Flamed Telecaster: Test-Fit Completed

While I'm waiting for coats of gloss white to dry on my Stone Roses Tribute build, I thought I'd get a start on my first ever Telecaster build. It's a kit that I ordered directly from China through aliexpress.com, and although there is no binding around the top (a source of some consternation on my part) it should be a great build.

The mockup went together without incident. There was a little bit of work required to get the scratchplate to fit around the heel of the neck, but with my trusty nut files this was easily overcome. Although the scratchplate is a 3rd party addition to the kit (I liked the idea of white pearloid), the plain white scratchplate that came with the kit suffered from the same issue.

I'm planning to finish this guy in a combination of Colortone dyes and Tru-oil, with a final gloss coat of clear acrylic. The flame maple top will be dyed Vintage Amber, with the figure popped with Mahogany Red. To this I am planning to add a Mahogany Red burst around the edges, and I'm hoping this will help hide the edge join between the mahogany and the maple cap.

I've never done a burst before so this will be a first for me. I'm very excited to get started on it, but first there's sanding through 600 grit and filling the mahogany body with Walnut Timbermate. Fun times!!

Siena's Stratocaster - It's Finished!

I finally got the stratocaster polished and assembled today. Gotta say it looks awesome. I was able to achieve a mirror finish using my Colortone polishing compounds, and since i did a mock build right at the beginning of the project, everything went together very easily without any mishaps or scratches.

After adding some copper foil to overlap the edges of the pickup cavity (so it could contact the shielding on the back of the pickguard), the only thing left to do in terms of electrics was to ground the cavity shielding to the back of the volume pot, solder the ground wire to the back of the tremolo hook, and solder the output jack. I had a few tense moments during which the output jack kept grounding out, but a bit of heat-shrink insulation sorted it out.

Despite being the one of the cheapest kits on the market, this strat plays really nicely and sounds oh-so sweet. The full range of strat tones are there, and it was made to cry the blues. This build was for my niece Siena, and I gotta say I will be sad to see it go. It looks so nice hanging on my wall right now! Obviously the thing to do is build one for myself. Yes. I must. The colour in real life is a lot more aqua than it appears in the photos. It is weird how much the camera's flash brings out the green, but if i don't use the flash the colour looks blue!

If you've been thinking of building a kit, then the Stratocaster kit from your online supplier of choice is a great place to start. These kits are cheap, there's minimal wiring to be done, and the finished product looks good, sounds good, and is a pleasure to play. Come on, you know you want to!

Rock on. \m/ \m/

Siena's Stratocaster - Shielding the Pickguard

Today I shielded the back of the new perloid pickguard I bought for Siena's stratocaster. For this I used adhesive copper foil purchased from eBay. I gotta say, I love this stuff! It's awesome to shield both flat surfaces like this, and pickup/control cavities. If you are buying this stuff from eBay or whereever, it is very important that you make sure it uses conductive adhesive. If you don't, the overlapping strips of foil won't form an electrical connection and your shielding will be useless. The whole surface you create must be one large ground conductor!

The secret to effective shielding is to create a complete Faraday cage around your hot (signal) wiring. The faraday cage is grounded so that any estraneous EM radiation in the playing environent is collected by the cage and directed to ground rather than being accepted and transmitted as noise by your guitar wiring.

To create an effective faraday cage, a good conductive surface must be created above, below and encasing the whole cavity, with as few gaps as possible. This means that the shielding from the walls of cavity must overlap the edge to make sure the top shielding (ie on the back of the pickguard) is electrically joined to it. Also, the shielding must be electircally connected to your circuit's ground (along with the grounded bridge, output jack, and control casings). What I love most about this copper foil though, is that it makes this job much easier by allowing ground wires to be soldered directly to it!

The next job I need to do is to work on shielding the walls and floor of the cavity itself. In the next few days I'm going to trial some Stewmac Conductive Shielding Paint to see whether this can do as good a job as the foil. With a cavity as big as the one on this strat, it's pretty expensive to foil the entire thing. The question I have though, is just how many coats of conductive paint do I need to create a good shielding surface? If it's more than 3 coats, then I'm not sure the paint will be an effective solution.

I will attempt to answer this question before deciding whether to use the paint or not, so stay tuned for trial results!

Siena's Stratocaster - Unboxing & Perloiding

I started a new build today in honour of my neice Siena's 10th birthday. She has requested an 'Aqua' electric guitar, and what better way to deliver it than with a custom Stratocaster. Based on a Pitbull guitars ST-1 kit, I will attempt to use Wudtone for the first time with this build, mixing a custom colour from two off the shelf colours 'Surfer Girl' and 'T-Bird' to create the desired 'Aqua' shade. Let's hope it doesnt all end in tears!

I have already swapped out the stock pickguard for a nicer perloid one and things are already looking good. There were a few tense moments there when I thought the knob on the selector switch wouldn't budge, but in the end my fiendishly strong IT muscles won against the factory knob installation and I managed to swap all the electronics over to the new guard. With all the electrics pre-soldered on this beast, this build really shouldn't take too long? We'll see..

Perloid pickgurd installed. Plenty of Strato-doodads still to decypher..

The next step is to do a mock build to make sure all the parts go together correctly, and to positon the bridge and neck to reflect the correct scale length. The strat anatomy is still a mystery to me - there's springs and other unusual doodads to get my head around, but that's all part of the fun.

Given that this is my first strat, I'm going to try and document the build with as much detail as possible. Stay tuned for more Strato-goodness to come.