A half Warmoth strat

[Nick Ellingworth]

I hope you guys don't have anything against projects which are only half Warmoth.  :icon_biggrin:

Anyway... I started this project late last year and unfortunately the body and neck I ordered turned out to be utter junk, but I still had a load of parts to do something with and rather than simply modify an existing guitar I persevered down the self built route. I am fortunate to be in semi regular contact with a luthier in the US who offered me a body which fitted my specification exactly for a lot less than a Warmoth body (still built to fender specs though). The reason it was cheap is that he'd apparently had it hanging around for a few years, originally it was intended to be the body for a guitar he was building for Roye Albrighton of Nektar but Roye decided he wanted something different to a regular strat clone. So I bought it to replace the original body I intended to use, it arrived in late May and I started to look for a decent neck. I'd been aware of Warmoth for a few years and they seemed the obvious choice. Unfortunately financial issues since early June have caused me to postpone ordering the neck until now.

My original choice was a Bubinga neck with a Wenge fretboard but I looked through the showcase to see if there was anything of interest to me in there and I stumbled upon an all Pau Ferro neck that I just had to own so I've just pulled the trigger on that and added SS6105 frets, a graphite nut and one of those metallic Warmoth stick on logos to the order.

Here's the neck:

And here's the body I bought it for:

Hopefully Warmoth will get back to me quickly with a shipping estimate.

 

[kboman]

That is going to look soooo good!  :headbang:

 

[Nick Ellingworth]

I hope so! It's taken far too long for me to get to this stage of the project.

 

[Soloshchenko]

That will look fantastic. I love the colour and the neck looks v. exotic.

 

[Nick Ellingworth]

A small update for everyone, I got a phone call from UPS today telling me that the neck will be delivered tomorrow.  :icon_biggrin:

 

[NonsenseTele]

A small update for everyone, I got a phone call from UPS today telling me that the neck will be delivered tomorrow.  :icon_biggrin:

:cool01:

 

[nathan a]

Wow. That neck is absolutely incredible. One of the best I've seen.

 

[Nick Ellingworth]

The neck has arrived although the box was a little mangled which had me worried briefly, on closer inspection though it looked like customs ripping the box open rather than UPS mistreating the package. The neck is a little bit darker in person than the showcase photos suggest but I think that's actually a good thing as it suits the body a little better.

Unfortunately the neck holes don't match those on the body so I've filled the holes on the neck and I'm now waiting for the filler to cure, while I do that I'm probably going to finish all the work I need to carry out on the body which at this stage is merely fitting the bridge, jack plate and pickguard hopefully I can have all of that lot done by tomorrow afternoon.

Here's a pic of the neck, I apologise for the low quality annoyingly my camera is playing up at the moment.

 

[m4rk0]

that will look great on that body! I love darker wood necks on lighter colored bodies!
show us some pics of both together!

 

[Nick Ellingworth]

I will once it's built, which is going to take longer than initially thought thanks to Gotoh sending me a set of screws for the tuners which fall apart as soon as you use them, 3 out of 6 have sheared in the headstock and I was actually drilling an extra few mm into the wood, obviously this is an easy fix all I have to do is drill out the old screws, fill the holes and try again but to have 3 out of 6 fail is really poor on Gotoh's part.

 

[blue313]

I hate cheap tuner screws.  It's why I try to only use decent stainless ones now (as well as waxing the threads and using my favorite snap-on screwdriver I got at a tag sale)

Looking forward to seeing this finished.

 

[Nick Ellingworth]

I've finally got the neck sorted.  :headbang1:

Unfortunately the screw removal job was beyond me but I was able to find a local tech willing to do the job, the headstock still needs a string tree or two but I'm going to see which strings need one before drilling more holes in the headstock.

I plan to join the neck and body tomorrow and hopefully get it set up tomorrow too.

Here's a pic of the neck with the tuners installed.

 

[Nick Ellingworth]

And it's finished.

Only took around half an hour to get the neck on, the strings on and a basic setup completed that makes it playable, obviously I'll take longer getting it set up properly once the neck settles down a bit. Again I apologise for the poor picture quality still having lighting issues when taking pics but I've done the best I can with an editor.

 

[Wana_make_a_guitar]

That is very nice, get some sound clips on when you've got it all set up.

 

[Nick Ellingworth]

I intend to, just got to find the time the next month or so is going to be really busy for me. I have of course given the guitar a quick test and the Fender Tex Mex pickups I've got in it sound fantastic particularly when I play something bluesy.

The Pau Ferro neck though is what amazed me, I've never felt anything like it but I'm not sure that I could buy another guitar with a finished neck now.

 

[Wana_make_a_guitar]

Well that sure sums up what will happen when my All rosewood unfinished neck comes will feel like.

 

[Nick Ellingworth]

I recorded a nice clip today unfortunately it's not really a clip, it's a song lasting nearly 5 minutes. I was aiming for a post rock style, the effect used was the 'reverb + delay' setting on my amp's DSP dial. It's still very rough but that's inevitable since the guitar still isn't set up properly and this was a one take run of something I've only been working on a couple of days with a few improvised sections.

You can listen to it and even download it if you wish from my myspace page which I set up just for this.  :doh: