Building my StewMac STRATOCASTER | My New Favorite DIY Guitar Kit

hello and welcome back today i'm going to take you step by step through the process of building my stumax strat style electric guitar i'll give you my thoughts and tell you why i love this kit and i think you will too although i have many guitars there has been a stratocaster shaped hole in my collection for some time taking it out of the box i was immediately impressed with how well it was packed i've seen children less buckled in than this really nice touch stu as you can see most of the work is already done this is really going to be more of a finishing project than a full build that makes a great fit for the budding luthier who wants to get into building guitars but might not feel ready to take on a big project it's also a great one to share with the kids even my daughter was able to get involved now that's not to say this isn't for a more experienced woodworker either i don't always need to do things the hard way it was a nice change of pace to have a smaller project that i could complete in only a few weeks so let's talk about what the kit comes with inside you'll find an all mahogany body and neck along with an assortment of parts including pretty basic tuners and what i assume are stock pickups pre-wired to this white scratch plate of course you'll find all the necessary hardware and they were nice enough to include a set of strings honestly i have to say this guitar is closer to being ready than that glary i reviewed and it was supposedly finished one of the nicest things about this kit is the instruction manual this is one you definitely won't want to toss aside it takes you through the entire process while remaining short and to the point on top of that it has some useful tips and the color photos are a very nice touch so what's the first step in this project well use your imagination no i mean really the first step is to imagine what your ideal strat should look like a simple google image search is a great way to get inspired while you're at it you can download some of those images and combine them in photoshop to try out different options after some back and forth i was sold on this blonde finish with the tortoiseshell pickguard now if you wanted to you could keep things super simple and just go with a simple clear coat or even a rubbed oil finish but i think this guitar begs to be painted and to that end there's lots of paints you can use you might even want to pay a visit to your nearest auto parts store a lot of beautiful vintage guitars were painted with the very same paint used by the auto industry dupli-color makes a vast array of lacquer-based paints that although intended for use on cars are actually perfect for guitar bodies of course looks aren't everything and to that end good electronics are a must i ordered these custom wired fender tex-mex pickups from 920d which just happened to come on that tortoiseshell scratch plate i needed now i have to come clean with you and admit that i spent more on these pickups than the entire kit cost why i hear you ask no actually no one is asking that if you're a guitar player you understand the difference between high quality pickups and cheap ones this isn't a dig at stu mac they include inexpensive tuners and pickups to keep the cost down and they know that people like us will want to choose our own anyway with decisions made and parts ordered it's time to make our first and last cut into this guitar the fender headstock is an interesting situation from what i understand fender effectively lost any legal claim they had on the design of the stratocaster and telecaster bodies that was down to their disinterest in taking imitators to court however the courts have held that they can still lay claim to the shape of the headstock for that reason this kit and many others come with an oversized headstock that you can either cut to the original fender shape or come up with your own design stumac has this excellent template on their website for a generic royalty-free headstock i printed out and attached it to a piece of plywood but as i was preparing to use it i discovered that it doesn't actually line up with the version of the headstock they make today after that minor detour i did what i should have done all along and more or less free handed it with the shape penciled in it's time to cut off the excess this job could have been done with a handheld jigsaw or even a coping saw if you have all day but i didn't buy this bandsaw for nothing so i'm going to use it you'll want to cut just shy of the line so you can sand down to your final dimensions since sani is as boring to watch as it is to do here's some dramatic lighting another area that should be sanded are the ends of the frets you don't want to go crazy here you just want to make sure the fret ends are perfectly flush with the fingerboard also don't forget to fill any chips or dents [Music] after sanding everything down to 220 grit it's time to seal the wood i can't overstate how important this step is mahogany is notoriously porous this sealer coat will keep oil and dirt from getting trapped inside the pores and ruining our finish before you spray it make sure to wipe the body with napta to remove any oil or debris that might already have gotten in then put on a generous coat we're going to mask off the fingerboard because this indian laurel is naturally oily and will only get a nourishing coat of fretboard oil at the end after the sealer we'll wipe everything down again for good measure to achieve a smooth finish we need to fill the pores of the wood you have a few choices here stumax sells a powdered pore filler but you could also just buy joint compound for a lot less money i personally like aquacoat to apply it you rub it in and then scrape it off with something flat like a plastic card before we go any further we need a way to support the body during finishing i decided i wanted to use one of my tripods with a rotating ball head that will allow me to angle the guitar any way i want to do this i made a block of wood with a quarter inch threaded insert to give it some extra strength i drilled the hole deeper and used epoxy and a length of quarter inch rod to hold it all in place i fitted that to the body and behold it's a thing that might look a little strange but it worked out well for me with the body supported it's time to add a few coats of vinyl sealer at this point i need to be honest with you guys and say that i'm not the authority on finishing i feel like every time i do this there's a certain amount of trial and error i'm leaving all my difficulties in here for your education and enjoyment one thing i find baffling and i'd really like to get some of you experts in the comments to help me with is this every time i work with mahogany i end up with these little blotches particularly along the end grain now i understand how end grain works it's like a straw it sucks up everything but what i don't know is whether it's a sign that it sucked up some of the oil from my hands and that's affecting the finish or if it's simply that it's sucking up all the finish and i need to keep applying it my gut told me that this was a sign that the grain still needed to be filled to deal with that i rubbed in true oil on the affected areas and sanded the mixture of wood dust and true oil makes an excellent grain filler that in combination with many more coats of lacquer seem to do the trick you can actually finish the entire neck using true oil but i really like the feel of the satin lacquer it's just so buttery smooth let's talk about lacquer for a minute all the lacquer i'm using is color toned nitrocellulose lacquer in an aerosol can what's funny is i do own a pretty nice hvlp system i've used it before and it's definitely superior to the spray cans but between working and chasing around my daughter i find the spray cans are about all i have time for a few tips about aerosol cans that i don't always follow but you definitely should 1. warm up the lacquer before you spray you can do this by heating some water on the stove and then letting the can sit warm lacquer sprays more consistently and is less likely to sputter two make sure you keep the can facing up if you tilt it too much it'll definitely spit three after you finish spraying hold the can upside down and spray for a few seconds to clear the nozzle that keeps pain from drying in the tip and again prevents the splatter four and this is a tough one quit while you're ahead when everything looks great and you think maybe i'll just give it one more coat stop yourself that one more coat is probably going to be the one that some insect or a piece of dust lands in so when it looks done it's done [Music] speaking of dust can we talk about that i kept getting these little red fibers on mine and i wasn't even wearing anything that color spray in the body probably took about two weeks and a lot of that time was spent going back and forth sanding off a piece of dust or some other imperfection and then spraying again one thing i discovered is that i could use a piece of cardboard with a small hole in it to touch up those tiny imperfections without introducing new problems into the rest of the finish that actually worked really well i sprayed about three coats of blonde nitrocellulose lacquer on the body after the paint goes on you may start to notice some areas where the grain filler doesn't completely do its job you could keep spraying and hope it builds up but for some spots it's faster just to dab a little epoxy in there sand it away and then it's time for more paint i think i had my camera a little too close to the action here and i got some overspray on the lens good thing i used cheap lenses for filming this kind of stuff if this had happened to one of my expensive ones i may have had a heart attack with the color sprayed and the camera lens cleaned i moved on to the satin clear coat it's the same process here spray look for problems sand off the problems and spray again after some spraying and possibly some praying i was finally ready to move on it's well known that good fretwork is what separates a poor neck from an excellent one part of what you get in an expensive guitar is that attention to detail to begin with we need to make sure our neck is straight to do this you'll need a special straight edge with slots for the frets or you could make your own if you're handy with an angle grinder you'll want to adjust the truss rod until there's no gap after the neck is perfectly straight we mask off the fretboard and mark the tops of the frets with a sharpie next you'll need a 14 degree radius block this is one of the few special tools that you really do need to buy use some spray adhesive to attach 220 grit to the block next sand all the frets until your marks from the sharpie are just visible the purpose of the ink is to show where the high spots are to check your work you'll need another special tool called a fret rocker fortunately these are relatively cheap the fret rocker is a small and very precise straight edge to use it place the fret rocker over three frets at a time and press down if it rocks back and forth at all it means the one in the middle is high you'll need to sand or file until it's even with the others mine was pretty level with only a few spots needing a touch up we now have level frets but they're also flat to play in tune each fret needs to be re-crowned there is more than one way to do this but i like to use a fret crowning file at this point mark each fret again with the sharpie keep an eye on the pen mark and stop when only a fine line in the middle remains be careful not to remove all the ink or you risk undoing your fret leveling lastly we'll polish each fret with 400 600 and then 800 grit sandpaper here i'm using a fret resin file to lightly knock off the sharp corners of those fret ends this one also has safe edges so you won't gouge the fretboard should it slip since we're ready to work on the body i'm going to put down some protective foam and a soft t-shirt it would be all too easy to scratch that beautiful finish and none of you want to see me cry today install the tremolo bridge we need to put in this anchoring plate due to the shallow angle of the hole you'll need a very long bit i didn't have any of those but what i did have were these lovely self-tapping kreg pocket screws and the long driver bit they came with again to protect the finish you'll want to have something in between it and the drill the next thing to go in is the bridge this step is super easy because the holes are all pre-drilled when i went to connect these springs i realized they're much too tight to do by hand what you need to do is set the screws in loosely connect everything and then slowly bring it up to tension with the drill for the tuners i've gone with these fender american standards they each have two little indexing pins which i'm not really sure how i feel about i like the idea that it keeps them from rotating but it's an extra step that can be kind of a pain to mark where these holes go i lined up the row of tuners and then tighten them down just enough to make an impression in the wood a small drill bit with a piece of tape will keep us from drilling too far once the tuners are in it's time to move on to the electronics that lovely set of fender tex-mex pickups from 920d came pre-wired that leaves us with only a couple of things to solder the first order of business is to install our ground wire that's easy to do just get yourself a wire strip the end and pinch it underneath the little tab on the anchor plate after that simply heat and add solder just in case you're new to electronics let me emphasize how important this step is if your guitar isn't properly grounded all you'll hear when you plug it in is a loud buzz next we'll desolder these wires and feed them through the channel in the body lastly we need to reconnect all three wires to our output jack i'm using a towel here to keep any hot solder from falling onto the guitar with the wires connected it's time to install our jack plate one thing that impressed me when i first opened the box is that the neck came pre-drilled and well aligned while you certainly could fill these holes and do your own fine-tuning to the neck alignment as i've shown in other videos it wasn't needed in this case i think the fact that these holes come pre-drilled makes this kit a great fit for someone looking for their first guitar project one small modification i needed to make and you may as well is to file around the edges of the pickguard these often end up overhanging the neck pocket by a small amount but it's easy to fix one of the last steps is to drill the holes for our strap buttons and install the back cover final setup while often overlooked is critically important to ensuring this guitar will not only sound great but play great the kit even includes a cheap set of strings just for this part before we start we'll need to install this string tree the break angle of the fender headstock is shallower than that of the gibsons making them less prone to snapping off but also necessitating this little device to pull down on the b and e strings the first thing to check is the height of our strings the nut to do that you'll want to hold down each string at the 5th fret and then measure the gap at the first fret according to the manual a comfortable action for the high strings is 1 12 000 of an inch and for the low strings 1 20 000 of an inch some of your strings will probably be a bit too high to address that you'll need to deepen the groove be careful when you do this because it's easy to take off too much material the other problem you can run into is filing at an angle that's not steep enough remember the string isn't laying in that groove but rather being pulled tight against the ledge i actually underestimated this a bit myself and had to go back and file a steeper angle on my high e string later once everything looks good at the nut it's time to measure the height at the twelfth fret we're looking for about one sixteenth of an inch at the high e string and around five sixty fourths or two millimeters for the low for this adjustment there's a small allen wrench included to raise or lower the height of each string now stumac also includes this little paper template you can cut out to help you get the right string radius at the saddle but i personally didn't find this useful at all maybe i'm missing something but i always measure the height of the low and high ease and then just eyeball the radius until it feels good to me for the strings to play in tune we need to check the intonation that's a fancy way of saying we need to make sure that each string is exactly the right length it's not really hard you just play a 12th fret harmonic and the same note fretted if the notes match you're good if it's sharp which it probably will be tighten the screw at the back of the bridge and move it further away and if it's flat do the opposite another important step is to set the height of these pickups if one side isn't right you'll end up with some strange balance issues stu-max has to hold down both the high and low e strings at the 22nd fret and then adjust the treble side to 1 16 of an inch and the base side to 5 64 of an inch lastly tighten or loosen the truss rod to set the neck relief to your liking and with that this guitar is finally ready to play [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so what's the verdict then is this guitar a good purchase should you get one i would say absolutely yes this guitar has quickly become my favorite to pick up and play and the entire project even with the upgraded parts still cost less than a mexican-made strat and much less than an american-made one if you're considering taking this project on i would encourage you to go for it what i love about this kit is just how approachable it is you don't need a workshop full of tools or countless hours of time few things are as satisfying as playing a guitar built by your own hands and for anyone looking to get into building guitars i think this is the perfect entry point with just a little work you can have a guitar that you'll cherish for a lifetime and just a note i know it can be hard to get an idea of how an instrument sounds from a full mix so for anyone who wants to hear the individual tracks i'll link them down below well that's it for now don't forget to subscribe and check back later for more music and guitar building videos just like this bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Brian Gossard

Views: 59,563

Rating: 4.9168525 out of 5

Keywords: guitar kit, diy guitar kit, stewmac, stewmac electric guitar kit, Stratocaster Kit, Stratocaster kit build, Stratocaster build, Stewmac kit, Guitar building, Guitar restoration, DIY Guitar, Project guitar, partscaster, Stewmac S Style, Beginner luthier project, easy guitar project, Guitar woodworking

Id: rcnlV_Fhy3o

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021