Assembly and Setup

2013-12-05

Test-fit the drilled pickguard on the finished body

Assembly was just taking the complete pickguard with electronics, placing it on the body, and then attaching all the rest of the hardware and parts.

The photo at right shows the finished body and pickguard, but the electronics are not yet installed. This could be considered the beginning of the assembly phase.

The photo at right shows the original curvy concept for the pickup cutouts. I wanted the curves to follow the shape of the pickups, and I was pleased with the curvy look.

But the curvy cutouts did not fit the pickups! The pickups had wires bulging on the side that caused the problems. I filed more and more material away from the curves, but still the pickups still would not fit. I was disappointed that I eventually had to make the pickup cutouts square to fit the pickups.
:c(

About The Pickups

Pickups are an important component of an electric guitar. I want to mention that my pickups were made for me by Bryan Gunsher of BG Pups. I am happy with the pickups I got from Bryan. I ordered “HellaBucker Bridge”, and “BG Dark” for the neck.

The good thing about ordering custom pickups is that I could get exactly what I wanted, however misguided that may be. I was stuck on using two humbuckers, because that was the original concept for this guitar, and the concept for the wiring. I wanted the pickups to be “hot”, because of the diode clipping experiment. And I wanted to pick the colors.

Plain black and plain white were my favorite colors to go with the fruity color scheme. And I wanted them to alternate black-white-black-white, which echoes the south-north-south-north or A-B-A-B pattern of the coils.

Initial Setup

Just messing around

This is a photo of me doing the initial setup one evening. Just messing around.

At this point, I didn’t do a real setup, with careful intonation and fit. That’s because at this point the electronics were all freshly soldered, into a wiring scheme which I made up, and I wasn’t convinced the whole thing would work.

I first needed to roughly assemble the project, and see if everything works as planned. Once assembled, I could make notes about what could be improved in the final setup.

Playable

Here is the guitar after it had been knocking around the house for a while. This is after the initial setup, but before a final setup. It was fun to play, and I had other projects, so I have delayed doing the final setup.