crafty

Please correct me if I'm wrong, and I don't mean any disrespect, but it sounds like you may not have much woodworking experience if you don't know what a jointer and a planer are used for. If so, there are many books you can purchase that will help you select the proper tools and supplies to use to make your guitar. I like Melvyn Hiscock's book, Make Your Own Electric Guitar, and Dan Erlewine's Guitar Player Repair Guide. Melvyn will help you build the guitar, Dan will help you set it up. Again, you haven't told us much about your woodworking experience, but I cannot stress enough how important is power tool safety. Also, before you purchase $60 worth of fine mahogany, you might want to pick up some poplar or oak from the Home Depot or a real lumberyard and try building a couple of prototypes first. It's a lot better than crying over a nice piece of wood that you laid down some serious money on. Welcome to the Project Guitar forum and don't ever hesitate to ask questions if you need some help with something.

The tuners may not necessarily be a drop-in solution. If the holes are too small for the replacements, just drill 'em out. If they're too big, you can probably get bushings to make the new ones fit. As for the electronics, either guitarelectronics or seymour duncan's website has some good schematics. Wiring it up shouldn't be too tough, either. Dimarzio will probably give you a schematic with the FRED in the box, too. You can probably reuse your old five way switch to give you the coil-tap function as well.

How on earth did that happen??? Okay, there's a sandwich of poplar backed on one side by a metal plate and a thick piece of maple on the other. All of this is held together tight with four screws. So how could that crack have even occurred? It just doesn't look right to me. Maybe the wood shrank and the compression of the "sandwich" and tension from the strings made part of the wood's cellular structure collapse and form a compression crack, but that just seems physically impossible.

What kind of pickups did you decide on, anyway?

RIP to Indian Larry and your guitar. It all depends on where the crack is, how deep it goes, and what kind of wood you have, my friend. What kind of setup is it? Set-neck or bolt-on? What kind of finish does it have?

Oh, I see. BTW, I didn't mean to sound like I was coming down on you or anything. Every time I look at something I post it seems to sound rude or something. I need to work on that. Anyway, yeah, I see your point now. It sucks once you've already routed some wood only to find out that you routed for the wrong size component. Everything is usually pretty standard amongst Strats, but the bridges, no matter if you have a Floyd, Wilk, Schaller, or Hipshot, are always going to be a little different. Note how almost nobody advertises a "replacement" tremolo.

I'm still trying to figure out why using your MIM Strat as a template for a new body is going to cause problems with the bridge. I know the bridges are narrower than the older "vintage" style bridges, but why don't you just pick whatever bridge you want and change the design of the body accordingly? It may take a little time and you may have to practice on some scrap first, but if you're building a guitar from scratch, at least build it the way you want it. You can even get routing templates from Stew-Mac at a reasonable price. Settling for an el-cheapo bridge on an otherwise quality guitar is like putting 13-inch steel wheels on a Corvette. Try to find one with a brass baseplate and a steel block--probably the best combination of metals for a trem bridge. Like the Hipshot dual-point, which has the same string spacing as a MIM Standard at 2-1/16.

I distinctly remember watching an A-Team episode once where Rick James was the guest star of the week. He was playing a pink Explorer-style bass, too. Just do a google for A-Team and Rick James (or Rick Jaymes) Best A-Team episode ever, by the way.

Well, you get what you pay for. A little common sense would probably tell you that if someone's saying they'll give you a Martin D-28 level guitar for $150, it's probably a nice lie. The problem I've heard and WWW confirmed is that the action is very high or gets higher because of weak bracing. Now, I don't know about you, but when I was learning it was frustrating enough with a relatively low action. If you want your friend to stick with it, tell 'em to pick up a cheap Washburn, Fender, Epi, or Ibanez. It won't cost much more, if at all, and it'll hold up for a few good years of playing.

Mmmm...gold leeafff... Clapton had Fender make a special Strat for the Pilgrim tour that was gold-leafed. I remember when I was younger we used gold leaf in arts and crafts for various things. First, you just spread a very thin coat of some kind of tacky adhesive, like contact cement, then you lay down the gold leaf (gold side down) and peel the substrate off. It's kind of tricky and I'd definitely practice on scraps first. But the results can be outstanding, as you can see. As for finishing, you could probably use any clear poly to protect the gold from scratching.

Yeah, I found out about the bridge when I tried to install some graphite saddles. Didn't fit, didn't want to blow anymore money trying to find ones that would The original pickups were okay, but sounded way too bright and shrill. I use Seymour Duncans now and the sound is quite nice. I'm probably going to build my first lap steel with the original pickups. The body is poplar, but since it's a black guitar and sort of my test-bed for new ideas, the poor man's (law student's) alder suits me fine for now. I didn't see any laminations when I was routing a battery-box in the body, but maybe they only did that on the sunburst models. Now I know I could have probably bought an American or Japanese Strat nine years ago and probably had almost just as good of a guitar as I have now, but figuring my parents spent probably $250 on the guitar and I've added maybe $250 in upgrades, that's still $250-300 less than the US Standards were going for nine years ago. Besides, this is the Project Guitar forum. We're all either about building from scratch or getting a beater and making it gold. BTW, I tried out a PRS Tremonte SE the other day. Fabulous Guitar. I did a double-take when I saw it was made in Korea. Too bad they can't make anymore of them right now, but if you can, snap one up because it's a mighty axe for not much coin. Better than the Epi Less Les Pauls.

When I got my MIM Strat as a gift nine years ago, I immediately took it apart to see how it was built. It was my first electric and I was taking some electronics courses in school so I was just curious. The one thing that stood out was the pickup routs. Instead of a big swimming pool rout like the American Standards, it had individual routs for the neck and mid pickups and a humbucker-sized rout for the bridge. I've never taken apart a 1995 US Strat, but what everyone told me was that they had the "pool" rout that messed with the sound somehow during those later years in the '90s. So that was one pleasant surprise. I just wish Fender put the medium-jumbo frets on it instead of the small vintage wire. I guess that's the next project.

I love my Schaller locking tuners. I had to redrill the holes in my MIM Strat headstock to get them to fit, but the change was worth it. Grover and Gotoh make a good tuner, but why go for a copy when the original is still the best?

Yeah, but my fat fingers were too big to grab the battery out from under the partially-opened pickguard cavity--and too big to type on this tiny laptop keyboard too! To each his own--work with what works best for you...I like the battery box and it works best for me.

Installing a battery box is the way to go. Although the batteries last a while, I grew tired of having to remove my strings and pull the pickguard whenever I needed to change the battery on the EMG-AB I installed in my testbed MIM Strat. Also, while the battery will fit under the pickguard, it's a little more than a tight fit. Just use the Stew-Mac routing template and battery box. I put mine about 3/8 of an inch back from the trem cavity rout on the back of the Strat, then used a long bit to connect the box cavity with the jack cavity on the front.

"Hollow body = less sustain" -Les Paul's Law Okay, I've played both semi-hollow Strats and Teles, and no, they don't sound like a solid one. There isn't as much sustain, but the notes do seem to have a more bell-tone like quality. Having said that, it's kind of pointless to discuss tone in print on the internet. If you actually bought one, there are so many different pickup, amp, and effect combinations that it's impossible to know how you'll feel about the sound until you try it. What I would suggest is looking at exactly what you want out of the guitar. If it's an SRV sound, you can look at the specs of the SRV signature strat on Fender's website and just dupe that out, buy a Matchless combo, and chug about a fifth of Jack and you'll be about 10% there. But if you want something unique and not quite as shrill or sharp, go semi-hollow. Think of the sound BB King gets out of Lucille, then think of the sound Peter Frampton or Jimmy Page gets out of a Les Paul. BB's going to be a little mellow, Page is going to have a razor's edge.

Strings for acoustics are usually made a little different than strings for an electric. Besides the obvious unwound-G (although the only strings you could get until Ernie Ball came around were railroad tracks with wound-Gs), the metals, number of winds, tension and the profile of the strings is going to be much different. Such as phosphor-bronze coated strings for acoustics vs. plain steel for electrics. The strings are just going to sound different, maybe a little more trebly and less boomy. Some people would call that a thin sound, others may find it perfect on a piezo-equipped guitar. Anyways, it never hurts to experiment. You never know if you'll like the sound unless you try it. Besides, it's not like you're taking a router to the guitar or throwing a set of non-returnable custom pickups at it either. The only thing you'll be out, if you don't like the sound, is a set of $5.00 strings.

The next Dweezil Zappa...cool, man Now he's just gotta work another summer to be able to buy an amp to play it through!

That's too bad. I have the "Live in San Francisco DVD" and it looked like he was really attached to that axe. He used it for all but maybe two or three songs in the whole set. I'd cry for a year if someone stole even my silly first MIM Strat...

Well, yeah, I guess you could say it's definitely glued-in, but it's not necessarily what's considered a glue-in neck. These type of necks typically have some kind of mortise and tenon routed into the neck and body that give the joint its actual holding power and strength. The glue doesn't really do anything except hold the neck in place. Simply gluing your bolt-on neck to the body and putting the bolts isn't really making it a glue-in joint in the traditional sense. The holding power and strength is still dependant on the bolts, so it would still be considered a bolt-on joint.

The reason why Satch's chromeboy had the crack near one of the pickups was because it was a blemished prototype to begin with. It was one of Ibanez' test guitars when they were developing the Chromeboy finish process. I haven't seen too many up close shots, but coupled with a decade of constant shredding and a proto finish, it's a pretty beat-up axe. Doesn't matter as long as it's Joe's favorite, kinda like SRV's Number One or Clapton's Blackie. BTW, I remember hearing a while back that Joe's chromeboy prototype was stolen. Did they ever recover it?

Anything with a "whammy bar" is NOT A HARDTAIL BRIDGE: The Stop Tail/Tun-O-Matic, Trapeze tailpiece, Tele bridge, Strat Hardtail Model Bridge, and the Ibanez JS-2000-style Edge bridge are all HARDTAIL BRIDGES. Anything with a "whammy bar" is a TREMOLO BRIDGE: This includes the Floyd Rose, Bigsby, vintage/modern Strat (standard) with Syncronized Tremolo, Wilkinson, Ibanez JS-1000-style Edge bridge, etc. In short, there is no such thing as a hardtail bridge with a "hole" for a "whammy bar" because there is NO WAY it can ever function as a tremolo bridge. 95% of the time, if you see a Strat, it's a tremolo bridge, not a fixed bridge. The only, and I mean only, way you could ever mount a bridge with a "hole" for a "whammy bar" would be to disassemble the baseplate from the block and mount the baseplate hardtail style with strings going through the body. But it's a waste of money to do this because you'd have about 50% of the parts not being used and a stupid hole and plate tab taking up more space on the body. OTOH, it would be kind of a neat faux-trem installation, or you could do it with a Floyd-copy in order to gain the fine-tuners, ala the JS-2000.

Looking at the number of posts I've done, you can see I don't say much around here. But I do look around a lot. Quite honestly, even without the background story, THAT guitar is amazing. And if it's a 12 year old kid that did that kind of finish and inlay work, more props to him. I doubt there are many 20-50 year old adults on this forum that could match it. The colors remind me of late-80's guitars that looked otherworldly and had some real imagination behind the art. I like guitars with quilt and flame just as much as anyone, but sometimes it's cool to see an old-school shredding machine with a chromed-out Floyd, purple DiMarzios, a wicked inlay over the shredding-range frets, and an alien-snakeskin paint job. Even though Jackson and ESP still offer graphics, nothing from them looks as good as that Leviathan. Bravo to you and your Young Apprentice.

Try these guys: http://www.azwoodman.com/branding-irons.html

Well, if the scratches are on the fretboard and not on the back of the neck, the only problem is going to be cosmetic, and that's only if you use a gloss finish. Gloss looks great for a little while until the strings eat through the finish. Check out a pic of Springsteen's Tele sometime and you'll see what I mean. You could probably sand the clear down evenly to fill the scratches, but it would take several coats and a lot of tedious sanding to do that. Grain filler may work better, but you'll still have to deal with sanding a very small area. It's up to you whether you want to spend the time with it. Also, Brian's offer to take care of the neck is real customer service. I wish more people and companies were like that more often.