Neon Pink SuperJazzmaster

guitarstv

Junior Member
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Started with a roasted swamp ash jazzmaster body and an unfinished quartersawn maple neck.



About 12 coats of Danish oil over the whole neck, then rounding the frets, then board edge rolling, then then taped everything off and two coats of wipe on poly on top.  A little light sanding of the edges and there's no transition that you can feel at all between the gloss and the oil.  Then just had to drill the holes for the string retainer and screw on the tuners.
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A whole bunch of grain filler later . . .


Primer on:
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Neon on:
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Clear and wiring done:
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So, I screwed up and ended up sanding through the clearcoat and colour in one section of the guitar. This required an awful lot of swearing, followed by some careful taping off of almost the whole guitar, then respraying the flourescent paint and re-doing the colour coat. Then I put a couple dings in the paint when putting the bridge on, but I think they're mostly hidden by the pickguard.

From 10 ft it looks pretty good! :p



It's kinda a weird colour. In dark light it is a very dark pink, but in bright light it's super bright. Hard to capture on camera.

Still need a couple days to tweak the setup just right, but the upper fret access is outstanding compared to my Charvel So Cal. I know it doesn't matter to amplified tone, but acoustically the guitar is really loud . . . about the same volume as my Epi Dot. Guess the light weight roasted swamp ash acts kinda like a semi-hollow. I'll have to wait until I've got some free time to really let her sing at volume.

Wiring is cool. Tone Zone in the bridge, and Evo in the neck. Knobs-wise, there's a master volume, a regular tone pot, and a bass cut pot. The bass cut is pretty sweet to have on a guitar with a Tone Zone, it lets you tighten things up nicely.

Three way selector for the two pickups. Each pickup has a push/pull tone pot to control series/parallel switching. At the upper horn there are two switches. One toggles between telecaster and LP mode (Both pickups split/both pickups full HB). The other switch is a blower, and connects the bridge in humbucking mode directly to the output jack for a bit of a solo boost. Everything is easily accessible while playing, but not in the way while strumming.


Ugh . . . took me an embarrassingly long time to get this done.
 
Nice Job! If the results make you happy, don't worry about how long it took. I've found that good things don't come quickly.  :icon_thumright:
 
guitarstv said:
...Ugh . . . took me an embarrassingly long time to get this done.

As Phil says, plus these 2 things to bear in mind:
1. You probably learned a lot
2. You have a seriously rad pink Jazzmaster.
 
Fat Pete said:
guitarstv said:
...Ugh . . . took me an embarrassingly long time to get this done.

As Phil says, plus these 2 things to bear in mind:
1. You probably learned a lot
2. You have a seriously rad pink Jazzmaster.

Thanks!

The number one thing I learned is that I don't want to do the finish on any more guitar bodies.  Necks, sure.  But the bodies are a giant PITA.  :p
Not sure why neon pink ever went out of style, or why you don't see more jazzmasters with a floyd.  If Warmoth hadn't nixed their neon colours I would have happily paid them to do the finish.
 
What do the various switches do on this Floyd equipped Neon pink offset guitar of yours do?

 
stratamania said:
What do the various switches do on this Floyd equipped Neon pink offset guitar of yours do?

I'm not much of a humbucker guy and usually play single coils, so went with an everything but the kitchen sink approach to see if I could make the 'buckers that I had lying around work for me rather that buying new ones:
- The mini toggle closest to the neck toggles between both humbuckers split and both humbuckers in series.  Kinda like a telecaster/LP switch.
- The mini toggle below that is a blower switch that connects the bridge pickup directly to the output jack (for sort of on-board solo boost).
- The tone pots are both push/pull and each sets one humbuckers into parallel.  This switching overrides the coil split/series wiring.
- The tone pot closest to the neck is a regular treble roll-off, and the other tone pot works as a bass roll-off (stole the idea from G+L PTB wiring)


This sounds way more complicated than it is though.  From a playing perspective it's actually really intuitive (at least for me):
- the 3 way switch always works to select neck/both/mid all the time
- you can switch between humbucker or single coil sounds if you want (telecaster/LP mode)
- if you find the neck too dark in full humbucker mode or the bridge too noisy in split mode you can individually switch the pickup to parallel to fix the problem.
- any time you want you can kick in the bridge humbucker at full power and full tone for leads



All that said, so far . . . I like the sounds out of the split 'buckers pretty much exclusively from what I've been playing so far.  :p  I'll give it a couple weeks to get used to things and see, but may be tossing the fancy wiring and pickups out for a neck + middle single coil and a telecaster bridge with a standard 5 way switch in the end.  At least that'll take me a lot time to wire up.  :p
 
Thanks. One thing a Jazzmaster seems to lend itself to is being able to do lots of switching. Seems like a good scheme you have.
 
guitarstv said:
... The number one thing I learned is that I don't want to do the finish on any more guitar bodies.  Necks, sure.  But the bodies are a giant PITA. ...

This: +10. I'll do it for clients, with specific colors or schemes, and for a few friends, but not if I don't have to. It's time and energy and shop space that I can use for something far more productive. That being said, there is a certain satisfaction to seeing a good paint job come together at the end of the build.

Nice work on this one. I really dig your JM. I've had a jones to do one in surf Green with a pair of P-90's in it for some surf sizzle, but I just haven't been able to justify the time and cost yet though.
 
. . . and got some leads recorded with her:

https://soundclick.com/r/s8db90



Unfortunately, I'm not gelling with the 'buckers, (all the stuff in that song was recorded with the splits) and have some strat singles on order with a new pickguard.  :p
 
Sounds good. I like the smooth, clean tones you can get with it. Decent playing, too.
 
That sounds fantastic! You might consider posting that track in the "Studio and Sessions" section of the forum so more folks will see it.
 
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