Steve has come to finish his guitar while Ciaren continues with his acoustic
Today is mainly dedicated to getting Steve’s ‘Red Wine Burst’ guitar finished but Ciaren came as well as he wants to get his done before Christmas – we’ll do our best!
Ciaren was busy bending his sides and gluing the kerfed lining on – He has already made the front and the back so next time he can start assembling his body. He left about 5pm and left Steve working on his fretjob.
There are basically three jobs to do on finishing day but each one takes quite a long time so it is still a full day.
- Assembly – putting all the bits on and wiring up the pickups. Steve is the first on our course to use the new 6-way toggle switch. He has three humbuckers which can be a problem with normal 3-way toggle switches – you have to have the middle pickup always on. Another solution for 3 pickups is to have a 5-way slider switch but that can be very tricky to fit on a carved top guitar. Also it is possible to have 3 volume controls – one for each pickup but that cuts down the number of tone controls. The new 6-way gives us all the options we need while keeping the 2vol 2 tone layout. We used push pulls for the tones so we can also split each pickup for single coil sounds…..
- Fret job – Levelling the frets, then reshaping and taking off all the sharp edges before polishing them. The guitar is strapped into a jig, to simulate the tension of the strings tuned up to pitch, for levelling the frets. This took quite a long time – Steve chose jumbo frets which needed a fair bit of work.
- Set up – Set the truss rod, set the action, set the intonation. This went very well – no problems setting the guitar up.
We took the guitar next door to take some nice pics of it finished – hope you enjoy them….
After that there is nothing left to do but play it!