Super Jag's 1st on this site, The Lynx

[Super-Jag]

This project started life around 5 years ago when I went into a local music store and saw a large cardboard box sitting on the floor behind the workbench, and in that box was a Teisco Del Ray bass from the 60's, all battered, chiped, and beaten to heck, looked like somebody had thrown it across the room a couple thousand times. For $50.00 I bought it and decided to use it as the basis for a "Heavy Metal Jaguar" project as the body was close to that of a Fender Jaguar, and use the hardware for parts. What I was going for, and still am, is in the picture I drew below.

Anyway, I started on it soon thereafter but never got anywhere being a near broke teenager at the time. Now that I have a job (though my funds are limited by the prospect of moving to another state as well), I think it's time to get this project up and running. As for the moving, that's just another motive, I have tons of stuff I started on and never finsihed since high school. Anyway I'll put up some pics of my current progress tonight, as I have more done than mentioned. The body is already cut to size and had the custom routs added for the extra electronics, the elongated "Teisco" control panel rout has been augmented and filled , so half makes up the main lead circuit volume/tone control plate rout, the other half is where the strat style jack is. I pulled this off using Wood filler and leftover pieces of Mahogany from when I trimmed the body down from an almost Bass VI shape (which was badly torn up) to a Jaguar shape with some "Kramer" like twists added (the longer waist on the bass side being one of them). I'm probably going to learn very much more about painting on this project (as it has been my weakness, been doing the EVH type aresol can paint thing for too long, and unfortunatley, I'd prefer to get a standard high gloss finish). So far so good, but I'll let that wait till I get to my current progress later on. I got to go grab me some primer, I got to do some work on the back side.

[Super-Jag]

Allright, here's some specs and some more pictures (I've been working more on this finish today so I should have more pictures soon).....

Neck Mahogany 2 piece with angled reverse "banana" headstock, schaller tuners, Floyd Rose Locking Nut w/ Single Bar String Guide. custom 24" scale 24 fret fingerboard with rock jumbo fretwire, and an interesting experiement, a flat radius like a classical guitar.

Body Modified Teisco Del Ray bass guitar body, re-trimmed with contours, about 2/3 as thick as a normal Fender Jaguar

Pickups Seymour Duncan SH-8 Invaders (Neck and Bridge), Seymour Duncan Vintage Jaguar (Middle)

ControlsSeparate Rhythm and Lead Circuits (with pickups switchable on both circuits), master volume and pickup selector controls, and Lead Circuit with 3 tone controls appended to the pickups, and 2 coil splits for the neck and bridge humbuckers.

BridgeSecond hand black plated Kahler Locking Tremelo

TrimControl plates are black plexiglass with self fabricated holders for the rhythm circuit pots. Pickguard is an Allparts 62' Jaguar pickguard modified to fit 2 humbuckers and a SD Vintage Jaguar in the middle position. All the control plates are painted gloss black and beveled to fit along with pickguard.

ColorFord Cayman Green Metallic (sort of a metallic Teal color)

In this picture we can see the routing modifications made, as well as some small paint errors I need to fix (taking my time, I want this one to look really good). I had to trim away about 5-10% of the original wood, and so far it looks almost dead on with a normal jaguar.

Right here is the original Teisco neck I disassembled fully (and am currently working on finding a headstock blank of mahogany for). I used my Jag-Stang's neck as a guide to how I wanted this neck to be. You can also see the pickguard and the master volume knob, mind you this is a rough setup right now currently being worked on.

In back, we see my own version of an "All Access Neck Joint". I wanted to do it and still have enough stability to hold the neck in place. The back and front are being painted separatley, and I'm slowly blending the front and back paint jobs together to finish the whole guitar using an old Computer case as a "Lazy Suzan" to do the job.

The final photo here is just to give a perspective on the whole thing, the only thing I did not show was an early mistake on my part (COUGHplywoodheadstockCOUGH), I want to change that to a normal tonewood eventually, but I'm not going to rush it. I have been toying with making a new neck out of maple as well, just depends on funds and where I decide to go. I have 3 necks already in the works in the shed that I might could use, just depends on what I feel like doing.

[Brian]

Your making progress and thats what counts bro! Your also going to find out that the finish depends on the how smooth you can get the base coat to begin with so don't think you can do a little fill on a spec that bothers you later, do it while you can just hit it with primer again to see if it has dissapeared.

[bowser]

go SNES!

not bad, i like the larger waist on the bass side like you said

[litchfield]

Well, the routes look a bit sloppy to me, and I'd really suggest getting a pickguard from Warmoth. Looks fine, but there's some things that bother me. Yes, they'll be hidden, but I think you could do better. Not bad tho.

[darren wilson]

Is it just me, or does that bridge rout look WAY too big for a Kahler?

[Super-Jag]

Is it just me, or does that bridge rout look WAY too big for a Kahler?

Well, the routes look a bit sloppy to me, and I'd really suggest getting a pickguard from Warmoth. Looks fine, but there's some things that bother me. Yes, they'll be hidden, but I think you could do better. Not bad tho.

Darren, it was actually for a cheapie clone of a Kahler (which I bought with the trashed Teisco), but I kept it within limits that the Kahler could cover it over. I had both a Kahler and a crappy cheap clone (which is now a custom tremelo on my Explorer guitar, and a proto-type for a trem Idea I had back in high school after the floyd caved in on my Kramer Focus, but more on that later) and traced them both over the top of the guitar and made the route to fit them, not to mention the New Kahler tremelos are a little bigger than the older ones. The Tremelo should be able to pull pitch up approxamatley a 5th (like the claims for the Steve Vai guitars, and my Kramer Focus that runs a Kahler).

As for the routs. Part of the sloppiness is because I just left the regular Tesico routs in there, so some of the incredibly large empty spots (particularly around the pickups, are the routs for the original Teisco pickups that are larger than the normal Humbuckers. As for the pickguard, I kinda went overkill with it and used a regular router (not the Dremel as I usually do). The Pickguard was cut for hums because it was overstock from another project with a pine body that went awry (one of my earliest works), and also it facilitates another feature that I plan to implement, and that's using molex connectors to hook the pickups up with, I read somewhere Earnie ball used them in one of their guitar models. Because of the connectors, I'm planning to make pickup swaps much faster by allowing the trim rings to fasten to the pickguard and be removable, so all one has to do is wire the pickup wires into another connector, put the pickups back in and the strings back on, and boom, done. I plan to use some special screws to fasten the trim rings to the pickguard (thin coarse thread machine screws, I have a ton of them laying around).

As for an update, tonight I have done the base primer coats on the back to fix some grain "show through" that was showing up in back, so far so good, it looks nice and smooth. All I have left is to sand out one fingermark in the top and one run and one light smudge on the back and then it'll be ready for some more coats of Caymen Green, then it'll be time to add the clearcoat. Then I'll need to locate some kind of automotive buffing/polishing compound to get a showroom shine going (I'm going to have to try an auto parts store apparently, Wal-Mart has all the sandpaper and paint tools I need, but no Automotive polish). If worse comes to worse, I can always wait awhile and buy from Stew Mac like I used to.

[Slabbefusk]

I like it...

[litchfield]

Wal mart has a nice array of auto polishes.

[Super-Jag]

Got some more work done this morning. Most of today's work has been to get the surface imperfections out, among the worst being the area between the stratocaster input jack rout and the Lead tone control plate rout (until now the areas where I filled in the area in with excess wood and wood filler looked worse the the pictures show, now it's invisible). I had to take a nasty finger smudge off the bass side near the arm contour, and had to take care of a few very light runs on the edges. and some grain showthrough on the back. It should not be too long before I get to clearcoat this monster.

This is kind of a real stretch as my best paint job so far and the coolest so far have been 2 different things....which I'll show below for comparison.....and mind you this is very early work of mine, so yeah, it probably sucks from professional standards, but then, that's not the real point to the guitars I build, I built them to be played for the most part....

First off is a HEAVILY MODIFIED Harmony beginners Electric Guitar, for my best paint job thus far, it was painted in some cheap "textured Hammered Metal" rattle can paint. The Neck was done in fake stone colored paint. It looks kind of like the inside of the Walk-In Cooler where I currently work....

Next off is a remarkably great sounding guitar that I built out of junk leftovers from another Harmony beginners electric and the Teisco Del Ray, with an Ibanez Humbucker in the bridge. The body is also odd in that it's 3 pieces of pressure treated pine that was originally intended for a "sliding door" for a home project for mom that did not work out, so I cut it in 3 pieces, NAILED and glued a construction grade plywood top on it, and cut it out simiar to the Lynx I'm working on. It used to have lots of stickers and a WORSE paint job on it. However, the cool part is that I overloaded the paint on the pickguard and the top (using some GM blue paint, some black paint, clearcoat, and 24K gold paint mixed together), and despite the back looking terrible, the front, all surface imperfections aside, looks awesome. I even mixed in some color change paint from Wal-Mart, so at some angles the black looks purple or midnight blue, these pictures do not do it justice. And yes, that is the ground wire running out the top (used to deal with badly grounded studio equiptment where I had to remove the ground wire to keep my lip for being zapped). Jeeze I'm wordy.

So, looking at the above, I'm looking to make this finish look MUCH better than either one of these two.

[Super-Jag]

A new update......

Yep litch, you were right, there are polishing compounds at Wal-Mart, I just did not look hard enough.

Finally got the body painted and polished, it looks stunning to say the least, i'm still trying to get over the fact that I have a metallic green Fender Jaguar copy hanging on my wall at this point (given it's hard enough to find a REAL one), should be soon ready to start work on the neck.

Polishing was done using 3M buffing compound and finalized using Kit Scratch-Out (which I've had for awhile, it did wonders bringing my Truck's hood back to a shine, therefore it would be suitable for guitar polishing), it did it all by hand after testing it out on a Strat body that I'm going to refinish (had a crappy Krylon paint job with many surface imperfections, however, it still looks really nice even with them). Here's a few pics of the work in progress.

Other stuff I have yet to do are clean up the routs a little, add sheilding paint, and clean up the pickguard trimming (got to Jaguar-ize the middle pickup rout), as well as get some control plates and repaint them black. I'm pacing myself pretty well, even if it's hard to do till it comes to time though.

[litchfield]

lookin good.

[jay5]

lookin good.

No offense, but no, not looking good. I dont see why people spend so much time working on a guitar but have such low standards for quality. I really hate to sound like this but this site is such a good resource for info that there really shouldnt be any reason for people to do such sloopy work. I agree that your current project is a much better attempt than your earlier ones, but... there really is no need for the sloppy pickguard routs and such. Those are pretty simple things to do well. I would just slow down a bit and attack each aspect as its own seperate project. All in all I think your desire is definately there, but despite the fact that these are being built to "be played" I really think you owe it to yourself and your time to strive for better results.

[Scott Rosenberger]

No offense, but no, not looking good. I dont see why people spend so much time working on a guitar but have such low standards for quality. I really hate to sound like this but this site is such a good resource for info that there really shouldnt be any reason for people to do such sloopy work. I agree that your current project is a much better attempt than your earlier ones, but... there really is no need for the sloppy pickguard routs and such. Those are pretty simple things to do well. I would just slow down a bit and attack each aspect as its own seperate project. All in all I think your desire is definately there, but despite the fact that these are being built to "be played" I really think you owe it to yourself and your time to strive for better results.

Well Said

[Hotrock]

First off is a HEAVILY MODIFIED Harmony beginners Electric Guitar, for my best paint job thus far, it was painted in some cheap "textured Hammered Metal" rattle can paint.

Bugger, I thought I was the first to do that . Good old hammerite, just got to paint the back tonight.

I like the way it looks but unfortunately I got a 12 year old girl to paint the top (honest, it's the girlfriends little sister - I was baby sitting) and although she has done an outstanding job in general, there's a little rough patch on the front but I'm not too fussed, this was just a mess about project.

Did you clear coat over the hammerite. I'm thinking that you can't but I'd like to know what you did. Cheers dude

[Executioner606]

I must say i quite like it. I cant wait to see it all finished.

[jefm]

That guitar absolutely rules

It's got soo much character :-)

the ground wire is awesome...I noticed that and laughed

I love the paint too....

Actually a guitar that is wired up so all the wiring is comes up through the PG would be kinda neat

[Strange Fruit]

Actually a guitar that is wired up so all the wiring is comes up through the PG would be kinda neat

Yeah, and kinda unshieled and kinda noisy too.

I think this project has a lot of potential, and cant wait to see how it finishes up!

[Super-Jag]

Well, I'm back to working on the axe again, it's starting to look better. I know it's been quite awhile, but since my truck is in the shop, and I'm being held up from moving (yet again) because of it, and I've got everything else done, I have nothing better to do than better my axes. I'll start with some answers...

No offense, but no, not looking good. I dont see why people spend so much time working on a guitar but have such low standards for quality. I really hate to sound like this but this site is such a good resource for info that there really shouldnt be any reason for people to do such sloopy work. I agree that your current project is a much better attempt than your earlier ones, but... there really is no need for the sloppy pickguard routs and such. Those are pretty simple things to do well. I would just slow down a bit and attack each aspect as its own seperate project. All in all I think your desire is definately there, but despite the fact that these are being built to "be played" I really think you owe it to yourself and your time to strive for better results.

No offense taken. I understand it's rather hack quality compared to many on this site, and even compared to some of the newest stuff I've been working on. This guitar is really the beginning of a design that I've been working on since I was in the 8th grade, and much of the routing and so on was done back in high school, which was more than 5-7 years ago. I had first got a router when I started working on this, had no computer, no knowlege of parts/blueprint providers, or anything. It was all done by hand tracing, photographs, and lots of ridiculous amounts of learning to accept mistakes. Of course, I'd never sell any of the hackneyed guitars. My plans for the next one (Lynx v2.0) are to have it fully done in CAD on my computer.

That guitar absolutely rules

It's got soo much character :-)

the ground wire is awesome...I noticed that and laughed

I love the paint too

Funny you say that, that guitar was possibly the hugest rush job I ever did. It originally was assembled in 45 minutes time. The last few days I've been re-doing the neck to look better (as well as making my first attempt at scalloping the fretboard). The paint was just a bunch of black, gold, and blue paint I sprayed on till it was literally dripping off the edges of the body. I go to bed, come back to the shed the next morning, and find this AMAZING quazi crackle/burst thing going on. Of course, it'll never be a PRS, but the tone is amazing for what is made out of the same thing Lowes uses to make you a patio deck. The only reason for it ever existing in the first place was the fact that I had a TON of crappy spare parts laying around, and rather then throw them out, I decided to attempt to make a really crappy guitar for my "beater" axe, but then It's maiden voyage was at practice with a band I was working with at the time, and we took it to the studio, recorded a song with it, and when I heard the solo I played from that guitar, I could hardly believe my ears, it sounded incredible, all out of the 50 cent Harmony pickup in the neck. Sure I sound crazy, but that song actually got airplay on the local radio at one time. I might try and post it when I get time. As for the ground wire, that was added later because the faulty grounding in the practice area caused my lip to get zapped with +48 volts when I'd step up to the microphone, so I had most of my guitars at the time set up to have the ground wire removable so I'd quit jumping back from the microphone.

Anyway, on with my work on the guitar. I will post pictures later as my digital camera went out on me, so I'll have to borrow one or get a new one. I've done alot of work. I tried to smooth out the middle position pickup rout a little on the pickguard, but I did slip up just a small bit so that's one more piece of trim I need to make. I just made a switch plate for the volume and tone controls, as well as the slider switches, and as I see, I'm probably going to need to go with Jaguar prefab units instead because I just don't have the tools presently to engineer such items (besides $8 apiece is not bad). I fitted the pickups (with the bridge pickup from the aforementioned "crackle-burst" gutiar in the neck), they fit nice and tight, however, I am getting rid of my "painted" trim rings from the silver guitar (which I have decided to strip because I'm moving "eventually"). It does not look too bad, though it does look rough in a few places (namely the mismatched trim rings and the chrome covered HBKR). All I really need is a Kalher bridge to make it functional as/is, but as they are going for huge someson E-bay, I may be putting this project on hiatus for awhile. I just wanted to post back that I have not given up or quit.