Drive Blind

Around the same time, and not entirely unrelated, I was looking for new projects to keep myself busy in my recently set-up woodshop in the basement. I ended up talking a lot with the guy who sat beside me at work since I knew that he had studied under a luthier (guitar-maker) and had made some instruments of his own. He pointed me to a lot of good resources if I was really thinking of making my own guitar. His recommendation was that I start with something cheap and easy, like the $200 Strat kits that come with everything you need. However, I knew that if I was going to spend my time building a guitar for myself, I'd at least want to build something that I'd really want to play. Unfortunately, none of the kits I found really fit that bill.

All my reading and surfing kept bringing be back to this one store that really seemed to have everything that I could want if I were to build my own guitar. Warmoth sells just about all of the materials you need to build a guitar or bass for yourself. Whether it's the body, neck, raw wood, pickups, or hardware, it's all there, just begging to be put together. I focused on their showcase section, which includes necks and bodies that have already been shaped, routed, sanded, and sometimes finished. I was starting to think that I'd really like to build myself a Jazzmaster-style guitar. I think that I just really liked the look of the big pickups and I was a little wary of the short-scale necks on the Jaguar. Soon, though, I focused on an unfinished Jaguar body that was on sale for only $129. It was a three-piece body and I was assured by my co-worked that that doesn't really matter if I'm just going to paint over it with an opaque color, anyhow. I found a Jaguar at Guitar Center and decided that I was perfectly comfortable with the short-scale neck, so I started to compile my first order.

Rather than order a pre-made neck from the Warmoth showcase, which wouldn't have saved me too much, I focused on ordering a custom neck, for which I was able to specify everything down to the fret height. I chose a birds-eye maple neck with a Pau Ferro (really nice grain pattern, although it looks very close to a standard rosewood) fingerboard and a CBS-era Fender style headstock. I also spec'ed out all of the knobs, control plates, electronics, and a blank pickguard plate to cut myself (much more on that later). I stuck with my desire for the Jazzmaster pickups, so I went to eBay and got a couple of those, along with the standard white pickup covers that would be replaced later with black ones. I decided that I was going to paint the whole thing Olympic White with a red pearloid pickguard. So, I put in my order and waited about a month and a half to get everything; most of the wait was for the custom neck. At this point, I thought that I'd get some paint, put everything together, and bang, I'd quickly have myself a brand-new guitar.

Well, of course, things never quite work out that way. Over the next couple of posts, I'll talk about what went right, what went wrong, what I learned, and what resources I used to put this beast together. From first thoughts to finished product took me about a year and a half. There were a lot of breaks in there. Some were because I was just too busy with other things, and some were that I was frustrated with my lack of progress or paralyzed and/or confused about the next step. I learned a lot with this project and hopefully some of what I write here will help someone else if they want to try to do the same thing.