Dub's Wacky Project Guitars Thread--we're baaaaaack

[dubkitty]

well, the annoying finish problems are almost sorted. some gentle and careful polishing toned down the aging tint on the Duo Sonic made it more realistic, and feel better to the touch as well. matching the blue didn't work, but i was able to get the added paint off with careful use of swabs and rubbing compound. so it's as done as it's going to get.

the Jetstar results are mixed...most of the primer and off-white sanded off, but i used a small block from a nail care kit that has four levels of polishing and managed not to further screw up the original paint. the good news is that it occurred to me to test the blond StewMac marker and it's an almost perfect match for the original color, which means that it should be as simple to finish off as the Kondor body black paint fixes. imagine my relief. i'm fixing to go out to Becky's, but will finish off sanding and prepping tomorrow. i would be so happy to be done with it.

[dubkitty]

worked on the Duo Sonic some more. it needed heavier strings so i went out to the local shop and wound up with D'Addarios .012-.052 with a plain .020 G string. i'm generally not a fan of their strings which i find a bit too hi-fi, but they sound absolutely wonderful on the DS. perhaps due to the short scale, the sounds of the pickups are less drastically different than on longer-scale guitars...the transitions from one position to another or from bridge to neck are much smoother. the guitar's oddly mellow sound and switch-position consonance ironically would make it perfect for jazz, and it makes me look forward to getting the Byrdland done. the one hang-up is that the distance from the mounting hole to the saddle of the low E string is shorter than the amount of extra winding at the ball end, so that string was impossible to intonate. i solved this using a trick i'd used on acoustics before, placing a trimmed-off ball end over the string at the ballend, creating that extra 1/8" of room needed for the wraps to stay safely behind the saddle. it doesn't look too stupid. here you can see how the finish was brightened up a bit by polishing out some of the aging tint.

low E extension.jpg (81.58 KiB) Viewed 23 times

the guy who did this did certain things i wouldn't choose to do to one of my builds--i wouldn't do a fake logo or the kind of relicing seen here throughout--but he did a good job for a home builder. there are way too many wrong things (truss rod adjustment at head, 3-layer pickguard, visible fill of 2d string tree on the Mini Strat neck) for it to pass muster as a real fake job, but from more than 5 feet away it's utterly convincing.

[dubkitty]

those compensated saddles are the bomb...i would still prefer individual saddles for all 6 strings, but the designers got it spot-on in terms of how much the strings would need to differ.