Guitarsquid

Hey everyone, I made a post a day or two ago about my first project guitar and since it is going to be a process, all the help, info, and feedback I can get is greatly needed and appretiated, I am sure I will be on this forum quite a bit. This being the case I figured that I should introduce myself to the community. My name is Chris though Squid is fine and I usually go by that. I am from the land of ten thousand lakes, good ole' Minnesota where I just started college. I have only been playing guitar for about two years (though I played bass for about 4 years prior to that) but I absolutely love it and have become quite passionate over the instrument. I have two acoustics and the electric that I rebuilding. Again I am very new to this and I am jumping head first into it which is both exciting and a little intimidating at times. I had the pleasure of speaking to Brian Calvert for an hour or so a few days ago all about my project. He answered a lot of questions and helped me out quite a bit. That conversation doubly renewed my excitement about this project and I am very pleased that I decided to do this. All in all, that is pretty much who I am and I hope to talk to you all in the future. Squid

I plan on veneering the top in flame maple (also via Brian Calvert) and I plan on staining that in cherry and then doing a gibsonesque vintage style sunburst in dark transparent brown. I will probably finish it with a clear coat of some sort and buff it to a nice shine. As for the pickguard and pickups I plan on having a custom cream/black/cream pickguard made that doesn't have the notch for a standard strat trem and I am thinking or putting in a humbucker at the bridge and two antiquity II surf singles for the mid and neck (all Seymour Duncan). These are just my plans and I am very open to suggestions. I am sort of going for a tone that is some combination of The Ventures and a Gibson Les Paul (or ES-335).

Here are a few images of where I am right now with my first attempt at rebuilding a guitar. I am very new to this and and suggestions, feedback, comments would be appretiated. My whole concept stems from getting a free squier strat from one of my friends and not liking the way it sounded. This being the case I decided to rebuild it from the ground up and make it look, sound, and feel the way I want it to. That is my idea anyway. I started with a red squier strat and what I have done so far is taken the paint off, cut off and sanded the top horn for a more telecaster feel to it. I plan on filling the tremolo cavity (via Brian Calvert's tutorial) and mounting a tune-o-matic with a bigsby b-500 tailpiece on it. Tell me what you think. this is after I stripped the paint and took off the horn. this is a pic of the fill for the trem cavity as it is now. these are before and after images of the modified horn. and this is the stage I am at right now in my project.