Thanks Fat Pete! I started taking guitar lessons just over a year ago and I thought it might be fun to build my own guitar. I've always been pretty good at building stuff. Much better than I am at playing guitar!
I've got plenty of pics!
Attached are few of them I took along the way. I found shaping the guitar pretty straight forward. Routing the edges, pocket, binding groove, and cavities went pretty smooth. Applying the binding was pretty tricky. I had a little anxiety because of how fast i had to work and had never done this before. I used a TON of tape and several bungee chords to keep it together. I was actually surprised how well it turned out after I sanded it back down. I ran into some trouble drilling the jack hole and chipped a piece out of the edge. I used a little car Bondo to fix the mistake. THANK GOD FOR FORUMS LIKE THIS!! Afterwards, I applied grain filler as recommended by just about every guitar builder. I started getting really excited when the neck arrived. I was amazed at how nice it was. I created a spray station in the back yard using a 3/4" dowel attached to the fence and a 1" pvc pipe attached at the neck pocket. I think it worked pretty good, but i still ended up with a few bugs in the paint that needed removing. I sprayed the guitar body with Behlen Water based lacquer and tinted it with a combination of blue and white Colortone Dye. The Preval cans worked pretty good, but I think next time i'll upgrade on the sprayers. Finishing the guitar was easily the most difficult part of this project. I'm not going to lie, I struggled. I'm still not satisfied with how it turned out. The corners were thin and needed touching up after sanding. I couldn't completely get the scratch marks out either. I must have used every grit possible and still couldn't make it work. I have a whole new appreciation for those who do this well. The head stock logo is made from a Testers water slide decal. My name is Chad Gibson, so I thought it would be a little funny to use the Fender style with the "Gibson" name. Chadocaster seemed logical and corny so I used it! That's pretty much the story! Its not perfect but i'm proud of it anyway.
