# Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project - I'M GONNA WRECK IT!!!



## KhzDonut (Oct 25, 2014)

CHAPTER ONE: IT'S WRECKIN' TIME!!!

Continued from my NGD Post: http://www.sevenstring.org/forum/standard-guitars/281915-ngd-squier-jazzmaster-pics-review.html

Time to modify the holy hell out of a cheap Squier Jazzmaster! I've done the basic math on what I'll end up sinking into this guitar, and it'll end up being quite a bit more than I actually paid for it... But whatever. It's going to be a fun project.

So, first things first... Before I can repaint it, I have to disassemble it:








So here's what we have to work with. To many, this is probably a lovely guitar. To me, I think it a lovely pile of potential with a less-than-appealing paint finish. Not a vintage burst fan, not a vintage-tint neck fan. Other than the body shape there's really NOTHING on this guitar that fits my tastes aesthetically.







First, off comes the bridge. Fun Fact: The bridge is magnetic. Obviously not brass or aluminum. It stuck to the pickups once I got the big wood screw out of the back of the bridge. (and as I said in my NGD post... Wood screws shouldn't be used as necessary adjustment screws. Just sayin')







The jack is obviously not a Switchcraft, but does appear to be of adequate quality manufacture.







Once the pickguard came off I noticed that there was some weirdness in how things were shielded. The lower cavity is shielded, despite there being no controls there, but the area where the switch and the pots are located has no shielding paint applied. Whereas the ONLY part of the pick guard that's shielded is those two spots. Everything is only shielded from one side, which is just kind of weird.







Lots of foam behind the pickups to allow for height adjustment. I wonder where they got the foam from? It looks like it was used for something before being repurposed as height adjustment foam. Interesting. Another fun fact kind of thing I guess, but without actually having access to the facts...







I've never wired up a Jazzmaster before, just LP's, and even then, I usually don't have anything complicated going on. This looks like more wiring than I've ever done on a 3-way toggle, so at some point I'm going to check out what they actually did here. For a $300 guitar I'd say the wiring was pretty clean overall. I don't expect better than this at this price point, and I've seen worse on costlier guitars.







They grounded the whole thing to the conductive paint, which is kinda cool. Didn't expect to see that. I've always used shielding tape and just soldered directly to it, so I probably wouldn't have thought to do it this way, but I think it's kind of clever.

Also in this shot: You can see there are some gaps around the corners of the neck heel. The sanding on the neck itself was a little sloppy.







So... We meet again, Mr. Bridge Post... And what's that? You have your friend with you, Mr. Bridge Stud?







There's a number of ways to get the bridge studs out of a guitar body. I prefer to use the AWESOME way! That's a chunk of Ebony wood cut off the end of a fingerboard blank underneath the hammer, keeping it from denting into the top of the body. Worked like a charm.







With a loud "pop" and a "squeak" the stud came right out.







I was really happy to find that the wood didn't crack or split and the paint didn't chip off. I was not expecting it to go so smoothly, especially given the fairly rough treatment. As I said, there's multiple ways of doing this, and about half of them are more gentle and precise than the method I chose. But the whole thing is getting repainted anyway, so I wasn't too worried about a little paint chip or two.







The string tree is the typical Fender style, but one cool thing was the little spacer was actually made of metal. I'm so used to seeing little plastic spacers that it just kind of gave me the warm fuzzies to see metal here. It's the little things.







Typical budget "vintage style" tuners. There's a bit of play in the tuning mechanism, but they're quite stable once brought to pitch. I've used worse, that's for sure.







Oh yeah... Vintage tuners have press-in ferrules. I always forget that. I'm so used to dealing with Schaller/Gotoh/Hipshot.







Nothing a simple screw-drivering can't fix! (Just be sure to support the headstock when popping out ferrules, and make sure the screwdriver is the perfect size or else all kinds of horrible things can happen)







Next the strap buttons, which were perfectly acceptable. They even had little felt bumpers, which I've seen omitted with disastrous results a few times in my career.







Fun Fact: The felt will "sink" into the finish, and this is a product of one or more of the following:

Soft Finish
Age
Assembly before the paint is fully cured.

Considering the age of this guitar and the type of finish itself, I think the most likely reason that the felt has marred the paint to this degree is a quick turnaround time in the factory. Considering it's from Indonesia, I think quick turnaround/mass production is a safe assumption anyway. Note: this isn't a quality thing, just a fun fact. Anything with a finish has this.







The neck plate has a very nice Squier logo engraved into it. Kind of a nice touch, really.







What's a less-than-nice touch is the lack of a plastic bumper between the neck plate and the body. Not a huge deal, it doesn't affect functionality or playability, but I'm always surprised when this is omitted. Seems like such a low-cost item to help protect the finish of the guitar. Then again, it's not like you'd ever pull off the neck plate and see the finish underneath unless you were doing a serious adjustment or repair. Working in finish departments for so long has left me with a cringe-response when I see anything metal touch a guitar finish. 







The neck pocket was relatively clean, so whoever taped it off did a pretty good job. I've seen expensive guitars that had much crummier looking neck pockets, so that was a super nice surprise.







This didn't leave me super confident that their truss-rod guy knew what he was doing, this just looks very sloppy and lacking in precision to me. Truss rods are such an important part of the construction, I'd like to see a little more care in this area.







Likewise, the nut installation left a lot to be desired. It's one of those "it does the job" things, and you can only expect so much from a budget instrument, but there's so many areas where they exceeded expectation that I would have hoped this would be one of them.

NOTE: This is not the original slotting. I widened the slots to accommodate a heavier string gauge, but didn't do a brilliant job because I'm not planning on keeping the nut. The original slotting wasn't great, but I didn't even bother to clean the burrs off when I did it, so don't fault Squier for that. It LOOKED cleaner than when I did it, but the slots were a bit high and would have needed work even without changing string gauges.







But anyway... That ends CHAPTER ONE: IT'S WRECKIN' TIME!!!

I give you the final picture for this installment: The body and neck, ready to go through the scuffing/reshaping process before getting refinished.

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR THE THRILLING CONTINUATION!


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## Mprinsje (Oct 27, 2014)

very cool man! dying to see what you're gonna come up with


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## KhzDonut (Oct 29, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter II: Love & A Hacksaw

So, now that I have the whole thing dismantled... Time to start Wreckin' It.

The finish sanding on the body was reasonably good. Some slight faceting here and there, but nothing outrageous (at least I didn't think so to look at it/feel it over). I decided to use a Scotch Brite pad (FOR METALZ!) to scuff the body for a better bond with the new paint I'm going to be putting on it.







No turning back now!







The Scotch Brite pad worked like a charm. This is about halfway through the process, but you get the idea. And, a note: This stuff smells horrendous to sand. I don't know what kind of urethane they're using in Indonesia, but I'm really doubting it's something you want to breath in. I made sure to wet-sand to maintain really low dust accumulation in the air.







Next order of business is filling the holes left over from taking out the bridge posts.







A few drops of trusty Tite Bond...







A meticulously jammed-in-there piece of dowel.







Add a little more glue and wipe off the excess...







Once it's dry use some Timbermate wood putty to level out the top. It's my favorite wood putty for most projects. It cleans up with water, can be thinned and used as a sealer, can be used as a grain filler, and comes in a buttload of colors, and the neutral tones take stains very well. It's pretty awesome stuff.







Just jam it on in...







Scraped off the excess with a piece of plastic (forgot to take a pic of that part) that came from the packaging for some Dremel bits (more on that later) and then waited for it to dry. Once it was dry I used a flat block and some 320g sandpaper and get it lookin' smooth.







Now the real fun begins!

I'm not a Fender guy, never have been. I like some of the body styles (J-Bass, Jaguar/Jazzmaster. Never liked Strats or Teles... At all. Especially Tele's.) but the overall build methods and construction have never been things that appealed to me. There's also something just... Philosophically _wrong_ to me about having a really rounded body style with a big, sharp, square heel. It's especially wrong to me on a Jazzmaster, because the whole body is SO ergonomic and the upper fret access is completely uninhibited.

So yeah... Square heel has to go. (The green electrical wire is just what I was using to hang the body up on my bench while I worked on the neck. Ignore it.)

Quick sketch on the body of what I want it to look like...







Nothing a Hacksaw can't fix!







Well, I don't know exactly what shape you would call that, but it's certainly not a square any more!







Nothing some 100g sandpaper and a flat block can't handle!







Ahh... That's more like it. (sorry for the slightly blurry pic) You can see how thick the (I'm assuming) polyester basecoat is where the black transitions into wood. The dark brown is basecoat. It's not horrendously thick or anything, but I do have to say that during the process it smelled really awful. I've worked in a couple finishing departments for several manufacturers/refinishers, and this stuff smelled particularly noxious to sand.

DISCLAIMER!!! ALWAYS WEAR RESPIRATORS/DUST MASKS. - This PSA is brought to you by my ailing lungs.







That does leave us with one problem, however...







There's a couple ways to go about solving this problem:

A) Use some of those little round ferrules/washers on the back of the body.
B) Just glue the neck into the body and do a faux-setneck kind of thing.

I went with:

C) Do something really time consuming and generally ill-advised unless you have all the right tools (which I really didn't)

That's right: Time to reshape the neck plate and recess it into the body!







I couldn't find my go-to routing bit for my Dremel, so I bought these, which worked way better anyway. I mean, WAY better. Perhaps a little TOO well.







DISCLAIMER!!! ALWAYS DOUBLE CHECK YOUR DEPTHS! - This PSA was brought to you by my many failures.







I never really thought it'd use this router-guard thingamajig for my Dremel, but it worked really well for this.







So yeah... The bit worked really well. So well that it hogs the material off faster than I can really compensate, so it's a bit jagged. I thought about going in and cleaning it up with sandpaper and a file and all that, but decided not to for two reasons:

1) The thick polyester basecoat on the Squier coupled with the soft Alder body wood makes precision operations like this a tad difficult.
2) Laziness.

But hey, I've seen worse, and I'm starting to get past the whole "it has to be perfect" thing when it's my own guitars.







Of course, now I had to make the neck plate fit. Time to bump and grind! (well, at least grind...)







Well, my grinder works.







And Shazam! It works!

Of course... Wow, I don't know how I overshot it that much when grinding, but that gap is nothing short of embarrassing. I had it really close, and then that last pass I just mangled it. Oh well... It will do the job perfectly well, but I had hoped for a better result. Really, it's just the embarrassment factor, because I know I could have done way better if I had just been a little bit slower and checked it a couple more times.

Live and learn.







That's all for this installment. Too many damn pictures to post, so I'll get some more up on Saturday if I don't spend the whole day sleeping off a sugar coma from eating all the candy I bought (with no intention of giving to trick-or-treaters. They can get their own damn candy  )


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## KhzDonut (Oct 31, 2014)

Mprinsje said:


> very cool man! dying to see what you're gonna come up with



I'm dying to get it finished to see what I come up with 

It's going to be something of a monstrosity when all is said and done, but it will definitely be a one-of-a-kind Squier.


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## KhzDonut (Nov 1, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter III: Angling For Some Modding

One of the things I'm not too keen on is really tall bridges, so things like Jazzmasters and Les Pauls generally feel a little weird to me. I really prefer the low profile of a flatmount bridge. With the Jazzmaster, the neck pocket angle is not flat, so just putting on a flatmount bridge isn't an option unless you change the angle of the neck pocket.

Well, since that's the kind of thing best done with routers & jigs (or a CNC machine if you just happen to have one of those laying around...) the next best option (I use the term "best" loosely here) is to change the angle of the neck heel itself.

I wrote down the measurements of the neck heel for reference, though really all that matters is that I just keep checking the angle with a straight edge as I'm going, and that will help to make sure the bridge height is correct. But hey, data points are never BAD...







Once again a flat block and some 100g sandpaper make reasonably short work of the problem. And this is another of those times that I look at the beautiful bone-ivory color of maple and boggle at why they'd want to cover it up with a yellow-tinted paint. I get the appeal of vintage aesthetics, but I really think maple is a beautiful wood, and I'm really not a fan of this shade of yellow. To each his own, though.







Checking throughout the process with a razor blade to ensure things are as flat as possible. Razors make a great straight edge for small surfaces like this because they're very easy to handle due to their small size and light weight.







After all was said and done and the angle finally looked right (or at least very close to it) I had taken about .070" off the end of the heel. That's a little over 1/16 of an inch or about 1.7 millimeters. It might not seem like much, but that's apparently the difference between a Jazzmaster bridge and a Flatmount bridge when it comes to neck pocket angles. I tried to be conservative with my sanding, so once the whole thing is assembled I'll probably find I need to sand a little more.







Now to take care of those sharp fretboard edges. This is how I roll (fingerboard edges) It's fast and easy, and during the scuffing process I'll end up sanding out any chatter. It seems like a haphazard way of going about doing this, but it's actually pretty easy to get a good result, and you can go all the way up to the fret if you want to, which is helpful if you do the ball-end fret thing. (which I'm not doing here. Maybe if I refret this neck in the future, which I almost surely will. I chew through nickel frets like they were Beef Jerkey)






It doesn't take much to go from uncomfortable to pretty damned comfortable. Just barely enough to show bare wood underneath the finish, and the neck didn't have a super thick basecoat like the body did.







Now to scuff the fingerboard. Scotch Brite to the rescue again!







Not bad. Ended up getting the frets a bit, but no big deal. The real problem is that there's little shiny spots on the fingerboard right NEXT to the frets.







I just folded up a bit of 320g sandpaper and very gently sand in little diagonals away from the fret. If you just run the paper along the fret it's really easy to leave little trench-like gouges in the finish without realizing it. You won't be able to see it until you put more finish on the fingerboard, and that's never fun to find out.







Didn't quite make that last half a millimeter, but it's better than it was. Good enough that I'd feel comfortable putting more finish on it.







I'm planning on putting a Graph Tech nut on it, so the current nut has to go. Before pulling it off I have to get all the finish off the side of the nut, though. Otherwise it'll pull bits of paint off with it.







Once again, a razor blade is one of your best friends as a luthier.







Just cut along the glue lines and then slide the razor blade under the little square of paint and lift it right off. Viola!







D'oh! Ok well that'll happen when you're pulling the nut off. Should have checked that a little better. This could have been easily prevented.







But no matter... I used a little piece of Delrin I had laying around to make a tiny sanding block and used some 320g.







Nobody will ever notice once there's a different color paint on it.







That's all for this installment. Next time around: Reshaping the Neck Backshape! A process that is almost guaranteed to be an absolute disaster! 


Here's a sneak peek!







Oh yeah, doesn't that just look like fun on a bun? What could possibly go wrong?


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## Fretless (Nov 2, 2014)

This is a pretty big inspiration. I'm tempted to do something akin to this to a squier bass vi!


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## Stooge1996 (Nov 2, 2014)

Dude this is awesome! Keep up the good work, this is really a good read


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## Blue1970Cutlass (Nov 2, 2014)

Love. This. Thread.


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## KhzDonut (Nov 5, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter IV: Neck Shaping - What Could Go Wrong?

So, first thing's first... I want to know how much material I actually have to work with when it comes to shaping the neck. I like a thinner, flatter profile than the guitar came with, but ultimately I'm not too concerned about the taper/thickness, it's mostly just the shape. I like something more akin to a D (maybe a U shape?) shape, and this is more like a C shape. No shoulders whatsoever.

Before I go shaping the back of the neck and hit truss rod (which would surely spell the end of this project unless I wanted to invest a lot of time/effort/money into doing some super crazy mods... Which is a little beyond my current time/effort/money budgeting at the moment.) I have to find out how much neck there is before hitting truss rod. Easiest way to do that?







That's right: drill into the neck with the tiniest drill bit my Dremel set has and go until I hit truss rod! If you try this, just be sure to do it right around the middle of the actual truss rod's length, so between frets 9-12 or so, because on a vintage-style, one-way truss rod that's where it will be tallest, and that's where you'll be most likely to go through the wood.






This also told me how great of a job the person doing skunk-stripes that day did at their job. The answer in this case? Not great. I felt the bit get through the wood and then drop about 1/16" - 3/32" (1-2mm or so) before hitting truss rod. The idea is to get it snug without squeezing the rod. Didn't quite work out this time... At least I haven't noticed any rattling while playing, which is the obvious concern with something like this. However, if you smack the neck a bit, you can hear it knocking inside.

This is where I have to remind myself it's a $300 guitar and suppress my general annoyance...

To get a measurement of how much room I had to work with I took the drill bit out of the Dremel, dropped it into the hole, and put some tape around it, getting as close to the base/surface of the neck as possible without lifting up the bit.







Then I measure how much bit was inside the neck. (The observant of you will notice that I actually did this BEFORE sanding the neck heel and setting the angle, but it wasn't really relevant at the time so I rolled these photos into this post)







So, now that I know I have about .200" to work with. Well, realistically, I wouldn't want to take more than about .050 off... If I want to stay in the ballpark of 1/8" of wood between the back of the neck and the truss rod, and factoring in the 1/16"+ gap between rod and neck, I should probably really take it easy towards the middle of the truss rod.

But now that I have my measurements it's time to fill the hole back up. To do this I just used a toothpick with some super glue on the end.







Jammed it in there good and snug and waited for it to cure.







Then snipped it with some wire cutters.







Good enough for now. I'll just end up reshaping the whole thing anyway.







So let's see how thick this neck is: 1st Fret.







A pretty spot-on .830"

But what's this??







So it turns out the calipers verified what my hands were feeling in the NGD post; there is a dip in thickness between the 2nd and 5th frets of about .010-.020 depending on where you measure it.

$300 guitar... 

And finally the 12th fret:






So about .830 - .865, which is about what I figured it would be. This is my first Fender/Squier, but I've worked for OEM's that produced a lot of vintage-style guitars and most of the more clone/knock-off kind of things were about the same measurements. I was hoping the "modified" part of "Vintage Modified" would include an .800 - .830 D shape profile, but I guess we can't have everything  

So anyway... Might as well get on with it and start trashing this neck!







Oh yeah, nothing like taking a rasp to a brand new guitar. Just look at that smooth, comfy texture. I was tempted to just leave it like this. 







I reshaped the area around the heel to conform to the new shape of the neck pocket. The line closest to the heel is the outline from the neck pocket itself, and the line closest to the shaft is where I'm going to stop the shaping. I figured that was close enough, and I didn't want to risk over-sanding and leaving a little gap. I've been down THAT dusky road before...







Once everything was shaped I used a flat block with some 100g to do final refinement of the back shape. As you can see in the next photo, flat blocks will reveal the high and low spots left by the previous sanding personnel. Further verification that there was a lot of lumpiness going on: you can clearly see where there's an unsanded section between two fully stripped sections where the sanding block didn't even touch the neck while sanding down the two high spots.

Flat blocks never lie.







So after all was said and done I got a profile much more to my liking, and while I had no specific thickness in mind, ended up getting a pretty accurate .800, which is about .020 larger than what I'm used to playing, but the frets on this are also smaller so the overall thickness really doesn't feel much different. That shape is definitely odd, because for the last few years I've pretty much exclusively played 7-Strings with .780 necks. Quite a departure.







At the end of the day I only took about .020 off the 12th fret area, because I don't spend a lot of time in the upper registers anyway, and just didn't care to risk hitting truss rod this time around. I have big plans for this guitar, but there's a limit to what I can do this round. The most important thing was that the neck measured a clean taper all the way down; no low spots or lumps.







Before putting a finish on the neck I wanted to make sure the skunk stripe was good and sealed. I couldn't quite tell if it was Walnut or Rosewood, but either way, neither plays super nice with urethane finishes, especially Rosewood. I wasn't going to take any chances. I did it the annoying, but fairly reliable way and just used some super thin Super Glue. It's a pain, but I've done it 8 billion times and it's just what I'm used to. This is the brand of Super Glue I prefer for this (and in general).

Satellite City has the longest shelf life of the super glues I've used, and I like the consistency of their thin the best. It's very easy to work with, accelerates easily, just everything. You can get it from Warmoth for pretty cheap (well, cheap after factoring in that you have a minimum order there) but I'm sure you can probably get it elsewhere just as easily. I had to order some parts from Warmoth anyway, so I just got it there.







Just apply with a Q-Tip. You'll want to do numerous thin coats, sanding between coats to ensure flatness and proper filling of the grain. If you're doing a clear or transparent finish, make sure to get the dust out of the pores before applying subsequent coats. If you're doing a solid finish, screw it. Just leave the dust in there and saturate it with the glue to make a super lazy dust-n-glue grain filler. It'll look a little spotty, but it works just fine.







Used Timbermate Putty to fill in the now superfluous fourth mounting hole.







Got lucky and didn't get a lot of speckling in the skunk stripe. Finished the back shape off with 320g to get that smooth-as-silk feel prior to finishing.







That's all for now. Next time I'll finish scuffing the neck with the Scotch-brite pad and then finish it. I've always been a fan of that ultra-modern look, Carbon Fiber necks, or things with Ebony boards.

Not having access to EITHER of those things I'll just do the next best thing: Black Spray Paint!







Be sure to tune in next time for Chapter V: Black As Coal, Black As Pitch, Painting Necks Is Such A [Character Limit Reached]


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## KhzDonut (Nov 8, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter V: None More Black

So before I get to painting the neck, have to finish scuffing the headstock with the Scotch Brite pads.

Fun fact: The text on the back of the headstock is a silk screen that sands right off. Made sense once I thought about it. I worked for a small builder that used decals for the serial numbers, and that was a real pain when something went wrong. You either had to never screw up, or you had to always have doubles of all your serial numbers. I have no idea what decals run, I never had to do the ordering, but from what little I remember of talking to the painters I've worked with they're a little spendy.







The Logo and everything on the front of the headstock is a decal under the clear coat. No damage there when scuffing.







Sprayed the neck black using Rustoleum Painter's Touch 2x Paint + Primer in Flat Black. Not bad stuff. First time I used it, and I don't hate it.







So when you paint a neck black you kind of end up losing all the side dots. Silver paint pen to the rescue!







I didn't really have anything in mind to do for side dots until the day of clear coating came and I just kind of decided "Hey, I know what would look cool! ROMAN NUMERALS!"

Well, the XIIth fret sure looked sweet!







Hrm... Ok, mental note: Roman numerals get really big as you go up in numbers, but the spaces between frets get really small.

Admittedly, not my most brilliant idea, but I don't absolutely hate it either. At the end of the day the person playing it is the only one who will ever see it, and that's me, so... Yeah.







This is AFTER the clear coat, and shows what happens when you don't quite get those 100g scratches out. This is why it's always a good idea to use some 180g or 220g between the 100g/120g and the 320g, and to make sure you check in some very good lighting before you spray everything. Oh well. Chances are I'll end up refinishing the neck at some point for whatever reason. I still can't quite decide what the end goal for the build is, it's kind of taking on a life of its own as I go.

And I do have to say, the further I get in the project, and the more mistakes happen, the more liberated I feel in just plowing through the project. It's nice not having to try and make it absolutely perfect for once.







I'm using Minwax Satin Urethane for the clear coat. This stuff is great for the doing the back of the neck. It's not a vintage satin feel by any means, but it's very durable. It doesn't gloss up nearly as fast as the majority of satins I've tried, including the more professional grade urethane satins. It's also very controllable in terms of texture. If you spray it closer than the recommended 10-12 inches it goes on thicker and wetter, but also very smooth, for a feel that's kind of like a cross between a vintage satin and a Formica counter top (as unappealing as that might sound, it's a very smooth and comfortable texture to play on)

If you do more of a mist-it-on kind of thing at a longer distance you can get anything from a slightly textured feel to something really similar to truck bed liner. If you sand and spray a quick, close coat on a really rough textured surface like that, you get a textured surface with a smooth sheen/feel. 

As a bonus, it sprays in a fan pattern, and the nozzle can swivel to give you either a vertical or horizontal fan. Super handy for doing guitar bodies.

Anyway, you can experiment and get some really good results with it.







One thing I forgot to do before painting: Re-drill the tuner holes. Those vintage tuners are tiny, and I had no desire to continue using them after the first time. I've been spoiled by Schaller and Hipshot.







Oops. Tried to maintain that stepped hole size that is recommended for the Gotoh ream, but while fine-tuning it the bit really grabbed and just plowed through the front of the peg face. Oh well, it won't affect anything. The tuners fit super snug in the holes. I used a 3/8" bit and used the Dremel to fine-tune the holes, because finding the 25/64" or whatever the hell the proper size is was an exercise in futility at my local hardware store, and I was afraid the closest size up was going to be a little loose.

This is why using a drill press is way better than using a hand drill.







Whether you're doing the whole neck and fingerboard, like I did here, or just doing the peg face, be sure to save yourself some hassle and tape off the nut slot.







I had originally planned on using a Graph Tech nut for this build, but I decided to go with an Acetal (Delrin) nut for prototyping purposes. Also, it's been like a year since I've slotted a nut, and I don't have a bunch of Graph Tech nuts just lying around... I DID however have a chunk of Acetal that I had no plans to use for anything.







Chunk of Acetal cut and installed.







Graph Tech string retainer (crummy picture, sorry).







Ok, here's a thing that I derp'd pretty bad on. I've sprayed whole necks black before, I have a bass I did it too awhile back. Thing is, I always use Stainless Steel frets for my builds, and most paints don't stick to the SS frets very well when they're freshly installed; they're usually pretty smooth coming from Jescar. It will pretty much just flake right off. However, these are Nickel Silver frets, and I scuffed the crap out of them when I was scuffing up the fingerboard before it got painted.

So... The paint adhered fairly damn well to the frets. I pretty much had to just scrape the frets manually with a razor blade. It didn't take more than about 20 minutes, but that's 20 minutes I would have rather spent sleeping or watching cartoons...







Of course, one nice thing about Nickel Silver frets is that they polish up really well with some steel wool. Can't really do that with SS frets!







Sooo Shiiiny!







Now to try out the new Gotoh Magnum Lock Trad Tuners! I've never used these before, I custom ordered them like a year ago for a 7-String build that never happened. I've used Schaller locking tuners and Hipshot locking tuners, so now that Gotoh has a thumb-lock style tuner I really wanted to give them a go.







Oh the joys of drilling those tiny alignment holes...







Ok so here's a problem I overlooked. When I bought the Gotoh tuners I bought them for a 7 String project. I forgot that rather than buying 7-Inline I had bought tuners for a 5+2 configuration, like the Ernie Ball John Petrucci model... D'oh!







Quick Fix! Use one of the old Schaller locking tuners from an old 3x3 set I had lying around. You almost can't tell from the front, except the button is *slightly* different, and the washer on the tuning post is beveled on the Schaller, but not on the Gotoh. I prefer the look of the beveled washer on the Schaller, but if you ever wanted to recess the washer like Mike Lull does on his basses the Gotoh would be the better option for that.







Next, I used some feeler gauges to mark an approximate rough shaping height for the nut. Basically I just do .050 higher than the fret height for the scribe line, and then just stop a little short. Close enough for a rough shaping.







It's about to get messy...







Looks like it snowed in here... If snow were made of space age polymers derived from Formaldehyde!







Anyway, that's it for this post. Be sure to tune in next time for the thrilling continuation!

In Chapter VI: Body Painting With Class - Where we'll be getting classy and sophisticated when we paint our Jazzmaster body!



It will be Classy.



It will be Sophisticated.



It will be Understated.



It will be SUBTLE!!!



It will be....







MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!


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## jwade (Nov 8, 2014)

Love the black fretboard. I totally want to get a Bass VI and paint it purple, fretboard included.


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## KhzDonut (Nov 8, 2014)

jwade said:


> Love the black fretboard. I totally want to get a Bass VI and paint it purple, fretboard included.



That actually sounds kind of cool. One time I saw a set-neck LP-style guitar get sprayed red, and because the fingerboard was masked off with blue tape the fingerboard did this crazy dark-to-light purple fade from the headstock and body towards the center of the neck.

Always thought it was a shame we never just did a guitar that way on purpose, it looked really awesome.


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## vkw619 (Nov 8, 2014)

Subscribed. I can't wait to see how this turns out!


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## Dabo Fett (Nov 8, 2014)

this is looking so awesome man


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## Mprinsje (Nov 11, 2014)

You have the honour of being the first thread i've ever subbed to.


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## KhzDonut (Nov 12, 2014)

Dabo Fett said:


> this is looking so awesome man



Thanks so much! It's a bit of a train wreck, but it's definitely turning out to be a very fun train wreck 



vkw619 said:


> Subscribed. I can't wait to see how this turns out!



You and me both 



Mprinsje said:


> You have the honour of being the first thread i've ever subbed to.



Damn, thanks. Glad you're enjoying it as much as I am.


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## Neilzord (Nov 12, 2014)

Really can't wait to see some more action on this Jazzblaster!


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## KhzDonut (Nov 12, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter VI: Pink?

So, the time has come to paint the body!

I worked in the finish department of a guitar manufacturer for about 7 years. I never did any spraying, mostly doing sanding, buffing, masking, etc... Basically everything BUT spraying. And obviously, I don't have access to professional spray equipment.

But I learned a few tips and techniques to get things done, and as you will see here, deviating from them tends to go wrong real fast. 

So the first thing I did is get any dust and oils off of the original layers of paint after they were sanded. The things I find work best for polyesters and urethanes are, Naphtha (Lighter Fluid) or my personal favorite: Denatured Alcohol. It evaporates quickly, is generally non-reactive with everything, is not a petroleum product (which the hippie in my likes) and is generally non-toxic unless ingested or the vapors are highly concentrated.

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT DRINK OR CONCENTRATE FUMES! This PSA was brought to you by the department of don't be a moron with your chemicals.







If I was painting raw wood I wouldn't degrease the body unless I actually spilled grease on it, or I would use acetone to wipe down things like Rosewood or Wenge in order to get a better bond, though I don't really have experience with that personally. Where I worked we always used a Rosewood sealer for woods that didn't like to bond.

Anyway...

So here's the body, hanging up and ready for paint (sorry for bad photo. The light in my garage is terrible)







Then paint!

But before I do: I wanted be sure I knew what the paint was going to look like by doing a test. My intent is to go mega-fleuroescent pink, something that will make eyes bleed and grown men weep. But before painting over something dark, or a burst, it's good to to know if the paint is high-solids or not.

If you spray a translucent color over the burst, obviously it's just going to look like a pinker version of the burst. More than likely it will need a solid color basecoat. Something I learned in the finish department was that if yo have a bright neon color, white is usually the preferred color for a basecoat. The problem is that it's REALLY hard to get a completely uniform translucent color coat over white. It tends to go blotchy unless you've got a professional paint setup and know what you're doing.

I don't have either, so I went with a slightly pigmented basecoat that is similar to the color I'm aiming for. In this case, a light pink basecoat was the closet thing available that was really light.







But just to be sure everything was going to go as planned I did a test panel.

The black was sprayed awhile back and was perfectly dry, the pink was sprayed moments before spraying the pink, and resulted in cracking, but it was good enough for a basic color test. Generally, so long as you give the basecoat some time to dry (often times just a few minutes, depending on the paint) the next layer won't crack or react too poorly with it.

But as you can see, the fluorescent paint has poor covering abilities. It's probably 3x thicker over the black than it is over the light pink, and just barely looks pink. It's obviously got SOME solids, otherwise it would just look way blacker than it does. I'll come to find that this semi-translucence will be the bane of my existence 

Over the pink it turned a bit reddish, but under the garage lighting I couldn't really tell. This will be one of several setbacks to come...







So, next step is to basecoat. You can't really tell from the photo, but it's actually like a lighter version of the old Fender "Shell Pink" color. I was tempted to leave it, it looked kind of nice.







After waiting awhile for the paint to get tacky, but not wet, I figured a few light coats of the fleorescent would be fine to mist on. I mean, they're the same brand of paint, as long as it's dry enough for the basecoat layers to not crinkle on each other, surely the fluorescent won't crinkle like the test panel, right?

Wrong!







If I had any means of guaranteeing a controllable crackle, I'd be really tempted to actually do a crackle finish; maybe a black with bright pink basecoat so it looks like some sort of neon magma effect... Anyway, I digress.

So... While it was still wet I just used some mineral spirits to wipe ALL the paint off. I re-sprayed the pink basecoat layer and let it dry for a couple days (I'll spare you the extra photos)

Then I sprayed the fluorescent on, and this time I didn't get any crinkling... But it did seem a bit red. I assumed it was mostly a trick of the bad lighting.







After all this spraying I did notice a peculiar side effect on my sneakers when I walked out of the garage into full daylight.







It's actually closer to the color I wanted than the body itself.

Anyway...

If you've been following the thread you'll remember this photo:







To hide the gap a bit I did a really cheaty cheat. (don't tell anyone)







Sharpies are the sneaky/lazy painter's best friend.







As you can see from the photos it really looks pretty red. I again chalked this up to lighting and thought "well once I put a black pick guard on it it will probably look better overall." Also, I didn't want to spend a lot of time or money on painting this thing without getting some "proof of concept" on the build. At this point I still don't know how well the neck pocket re-angle worked, or how well the pickup and bridge solutions were going to work. If I really wanted to I could always repaint it later, so I forged my way ahead because more than likely I'd end up changing some things on the build fairly soon after it was finished anyway.

Big roll of adhesive copper foil I got from way back. The color of the copper really sets off the ugliness of the body, don't you think? Makes it look all salmony.







Not sure how most people go about this, but usually do sides first. And man, you don't realize how much route there is in a Jazzmaster until you actually have to shield one. That's a lot of route!







When all was said and done I ended up using like 2-3x more copper shielding than a Les Paul-style build. Not a big deal, as I had a crapload of copper shielding, but it's one of those things I like to take note of.








So that's all for now. Next week we'll see things get really crazy (i.e. - needlessly complicated) when I decide to cut my own pickguard!

So how did I go about making a simple process really difficult and needlessly complicated? Rather than spending the $15 on a sheet of actual vinyl pickguard material I decided to grab a $4 piece of acrylic I found at the hardware store!

Guess what's way harder to cut than vinyl, and also needs to be painted because it's clear?

Acrylic!







So tune in next time for the thrilling continuation: Chapter VII: Nobody Ever Told Me Acrylic Was So Tough!

Watch as I plow through a bunch of still-formulating ideas and end up with something that is altogether morally wrong!


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## Pikka Bird (Nov 12, 2014)

I love the amount of detail you're putting into each chapter in this adventure. And I think it's turning out pretty bad ass as well. 

...can you get hot pink Squier headstock decals?


KhzDonut said:


> Denatured Alcohol ... [snip] ... is generally non-reactive with everything



But will fog up many plastics, so don't use it to clean sticker gunk off CD jewel cases or wipe laser lenses.


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## JoryGriffin (Nov 13, 2014)

Looks great. I kinda like that reddy pink to be honest.


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## Vicious7 (Nov 15, 2014)

This is easily one of the best build threads I've ever read, I can't wait for more!


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## KhzDonut (Nov 16, 2014)

Pikka Bird said:


> I love the amount of detail you're putting into each chapter in this adventure. And I think it's turning out pretty bad ass as well.
> 
> ...can you get hot pink Squier headstock decals?
> 
> ...



I like the idea of pink Squier decals 

And yeah you're right, don't use alcohol on acrylic, that's bad. Sorry I forgot to mention that. It doesn't generally hurt polyester, and I haven't noticed any bad effects on most urethane topcoats, but I guess caution should definitely be employed when using it on any plastic/polymer.

Thanks for pointing that out! Don't want to give people bad info.




JoryGriffin said:


> Looks great. I kinda like that reddy pink to be honest.



It's not like it's a BAD color, but it's definitely not what I was going for, and the more I look at it the more I'm sure I'm going to redo it when I get the chance. I've already started looking for new paint options and doing some tests.




Vicious7 said:


> This is easily one of the best build threads I've ever read, I can't wait for more!



Thank you, sir  Much appreciated.


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## KhzDonut (Nov 16, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter VII: Nobody Ever Told Me Acrylic Was So Tough!

So, you may be asking "why buy acrylic rather than vinyl?" and perhaps "why buy clear if you're just going to paint it black?"

Well, several reasons.

1. This cost less than half as much as a blank of "proper" pickguard material.
2. I wanted to keep my options open. I *did* have an idea for how to utilize the clearness of the pickguard, but eventually opted not to. But I *could* have if I had wanted to, and that was a nice bonus.
3. Learning experience: I've never worked with acrylic before, and intend to do so in the future, so this seemed like a really practical project to use as a learning experience. If I screwed it up I could just grab another blank from the hardware store.
4. Again; it was cheap! I figured that since I'm cheap, and the blank was cheap, we had a lot in common, and would probably get along really well. (And we sorta did!)

So anyway... I put the original pickguard on top of the acrylic blank...








Then traced out the perimeter.







Really convenient that the size was so close. Thanks, Home Depot!







So, I've never cut acrylic by hand before. I've seen it done on a CNC, but I have no real hands-on experience with it, so I decided to try a few different things. First was to just use a hacksaw blade with a paper towel wrapped around half of it and saw through it after c-clamping it to my work table.

Honestly, that worked just fine. It was slightly awkward because of the flexibility of the blade, but it did the job. The problem was that it was fairly slow. It took me about 5-10 minutes to get only about 20% of the total cutting done, and what was left over would most likely require dremel cleanup in addition to a lot of hand sanding.

It wasn't ideal. My kingdom for a small bandsaw!







I didn't really have anything else that would work super well, and since buying a small bandsaw was outside of the project budget by a fairly large margin, I had to get creative.

I had originally thought of using a drill bit and Dremel to punch a bunch of small holes, but assumed it would take too long. Turns out it took maybe 5-10 minutes to do the whole rest of the pickguard. Derp. That's what I get for assuming.







From there I had a couple options. My first thought was to use a little grinder wheel to make a small score line across the line of drill holes. That actually worked really well, but it was a little awkward to control.







But it was very effective! The pieces just snapped off with no real hassle. The only problem is that it does leave a very saw-tooth-like pattern which is hard to clean up with a Dremel and would take a really long time to just sand down by hand.







Overall the perimeter ended up pretty clean, though.







As you can see, the pickup routes were going to prove a little awkward for the drill-and-score method of cutting, so I had to come up with something else.

Also, pickup placement was essentially "as close to the bridge" and "as close to the neck" as the body routes would allow. That put the bridge at a generic modern humbucker location and the neck somewhere in the general vicinity of a Les-Paul humbucker. Well... More or less...







I ended up using this little milling bit. Just slide it into one drill hole and route your way to the next. It worked really well. The reason I didn't just use the bit for the whole project was just that it would have been too hard to see what I was doing without the holes to kind of auto-guide me along, but also because without a proper routing table kind of setup it would have been a real hassle to continually clamp and unclamp the work piece so I could do it off the edge of my work table.







After all was said and done I used those sweet bits I bought for routing the recess of the neck plate and cleaned up the perimeters.







Testing fit for P90's. These are an old set of EMG's that are their regular 81 and 60 in a P90 route. I salvaged them from a really old project. The reason I bought the P90 version was because I thought I might eventually turn that guitar into a single-coil guitar, but for the time being needed something with humbuckers for "the brootalz".

Plus, I really like the look of soapbar pickups. Whether it's guitar or bass, I think they just look clean and zazzy, so I figured; why not?







Cleaning up the perimeter with some sandpaper.







And the pickup routes... I used a chunk of the left-over acrylic as a sanding block, which felt a little weird. Like beating someone to death with their own leg. Felt kinda metal. 







Using a block and really course piece of sandpaper to try and bevel things proved to be a *very* slow process, even for easy to reach spots like this. I didn't want to find out how much of a pain it would be to do the insides of curves and whatnot...







So... Had to think of a way to speed things up. Sounds like a job for the Dremel once more! Obviously, a proper router bit and router table would have been the better way to do this, but doing it by hand wasn't as big a hassle as I thought it would be. Definitely faster than sanding alone.







Bevels sanded clean, top scuffed for black paint. The control holes were done using a combination of a drill and the mill bit. They ended up clean enough, not perfect, but the pots fit very snuggly so good enough for me.







Now to counter-sink those screw holes! It's not even close to the proper beveling angle, but it still did the job.







This image is brought to you by the "Close Enough" council.







Gave the whole thing a coat of black and then satin clear and it looked pretty good.

If you're wondering why there's extra screw holes, it's because I thought later on I might like to modify the pickguard and do a pseudo-Jaguar pickguard setup with metal (or some other material) control plates. I dunno. Just keeping my options open. Also, I still wasn't quite sure what to do with the bridge at this point, so I haven't done any bridge routing as of this picture.







And I had a few people suggest keeping the pickguard clear. First, I didn't really like the look, and second, it would have prevented proper shielding. My recording space is very noisy, so I tend to over-do the shielding.

(Please forgive the bad picture)

You might also notice that there's some extra bridge area routing that wasn't there in the last picture, and it's really off-center. That will be explained in the next post.







So that's it for this installment. Be sure to join us next week for yet more haphazard lutherie nightmares!

Here's a sneak peek of "Chapter VIII: Forgetting Something?"







...Those moments where you suddenly realize you've already shielded the pickup cavity, only to find out that your new pickups won't fit because they have those damned EMG quick-connects sticking out of the back of the pickup. SHAZBOT!


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## Mprinsje (Nov 18, 2014)

that looks really cool, love those p90 emg's


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## SeductionS (Nov 18, 2014)

Makes me want to buy a Blacktop Telecaster to do the exact same mods...
Great job so far, will be following this!


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## KhzDonut (Nov 21, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter VIII: Forgetting Something?


So, throughout the years I've been a pretty ardent EMG fan. I've accumulated quite a collection of random EMG parts, a portion of which are represented here in this bin.







Unfortunate thing about EMG's is that it's hard to actually find a wiring diagram for an actual soldered connection. The EMG site just has the new solderless system diagrams. I had to search around a little bit, and since my printer is fried I copied it down on a post-it note.

That's high-tech at its highest *and* techest. Also note my highly sophisticated "rat's nest" wiring technique. It enhances tone... Or something.







Something I forgot to do when shielding the cavity was that those quick connects on the back of EMG's tend to make direct-mounting a real pain. In fact, it also meant they were too tall to even work in these routes once I re-angled the neck pocket to accommodate a normal hardtail bridge height.

Looks like Mr. Dremel is going to have to come to the rescue again!







You're the best, Mr. Dremel!







Re-shielded. I like this image because it's kind of a stark reminder that no matter how much you get your guitar dirty and dusty and mangled, a little work will breathe life back into it and make it shiny and new again. And if it doesn't, hopefully the pickguard will cover your horrendous mistakes...







Also interesting thing to note...

The original jack included with the Squier is SIGNIFICANTLY shorted than the stereo jacks that come with a set of EMG's.







And because there's no extra recess in the jack route the stereo jack doesn't really fit all that well. I put some electrical tape inside the route to try and keep it from grounding out.







Next is to determine the bridge location. Obviously I bolted the neck on at some point, but I can't seem to find a picture. At this point I think everyone knows what bolting a neck on looks like anyway... One thing to note: because I sanded so much material off the neck heel and angles changed etc... Some care had to be taken to make sure I didn't end up stripping the screw holes.







Easy way to check the margins on the outer strings (which is important because of the type of bridge pieces I'm using) is just wrap a string around a tuner, tape it to the proper spot on the nut, then run it down the neck and mark where you want it to go.







And here's why that's important on a bridge...

Long story short, I thought I had an old Schaller 6-string bridge lying around. Turns out I forgot that I used it building a guitar for a friend. Derp! But I had a handful of these ABM single-string bridges laying around.

Well, to be exact, I had 5 of them laying around.

Why only 5? Because back in the day I did a Warmoth build that was only 5 strings. I started out playing bass, and being a metal guy quickly moved from 4 to 5-string. So at the end of the day I got really used to BEADG tuning. I couldn't find a 7-string I really liked at the time, so I had the means at the time to just build a weird project guitar with only 5 strings, tuned BEADG to complement my "normal" 6 string guitar. Y'know... For the br00talz... And stuff.

I never said it was the most brilliant idea in the world, but finding a decent 7-string Les Paul in the early 2000's wasn't super easy, and I was REALLY stuck on Les Pauls and low tunings... And for whatever reason just down-tuning a 6-string felt really weird to me. I feel like the "home row" is the low-E, and I didn't want to just chug the lowest string all the time. I'm used to using it as room to move down during the song, not the place to start.

I called it a "Mini Baritone V" because it had a 24.75" scale with 5 strings tuned BEADG. So... Kind of like a really wacky version of a Bass VI... But... Wrong.


Ok that story got pretty long pretty fast... 

The short version is I'm super OCD and had the ability to build a guitar that suited my OCD, so I went ahead and built it. Wish I hadn't parted it out... It was pretty sweet.

So... For the sake of keeping the project moving I elected to just put the 5 I had in place and worry about the 6th string later, just like I did with the tuner... When I say I'm gonna wreck it, I mean it!







Because this is mostly for proof of concept I just eyeballed the bridge piece locations. I'll soon find out that I got the spacing off a bit, but again; proof of concept. At this point I still didn't know if it would actually string up correctly through empirical verification, though I was sure I got everything right, even with the haphazard methodology employed thus far.

Well... *Pretty* sure...







And that's the reason the current routing on the pickguard is a bit off-center, because there's a missing bridge piece. I'll figure it out later, I swear! (I mostly swear)







Pickup mounting screws! I think these were actually listed as being for J-Bass pickups, but I figured they'd work fine for P90.







Ok, so they do the job, but they are a bit tight. Pretty much had to screw them through the pickup and into the body, but once they were all the way in they turned fairly freely in the pickup.







Now, you may say this completely defeats the purpose of direct-mounting pickups, but I added foam for the sake of height adjustment. At some point I'll go in and just put set-screws or a shim of some sort so it's a more accurate direct mount.

Though, to be honest, I've done it both ways and never noticed any real difference. Perhaps that was a limitation of the equipment I had at the time (which is a perfectly reasonable assessment; it was pretty much a POD X3 going into a cheap pair of M-Audio studio monitors... And one could argue that EMG's may not be the best platform for a test such as that, but you could probably argue the opposite as well. I'm no audio scientist.)







Dressing it out in some black hardware...







And here's the world's most technologically advanced battery mounting system ever devised. I used some NOS paper towels and used a very accurate one-and-something-or-other wraps to achieve a perfect fit, accurate with within +/- .25" which is a tolerance you're unlikely to see in even the most advanced aerospace machine shop.

May I be struck by lightning if that statement is inaccurate.







Pickguard screwed on... Getting close!

But... Man. I really hate that red. I thought I'd like it better once things started coming together, but I really hate it. This is about the time that I started getting a bit bummed about the project and thinking I should have just refinished it before getting to this point, but... Yeah. Looking at these pictures I have to do something about it. It's just awful. It's not pink, it's like a salmon red, but in the worst possible way. Salmon should make your mouth water in anticipation of a big hunk of raw fish on a bed of rice and seaweed, slathered in salty fermented soy bean juices and nose-stinging horse radish paste.

This color just makes me want to throw the can of paint at the guy at Home Depot and demand a refund.







But... Must get proof of concept first... Must make sure it works...

And I figured, if I've got another 5-string Semi-Baritone guitar laying around, might as well string it up for the br00talz, right?

Be sure to tune in next time for the thrilling continuation, where we find out that the new Gotoh Magnum Lock Trad can't accommodate a .073 string gauge, in Chapter IX: What's That You Say? No Heavy Gauges?







If things keep going this way I'm probably going to lose my luthier's license.


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## Pikka Bird (Nov 21, 2014)

^Get some hot pink then (which is what it looks like on my screen). Salmon is the worst colour for non-salmoney things.


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## Dust_to_Dust (Nov 21, 2014)

Dayumn


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## rockskate4x (Nov 21, 2014)

Glad we made it to page two. It was taking forever for all those pics to load just to read updates at the bottom of page one 

Naw man, take as many pics as you like. I'm loving the frequent and informative progress reports on your "shoot from the hip" luthiery. Keep rocking!


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## KhzDonut (Nov 23, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter IX: What's That You Say? No Heavy Gauges?

So, as I said before, I like to tune low and use thick gauges, and Gotoh decided to not accommodate a .073 string gauge. Peeling back the outer wrap worked fine. A little bit of a pain, but realistically it only adds about a minute to the re-stringing process... So whatever. It's still just a "proof of concept" setup at this point, so whatever happens happens.







Now to eyeball the spacing. Turned out a little wide in the end, but that's why I'm using a crummy piece of scrap Delrin for a nut. It's been AGES since I slotted a nut, and I figured this one would end up a little wonky. Also, the glue job was pretty crummy, as you can see from the picture. Derp.







Now, a quick and dirty trick for getting your string heights correct is to just put some tape on the 1st fret and slot until it buzzes on the tape. It's not the most elegant solution, but it gets you in the ballpark, and for this setup I just need ballpark. 2 or 3 thickness of blue painter's tape will end up being about .010" and that's pretty much what you're looking for. If you just go until it buzzes really bad, but stop just before it cuts it out completely, you should have a pretty good nut height. Honestly, with this guitar, just about anything would have been better than the stock nut slot height.

You can't really see the pieces of tape in this picture, but I am indeed measuring the thickness of blue painter's tape with a set of calipers. SCIENCE!







And a slotting we go!







After slotting I like to loosen the strings and tape them to the side of the fingerboard, this gets them out of the way for nut shaping.







I have some nut-shaping files for doing really professional looking nuts, but this time around I just did a rough shaping with a piece of 100g sandpaper on a small block. Did the trick in a pinch. I mean, I wouldn't want this to turn out TOO perfect, right?







A reasonably well-shaped nut is a happy nut.







RESULTS:

So, without getting too much into stuff that really doesn't matter... I tuned the whole thing up and played it. I had found the following problems with the build:

1. Really hate the color. REALLY hate it. H.A.T.E. I.T.
2. The output jack can still short out if I press on the cable a bit.
3. There's some sharpish facets around the perimeter of the body, most notably on the forearm contour.
4. The edges of the fingerboard are still way too sharp feeling and just generally uncomfortable to play.

Solutions:

1. Repaint it.
2. Route some relief inside the jack cavity so it doesn't short out on the foil.
3. Resand the crap out of the sharp spots while refinishing it.
4. Accept the fact that if this guitar is going to actually have a comfortably rounded neck edge that it's not going to be able to accommodate 6 strings and just turn it into a crazy mini-baritone 5-string like my old Les Paul project.


So... Yeah. This guitar has now gone from "slightly wrecked" to "scheduled for complete obliteration."


As far as color goes, I've gone through various cans of pink spray paint, various basecoat colors, topcoat colors, etc... And while color varies from light source to light source, and pictures on a computer screen also vary, I can show you an example of the DIFFERENCE in what I want and what I got:

This T-Mobile tote bag I found at the mall is pretty much the exact pink I want. In a cool-light setting it looks slightly too purple for my likings, but in a warm-light situation it's a very warm pink, but still not RED. The strap in the picture is one of the Planet Waves Voodoo straps (or whatever) and is not at all pinkish red, it's just pure red. As you can see, the color of the body is closer to the strap than it is to the T-Mobile tote. Arg!







After numerous tests the closest I got on test-panels was by using a combination of paints. I use this the Rustoleum light pink as a basecoat, then THIS stuff as a primary coat with a VERY LIGHT dusting of the fluorescent pink Rustoleum on top of it to make it slightly warmer. I got this stuff from the craft store. It smells toxic as all hell, mixed with something morbidly sweet and floral. I can't believe it's marketed to housewives. It smells like it's made of pure cancer.







And here's a picture of one of the sharpish edges on the body. You can just barely see it in the light. On the upper horn it of course doesn't matter, but the ones on the forearm contour are kind of uncomfortable, but also impossible to photograph. Anyway... If I'm going to repaint the thing I might as well round out the rough edges a bit.







And I used the Dremel to open up the jack cavity a bit. Should work fine now.







And if I'm going to commit to it being a 5-string mini-baritone monstrosity then I might as well make the bridge pieces line up right. (I'll have to figure out something for the tuners, but we'll get there when we get there...)







I'll tell ya... One thing about this project. Not much has gone right the first time through, and I'm finding out that doing things twice usually means you'll end up doing them a third time as well... Let's hope I get this right the second time. The black outline of the pickguard was to tell me how far I needed to sand in towards the shielding foil.







Once more through the scuffing process...







Rounded the hell out of the forearm contour. It's pretty comfy now!







Rounded the edges of the fingerboard. A lot. Kind of looks like binding... Hmm... This is giving me ideas...







And here's the body all scuffed... Looks almost like a relic job... And I think it's giving me ideas as well... Hmm... Also you can see how different the pinks can look in a really cool-light situation. In my bathroom the red looks almost like the perfect pink (but the T-Mobile tote looks purple) and in the warm light it looks red (and the T-Mobile tote looks pink) So I think the pink I have in my head is one of those "it only exists in reality in certain lights" and the fine line between "too purple" and "too red" is just TOO fine for my preferences...

But this crazy relic look... Hmm... I think there might be something there.







So, what do you guys think?

I liked the clean look of the pure black neck and solid color body, but there was a certain lack of depth to it. I'm used to metallic finishes that have a lot of "movement" in them that this fluorescent pink/red doesn't seem to have. It's just so... "flat" looking. The relic look gives a lot of "depth" to it because it gives it variation. On the neck it gives it an almost bound look, which I like.

So... What says you all? Should I just do a relic job on the whole thing?


Find out what I decide to do in Chapter X: To Relic Or Not To Relic?!


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## Metaldestroyerdennis (Nov 24, 2014)

"NOS paper towels"


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## downburst82 (Nov 24, 2014)

I pretty universally hate "relic" jobs....but that actually looks pretty awesome!

If you decide to leave it I approve  (which is always important )


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## Pikka Bird (Nov 24, 2014)

I'd hate to not have an outrageous pink/black Jazzmaster in the world. Prove that another exists and I can sleep well even if you don't go through with that colour scheme.



Metaldestroyerdennis said:


> "NOS paper towels"



Yeah, I appreciated that too...


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## KhzDonut (Nov 25, 2014)

downburst82 said:


> I pretty universally hate "relic" jobs....but that actually looks pretty awesome!
> 
> If you decide to leave it I approve  (which is always important )



Your approval is noted and appreciated 



Pikka Bird said:


> I'd hate to not have an outrageous pink/black Jazzmaster in the world. Prove that another exists and I can sleep well even if you don't go through with that colour scheme.



I'm thinking about going a little bit of both; redo it to a nice pink and then relic it in a much more "legitimate" fashion, one that actually LOOKS like a relic job and not just like someone sanding between coats.

*fingers crossed*

Hopefully it will be a relic job that lets you sleep at night


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## KhzDonut (Nov 25, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter X: To Relic Or Not To Relic?

So... Man, this project is starting to really kick my butt. But through the failures I am getting ideas, and that's always fun.

In the last post I mentioned the possibility of doing a relic job on the body, and after re-shaping the sides of the fretboard and giving it a sort of relic'd look as well, I thought... Ok, yeah, let's do that. The neon pink and black look just isn't materializing the way I want it to without things like metal flake and proper high-gloss body finishes and a bunch of other things that I just can't do in my garage.

So yeah, if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it in a way that actually achieves the goal. If that means changing the goal, so be it.

So once I got the edge of the fretboard shaped to my comfort level it had become obvious that I was losing too much fret crown to comfortably accommodate 6 strings, so a Mini Baritone 5-String (if that were a real thing) is what this shall become. With GUSTO!

The look of the fretboard edge with the black sanded off looked a bit like binding, so that gave me the idea on how to proceed with the neck while I get the body re-sprayed for a "proper" relic job (one that actually looks like a relic job and not just a "sand between coats" transition) and this time with a proper pink, not just salmony red...

So, time to scrape some relic'd faux-binding! (I call it "Rinding" TM)







The crummy thing is that this will of course leave a bit of a ridge for the next round of clear, and doubly so because whatever they spray these Squier necks with is yellow all the way through to the wood, so you have to scrape to bare wood to get it looking like plain maple.

I really don't like vintage tint necks, and I really don't like yellow binding... So ultra-ridge it shall be!







Doesn't look too bad as long as you're a foot or two away 








But fretboard binding without headstock binding just doesn't look right to me...







So shall the headstock be faux-bound! (or "Rinding'ed" TM) This straight part was easy. Normally you use one of those awesome scribing tools to set your masking width for something like this... But I don't have one, don't really want to buy one, and didn't want to wait for it to be shipped to me before working on the neck. So... Y'know. I just went ahead and eyeballed it and free-handed the scraping.







Of course... That thing about free-handing... It's super easy on straight lines... Not so much on curvy bits like a Fender headstock... The margins got pretty wonky in parts.







Relic'ing the back of the neck turned out a lot like what I've seen companies I've worked for/in conjunction with do for relic jobs, but I think I overdid this one. Plus, if I want to get that yellow completely taken care of I'll end up reshaping the back of the neck in a way I don't really want to do, so... I think I'll spray some more black on the back before this is done.







Likewise on the headstock. I just got carried away, and if I wanted to remove all the yellow from the headstock perimeter I'd probably lose about 2mm / 1/8" off the entire headstock, and if anything I'd want to go the OTHER way. I like the big fat CBS headstocks on a Jazzmaster/Jaguar style body.







And of course... Go me. At least it will be easy enough to fix with that ridge there from the scraping. Nice easy tape line if I decided to respray it... Which I didn't (Probably a mistake)







One of the things I see people talk about a lot lately is "ball end" frets, and I decided to give it a try. Again, I would have preferred to have one of those little fret-end detailing files like Stew Mac carries, but... Oh well. This diamond fret-leveling file I got like 10 years ago will do the trick! (I think...)







Yeah, they look kinda rounded... Sure. 







Now to get the crown to transition...







Doesn't look terrible to me. I wouldn't say it looks GREAT, but it's my first time really trying this out, and I should have probably used more appropriate tools. By the time I got to the end of the neck it started getting easier to get a good result though.







A little hit with the Scotch Brite pad made it look pretty snazzy, actually.







After some steel wool it actually looked pretty decent to me. (And the rest should look even better once they're all polished up)

Sidenote: You can see in the photo that the filler they put in the fret slot ends has been worn away and will need to be replaced before a re-spray.







Of course there's this one problem with taping off a painted fingerboard that was recently scraped...

If the paint isn't the sort that bonds amazingly well those little scored edges are really prone to pulling up the topcoat. Awesome... Nothing that can't be easily fixed, but it's time consuming...







Re-filling the gaps beneath the frets that has been re-opened from all the shaping and scraping. I have to say it's nice to see that Squier actually nips the tangs and then fills the end of the fingerboard. I totally imagined they'd just leave the fret ends to poke through the finish as the wood shrank and swelled with the seasons.

Well done, Squier. That's definitely a point in your favor. I've seen much more expensive US-made guitars that couldn't get THAT right.







Along with the headstock, the fretboard suffered some black paint casualties during the scuffing/sanding process.







I'm sure I'll come to regret this, but I'm going to do the Sharpie Fix method and hope for the best. This is very likely a huge mistake.







But at least it went on really clean because of the massive ridge.







Anyway...

During this I got a coat of base-coat pink on the body, so we'll see how this proceeds. I'll try to make sure I don't bore you with steps that I've already done once before, I'll just give results unless there's a lesson to be learned or a blunder to be laughed at 







Be sure to tune in next time for Chapter XI: Isn't It Ugly Enough Already?!?


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## Mprinsje (Nov 25, 2014)

This is so cool. Wreck that shit!


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## KhzDonut (Nov 27, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter XI: Isn't It Ugly Enough Already?!?

Before I get deep into this chapter, I'll just let you know that this is primarily a "see all the things I've ....ed up and redone" post, so if you are going to skip a post, this is probably the one. If you want to see which shortcuts totally failed and how I went about fixing some of them, this is for you!

So as I said in the last post I thought I over-did the relic job on the neck, so I decided to redo the back. I taped off the front because I'm pretty happy with the "Rinding" job on the front.







Re-Blackenned.







More modest relic job.







The headstock definitely looks better to me now.







Once I was done clear-coating it I realized that I totally forgot to re-seal the skunk stripe. I noticed it looked more "orange peeley" than the rest of the finish, and upon closer inspection had actually not properly cured. It was gummy and sticky and easily marred, whereas the rest was super scratch resistant. This makes me think that it's Rosewood and not Walnut, but I have seen Walnut react odd with certain finishes so I can't really rule that out, but whatever the case may be I have to strip this part and seal it and respray it.

Lesson of the day: Slow down and make sure you did every step or your do-overs will have to be do-over'd again... I'm starting to get too excited to finish the project and it's biting me in the ass.







Sanded back. Unfortunately because I wasn't also sanding back the black there wasn't any black dust to work its way into the pores of the maple, so now there's a big pale spot on the back. If it's not one thing it's another.







Took some black spray paint and put it on a cotton swab.







Worked it into the wood. It's obviously not seamless, but it's better than a big pale spot.







Sealed it with CA Glue. Lot's of glueing, then sanding, then gluing, then sanding to get it to be a nice consistent coverage with no lumps or bare spots.







There's a certain irony in looking at a relic job and saying "oh that doesn't look quite correct" when the whole point is to make it look crummy. "Hey! That's crummy, but in a way that isn't completely accurate! MAKE IT AGAIN!"

I'll compromise on this one...







The next thing to go wrong is a result of several things...

1. Too many coats of paint, which is a result of not knowing what I wanted at the beginning.
2. Too many shortcuts taken in-between coats, which eventually resulted in bad bonds.
3. Sharpie fixes prevent the next layer from properly bonding.

As you can see here, when I used a razor blade to score the paint so I could remove it from the frets, it didn't bond right to the layer underneath, which is largely due to less-than perfect sanding, but also to the excessive build-up of paint around the frets. I knew this was a risk and I rolled the dice.

Never roll the dice.







I did a quick scrape around the frets to get any delaminating paint to come off, then I put glue on the area to make sure everything stayed bonded where the edges of the topmost layer of clear ended. Then I sanded and sent the whole thing in for another round of clear coating. If this were a professional painting situation half of this wouldn't have happened, and I'm quite sure that this method would have worked just fine to fix it... But this is rattle-can paints for furniture... We'll see.







After it came out of clear coating everything looked really good, so I taped off the fingerboard and decided to do the final treatment to the frets. I used a diamond leveling file to put a touch of fallaway into the end of the fingerboard and take care of some high/low spots I found. I didn't do a lot, obviously this isn't the stage at which you'd want to do a "final" leveling and setup, but the neck itself was reasonably well adjusted and fretted, so these very minor adjustments shouldn't be a problem. (Of course, I've said that before.)







This is the 5th or 6th fret, and you can see that the Sharpie mark on it is still there, while the frets on either side have had the Sharpie sanded off. Definitely pretty damned low, and would explain the horrible buzzing I was getting on the high E and B strings.







For doing more detailed crowning I prefer a diamond crowning file. I think I got this from CE Distribution for much cheaper than most other suppliers sell them. Works like a charm. One thing I notice about the diamond stuff is that it takes a few runs with it to "break it in." Sometimes I'll get some loose grit come off it in the first usage, which ends up leaving some really deep scratches, but after that they work great for a really long time and give consistent results.







Did the whole 320g thing and then used some 800g I had laying around, and then back to the steel wool for final polishing.







Now let's see if the last round of topcoat really bonded properly...

Take the tape off...

And...

AAARGH! There were about 8-9 different spots where small chunks of paint came off...







More scraping, this time taking it down to the bottom-most layers of paint to reduce buildup around the frets...







Hours of meticulous-but-aggressive sanding later...







Re-application of black primer...







Expediting the drying process just enough to enable scraping...







Wiped off over-spray from the headstock. Denatured alcohol did the trick ok.







Re-scrape around the nut slot which got a little mangled.







Fingerboard actually looks *mostly* better now than it did for the first scraping. My only complaint is that I know that once it gets repainted the fingerboard won't look as "flat" as it did before. All the scraping and sanding around the frets will give a slightly beveled or "pillowy" look to the area between the frets, which often happens with numerous thick applications of paint on a fretted fingerboard. Ideally I would have just used a bound Ebony or Phenolic/Richlite fingerboard, or I would have done the bulk of the spraying PRIOR to fretting, and then only done a final clearcoat AFTER fretting.

Obviously things have not gone ideally. 

I'll put a layer or two of clear on this (depending on how it goes... The can I just used to spray this had a faulty nozzle and didn't give a super even coverage, so I'll probably have to give it another go. Also got some contamination on the fingerboard) But I'll post pictures after it dries and I see what I've got to work with.







In other news, I got the final layer of Pink and Fluorescent on the body. It's pretty much the exact color I was looking for, but it still has that problem of changing drastically based on the light it's in. Also, one thing I'm learning is that going from gloss to satin really kills the depth and eye-gouging-ness of a fluorescent paint, so I'm still on board to relic the crap out of it.







Thanks everyone for the kind words thus far on the project. Some of these mistakes I was really tempted to just omit from the build thread, not only for brevity but also out of embarrassment. I've been doing this for a long time and have done work I'm really proud of, and this is such a botch job that I don't really want people to see it and think THIS is what nearly a decade-and-a-half in the industry has taught me about quality workmanship.

But I think if people can learn from these mistakes that's worth the minor hit to my ego.


Lessons to learn from this:

1. Too many coats of paint can potentially compound problems.
2. Be VERY thorough when scuffing between coats unless you are very confident of your paint's ability to bond to previous coats.
3. Be very aware of paint buildup around frets.
4. Make sure you know what kind of wood you're spraying onto and how it will react with your paint.
5. The more clear your idea is when you start the easier it will be to achieve it.
6. Samples and Test Panels will save you a lot of time and effort, and probably some money in do-overs and extra paint/supplies.
7. Go slower when you want to go faster, because going faster will probably result in a mistake that takes 10x as long to fix as going slower would have taken.

These are all lessons I've learned and had hammered into my brain over and over and over and over and over throughout my career. I thought I could get away with some clever shortcuts and some of them worked (such as the Sharpie repair on the peg face) and others worked very poorly (Like the Sharpie fix EVERYWHERE ELSE) and cost me more time and money in supplies.

And a more comprehensive note about the Sharpie fixes: They take more than one layer of clearcoat over them to work at all, because the clear doesn't fully bond to them and the Sharpie reacts with the paint and causes it to look orange-peely. The second coats worked ok, but still it's not an ideal way of doing things.

So unless it's a spot you know won't see any scoring, abuse, masking, or be highly visible in general (it doesn't quite match the black primer) and you know you're going to do AT LEAST two more coats of clear, don't do it. Again: Thought I was being clever, and it does the job well enough on the headstock, but doing it near the frets where I screwed up the scraping TOTALLY bit me in the ass. Could not have been a worse idea.

And maybe there are clear coats that react better with it than the Minwax, but I don't recommend doing it with THIS paint.


I submit to you these mistakes so that you may avoid them like the plague! 


And be sure to tune in next time for Chapter XII: If This Doesn't Work, I'm Setting It On Fire!


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## asher (Nov 27, 2014)

But... but...

Fire would be such an awesome way to relic it! 

Also, major props for the Shazbot.

And NOS paper towels.

And Rinding. It looks really cool.

And hell, the whole thing. This has been super entertaining and I'm really curious where it's going to end up.

(also, fvck acrylic. I haaaate working with that stuff in any way. Doesn't glue, bitch to laser cut, etcetcetc...)


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## Sofos (Nov 28, 2014)

Mayne, if you ever decide to sell this, PLEASE PM me. Also, I have a parts Strat that I got from a buddy in exchange for him ruining like 6 of my favorite CDs  Do you do commissions? I really wanna get this thing looking from ass to great.


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## KhzDonut (Nov 29, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter XII: If This Doesn't Work, I'm Setting It On Fire!

The body being dry, and the neck frustrating the hell out of me, I decided to take a little break from the neck and decide if I wanted to keep the body totally pink or if I wanted to re-relic it. Looking at the original pictures of the "in-between coats" sanding I had some ideas of how to make the relic job look really good.

But here's the purest pink I could manage. After so much work to get this color it does seem a shame to ruin it...







But ultimately I just think it lacks depth when it's straight pink, and if I wanted to keep maximum depth I'd have to keep it gloss. That's really not an option because I just don't have the necessary equipment to get the level of gloss I want to get... I'm just not into the orange-peely "done at home" gloss, and satin really seems to rob the color of its brilliance and depth.

But here's the thing, and I apologize if this is a bit rambling:

I'm not a relic fan. It's not that I don't like the LOOK of a beat-up old guitar, because I really do. They have character and "warmth" that really speak to me. They look like they have a "story" to tell with every knick and scratch and missing bit of paint and stain and rusty piece of hardware and worn-through spot. I really love that.

But there's two really big caveats to that:

1. I don't want to play a guitar that has someone ELSE's story to tell. I want those marks to represent ME and MY history with that guitar.
2. After years of busting my ass to make bodies and necks perfect in an OEM guitar manufacturer, only to have the builders buying them complain about little tiny scratches or discolorations before THEY go in and relic them? I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the entire idea of relic'ing guitars... But I won't go into that here, because that's a personal beef that's primarily directed at one or two builders, and that's not anybody else's fault.

But as I've said before, I want this guitar to at least achieve some level of "this is what it SHOULD look like!" whatever that is, and I decided that a crazy relic job was the way to go, so let's do it! (Besides, the neck is already pretty relic'd at this point, and I'd hate to have to actually do clean lines on that thing at this point  )

So here we go! No turning back now!







Without all the proper tools (bladder sander, pin-roller sander, orbital sander, buffing arbor, etc...) at the end of the day it turned out to be way faster and easier to use a razor blade for most of the relic'ing, at least for the edges/radii.







I debated as to whether or not I would leave any bare wood showing through, but I didn't think it looked terrible, especially with the neck being as rough looking as it currently is. I could have spritzed some black on the bare spots, but ultimately I decided to just leave it.







Decided to go for the "really well loved" look on the forearm contour.







I tried to follow the basic rule of "anything sticking out gets mangled!" and "anywhere my hand touches a lot get's worn through!" but really it's just an approximation. Feels kind of like a lie, but I'm trying to think of it more as a "layered-relic'd hybrid finish" rather than any sort of attempt at really relic'ing.

Whatever to help me sleep at night, y'know? 







I hated how the tummy cut turned out because it's in further than the original black burst, so there's this ugly yellow against the pink. It would be so much work to try to correctly fix it, and it's on the back of the guitar so the real gains would be pretty low... So I'm just going to leave it, but I think it's pretty hideous looking.

Really wish they had just sold these things in gloss black...







Once I got things sanded they started to look much smoother overall, and less like a guitar that had been mangled by a grizzly bear with a cheese grater and hangover.







Looked pretty good overall, at least to me. I know it's not for everyone, but I didn't build it for everyone. 

I'll probably do a couple more little wear-through spots here and there, and I might add a "palm-muting" wear spot near the bridge, but I think I might just leave that spot how it use. I don't want to risk it looking crummy because I couldn't even begin to re-do that big pink field of color in the middle, since it's multiple layers of paint to get that color. No going back on that one.







As I was going through all my random guitar leftovers I found this set of custom 7-string pickups made by Robert Tamm that I never got around to doing anything with. I told him I wanted something "kinda metal" and he wanted to try using Alnico 8 magnets in a medium-high output pickup to see what the result would be. I've been using EMG's for the past... I dunno, 15 years or so, and I've been wanting to try something different (and also just try something passive for a change) and Robert was willing to listen to some of my stupid ideas (and when he veto's an idea he's pretty damn good about explaining why it was a crummy idea. I appreciate explanations)

14k Neck, 15.5k Bridge, 7-string Alnico 8 pickups by Robert Tamm







Of course this means new pickguard...







This time I decided to leave the top glossy, and as suggested by several other forum goers, I painted the BACKSIDE rather than the front.







Ah, good 'ol shielding paint. This stuff gets a bad reputation for not doing the job very well, but I think that's because most people don't apply it thick enough. You need to get a few really good thick coats.







Goes on a lot like regular latex paint. I just used a foam brush, and it seemed to work fine. It's been probably 15 years since I've used the stuff, and it was probably some generic brand back then, but it worked just like I remember.







Now, the label says to wait 24 hour between coats, and to do 2-3 coats... I'm more of a 3-4 coat kind of guy, and I'm also impatient. An old trick I learned (and seems to work very well on this stuff as well) was to just use a hair dryer. That way you can get 3-4 coats in about 24 minutes, rather than 96 hours...







Hmm... Leaves a streaky appearance on the other side of the pickguard. Really weird. If I was more creative I'd think of some way to actually incorporate that into a design, but...







Instead I just stripped it, applied a layer of black spray paint to the backside of the pickguard, and THEN applied 3-4 thick coats of shielding paint. This resulted in a very consistent look. Obviously I never buffed out the edges of the pickguard, but I think that adds a nice contrast to the glossy top. That's probably just laziness speaking, but I can handle that accusation at this point. This project is wearing me a little thin 







That's all for this installment... Hopefully the rest goes smoothly. The last coat of clear on the neck doesn't look like it's turning out super awesome, but we'll see... And then there's still wiring, and for this project I wanted to actually utilize some of the things that passive pickups can do that active pickups can't, like a series/parallel switch.

Of course I couldn't find an EXACT diagram of what I was looking for; the closest I could find was for push-pull pots and the wiring looked different on the push-pull terminals than the separate diagrams I found for ON/ON mini switches (and that's all I have on had at the moment)

2 Humbuckers - 2 Volumes - 3-Way Toggle - 2 Series Parallel Mini Switches

So I cobbled-together some wiring diagrams on post-it notes again! And there's also my guide on what I think Tamm actually used for his color-coding conventions (his appears to be same as Seymour Duncan... But we'll see about that.) He wrapped the red and white together, and the green and bare wire together, so that to me suggests he's using the Seymour Duncan wiring... *fingers crossed*







Tune in next week for the thrilling continuation in Chapter XIII: Don't Cut The Red Wire!!!


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## KhzDonut (Nov 29, 2014)

asher said:


> Fire would be such an awesome way to relic it!



I see a new market developing: Fire relic'd guitars 




Sofos said:


> Mayne, if you ever decide to sell this, PLEASE PM me. Also, I have a parts Strat that I got from a buddy in exchange for him ruining like 6 of my favorite CDs  Do you do commissions? I really wanna get this thing looking from ass to great.



Oh man if I had time to do commissions I would totally do them, but this is literally taking up every second of what little free time I've got.

If I ever starting doing work for other people I'll totally let you know, but that'll probably be years from now with all I've got on my plate.

But thanks so much for the inquiry, I'm flattered as hell. I would have thought the last few posts would have scared everyone away from wanting me to ever work on their guitars


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## asher (Nov 30, 2014)

Still loving this. I'd definitely do some palm muting wear to help break into that field of pink a little more.


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## KhzDonut (Nov 30, 2014)

asher said:


> Still loving this. I'd definitely do some palm muting wear to help break into that field of pink a little more.



Thanks!

And I decided to forego the palm mute spot because putting a wear-spot into the middle of a field of color would be excessively difficult with just a sanding block, and I think I'm really happy with how it looks right now.

The OCD part of me really wants things to be "accurate" but I'm trying to learn my lesson that if it looks really close to perfect, I'll probably just screw it up if I try to go that extra step


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## craigny (Dec 2, 2014)

awesome project!


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## 693 (Dec 2, 2014)

This was a fun read. "Following"'


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## KhzDonut (Dec 3, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter XIII: Don't Cut The Red Wire!!!

So it's that time again: Wiring a guitar I've already wired once!

Had a couple hiccups with the last wiring job, namely I had a weird bleed from one pickup position to the next. Apparently that's a thing that can happen when you wire a 3-way toggle a certain way. Took quite some time on the Les Paul forum to nail down what I did wrong, and I'm still not sure I'm understanding it perfectly. Regardless, I decided to try out the Robert Tamm 7 string's (Because the poles would actually line up if I'm only doing 5-strings!) and since they're passive I wanted to try Series/Parallel wiring really bad, especially for the neck position.

Got some black mini toggles from Stew Mac. Oddly enough they were actually the most reasonably priced mini toggles I could find in black. $6.66 each when you order three 

Totally Metal








Of course lining everything up on the pickguard was a little tricky, but since there's quite a big margin for error with the mini switches I decided to use this trick:

Place the guitar on your workbench.
Put a piece of tape on the pickguard.
Make sure it's good and straight.
Slide the pickguard down the body, making sure to keep it lined up with some reference point - I use screw holes on the body and pickguard.
Eyeball it and mark the locations of the switches on a piece of tape.

This gives me one axis of the coordinates for the switches.







Then I repeat the process but move the pickguard along the perpendicular axis, and x marks the spot!







In this case I just marked the two outer pots, plotted a straight line between them, and measured where the center of the line was. Now I've got all three switches figured out, and they're ready to drill.







Of course I didn't have a properly sized Dremel drill bit so I had to ream out the hole using the little router bit.







And switches installed! Perfect enough for this project. Whether or not I actually end up utilizing the third switch right away is also part of the mystery of THE SUPER SECRET MYSTERY SWITCH OF MYSTERY!!!

I have ideas, but the road to broken guitars is paved with good intentions... Or maybe it's the road to hell is paved with broken guitars? I forget.







I also wanted to try 1meg pots, and luckily Peter had some audio-taper 1meg pots laying around. And by "laying around" I mean he had boxes of them and was cool with me taking a couple to try out on the project.  

Of course, it's a pedal company, so... Y'know. PCB-mount style legs. Not that it will really affect anything, but it's not exactly vintage-correct.







The real bonus though? The pots come with little dust covers on them! Of course this means I'll have to use some trickery if I want to solder to the casing at all.

First I drilled a hole in the casing... (I ended up having to open it up a bit wider than this)




]


Then I soldered a loop of bare wire on the back of the pot and replaced the modified dust cap. Still covers all the openings in the pot, and it'll probably be easier to wire all the ground connections anyway.







Something I noticed when I installed the LP-Toggle the first time was that it sat really high. I'm sure when I first bought this switch it had a height adjustment nut on it, but it's long since vanished so I just used a piece of scrap acrylic from the pickguard and made a spacer. (Which I had to modify after this picture was taken because it totally didn't fit with all those pointy edges)







As low-profile as a toggle switch can be and still look right!







Now to install the pickups... Which oh man, I hate doing this. I used to work assembly at a small manufacturer in California and installing pickups into pickup rings was always the thing that made me the angriest. Some days I can do 20 in a row without a hassle. Other days I get one pickup that fights me for a good 5-10 minutes and I eventually just burn down the building and find a job somewhere else. Obviously the building was haunted or built on an ancient burial ground or there's a voodoo curse on it... I mean, it couldn't have been that some days I'm just a terribly uncoordinated person, could it?

Of course not.

Anyway, these screws are about an inch too long and the springs are about twice as long as they need to be...







Springs are easy enough to cut with a wire cutter. Screws on the other hand... They require some more aggressive forms of persuasion.







There we go. Everything went fine, but I *did* buy extra screws just in case. My favorite thing about this picture is you can see some metal filings stuck to the pickup's magnetized screws. Probably should have shortened the screw BEFORE I installed the pickup, but... Y'know. Whatever. 







Now that I've got it all installed I have to wire it... And I figured that since I'm doing some more elaborate wiring than I'm used to I should probably not go the "rat's nest" route this time around. That way it will be easy to redo it all later when I find out that my cobbled-together set of wiring diagrams were too complicated and I end up with something other than Series/Parallel... Like... Silence/Failure wiring... Or Broken/OpensGateToHell wiring... Which would totally be my luck with this project.

Of course... OpenGateToHell wiring would be pretty Metal.







Wired up. Pretty clean overall. Fingers crossed that I actually know what I'm doing when wiring a Series/Parallel switch (I totally don't). I did figure out after taking this photo that I forgot to actually ground the bridge, but that was probably because I haven't re-drilled the bridge yet. Also need to ground to the shielding tape, but... Yeah. Anyway, one thing at a time.







During this the neck had finally dried with what I hoped to be the last layer of clearcoat... I emphasize "hoped."

Still deciding... Should I respray clearcoat on the neck again or accept that it has won and just let this big ugly piece of crummy contamination slide, so long as everything else worked out? I honestly am not that bothered by it at this point, because... I am SO sick of working on this neck. An aesthetic flaw at this point is just not enough to get me to re-sand, respray, and run the risk of more paint pulling up... Of course, I still have to clean the frets, so we'll see how that goes.







Be sure to tune in next time for Chapter XIV: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!


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## KhzDonut (Dec 6, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter XIV: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!

So if you joined us last time you will remember the horrible contamination that I got on the fretboard.







Ultimately my decision was to just leave it, provided everything else went smooth-ish. At the very least I would attempt to get the frets totally cleaned off and looking nice. But I've learned my lesson with this particular combination of paints: as awesome as blue tape is, it can still pull up paint like a bastard.

Not wanting to wait for a metal one to arrive from Stew Mac, I took a piece of blister-pack plastic and created an improvised fret-dressing guard. Only took a minute or two with a razor blade.







After scraping the bulk of the paint off the frets with a razor blade (I'll spare you more pictures of this process as I've already done it a couple times at this point) I used some steel wool along with the little plastic guards. It worked fine, but I kind of had to bend it over the side of the fretboard so it wouldn't move (which caused some minor scratching on the fretboard, but not enough to really notice) and it's so flexible that it didn't really want to stay straight.

At the end of the day though, it did the job.







Once I had that taken care of I could at least attach the neck to the body and use a piece of string to get rough dimensions on bridge placement.







Unlike last time I actually intended to leave it as a 5-string, so this time I put some more effort into getting proper alignment. And because I was using a 7-string pickup I could actually aim for "centered" spacing rather than "oh what happened to your high E?" spacing. If anything it's slightly shifted towards the treble side of the board (mostly because I was a little off-center with the pickup routes in the pickguard. Meh)







And if I've learned anything about drilling bridge holes it's that hand-drilling with a regular bit rather than a brad-point is an exercise in futility if your goal is to get them perfectly spaced/aligned/whatever. I made sure to measure as I was getting the holes started so I could at least get CLOSE. The nice thing about these individual bridge pieces is that you can re-adjust later by slotting the saddle to compensate.







Before I can install the bridge I still have to figure out what I want to do with the pickguard. I really hated how it turned out last time, with all the gaps around the bridge. Looked terrible. I wanted this to look cleaner, so after drilling one of the mounting holes I lined the bridge up on the pickguard and scored it with a razor blade.







Kind of hard to get a good photo, but you get the idea.







All of the pieces scored. I think this one makes it pretty obvious what's going on.







Back to the drill-and-route method of removing chunks of pickguard. It's getting pretty easy at this point, though my bits are starting to get mega dull...







After cleaning it up with my go-to routing Dremel bit it fit almost snug on the sides, but I did biff it on a couple of the round bits where the bridge pieces butt up against it. Ah well. I can always just use a black sharpie there so you won't be able to tell 







Of course I had to remove it all, because I once again forgot to attach a ground wire to the bridge. 15 years of playing EMG's; old habits die hard...







When I install strap buttons I like to use some wood glue. This is for several reasons:

1. Helps to stabilize and strengthen the wood
2. Helps to repair any mismatching of threads when using aftermarket parts (which I am)
3. Helps to eliminate the possibility of the screw backing out over time

And since it's wood glue it doesn't readily bond to metal, so it doesn't prevent you from unscrewing it later the way CA glue or Epoxy can.







When I get really close to the end of screwing it in I'll just take a cotton swab and clean up any glue squeeze-out. If I remember, that is. I forgot on the first one and remember on the second one. The little felt bumpers seemed to keep it from getting everywhere, so I guess it doesn't really matter. Might have to pry the felt pads off later if I ever remove the strap buttons, but I doubt that will be any more traumatic than anything else has been with this project 







After all that was done it was once again time to make a new nut. Fun.







This one turned out much nicer than the last one. It's not the best I've ever done, but it's far from the worst. I don't really like that the Acetal/Delrin is SO white against the creamy color of the maple, but I don't have any of the TUSQ XL (lubricated) ivory-colored nuts around, just the non-lubricated ones, and I find that I really am not a fan of them. Sound great, but I like some lubrication with all the string bending I do.







Well, that's pretty much it for this round... I did however think to myself that I should put SOME sort of logo on the headstock. it looks a little barren just being black. But what can I do? I don't want to spend the money on having a specially made decal (because why bother on a botch-job like this?) and I don't want something that I would have to re-apply finish over (because I'm SOOO sick of working on this stupid neck)

So... I headed to the craft store and picked up some Logo-Making supplies 







Because I thought this project could use a touch of class 


Be sure to catch Chapter XV: A Touch Of Class!


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## KhzDonut (Dec 6, 2014)

Squier VM Jazzmaster Mod Project Chapter XV: A Touch Of Class

So before getting to the neck, you might remember the "Super Secret Mystery Switch Of Mystery" from awhile back, and I finally figured out what I want to do with it. But it's going to require a power source.

I got a battery clip from Stew Mac, but didn't consider that mounting it might take some very specific screw dimensions.







Rather than do the rational thing, which is to just go to the hardware store and find s'more screws, I decided to just modify the part with the Dremel and a grinder bit, because otherwise I would have had to get out of my chair. Nuts to that! What am I? An athlete? 







Used a piece of 100g sandpaper to lower the profile of some Pickguard screws, and the whole thing worked pretty damn well after that.







I wanted to mount it in the BOTTOM of the control cavity, and I made sure to measure the wall thickness so I didn't just drill right through the back of the body. Turns out a pickguard screw (if my calculations were correct, and assuming a uniform thickness across guitars) WILL go right through the back of a Jazzmaster body if you put it in the bottom of the control cavity.

One thing I found out when checking is that this Jazzmaster body is about 1.6 inches thick, and I was always under the impression that almost all Fenders were supposed to be 1.75

Either I'm off, or this thing got way over-sanded at the factory. Doesn't matter either way, but I just find that stuff interesting.

So anyway, measure measure measure... This is about how much length I had left to drill into the body before running a very serious risk of going through the back.







After cutting the screw I used it and a piece of blue tape to get a safe stopping point for drilling the pilot holes.







And the whole thing went off (almost) without a hitch. I had to re-place it because one of the original screw holes was off a bit, and I did have a little trouble with the wood stripping out. Second time was a charm and everything feels solid as a rock (Well, maybe sandstone. Solid enough to feel safe)







The neck itself turned out pretty nice with the cleaned up frets and all. That spot on the fingerboard, while an annoyance, is something that I can live with.







A Mockup of what I wanted the logo to look like, using pretty glitter stickers I got from the craft store. The adhesive-backed plastic glitter heart worked great to cover up the extra tuner hole, and I was able to drill a new hole for the string tree that allowed for a much straighter-looking string pull (though I really only cared for aesthetic purposes) that almost perfectly obscured the old hole, so I didn't even bother filling it in. Out of sight, out of mind 

My only complaint is the lone heart looks a little out of place... But I think I found a good solution for that.







I took a second heart and re-shaped the back so I could butt it up against the first one and give a sort of "layered" effect.







It's been about a zillion years since I last used stickers like this on something. Normally if I'm using a sticker it's a SQUARE "Made In The USA" sticker that I'm slapping on the back of a pedal enclosure, not some delicate flowing letter with parts that can warp and bend all out of place while you're sticking it to something. This was actually one of those things that blindsided me with how hard it would be to get looking right.

I'm also really OCD about kerning, so getting all the letters to look properly spaced, and with margins that were just right was a real pain. "Should that 's' be closer? Should that 't' be angled differently? Does the shape of these two letters mean they'll look better if they're put closer together than these two letters?" 







But in the end I think it turned out as good as could be hoped. And oh-so-classy. I mean, I don't see how any human being could look at this and not just INSTANTLY fall in love with it. 

(Photo is color corrected because it originally showed the masked binding as being bright yellow and the reddish pink letters looks salmon again, and the purple looked washed out. I have bad lighting, but I'll get some better shots when everything is 100% completed)

I Give You: THE SASSMASTER!!!







In a sense the guitar is now "done."

But there's still that thing that cries out from deep inside my brain that says "there's one last thing that must be done..."

Like the little Devil on your shoulder speaking into your ear telling you that the Angel on your other shoulder doesn't know what he's talking about...


There's...

Just...

Something...

I Have To Do...







MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!! 

Tune in next time for Chapter XVI: The Final Battle Between Good And Evil!


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## BlackMastodon (Dec 6, 2014)

Love the name.


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## Steinmetzify (Dec 6, 2014)

Good god dude....GREAT thread. I laughed, I cried, I screamed at the screen and when the relic idea in Ch. X popped up, so did I. Seriously, it moved. I love relics just for the way they look....not going to get into a huge debate about it, but I do. Especially when it's offsets. 

This turned out fantastic and I think you're a sick quick pimp for the way you handled the setbacks. I had no idea what to expect when I jumped into this thread, and it was a joy to read. Thanks.

EDIT: "get out of my chair? What am I, an athlete?"


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## KnightroExpress (Dec 7, 2014)

This thing is great in a hilarious and twisted way. Two thumbs up!


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## jwade (Dec 7, 2014)

This thread just gets better and better.


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## Stooge1996 (Dec 7, 2014)

Seriously, great job dude! I've been reading since you first started and I've loved every post! Such a great read


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## Neilzord (Dec 8, 2014)

"My Minds tellin' me Nooo. But My Bodyyy. My Booooddyyy's tellin' me Yeeeaaaayaheeaaahhhh" - R.Kelly 1994

This guitar is summing up to be one of my guilty pleasures. 

Awesome Build. Much enjoyment was had reading it so far!


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## The Hiryuu (Dec 8, 2014)

I'm probably in the minority, but I loved that salmon color you had going on before.


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## KhzDonut (Dec 12, 2014)

Chapter XVI: The Final Battle Between Good And Evil!

So before we get to the nitty gritty of the final product, there are several little fiddly bits that have to be taken care of before it can be called "done." (and as I'm finding out, this project may never really end... It will probably just haunt me for the rest of my life, taking every last ounce of my energy and sanity until it finally kills me. I can kind of respect that, I guess.)

First, just in case anyone was wondering, this is the hole from the original string tree location. Hadn't originally planned on moving it, but from straight-on you can't see it under the Graphtech string tree. Also, it looks like the string isn't properly seated in the string tree, but that's because the strings are super slack in this shot. They fit correctly under tension.







The first thing I noticed when I strung it up the last time is that the neck pocket angle is slightly off, more so than it was the first time. It was weird. I did a test with a couple pieces of Dunlop picks (.73mm, or about .029") and that was actually more than enough to solve the problem, so it occurred to me that the problem may very well just be excessive paint build up on the back of the neck and top of the body causing the problem.







When I felt the neck where the "painting handle" had been placed it was a very noticeable ridge. I just didn't think about it when painting because normally I only put one or two coats on, so there's very little build up. This got painted half a dozen times and got fairly thick coats at times. It was just an oversight on my part.

The body also got significantly more paint than expected, and as such also contributed to the bridge sitting higher than before (though probably only about .5mm/.020")







As is generally the case, the solution was clear...







I scored a line on the neck pocket as a guide...







Then scraped all the paint off of the back of the neck heel, and some little bits in the neck pocket that had built up while I was at it.







When I was done it was a reasonably accurate job. I mean, it's relic'd, so it's not like it's the most noticeable of the flaws on the guitar, y'know?







So once I got that taken care of... Back to the drilling! I had to remove that big chunk of wood between the pickups to give myself room for my MASTER PLAN, which needed lots of room under the pickguard to work. I read on the internet that this is how they did it at Fender in the 50's. If you read it on the internet, it has to be true, right?







I don't have a proper chisel. Turns out a screwdriver does the job pretty good on Alder. Of course, I was still careful not to split the body in half, which who knows... You never can be quite sure of the quality of wood you're getting in a guitar, budget-guitar or not. If there were any pre-existing cracks in the wood there was always the potential to destroy the damn thing. I've seen weirder things happen.







Perfect swimming pool route. Provided you like swimming pools with shards of broken glass at the bottom and colonies of botulism so massive that they have their own parliamentary system...







So what's it all for, you ask?

Sour Cream, my friends. I'm going to fill the entire guitar with Sour Cream, courtesy of the kind people at Darigold, a Farmer Owned Cooperative since 1918!

Thanks, Farmers!







Ok what I'm REALLY going to do is jam a bunch of LED's into the Sour Cream lid to make a pattern. Here's a bunch of LED's and resistors!







Big thanks to my boss, Peter, for working up a little diagram for me. I know very little about electrical theory, but I'm competent with a soldering iron. He told me that this would run 20+ 5mm LED's at near-maximum brightness without burning them out, and still just run off a 9v. We shall see!







So, one thing you DO have to be careful about when soldering things that are stuck into a Sour Cream lid is that the lid will melt fairly readily when exposed to even moderately high temperatures. There was quite a lot of melty-plastic smell in my kitchen this night. Also the night after, where I had to re-do the whole thing because I accidentally wired every LED (after the first 3, which I double-checked) backwards.

It wouldn't be part of this project if I didn't have to do it at least twice, right?







Electrical tape barrier so it doesn't all ground out on the copper shielding...







And a piece of white paper as a "reflector" plate. Initial tests were not very successful, so I had to find ways to reflect and diffuse more light from the somewhat sparse LED's.







Initial tests also showed that even a very small gap around the pickups will kind of screw up any under-pickguard LED effects, or at least make them looks not as nice as they COULD look. And as you can imagine, I had some small gaps here and there... Y'know, in between the really big gaps 







So, here's where the beauty of the Acrylic pickguard with black painted on the underside comes in: I can just scrape bits off with a razor blade to create patterns, and since what I wanted was something that looked slightly rough and hand-scrawled, the effect was pretty much exactly what I wanted (Which was kind of a first for this project!)







So, installation was rather haphazard, even in it's final iteration. This is the first attempt, but it really didn't get much prettier. I ended up putting post-it notes of the appropriate color on the back of the pickguard to diffuse the light and to help properly tint the LED's, which as I found out were from two different manufacturers, and one was very warm and one was very cool, so colored paper helped to even out the color as well as diffuse the light.

And I eventually changed out the blue tape for clear medical tape, as it held better and didn't obstruct light anywhere (Had a couple problems with that initially)

This was also taken before I figured out that I needed light-blocking foam around the pickups. But believe me, the final product was no less haphazard or ugly...







But when all was said and done...

It was...

THE SASSMASTER!!!







Annnnnnnnnd... LED'S ON!!!







Oh Yeah... Nothing more Br00tal than a Neon Pink Pentagram. If this doesn't just summon the Devil the second I play a power chord I don't know what will! 







And thus, the story (mostly) concludes!

I will hopefully get video/sound clips up this weekend! (My schedule is screwed up this weekend, so it might have to wait until next week)

But oh man, I'm so glad to finally be DONE!


Little tweaks to be made in the future:

I talked to Robert Tamm about the pickups, which sound fantastic, but I'm so used to having EMG's that the change to passives is a little odd. I told him I wanted a bridge pickup with slightly higher output and more mids. He informed me that I would sacrifice some clarity for this, but I told him that's fine. These pickups, if anything, are overly clear for metal. Bright and articulate as anything I've ever played. I'd put these in any guitar I wasn't exclusively using for Teh Br00talZ, so they'll probably go into a different 7-string build at some point.

But anyway, he told me today that my new bridge pickup will probably be done tomorrow, and I'll probably have a new set of strings in from Kalium as well. So it'll be a 17k bridge pickup with Alnico 8 magnets (So, think Seymour Duncan Nazgul, but with A8's) and 70-53-39-29-22 (all wound) strings tuned G-C-F-Bb-Eb. Y'know... 'cause Teh Br00talZ.

Of course, that means new nut and more wiring, but whatever. Nothing I haven't already done three or four times.

Someday I'll want to put Stainless Steel frets in it, but by the time I get ready to do that I'll probably just be ready to build a whole NEW SassMaster, so I may just let it die with the frets.


Big thanks go to everyone that came in and said such kind things and showed such amazing support. I didn't think this would be nearly as fun or as interesting for me to do, and I didn't think it would interest as many people as it did. I'll get to individual questions that people have had later, but for right now I'm really ready to just call it a night after editing all these photos and doing some of the "final" setup. It's been kind of a whirlwind the last couple weeks!

Thanks again, you guys have all been super awesome!


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## Ibzzus (Dec 12, 2014)

HOLY SHIT that looks unreal!!!


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## Prophetable (Dec 12, 2014)

I've been enjoying this thread but thinking it was going to be a big pile of shit the entire time.

So, now that I see the finished project I love it. No kidding. The pink pentagram kills me. Outstanding.


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## MoshJosh (Dec 12, 2014)

Freaking awesome build!


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## Neilzord (Dec 12, 2014)

That is seriously epic. Sassmaster Flex. 

The Relic'ing on the body makes it look like chrome in the photo's haha 

Nice Devilish LED work too!


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## TheStig1214 (Dec 12, 2014)

5 string chug machine with pink light up pentagram?







Seriously, good job with this dude. May teh br00tz be with this guitar.


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## craigny (Dec 12, 2014)

Awesome.....


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## asher (Dec 12, 2014)

Wow.

Dude.

So much win. So much.


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## Devyn Eclipse Nav (Dec 12, 2014)

Jesus christ, this is ridiculous and awesome in the best possible way.


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## BlackMastodon (Dec 12, 2014)

F**king. Brilliant. And I normally hate reliced guitars.


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## Blue1970Cutlass (Dec 12, 2014)

I am sad to see this thread come to an end 

You better make a sequel or something for us!


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## KhzDonut (Dec 13, 2014)

steinmetzify said:


> Good god dude....GREAT thread. I laughed, I cried, I screamed at the screen and when the relic idea in Ch. X popped up, so did I. Seriously, it moved. I love relics just for the way they look....not going to get into a huge debate about it, but I do. Especially when it's offsets.



 Awesome. And yeah there are some super sweet looking relic guitars out there, I don't think that's something that even IS debatable, some of them are just awesome looking, and I agree that the offsets usually pull it off super well.




Prophetable said:


> I've been enjoying this thread but thinking it was going to be a big pile of shit the entire time.
> 
> So, now that I see the finished project I love it. No kidding. The pink pentagram kills me. Outstanding.



There were moments where I was pretty worried it would end up a big steaming pile too 

Seriously, there were a couple points where I was reluctant to post any images because I thought it was about to go down in flames. It was fear of having to admit failure that kept me going at times. Really glad it turned out, and glad you like it. 




Neilzord said:


> That is seriously epic. Sassmaster Flex.
> 
> The Relic'ing on the body makes it look like chrome in the photo's



Thank you, sir 

And wow, you're kinda right, it looks like some sort of weird 3D chrome texture gone wrong! Happy accident.




BlackMastodon said:


> F**king. Brilliant. And I normally hate reliced guitars.



Thanks! 

Not normally my thing either, but I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I guess by definition if you do it yourself, you're doing it to cater to your own tastes, so it had BETTER end up being something you like, right? 




Blue1970Cutlass said:


> I am sad to see this thread come to an end
> 
> You better make a sequel or something for us!



Oh there will be a sequel, oh yes... It needs a big (bass) sibling 




KnightroExpress said:


> This thing is great in a hilarious and twisted way. Two thumbs up!





jwade said:


> This thread just gets better and better.





Stooge1996 said:


> Seriously, great job dude! I've been reading since you first started and I've loved every post! Such a great read





Ibzzus said:


> HOLY SHIT that looks unreal!!!





MoshJosh said:


> Freaking awesome build!





TheStig1214 said:


> 5 string chug machine with pink light up pentagram?
> 
> Seriously, good job with this dude. May teh br00tz be with this guitar.





craigny said:


> Awesome.....





asher said:


> Wow.
> 
> Dude.
> 
> So much win. So much.





Zeno said:


> Jesus christ, this is ridiculous and awesome in the best possible way.



Thanks so much, everyone! Your support helped keep this project going, and it is most definitely the real icing on the project for me. I'm really happy that I'm not the only one that enjoyed the project.

Can't wait to get some recordings done


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## jwade (Dec 13, 2014)

This has to be one of the best threads ever on this site. The level of detail, humour, and ingenuity are just incredible. The guitar looks amazing, this has been inspiring as f**k, man.


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## metaljohn (Dec 13, 2014)

I demand you make more SassMasters.

Or at least one for me.


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## JEngelking (Dec 13, 2014)

That is.... just beautiful.


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## Sofos (Dec 14, 2014)

i'm in love! pic of leds on with lights off please


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## Dust_to_Dust (Dec 14, 2014)

That's so f**king metal.


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## KhzDonut (Dec 22, 2014)

Well, it took a bit of time to finally put it all the bits together, but here it is: The moment of truth!

Finally answering the age old question: Will a Squier Jazzmaster do Teh Br00talZ? 




I did change out the bridge pickup with another one built by Robert Tamm, this time it's a 17.1k instead of the 15.5k, and it has a bit more midrange punch and a little less zing, which suited my tone a bit better. All other gear/specs/signal chain info is in the description of the video for those that are interested.

Once again, thank you all so much for the kind words and support. It's been a crazy project, and it's certainly not something I expected to be everyone's taste, but the response has been super positive and I appreciate everyone's patience and stamina with this one


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## Neilzord (Dec 22, 2014)

Nice little edit showing off the Sassmaster! I have to admit I'm a little surprised to not see you using a Stanley blade as a Plectrum


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## TKOA-Dex (Dec 22, 2014)

Whoa, really digging that riff too! sweet build man.


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## Blue1970Cutlass (Dec 22, 2014)

Awesome vid - makes it look like you're playing a 3/4 scale 5 string bass


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## TonyGD (Dec 22, 2014)

You definitely did a kick ass job dude! That video would have Fender traditionalists raging!! but srsly thing looks and sounds mean as hell, and when you hit that stomp it reminded me of Jerry Cantrell from Alice In Chains (to me, that's a great thing).


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## CaptainD00M (Dec 29, 2014)

I lurked on your build, because most of the time I just like looking at the pretty pictures. But that was a pretty crazy roller coaster ride.

Its kinda nice to see things in perspective if you ever thought about putting together a guitar yourself with all the trouble shooting and success.

I dig your vid too, some of your riffs remind me of Merrow.


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