Stone Roses Tribute: She's Finished & Couldn't be Better

Well, my oval jack-plate came in the mail yesterday, and that meant the finishing touches could be applied to the Stone Roses Tribute build and she could be released to the world. She is now finished and, in this builder's opinion, looks absolutely stunning. Dare I say a work of art? Fuck, it's the closest I'll ever come anyway.

In short, I think that this guitar looks amazing. The multicolored Pollock finish is beautiful and is contrasted nicely by the stark white scratch plate, black pickup surrounds and natural neck colour. The scratch-plate itself, with it's 4 black control knobs, retains the classic "Rickenbacker 330" look.

I even managed to source some grommets to raise the higher section of the scratch-plate off the under-plate, adding another layer of authenticity. The Rickenbacker look is also carried over into the awesomely awesome truss-rod cover with its custom decal that proudly proclaims this beastie as a genuine Stone Roses tribute, and does so in quintessential Rickenbacker style.

The choice of satin Nitrocellulose lacquer has been vindicated now that it has cured. It seems to be protecting the Pollock finish nicely with a hard outer shell, without highlighting the unevenness of the finish provided by the Pollock splatter.

Both front and back look balanced in terms of colour and design, and each compliments the other nicely. It remains to be seen whether the finish will stand up to belt buckles and other rigors of continuous playing, but that's a question for the future.

Most importantly the guitar plays very nicely. The custom bone nut has been filed so that the action at the first fret is low and comfortable, and the remaining action all the way down the neck is also nice and low. There's no fret buzz and the stock Pitbull Guitars pickups sound pretty good. They are meant to be humbuckers,  and I have no idea even what magnetic material they are made from, but these things growl like single coils. All in all quite a nice, vintage sound - at least to my ear.

All in all an amazingly satisfying build. The final guitar looks exactly as I intended it to look - even better if that's possible. I never imagined that the truss-rod cover would look even close to what is does, and credit for that sits squarely with Andy from City Signs an Print in Port Lincoln SA. The build has taken the better part of 7 months to complete, what with setbacks and so on, so I'm very glad it's over. Time to savor the results!

Stone Roses Tribute: Fret Level and Re-dressing

While I'm waiting for my oval jack plate and output jack to arrive in the mail, it's time I did a fret level on the Stone Roses Tribute build in readiness to string her up and let loose with some sweet tunes. After straightening the neck with the truss-rod, I protected the frets with some painters tape and marked the top of each fret with a sharpie.

I could then use my levelling beam - coated with 320 grit adhesive sandpaper - to sand all the frets until every fret had a strip of sharpie removed from its top edge. Some of the frets came right down let me tell you!

I then went on and did an additional level on the last 7 frets at an angle down towards the pickups. To do this I laid 3 pieces of tape across the 7th fret and used this as a rest for the end of my short levelling beam. Sanding this way creates a ramp down for the very last frets and allows a much lower action to be achieved.

With all the levelling done, I proceeded to use my trusty fret files to re-crown each of them. I use a combination of el-cheapo Double-edge Fret File from Stewmac and a Little Bone file from Rectify Master. Each has it's place depending on which fret you are re-crowning. The Stewmac files are useless down near the pickups if there are horns on the guitar as there are in this case. Before using the files to re-crown, I re-applied the sharpie to each fret as a guide to how much material I was taking off each side. You don't want to file so far that you change the height of the fret!

Anyway soon the frets were re-crowned and polished to a chrome lustre. Beautiful! I then gave the neck a soak of Dr Duck's Axe Wax and it looks spectacular.

Finally, the neck needed only a new bone nut to be perfect. With my trusty Stewmac nut files and my bench sander I soon made quick work of the new nut. The action at the nut is really nice now and the whole neck feels great.

With the nut superglued in place, it was time to string her up and apply my beautiful custom truss rod cover. I received the decal for the cover from Andy at City Signs and Print in SA yesterday and couldn't wait to apply it. It looks absolutely amazing and is the perfect cap to a wonderful

Now just that output jack to go and I can call this worthy tribute guitar finished! It's looking so awesome I'm lost for words. Can't wait to get her strapped on and noodle away!

Stone Roses Tribute: Wiring Her Up!

Hot on the heels of the shielding, the wiring for the Stone Roses Tribute build quickly came together today. It was relatively easy to do, given the fact that all the wiring takes place on the back of the scratchplate. First to go on were the pickups - which slid effortless into their shielded cavities and were screwed home. I was tossing up whether to replace the surrounds by white, but I'm definitely liking the black!

Next the components went into the shielded scratchplate and were tightened into place. To save troubleshooting woes later on, I made a plastic shield for each pot out of milk-bottle container. This stops the terminals of the pot from shorting out on the scratchplate shielding when the pot is tightened. A neat trick that I learned from watching Crimson Custom Guitars on YouTube.

With the pots and switch in place, I followed the standard 50's VintageWiring schematic to get the components wired together. No hassles, no stresses here. I've done it so many times now I think I could do it in my sleep!

An so with the wiring all soldered up I did a quick tap-test on the pickups to make sure the volume and tone controls worked for each pickup and that the switch varied the signal source correctly. All sweet! All I'm waiting on now is an oval jack plate and output jack from Realtone Music Parts and I'll be able to put this baby to bed.

Stone Roses Tribute: Shielding

The neck clamp came off today and everything looks good. Time to get going with the electrical side of things! Before I could start on the wiring proper, the cavities and pickguard needed to be shielded and grounded to protect the guitar from noise generating EM interference.

Using double-sided conductive copper shielding tape, I coated the walls and floors of both the pickup and control cavities. Similarly I coated the inside surface of the pickguard, and overlapped some tape over the edge of the control cavity to make contact with the pickguard. The idea is to create a complete 3D Faraday cage around the important signal carrying wires.

After the copper tape was in place, each of the 3 cavities was joined to the others using wires soldered between them. I love this copper tape because it's so easy to work with - just being able to solder wires directly to it  - awesome. I used some small pieces of copper tape to keep the soldered wires out of the way, and used my multimeter to make sure that I had a complete conductive surface between all points on all cavities.

Next I took the ground wire from the bridge and soldered this wire to the wall of the control cavity. The result is that all shielding now conducts noise to ground. This was also tested with a multimeter to make sure there was an electrically conductive path from the bridge to the shielding.

Finally, a new ground wire was soldered to the control cavity wall. This wire will be used to connect to the back of one of the pots to provide a ground signal for the control circuit. With this in place, every thing is ready to chuck the pots and switch into the pickguard and commence soldering up the control wiring!

Stone Roses Tribute: Setting the Neck

So the day finally arrived when this Stone Roses Tribute could start being assembled. The clear coats have been subjected to IR lamps for a few days and given I wont be polishing the surface to a shine, I'm pretty confident I can move on with the next steps. The first and most important task - gluing the set neck!

There was quite a bit of play in the neck of this kit, both in and out and laterally within the neck pocket. To make sure the neck was glued at the correct angle, I installed the bridge and tailpiece first along with the tuners. This allowed me to get the two E strings placed up the neck to check for correct lateral angle.

To make sure the neck was installed at the correct depth, I installed the neck pickup and made sure the neck wasn't so far into the pocket that it stopped the pickup from being installed. I marked pencil lines to indicate the exact depth required on each side of the neck to accomodate the pickup.

In terms of the neck angle front to back, putting the bridge at it's lowest height I was able to establish that the two E strings were touching the first few frets. This indicated that a good action could be dialed in without the need to shim the neck. Phew! With all this done, the neck could be glued into the correct place and clamped.

I used Titebond to glue the neck into the pocket (the king of wood glues) and now must wait two days for the glue to fully dry before putting any weight on it (ie. stringing it up!). I'm pretty happy with how the neck is sitting and can't wait to give this baby a strum!

Stone Roses Tribute: Video Build Diary #7

The seventh installment of my video build diary for the RC-1 Stone Roses Tribute is now on YouTube. This installment deals with the do-over of the Pollocking paint job, and (finally!) the setting of the neck.

Enjoy!

Stone Roses Tribute: Clear Coats

Well, it's crunch time again - time for the clear coats to go on to the Stone Roses Tribute RC-1. And with the memory of this build's last bitter failure still fresh in my mind, I decided to steer well away from Polyurethane in any of its many forms. So too, since my success rate with spray on Acrylic Lacquer is still less than 100%, I'm also reticent to go down that path with the Tribute either.

So what am I left with? Well, for my very first build, the Flying V, I actually had quite good success using Behlen spray on nitro. It was easy to spray on, didn't run (once I knew what I was doing) and tacked off quite quickly. And since I don't have to wet sand the Pollock, it seems like a convenient and stress-free choice for me to take. I even had a couple of cans of the stuff lying around!

And so it went. I ended up using the better part of two cans of Nitro on the body and headstock face. Firstly, I sprayed 5 coats of Nitro gloss. This was the better part of a whole can. I then moved to 5 coats of Nitro "Jet Spray" satin to finish off.

I must say, I'm really very happy with the results. You can still see the ridges and troughs where the splatter has gone on, but I was always planning on keeping them this time around. The lacquer has really popped the colour and I'm really impressed with the final look.

Now I plan to leave the lacquer a few weeks to cure. After that I'll be able to move on to assembly. Awesomeness!

Stone Roses Tribute: Second Pollocking Complete

Well the last dollop of colour went onto the sides of the Stone Roses RC-1 today. It's looking pretty good - definitely different from the first Pollocking attempt - but good all the same. It's more colourful this time around, and that's not a bad thing. I'm thinking about changing out the black pickup surrounds for white. What do you guys reckon?

Now that the colour coats are done I need to clean off the side of the binding (a little acrylic still made it on there in places), and scrape the top of the binding to provide a border around the top. After that is done I can get started on the clear coats. I'm thinking of going with Behlen satin nitro, but I'm also going to check out some satin poly sprays to see how they look. I've done paintings before with the poly spray and it really brings the colours out, but I'm not sure how long it would last on a guitar. I guess a few experiments are in order..

Stone Roses Tribute: Pollocking Almost Complete

After two rounds of colour I'm happy with the results of the my second Pollocking attempt. Maybe not as awesome as the first time, but that's Murphy's Law isn't it? When you leave your finish up to the vagaries of fate and gravity you gotta accept whatever results! I still have the sides to go, but see what you think:

The sides will take me another couple of days to complete, and then I'll be faced with the choice of clear coats again. I'm trying to find a reasonably priced, acrylic satin clear coat that comes in spray cans. If anyone knows anything cheaper than Behlen Satin Nitro, then please let me know!!

Stone Roses Tribute: 9th Colour Layer (Second Coming)

Well, the Pollocking is coming along (again) and hopefully I'm creating something that will come close to what we had before. The 9th colour layer (black) is on and I'm ready to start the cycle again. Here's what she looks like:

I think it's looking pretty good, but only time will tell. It's a lot more nerve-wracking this time around given that I had something special the first time! By way of comparison, here's what she looked like at this stage last time:

This time, I put more white on in layer 8, which has masked off quite a bit of the more brilliant colour layers. These will come back with the next colour cycle.

Stone Roses Tribute: The Second Coming

It has taken a couple of weeks, but the Stone Roses Tribute build is finally back on track. After stripping back the original paint job back to bare wood, I found that I had pretty much ruined the binding completely. Paint stripper and plastic just doesn't mix people! It was a bad end to an epic fail - the second epic clear coat fail in as many weeks. To tell you the truth, I was pretty depressed about the whole damn project.

An email to Pit bull Guitars, and a package in the mail, changed all that. What began as an enquiry into the cost of re-binding my RC-1 kit body, ended with an offer from Adam and the Pit bull gang to send me a replacement neck and body (sourced from their kit returns) absolutely free of charge. Their resident lutheir, Dingobass, spent time making sure that the neck fit the replacement body, and they even covered the postage to get it here from WA. I was utterly blown away by their generosity. When the package arrived with the new neck and body, I was instantly re-energised and excited about the project.

In no time the body was sanded down to 400 grit, pore filled with Timbermate, and 2 coats of primer applied. This project has some traction again!

I may have taken a giant step backwards, but on the plus side, I get to do the whole Pollock splatter thing all over again!! Should be a whole new bunch of fun. Before I can do that, I need to let the primer dry, flatten it with 800 grit and apply a final coat. Then it will be on to the white acrylic gloss prior to flinging the colours. I can't wait! I dearly hope it looks as good as it did before - god I loved that original paint job.

I guess I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed and wait and see how it comes out!

Stone Rose Tribute: Poly Fails == Do-over

Ok so I made the difficult decision today to stop adding the poly to the Stone Roses Tribute and to give up on the finish. Although the paint job looked awesome when first completed, subsequent layers of both Minwax Wipe-on Poly and Cabots Polyurethane had muddied the colours to such an extent that I just didn't like looking at it any more. It was muddy and green and horrible.

Well, C'est la vie. Out comes the scraper..

I haven't had a solid colour build that hasn't involved a do-over. I had hoped that this build would be the exception, but unfortunately not. And I was sooo happy with the paint job on this one too !!! Oh well...

I will be repainting the body in exactly the same manner as before. The difference this time is that I wont be shooting for a level, or even a gloss finish. Just a few layers of satin clear over the paint and I'll leave it at that.

Stone Roses Tribute: Fucking Minwax Wipe-on Poly

Ok, so I'm pretty fucking pissed off. After 5 coats of Minwax Wipe-on Poly, there has been a distinct change in the colours on my Stone Roses Tribute guitar. The colour scheme I had worked so hard to create is now changed beyond repair. The whites in particular now look off-white or "aged". Not sure if you can pick it up in the photos, but under normal lighting the difference between the white of the pickguard and the now yellowing white paint is enormous. What a fucking disappointment.

With hindsight, maybe I shoud have known this would happen. The Minwax product is a "wipe-on" product meant to be rubbed on much like oil finishes. For this reason it isnt surprising that the poly has a very slight amber tint. You dont see it with the first coat or even the third, but by the fifth it's pretty fucking obvious.

This being said, a can labelled [Clear Gloss] is at the very least misleading. Fuckers.  I've since bought another brush-on poly from Cabots that also professes to be "Clear". Dare I continue putting on coats? I've no fucking idea..

Stone Roses Tribute: Video Build Diary #6

The sixth installment of my video build diary for the RC-1 Stone Roses Tribute is now on YouTube. This installment deals with the actual Pollocking of the front, back and sides of the guitar body and headstock. This is the fun part of the build and I get some help from my son Eben.

   

You can't quite see it in the video, but that very first chuck of light-blue paint was a little too enthusiastic and most of it went all over me. Nice one Eb!

Stone Roses Tribute: Psychedelic Pollocking Complete

Well today I finally finished the Pollock inspired colour coats on my Stone Roses Tribute build. With the last splatter coat in place on the sides, this boring piece of basswood has been transformed into a masterpiece of psychedelia :P. In the end the paint job came out very close to what I was shooting for and I think it looks awesome! I just can't stop going back to look at it!

All the masking went exactly to plan. There was quite a bit of paint on the top of the binding, and it took some very careful work with an exacto blade and my binding scraper jig to get it all clean. But, in the end, it's clean as a whistle and looking very professional indeed ;).

Next step is to decide on a way to get this bad boy clear coated. I am strongly leaning towards Minwax wipe-on poly for this one as it will be simple to apply and may well fill some of the valleys between splatter pretty nicely.

Stone Roses Tribute: 14th Colour Layer

Well the final colour layer went on today - the 14th! I'm loving how it looks now. I still have white and black on the plan, but I'm not sure whether I should bother risking a change to what looks so good now!

The headstock in particular I have no plans to change anymore. Consequently I was able to rip off the masking and take a look at the finished product.

Wow! I really love the contrast between the colourful front face and the natural Wudtone neck finish. It's going to look really great sitting above the guitar body. I'm still a little unsure about the side of the guitar. I never paid them enough attention during the font and back painting phases and consequently they look very empty. I was thinking maybe I should mask off the front and back and try to add more paint there..? Hmm not sure.