Dawn of the Final Day - 24 Hours Remain -

Before I go anywhere with this post, I have provided appropriate background material to enjoy whilst you read this blog post. If the previous link does not suit your taste, then enjoy this instead.

I woke up on Labor Day morning with an overwhelming sense of trepidation. The day before, I had decided that the guitar body was completed, and the only step that remained was the assembly of the guitar. This was the final step, and after 3 months of (sporadic) hard work, it had all culminated into this final moment. Kicking off my blanket, turning off the alarm that had been ringing since 11:30 AM, and rolling out of bed onto my dog-eared climbing magazines, I was ready to take on the morning.

Well, then I decided I had to eat lunch.

After lunch, the day finally started. Figuring out the proper course of action, I sat the guitar in my lap and started working. The first part that had to go on was the pick-guard, since it sits underneath the neck of the guitar. Mounting this meant I had to thread the output jack wires through the v-shaped hole connecting the output jack cavity to the electronics cavity. This ended up being the most frustrating process, since the wire kept on getting stuck somewhere in the hole. After 30 minutes of random poking, I managed to finally thread it through by pre-bending the wires and then grabbing them from the other side with a pair of tweezers. With this out of the way, I screwed the pick-guard in place, then soldered the output jack to the wires and then mounted that too.

The bridge came next, because why not. After aligning the bridge and screwing in the screws, I put the claw on the backside of the guitar and attached the screwed that hold the bridge in place. Now, when I use the tremolo bar, a.k.a. the whammy bar, the springs will snap the bridge back into place. Next the guitar neck was mounted. With the assistance of some clamps that I still had not returned to the robotics lab, I attached the neck without too much difficulty.

Now, all that was left was the cathartic stringing of the guitar. This was literally the last step. If you don't know how to string a guitar, here's a basic rundown: You thread the string through the bridge and then up along the neck to the head of the guitar where you string it through its appropriate tuning key. Then, you pluck the string as you tighten it, to make sure you don't tune it too far, and to loosen the string up. So I sat there stringing my guitar, and listened to each string as they slowly started singing their song. One by one, each string began to play the right notes and then before I knew it, they were all singing in harmony together. After 3 months of hard work, the guitar is finished.

Fuck. Yeah. 

The Final Step in Painting.

Obviously, I did not update the blog last week. I was unfortunately busy and didn't have time to put on the additional coats of lacquer that I wanted to. Putting on lacquer is a time consuming process because of setup and clean-up. On top of that, I have to wait two hours between coats to properly give it time to dry. But lucky me, I was able to make up the lost time with a 3-day weekend! Thanks, Labor day!

So, on Saturday, I setup the garage like before and sprayed the guitar a second time for that additional coat of lacquer. After two spraying sessions, I decided that I wasn't making any significant improvement by adding more lacquer with the spray-gun. The trouble was is that the spray-gun was spraying a very 'coarse' coat. The lacquer was going on smooth, but not completely smooth as what would be ideal. After giving sanding a try, I realized I was rubbing off the thin coat of lacquer in areas when I wasn't careful, and it still wasn't enough to make it smooth. Clearly the spray-gun wasn't working out, so I had to think of some other way to apply the lacquer smoothly. I decided to call it a day and sleep on it.

The next day, I woke up with the brilliant idea of putting on some lacquer using a paintbrush that I had purchased a long time ago (remember when I was going to do the rose?) Using a paint brush, I coated an area around the electronics cavity as a testing area to see if my idea had any merit. I checked back two hours later and amazingly, my genius plan.... didn't work. If anything, it still had that 'coarse' texture in the test area, only now it was thicker.

I sat there next to my incomplete guitar wondering what I could do to possibly to smooth out the body. As my gaze wandered around the body though, I realized that the 'coarse' texture was actually very consistent across the body of the guitar. I decided that using the spray-gun was the original genius plan and that this was the design I was going for from the very beginning. So, reasonably satisfied with how the guitar looked, I concluded that it was ready to be assembled.