Red Strat, Blue Strat

I finally got the color coats on my current projects after getting delayed by taxes, the flu, and other more fun stuff such as a guitar building event in Sacramento.

Here we have the Squier Affinity strat and a Crate Electra.

I shot both with Rusoleum metallic. The Squire is Apple Red, and the Crate is Cobalt Blue.

A couple of hours later I shot the first coat of Deft clear gloss lacquer, but the very first can had a bad tip and I immediately got a bad set of runs. Oh well, I'll put on a few more coats before sanding it out so I don't get sand-throughs.



Here's the Crate with its matching headstock.

One Strat, Two Strat

I've recently gotten back up to speed with two guitar refinishing projects. One is my Squier Strat that I stripped over a year ago and still needs a paint job. The second is a Crate Electra Strat abandoned by one of my wife's nephews. I stripped its paint and began prepping it for paint last fall. This weekend I finally got around to applying sanding sealer to the guitars.

Step 1 was to tape off the neck pockets. I learned the hard way last time that lacquer build-up makes it very difficult to fit the neck back in later. This time I applied tape to the entire pocket, extending out beyond the edges, and then trimmed it back inside the edge of the pocket. A fraction of an inch is exposed around the inside edge of the pocket, but the build-up should be much easier to sand back at the edges than in the inside corners of the pocket.



The washers shown sitting in the pocket are used to offset the paint handle so that there is a gap between the handle and the edge of the pocket. The gap prevents sealer and paint build-up where the handle and pocket would otherwise meet.

Here are the two guitars in the paint stands after getting sprayed with sanding sealer.






I shot two coats of sanding sealer, sanded with 220 grit paper, then shot two more coats of sealer and sanded with 320 grit. Next I sprayed them with sandable primer. They'll get sanded again before I apply the color coats, but I ran out of time this past weeked.

In the photo below, the one nearest the camera is Rob's (the Crate Electra) -- its also getting a matching headstock.





In the next post the guitars will have the color and a few clear coats. Check back soon.

Ken

Carvin Kit Contest

Back in June when I was waiting for the lacquer to dry and wiring the pick guard, I noticed a posting in the Carvin Builder's Forum about a contest for kit builders. The deadline for entry was on September 30th and I got my submission in a week or so ahead of time. For the next three weeks there wasn't much news regarding what was happening with it -- I checked the forum daily, and finally after three weeks they announced the finalists. In a poll thread on the Carvin Guitars forum were two pictures each of the six finalists. My guitar made it!

There's still a few days left to go and I'm in third place. I don't expect to win, but am very happy to have made it this far.

Setup Part II and PICS

Its been several weeks now since the guitar was first assembled. In my last post I gave the impression that I was done with setup, but nothing could be further from the truth. I tinkered with the setup for a couple of weeks and just now have it the way I like it. Here's what kept me busy... at first the bridge was too high, so I added a shim to the outside edge of the neck pocket in order to raise the headstock relative to the body. This allows the bridge to be lowered a bit while retaining the existing string height. Then I thought it would be nice to have the bridge flush against the body so I added a second shim, but this ruined the tremolo action. During this process I visited the Carvin store in Hollywood to see how the Bolt guitars are setup and finally decided on a single shim. At Carvin the bridges are perfectly parallel to the body and have a 4/64" gap between the body and the underside of the bridge. With a single shim my bridge is at the same height as the factory built Bolt guitars.

In order to shim and un-shim I had to take the neck out. Each time I loosened the strings and lifted the neck out of the pocket as carefully as possible but broke the high E string three out of four times. Lesson learned: get a pack of single gauge strings that match the high E string for the guitar (10s in my case).

I've also been battling fretboard buzz, and have raised the action a little higher than is suggested in Dan Erlewine's "Guitar Player Repair Guide, 3rd Edition". Currently I'm relatively buzz free with the string height set around 0.07 inches on the bass side and about 0.05 on the treble side.

Yesterday I showed off the guitar to my next door neighbor who happens to be a professional bass player. He was blown away by the finish and impressed with the intonation. He even remarked at how well it stays in tune even after some deep dives with the whammy bar. I'm not surprised about this last fact - the guitar has locking tuners, no string trees due to the tilt-back headstock, a graphite nut, and the Wilkinson tremolo. All of these contribute to a great tremolo system.


And now for the moment you've all been waiting for... finish pics.

Assembly and Setup

I was anxious to get the bridge studs in after my trouble with them during the wet sanding and polshing phase. One ReRanch forum member suggested pushing them in with the closed chuck of a drill press, so I went back to my neighbor's house to do so. I got the first stud in and realized that it didn't go in as far as the Carvin directions suggested -- the holes weren't deep enough. We chucked the threaded stud insert into the press, and then pulled the stud out while holding down the body. I called up Carvin and talked to a tech on the phone. He said the problem must be fixed, either by drilling the holes deeper or sanding down the bottom of the studs. Sanding shouldn't be too hard, he said, because the studs are brass which is a pretty soft metal. So I just rubbed the bottom of the studs back and forth across 60 grit sandpaper until the bottom of the bridge height adjustment screw was flush with the bottom of the brass stud. It took about 5 minutes each which included a cooling break - they got pretty hot during the process.

I went back to Bernie's house to press in the studs, and... success!




My next step was to shield the pickup and control cavities with copper tape. I used up the remaining supply from Carvin and then started using the 2 inch tape that I had ordered from Stewart McDonald. The tape extends out to a few of the pickguard screw holes so that the shielding on the underside of the pickguard would be forced into contact with the tape in the cavities.

To mount the neck I spent some time carefully sanding the lacquer buildup in the neck pocket until the neck fit back in.

I installed the spring claw in the rear bridge route and then mounted the bridge. The bridge is held in place by the tension between the height adjustment screws on the front of the body and the force of the springs in the rear.

Here's a picture of the progress so far.



The black wire visible in the control cavity is soldered to the spring claw in the rear and is routed through a small hole between the rear cavity and the control cavity.

All that remained was to mount the jack plate and the pickguard. I used small plastic wire connectors to connect the positive leads from the pickguard wiring to the jack, and to connect all of the grounds (pickguard, spring claw, and jack). This will make it easy to disassemble the guitar without having to desolder, if I ever need to.


For setup I used my copy of Dan Erlewine's "Guitar Player Repair Guide - 3rd Edition". It has lots of information including factory setup specs for Fender and Gibson guitars, as well as the setup specs measured from guitars of well known players such as Hendrix, Claption, SRV, etc. Back in June I purchased the StewMac basic setup toolset, which consists of a straight edge, action gauge, and radius gauges. This set was expensive at around $85.00, and if I were to do it over again would only get the string action gauge. The straight edge is only necessary for determining the amount of neck relief with the strings off. With strings on, the strings themselves can be used as a straight edge by employing a capo at the first fret and holding down a string at the last fret. The radius gauges are not a necessity and can be easily crafted by hand (Dan explains how in his book).

Using the book and tools I checked the neck relief and set the bridge and string saddle heights. The neck is perfectly straight even after putting on the strings, tuning to pitch, and waiting a day. I chose to leave it like that for now, with the option to add relief later as a way to deal with string buzz if necessary. Lastly, I set the intonation using the tuner function of my PODxt-Live pedal.

Wet Sanding and Polishing

Its now been over a month since spraying the last coat of lacquer. At this point the lacquer is nice and glossy but upon close inspection it has the typical bumpy "orange peel" texture on the surface. The process of wet sanding and polishing will render a glassy smooth "piano finish." I started with 800 grit on the 4th of July and worked to knock down the orange peel until the body was a flat matte surface void of any shiny areas. This took about 4 hours in total, most likely because I was checking my progress more often than necessary.

Here's a picture of my wetsanding setup:



I followed the ReRanch.com Basic Finishing instructions (ReRanch 101) under "Final Polishing" with the following exceptions. Most of these items were suggested by experienced ReRanch forum members.

• For the recommended pre-soak of the sandpaper, I first pre-cut each sheet into pieces that fit the my sanding block (eraser) and then put each set of grits in a separate glass of water to soak overnight. I labeled the glasses to keep track of the grits. I left the yet-to-be used sandpaper in the glasses for several days until I was finished with the wet sanding.


• I used a pink pearl eraser as my sanding block.


• I put plumber's putty in all of the pick guard screw holes, bridge stud holes, neck screw holes, and strap screw holes to prevent water from getting in and expanding the wood.


• For sanding, I used a bowl of water with a few drops of dish soap. I'd take a fresh piece of paper from the pre-soak glasses and dip it in this bowl of water.


• I tried not to sand too dry, always dipping the paper/eraser in the bowl to clean the paper and pick up more water, but I tried not to go too overboard getting water everywhere.


• I checked my progress often by wiping the slurry off with a clean paper towel or rag.


• I changed the water in the bowl often -- always between grits and sometimes during grits, especially with my starting grit of 800. It took me 4 hours to knock down the orange peel and get rid of all the pinpoint shiny spots. Maybe if I had started with 600 or 400 grit I could have gotten through the orange peel faster. I spent just over an hour each on the other grits.


• I wiped the body down with naptha and a clean rag between each grit.


• I sanded with small circular strokes with 800, but then switched to straight back and forth strokes for the other grits, alternating directions with each grit, and finished sanding with the grain at grit 2000.


• Skipped 1200 because I wanted to finish faster.

As wet sanding progressed, the body got shinier. Here's a picture showing the contrast between the 1500 grit results on the left, and the 2000 grit results on the right. The bright reflection is from the under-the-counter florescent light fixture.



After wet sanding and before the polishing step I was removing the plumber's putty from the various screw holes and managed to pull a chip of lacquer away from the edge of one of the bridge stud holes. I also noticed that the holes had narrowed somewhat from the buildup of lacquer at the edge of the holes. The Carvin instructions say to use a hammer to pound in the studs, and I was worried about doing even more damage to the lacquer during that step.

Based on feedback from the ReRanch forum users, I fixed the lacquer buildup by sanding up and down in the hole with a piece of rolled up sandpaper. Afterwards the edge of the hole didn't look so good, so I applied some leftover dye mixture that I still had on hand from my experiments back in April, and then used a toothpick to apply lacquer to the hole edge . After it dried I lightly wet sanded the areas around the hole again with 1000, 1500 and 2000.

At this point I wanted to see what it would look like polished, so I used a rag and the 3M Finesse-It II compound to hand polish a section on the rear of the body. You can clearly see the reflection of the florescent light fixture here.



Hand polishing is a lot of effort so I did as much as possible with a Stew Mac foam polishing pad in my electric drill, and then finished up by hand polishing the inside of the horns.

Here are the results:

Wiring the pickguard

In my last post I explained the process of spraying the color on. After that I spent the three days spraying three coats of clear lacquer per day, finishing the clear coats on May 27th. The guys on the ReRanch guitar refinishing forum suggest letting it wait 3 days per coat before the final wet-sanding and polishing,and counting the four coats of sanding sealer thats 13 coats or 39 days -- July 5th to be exact. It turns out that I'm out of town on vacation for the two weeks at the end of June so the long wait shouldn't be all that hard -- especially since I've got other things to keep me busy, like wiring the pick guard.


I abandoned my original plan to do stock Strat wiring in favor of the Strat Lover's Strat with tone switching from the Guitar Nuts website. This circuit provides all of the standard Strat switching options and adds the ability to put the bridge pickup in series with whatever other pickups are selected via the 5-way switch, and to put the neck pickup out of phase with the others. The bridge-in-series is activated by pulling out the volume pot, the neck pickup phase is reversed by pulling out the "neck" tone pot. With the tone switching feature the active tone control follows the bridge-in-series on/off switch. In other words, with the bridge-in-series switch off, the "neck" tone control is active. When the bridge-in-series switch is on, the "middle" tone control becomes active.

Here's the schematic for the Strat Lover's Strat (click to enlarge)




I think of the bridge-in-series switch as a rhythm/lead switch. Put the 5-way in neck/middle position for rhythm and adjust the tone using the "neck" tone control. Pull out the bridge-on-switch for lead and adjust the "middle" tone control.

This is probably one of the more complicated wiring setups for a Strat, requiring the use of two push-pull pots for the volume and neck tone controls. The push-pull pots provide the normal control operation for volume or tone and also have separate leads that are switched by pulling the knob out (and pushing it back in). Back in early May I purchased two of these pots and the third tone pot -- all 250K Ohms -- from Stewart MacDonald. The 250K pots are recommended by Seymour Duncan to match the Vintage for Strat pickups, and replace the 500K pots I originally purchased from Carvin.

Step 1 was to add aditional shielding foil to the underside of the pickguard, and mount the pickups, switch and pots.







I think the contrast of the black pickup covers will go well with the dark grain filler in the wood and the ebony fretboard. I've got black knobs to go with the black pickup covers too.


I stared at the circuit diagram for quite some time, comparing it to other diagrams, until I was pretty sure that I knew how it worked. To reduce the amount of thinking required while soldering, I re-drew the diagram to better represent the actual physical layout of the switch and controls.






Each set of six push-pull switch leads are stacked up over the three leads for the pot so space is tight, but I had the foresight to solder everything from "bottom up" to avoid having to use the soldering iron underneath something else that I had already soldered.

I haven't use a soldering iron in over 20 years, but after a few hours I was done. Its not very clean & tidy but I've double checked it with the multimeter and it appears to be wired correctly and working.






I expect it to be early July before I post again. All that remains to do is the final wet sanding and polishing of the body, assembly and setup. I can hardly wait!

Ken