Building a guitar

In the 'How much do you practice?' thread I mentioned I was building myself a guitar, and was subsequently asked to elaborate on it a bit rather than derail that thread any further I've started a new one.

So here's the specification of the guitar I'm building

Body: I believe it's Alder but I could be wrong, painted clear blue on the top and solid blue on the sides and back, has a universal rout so in theory I can fit any pickups I want.

Neck: clear gloss Maple/Rosewood strat style neck, 22 frets, C profile.

Pickups: 3 Fender Tex Mex single cloils.

Bridge: chrome Wilkinson VS100 pivot trem

Tuners/Machine Heads: Gotoh 6 inline sealed, chrome

Pickguard/Backplate: white

Basically it's a fairly standard strat clone, but since I've not got any guitar with single coil pickups it's going to fill a hole in my collection quite nicely and since the parts I'm using are high quality it should also play just as well as an Fender provided I build it well.

Here a pic of what I've currently got for those who are interested:


This photo really doesn't show the parts at their best, the rosewood fingerboard looks a lot better in real life than in this picture.

I'll update this thread once I get the other parts or get any work done but that's not going to be until late next month.

Have you always played strats?

Edited by SpaceMonkey - February 22 2008 at 04:36

Hopefully it works out for you in the end. I was always worried that if I took the neck off I wouldn't be able to get it "perfectly" aligned again. That was back with my other six strings though.

How do you plan on tackling the whole nut issue? If you are confident enough in your abilities go for it man. It would be great having luthier skills. The problem is I'm lazy. So I'll just go the extra penny and go for some signature models instead.

Edited by SpaceMonkey - February 22 2008 at 04:58

It's looking good Nick! Did you cut and fit your own frets or buy a pre-fitted fingerboard?  I found that the singular most difficult thing to do - basically you have 22 chances to get it wrong and ruin the whole thing.

I wish I had your patience..I tried rebuilding a BC Rich Warlock I had lying around....I wound up smashing it against a wall  I can laugh now..but when it happened, It was not so easy

N Ellingworth wrote: I bought the neck complete (bar nut and tuners), there's no way I'm going to attempt to fret the neck myself as I know how difficult it can be. If this project goes well I think I'm definitely going to be building more guitars and I will be modifying all my current ones too as I've got a few things I want to change on all of them particularly my Steinberger which really should have active pickups in my opinion but is stuck with passive ones.

Thanks for the advice.

To clarify the nut slot issue, there is no nut slot on the neck what there is however is a slot the size of a fret slot where the nut slot should be.

EDIT: following your advice I've also ordered a couple of books to help me though everything.


Edited by N Ellingworth - February 23 2008 at 04:07

Well I've got a small update,

I've figured out how where the nut will have to be installed and the fret sized slot simply marks where the edge of the nut should be. I don't know why the neck I've bought doesn't come with a precut nut slot but it's not a big problem.

The first of the 2 book I've ordered has arrived, hopefully the second will get here in the next couple of days as I intend to read both books from cover to cover before I even consider picking up any tools.

Your one and Make Your Own Guitar by Melvyn Hiscock.

The book you wrote was the one that arrived today it's already been very useful, as it helped me figure out how to find where the nut slot should be cut.