We're building this guitar for Bruce, a teacher who lives in Fresno CA. Bruce was one of the musicians who jammed with us at the Peddler's Faire in Oakhurst on Memorial Day weekend. He emailed me the next week asking for a quote on a Jazzmaster-style guitar, and over the next few days he and I designed the guitar featured in the pictures below. The specs are:

  • Kent Armstrong humbucking pickups:
    • WPU-JB (similar to the Seymour Duncan "Jeff Beck" model) in the bridge position
    • WPU-11 in the neck position
    • Coil-split wiring with mini-switches mounted above the neck pickup on the pickguard
    • Les Paul-style pickup selector switch below the neck pickup on the pickguard
  • Alder body with a flame maple cap
  • Strat-style tremolo bridge
  • All chrome hardware
  • Tortoise Shell pickguard
  • Les Paul-style volume and tone controls mounted on the body with a real control cavity
  • Mighty Mite birdseye maple neck

We start with the building up of the body blank. The base is made up of three pieces of 1-1/5" thick alder. They were cut to length and the edges trued up by ripping them on the radial saw, then edge-gluing them like this:

Next, we trued up the mating edges of the flame maple cap. The cap is a pair of boards that were the result of sawing a piece of flame maple into two thin 5/16" sheets, then opening them up like a book to get a symmetrical pattern in the grain. The result is called a Bookmatched Set. We bought this set from an Ebay Seller whose ID is burl.quilt. In the picture below, the mating edges of the bookmatch set were trued up on the radial saw, then edge-glued:

The next step is to glue the flame maple cap to the alder blank, like this (It took every C-Clamp I own to get this done!):

Once the glue was set, we did the following:

  • Cut the blank to shape on the band saw
  • Sanded the edges of the body smooth on the drum sander
  • Used the router to round the edges of the body
  • Used the router to cut the neck pocket

The result looked like this:

We didn't take any more pictures of this project for quite a while. But here's what we did:

  • Routed the cavities for the pickups and the various controls
  • Routed the cavities for the tremolo bridge
  • Sanded the body with the following grits of sandpaper: 100, 150, 22, 320, and 600
  • Applied two coats of sanding sealer, and 12 coats of lacquer, sanding with 320 or 600 grit sandpaper between coats
  • Prepared the neck's headstock and applied logo decals:
    • Sanded the front surface of the headstock with 600-grit sandpaper
    • Applied 4 coats of gloss lacquer, sandinbg between coats with 600-grit sandpaper
    • Polished the headstock to a high gloss with StewMac's polishing compound
    • Applied the SMCtek logo decals
    • Applied 6 coats of satin lacquer, sanding carefully with 600-grit between coats, to ensure that we didn't sand thru to the decals
  • Made up the pickguard from a Tortoise Shell blank purchased from WD Music, which involved:
    • Cutting it to shape with the 45-degree bevel bit on the router
    • Cutting the cutouts for the bridge and neck on the bandsaw
    • Cutting the pickup cutouts with the straight bit on the router, using a StewMac Lucite template as a guide
    • Drilling and beveling the pickguard mounting holes and drilling the pickup mounting screw and switch holes
    • Mounted the pickups and switches

The next picture shows the neck, pickguard assembly, and bridge in position on the body, but nothing's actually been mounted at this point:

At this point, I realized that some channels would be needed for the wiring to connect everything up, so I got out the router again, and cut the channels shown in the next picture:

This picture shows the headstock, after the logo decals had been applied:

We're making significant progress. The following things brought us to the point shown in the next picture:

  • After allowing the lacquer on the body to harden for 9 days, I sanded the body with 600 and 1200 grit sandpaper
  • Polished the entire body with StewMac polishing compound. First Medium grit, then Fine
  • Installed the bridge and controls on the body

In this picture the pickguard has been installed, which required a slight amount of trimming around the bridge. Notice that I have removed the pickups and switches for now. They'll be reinstalled when it's time to do the wiring.

The next two pictures show the neck mounted to the body. Rather than the conventional neck plate, we used individual bushings that are set into the body, with two advantages: 1) No risk of the screw heads scratching a table top or something, and 2) The screw goes deeper into the neck for a stronger joint.

   

The tuners have been installed on the neck:

   

The guitar is nearing completion at this point. The wiring is done, and I brought the guitar into the music room to test it with the Marshall. The objective of the testing is to make sure the pickups are connected with the correct phasing, that the coil-splitting switches do what they are supposed to do, that the pickup selector switch works correctly, and that the volume & tone controls function properly. Good news: everything worked properly on the first try!

The guitar is wired essentially the same as a Les Paul guitar, with a volume and tone control for each pickup, plus a 3-position selector switch to choose the neck pickup, the bridge pickup, or both. In addition, there are two coil-splitting switches, one of each pickup, to select whether that pickup is operating as a single-coil pickup or a humbucker.

Wiring diagrams for the standard guitar types are available on the Guitar Electronics website, at www.guitarelectronics.com.

The next set of pictures shows the guitar at this stage of the build. Here's what's left to do at this point:

  • Install the strap buttons
  • Install the output jack
  • Set the intonation
  • Make and install a cover plate for the control cavity

   

   


All Pictures and Text
(c) Copyright 2003 by Stephen Cyr
Last updated August 16, 2003		 Best experienced with

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