I’ve always enjoyed messing about with electronics, so was a lot more confident with this part than I had been with the woodworking.

So here’s the rundown on a typical Strat:

Three single-coil pickups
One 5-position selector switch
One volume control
Two tone controls (note, these are not treble and bass, but rather a tone control for the neck/mid-position pickups and another for the bridge-position pickup).

And here’s what I wanted to achieve with my Strat

Two single coil pickups
One humbucking pickup that would fit into the same space as a single-coil pickup
Three toggle switches (one for each pickup, allowing for every possible combination of pickups [eight options instead of five])
One volume control
One coil tap push-pull switch incorporated into volume control
One tone control (for all pickups)
One middle-pickup phase reversal push-pull switch incorporated into tone control
One boost control
One boost on/off push-pull switch incorporated into boost control

The boost circuit would be based on a Vox Treble Booster and would be built by yours truly (me).

It will take several entries to describe all of the electronics in detail, so I’ll start by explaining some of the parts that I needed to source.

Here is a push-pull pot. This can be used as a volume or tone control, but also has a switch which is activated when you pull it out. I needed three of these:


For neck and middle pickups, I wanted to use two standard single-coils, preferably genuine Fender ones, similar to this:


For the bridge pickup, I wanted to get one of these babies. I really wanted to keep the bridge position looking single-coil-like, but have a bit of “oomph”. This is a Seymour Duncan Lil’ ‘59 Jr.

The scratchplate

It would have been really easy (and pretty cheap) to just buy a standard Stratocaster scratchplate (pickguard), but I wanted to make my own.
You could buy a blank rectangle of scratchplate material at your guitar shop (or mail order one from somewhere like http://www.stewmac.com), but I went for the absolute cheapest option and used a piece of plastic I found in the street one night.

Here it is:


And this is my scratchplate plan:


I used the same technique as I did with the body of the guitar, which was to tape the plan onto the plastic, then cut around it. Again, I would recommend that you do this a different way. Print it onto card, then draw an outline around this onto the piece of plastic itself.

Anyway, the cutting was pretty easy compared to the wood. A hacksaw for a rough outline, followed by filing and sandpaper. Oh yeah, and the sign was cleaned up by sanding the "Associated Weavers" decal off. The small screw holes were drilled (and finished off with a tapered countersunk drill bit), and the pickup holes were drilled out and filed, then sanded into shape. One more thing. Instead of cutting out a slot for the five-position pickup selector switch, I decided to make three small holes for toggle switches (one for each pickup). This would later allow me to choose any possible pickup combination, which would not normally be possible (more on the customised electrics later).

Sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the finished scratchplate, but you can see a very bad picture of it here without the pickup holes:

EDIT: Actually turns out I did take a photo of the scratchplate, though sadly it's a bad one. Anyway, here it is: