Homemade Guitar

[Scorch]

I'm currently in the planning stages of redesigning a guitar. I have a $40 Chinese mini-bodied normal sized neck strat that I got from a catalog around 10 years ago. It plays really well considering it was $40, the frets are nice, and the neck isn't warped even though there is no truss rod. I'm modifying it because it has a bigass speaker on the front that sounds like stuff. I want to take it out and put a chunk of pine or something in the hole, move the volume knob a little bit, and turn the on/off switch into a killswitch and put it on the top like a les paul's pickup selector. It only has one pickup in the neck position, but I'm leaving it there because I like the tone of a neck pickup (bridge position is too trebley unless you use distortion all the time), and because I don't want to route out another slot for it to fit into.

I'm not doing a job like the idiots on youtube do when they mod a guitar (painting it with the hardware still in, not taping things off, etc), I'm going to spend time on this to make it look nice. Paint a cool design on it, put a few coats of lacquer on it, wetsand it to remove the orange peel texture, then buff it by hand to make it shine like a mirror.

It currently has 2 jacks, one output and one input to play stuff through the built in speaker I suppose, one volume knob, a switch and a pickup, that as mentioned earlier are going to be moved and stay in the same place respectively, and a 3 inch speaker that is going to be taken out and the hole filled with a chunk of pine for that Swedish metal tone. Nothing sounds as good as a piece of pine that grew in the harsh cold climate of frozen hills, it gives a nice tight bite to the low end and smooths out the high end to the amount that I like. The 9volt battery case in the back will be filled either with another piece of pine, or a piece of brass to give it some wicked sustain.

In the future I want to try making a guitar from scratch because I think it would be cool.

Has anyone else made or modified their own instrument before?

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[Bomberguy]

[Car Selling Pyro]

i have a friend that does guitar repair, not sure if that counts

[Scorch]

After sanding the body, I found out that it is made out of some kind of laminated plywood. So far today I sanded it and glued some wood in the speaker hole, I'm going to have to re-drill a hole through the new wood for the pickup wire to go through.
Here is a picture of it disassembled before sanding:


The only thing I will do to the neck, if anything, will be sanding the back, painting it, and sealing it with a matte finish to allow for easy movement.
I will put the original hardware back on, upgrading to higher quality parts in the future. I've thought about cutting the upper horn back to get it to look more like a telecaster, but I may just leave it the way it is.

[Scorch]

[Outpacte]

whenever people say 'homemade', i think of it as food.

[Brickman]

LOL WHAT
the original body had a built in speaker? wtf. is that neck even full sized?

[Scorch]

LOL WHAT
the original body had a built in speaker? wtf. is that neck even full sized?

The scale length (length of the nut to the bridge) is shorter than a normal guitar, but the width is pretty normal.

It's almost ready to be painted, I just gotta sand some wood filler to be flat. Wiring it will be pretty fun, I looked up a schematic for a one pick up one volume with a killswitch setup, it should be right based on the tutorials I watched.

[weaver123]

I can't wait to see how this turns out.

[Scorch]

After putting a coat of paint on, I notice some scratches from random sanding spots I did. I'm gunna resand the whole thing down with a few high grit sandpapers to get it nice and smooth. I can also see the speaker plug, it is raised up a bit so I have to sand it by hand just around the edges so the rim isn't visible.

[Scorch]

I got the wood filler almost to where I want it, I'm currently waiting for what I hope will be the last layer to dry. I soldered the electronics together outside the body to test the schematic I drew up from watching a few tutorials, the first try didn't work because the jack had 3 headers coming out of it, 2 hots and a ground. It didn't work because I soldered the hot wire coming from the pot to one hot header, and the ground coming from the pot to the other hot header on the jack. I re-soldered the whole thing with the ground from the pot connected to what at the time I was hoping was the right header, and took the killswitch out, thinking that it was the cause of the error. It worked with the ground going to the right spot and without the killswitch, so I re-connected the killswitch but didn't test it because I didn't feel like it.

Once I sand the wood filler, I can begin painting, then put the electronics in it and rock out. I'm still thinking about painting the back of the neck and headstock, but I might just leave it alone.

[Momentum]

wait, so with the paint off it looks like that chipboard stuff? i'm thinking this is going to look really stuffty when it's done, no offense. i'd put some sort of smooth paint (enamel paint or whatever it is) over it as a finish.

[ThatRandomGuy]

dat  body doe. looks like an acoustic body

[Scorch]

wait, so with the paint off it looks like that chipboard stuff? i'm thinking this is going to look really stuffty when it's done, no offense. i'd put some sort of smooth paint (enamel paint or whatever it is) over it as a finish.

It's laminated plywood or something, extremely smooth. I'm painting it with acrylic, so there won't be a smooth paint job because you can see brush strokes. After putting the paint on I went back over it with strokes following the long part of the body, so at least the lines look like wood grain or something instead of random patches.

[Scorch]

The wood filler or the wood itself that I used to plug the hole has sunken down, making the ring visible, I'll just make a pick guard to cover it up.