Building a guitar

It's all starting to come together now, I've got the neck and body attached and all that's left to do is fitting the bridge, nut, wired up pickguard, and then making the final few electrical connections (output from volume control to the output jack, bridge ground and jack ground.

N Ellingworth wrote: I'm not a member of any music forums other than this one.

Just wondering, how does the neck joint heel look?

^Snapped straight away, bugger. Brass nuts are cool, Graphtech nuts are even better, last longer and reduce string hitching in the nut to almost zero and cost about the same as a brass nut anyway.

I don't tend to break sting very often now that I've changed from 9s to 10s on my guitars except my baritone which has very thick strings which are needed to cope with the low tuning. So the graphtec saddles are probably a waste of money at the moment.

Yes the EMG Selects are passive, if I do replace the pickups I think I'm going to go with a versatile pickup set as I like my guitars to be able to handle lots of styles of playing from ambient to metal, I suspect I'll be adding coil taps for the humbuckers (it's an H-S-H guitar). As for the active/passive issue I am still undecided there, I suspect I'll just go for the cheaper option. One thing that will be important however will be keeping the look of the guitar intact so I'm definitely going to be wanting pickups which have the usual EMG style covers rather than the Gibson PAF style.

But on the main subject of the thread I've finally been able to make a start on my Strat, I've got the pickguard assembled and ready to solder and hopefully I should be able to buy the vertical drill stand/small pillar drill I need to drill holes for the bridge and neck fairly soon, I'm just waiting for a cheque to clear.

I'm not a member of any music forums other than this one.

I might do it depends on how it performs initially, if the tuning is stable and the intonation is good I personally don't see the point particularly since I could put the money spent on those saddles towards a new set of pickups for my other guitars which could really do with an upgrade. Particularly my Steinberger which was fitted with EMG Selects at the factory, I'd like to get some Seymour Duncans or similar brand pickups to replace the rubbish Selects, although if I could afford to I would be putting some proper EMGs in it.

Currently all I've got is a Fender Princeton 65 DSP and an old WEM ER40 head which I run through an old 1x12" H/H PA cab.

I'd love to get a better amp but guitars are so much more tempting, although the current crop of 5 watt class A valve amps for around £100 look like being great little recording amps.

The neck is pre fretted so I don't need to fret it myself but I believe it's got standard Strat size fretwire.

I should be able to start work on the guitar in a couple of days though, the first thing I'm going to tackle is getting the pickguard wired up.

None I'm afraid, I've been very busy with university coursework recently, and will be for the next couple of weeks.