Brilliant. Love it.

Also, points for use of "so it came to pass", which... I want to say it was Christopher Hitchens quoting Mark Twain re: The Book of Mormon described as "chloroform in print". Well played.

Yo, sweet! Those pencils sticking out look like a bunch of cigarettes. Are you gonna go for finished wood with visible pencil profiles or some sort of covering?

Originally, i was going to go as standard standard as possible, tolex and straight up Fender-looking with fender grillecloth and errything.

But, i don't think that i can actually allow myself to do that. I so much prefer it to look a little fucked up.

My current plan then will be to hit it with a little stain and some clear, so that all of the oddness of the joinery and the pencils will stay visible.

So, i am waiting for transformers for that amp build; pretty much have everything else. As an aside, anyone in the US who might want to buy transformers or parts for an amp build from Triode(they come up on ebay and google searches and seem to have nice pricing for USA made iron) do yourself a favor and avoid them. They seem to have lousy inventory management, and they don't seem to like to be very forthcoming with factual information as to when they might actually expect to ship backordered items.

So anyhow, while i wait for them to get their shit together and send me what i have paid for(money which of course, they removed immediately from my account), i have been keeping myself busy in other ways.

Firstly and foremostly, i got this thing roughed out:



It will be a mustang shaped body, 24" scale, jaguar pickups and bridge/trem. Yes, a mythical Mustaguar. This is the last unallocated slab of hemlock from that tree i cut up that lightning took down a few years ago. It was pretty thick, so lent itself to a jazzmaster trem setup(the jazz/jag needs a fair bit more depth than the mustang trem does), but was not huge enough to do a full jazzmaster. Well, then i bought a jazzmaster anyhow, so this will be a Mustaguar instead. The slab was just about perfect for the mustang body.


Anyhow, that is waiting for some bits now too, so i was on the hunt for something else.

Came up with this:



That is the olde Lowestang that i made a while ago. I am going to put a proper Mustang bridge on it now(hence the wacky routs you see), and i am going to get a proper mustang neck for it. The neck i was using was a real oddball; it was 24" scale, like a mustang, but the width at the nut was like a quarter inch narrower, as it was originally from a guitar that was really more of a 3/4 scale thing than a normal shortscale like the mustang or jag.

Anyhow, it too will now have to wait, as i will now need to acquire two mustang/jag necks.

Also, while i have it apart, i decided to finish it a bit more. The Mustaguar will be very minimally finished, maybe a subtle aged/yellowed sort of clearcoat biz. Thus i don't want the lowestang to match it too well, so i decided to keep going with what i started with in the filler and whatnot.

So this is what i did today:



It was some nice automotive touchup paint that i originally got for the MINI that is sitting/rotting in the driveway, but that car may never go again, and the paint was too expensive to waste. Still needs a fair bit of futzing to get the finish properly slicked up. I don't know if i care to do the futzing or just leave it though. All i am going to do is beat the hell out of the thing. How shiny does it need to be?

looks like you have some good sheen to the now sir. I agree if you are to beat it up then no need for overly shiny.

Looks quite delicious though

So you have your own wood planer and all that? Nice. Your woodwork looks very impressive too.

For wood planers, all i have are my old timey, hand-powered ones. For real dry knotty shit though, i will set up a ghetto planer with the router and a jig to hold the wood at a (more or less) precise level. The side effect of that, which i love, is that you get the ghosting of the router tracks all across the surface, which you can see on the hemlock piece, almost looks like maple flame figuring in pictures. In person, it is more of a lightly scalloped look, which i might leave in that guitar because i like it.

For doing this stuff, if you only have one power tool other than a small drill press, a nice powerful router is 100% the best thing. Between those two machines, you can do just about whatever.

Well, lets see, i have been up to things for sure.

Started by picking up a small pile of shortscale squire necks and other shit from stratosphere:



Used some of that to re-assemble the Lowestang. Then also started collecting in proper, the bits required for the Mustaguar.

My oddball switches on the Lowestang are sketching out a bit lately so i am going to redo the whole pickguard/switch arrangement a different way. That is what the pearl material is for(the cheapo chinese premade guards are not very close to the right shape, so won't go into this). The black pickguard material is for the Mustaguar.

A friend of mine gave me a pair of lace sensors which seem to be similar conceptually to jaguar pickups, so i am probably going to, at least to try them out, pop those in when the Mustaguar goes together. Also got my trem shit and bridge shit and some other odds/ends:



THEN. I finally received my transformers from Triode(they totally mailed them about a solid week+ after they said they did).

In my excitement i took all of zero pictures of the amp build going together, but go together it did and now i have this:



Which is not actually quite done, finishing bits-wise(faceplate, knobs, that sort of shit). But which is otherwise totally functional and pretty fucking cool, as a change of pace amp flavor. The grillecloth is totally just some re-purposed burlap coffee bag shit i found at work one day. I might shellac it later to shore it up a bit, dunno.

SO. That is almost all of what is going together around here. Gonna give the Mustaguar assembly a little time, as it still needs a bunch of work done to get it ready.

In the meantime, i decided to cheat a whole pile of pedal builds together with these:



Some of these are circuits i have already built on vero but want smaller or more reliable or more correct versions now of. Others are ones that i have just wanted to build for a while but that are biggish-for-vero type of circuits. Going to be:

•Klon (always wanted to try one, and all of these boards are designed to build into properly small 1590B boxes, which a vero build can't come close to doing)
•BJFE Honey Bee (just seems like an interesting/useful type of OD pedal to me)
•Nobels ODR-1(i did one on vero, want another, better one because it fucking rules)
•Bluesbreaker/King Of Tone (did a quickish one on vero, wasn't blown away, want to do a nicer/more correct version now, see what the fuss is)
•Dynacomp/JangleBox (did a dynacomp on vero years ago. it is fucking huge. want a smaller one, and want to try the specific different values from the janglebox, not just the bright cap mod)
•Maestro Echoplex EP-3 Pre (it was relatively cheap and i was curious to see if it will be useful)

Just putting all of the component collections together for them at the moment. Hopefully this will keep me busy for long enough not to rush the mustaguar finishing process.

you have been busy blowing shit up haven't you

Well, my kitchen/soldering area does look quite a bit like i am up to no good, that is for sure. It is not obvious at first glance what is going together; i am sure that some rando off the street would suggest explosives immediately.


Got myself back into the Mustaguar a bit today. Fixed some things, broke some other things, fixed those things, same old shit.



Got the control, pickup, and trem cavities routed, screwed with the screwed up neck pocket a bit. I need to come up with a better way to do neck pockets for sure; it is a little too "flip a coin" right now. This wood is pretty angry too, which doesn't help, big chunk split off when test fitting the neck. The fix for that is that block of wood at the top edge of the pocket that i am waiting for the glue to dry on.

Got the pickguard made, roughed out the control plate out of a bit of street sign.

Hopefully tomorrow i will finish the neck pocket fixin's and try to get things bolted together.

Hewn from a street sign.
Jesus Christ.

right?

When we take over the world, this fucker is in charge of mayhem.

That actually came out way nicer than i thought it would too, after a really lazyquick sanding then polishing with some Autosol:



Now i am onto my least favorite part of any project, fucking painting/finishing. I really just don't have the patience to do this shit correctly.

Anyhoo, got some tinted nitro lacquer from stew mac for the body and it is sort of a dirty yellowed sort of vibe. decided i didn't like how it looked with the lily pale squier jag neck so i lightly jobbed the neck with some of it too.



Unexpectedly, the nitro melted the serial number off the back of the jag neck.

Also, due to my insane levels of impatience i got some pretty weird color distribution that i had to try to fix with a brush. Weirdly, that fix sort of wound up looking like the neck was made out of some flame maple types of shit, so i am going to try to leave it like this.

Have to let both things dry/cure for a while though. When they say five hours between coats, err, they kind of mean five hours between coats.

Too impatient to let it cure for two weeks(i don't intend to polish it anyway), so i pretty much got this thing bolted together today:



Aside from fucking up the finish in a couple places when i was drilling it for a bridge ground wire channel, and also needing to adjust the clearance on the trem rout(i.e. shave off some wood) a bit, it went together pretty well.

Quick and dirty guesstimation on the saddle adjustments for the intonation for now just to get it roughly in tune enough to play it. After the body/neck settles a bit i will go back in and do it proper.

Thing actually sounds awesome. Exactly what i wanted to hear based on listening to a lot of Jaguar demos. They are squawky in a weird huge sort of way.

The pickups are Lace Sensor golds which are actually fairly similar in concept to what the Jaguar pickups are. Also, they are located and oriented as in the Jaguar, not the mustang. In addition to being perpendicular to the strings rather than the mustang's angled ones, the Jaguar's(and this guitar's) neck is further from the bridge hence darker and the bridge pickup is closer to the bridge, so brighter. Combination of those changes is, i theorize, why the Jaguar sounds so unique compared to the jazzmaster and the mustang, especially in the middle position.

I was going to go with a more Jaguar-looking hybrid switching/pickguard setup but in the end i decided to go with one more appropriate for the mustang body/pickguard shape. Not a standard Mustang wiring though.

The back switch is a three way pickup selector: bridge/both/neck.

The front switch is also a three way: In phase/out of phase/Just the neck with a dark cap setting like a Jaguar's rhythm circuit is.

The pots are jaguar style 1M, but the tone one is a push-pull. The switch on the push pull is used for the low cut circuit that Jaguars have on the lower switch plate. Thins the sound out a shit load, and if used in conjunction with the phase reverse can give some really screwy cocked wah types of squawk.

Lots of cool sounds, one of my favorite builds so far. Unexpectedly, the bridge position does a convincing tele thing even. I much prefer the neck and mid positions to what the jazzmaster does. Rarely does a build actually wind up sounding exactly like i wanted it to when i started thinking about doing it. I may actually go in and rewire the jazzmaster to be more like this one next, i really like the combinations it affords.

AH. Conveniently as i finish up that one, my next one arrives.

This one will be a little different:



Wanted a beater SG. I have an older '70s SGII here that my uncle longterm-loaned/gave me years ago, but i don't want to mess with that one too too much. Wanted more of a worker/beater/testbed guitar.

Was going to do the whole thing fromscratch style, even get into building a neck for it, but then i stumbled across this ebay kit for $140 that looked weirdly okay for a $140 ebay kit. Took a chance, it got here today, and even in person up close, it looks a lot better than i would expect of this cheap a kit.

Superlight mahogany-alike wood, well-shaped, clean job on the neck, very precise neck fit, nice routing... i dunno. I think it is going to work.

Amusingly complete kit too, wires, pickups, bridge, knobs, pots, caps, wire, a twelve page instruction booklet, a printed out wiring diagram, even a little coil of solder...

Going to try and put the neck on and see if it looks like it will line up right without too much futzing.

Waiting on some finishing materials to arrive now.

Will need lots of pics of that build. What colour are you going for?

Dunno yet. Was originally thinking beat up white kind of vibe. Like, for instance, i made this years ago with one of those virtual guitar builder things:



But i dunno if i want to fuck with fake aging a finish. I like the look of a beat up guitar, but doing it on purpose just seems kid of dumb to me.








Anyhow, lately have been thinking more like a pale metallic blue or green maybe.

Like what happens to old Pelham Blue guitars when the clearcoat ages and yellows, is pretty fucking sweet:

Agreed, relicing is pretty fucking whack.

I'm a sucker for the ol' deep red SG myself.

Oh yeah, that gibby cherry color is fucking classic.

For something i am going to have to spend a lot of time on though, i kind of feel like it is a bit too normal or something. I want something a bit more fucked up.

The one thing i am not into with the kit guitar is that it is slightly thicker than a normal SG(i don't have a fuss with this, as it is not actually thicker enough for me to care) but this is heavily amplified by the fact that the carves are extremely mild all around.

Compared to the SGII even, which has a different carve shape than a modern SG standard, the kit guitar is no where near shaped right:




So i marked it roughly where i wanted it, and basically started hacking away:



I did a bit more than that, also stuck some grain filler in there and sanded it flat to get ready for paint, but my camera is acting up and probably needs to charge, so you will just have to imagine what it looks like. (it looks pretty much the same as the above anyhow, just i went deeper on the carves and also carved the inside of the horns a bit).