Ebay DIY guitar kit review & build tutorial by professional guitar builder

so I've seen a lot of videos as well as reviews and things like that of these these strata tark hits and years ago I had got one and I had done a review on just the quality of it and there was a lot of people that got upset over it there was a lot of people that didn't understand my qualifications so they thought I was just trying to be a hater or something so this video we're going to do it again we're gonna end up reviewing one of those strat kids this one I got up Abbey Bay and they're all for the most part coming from China they're all pretty much done the exact same way okay we're part of it's done by Machine you know in a haphazard way and then part of it's done by hand in a haphazard way it's hit and miss some of the kids something will show up it's pretty decent you can work with it other ones it shows up and it's just pure junk but almost everything you can work with if you know what you're doing and for those that are unfamiliar with my qualifications is I'm a professional guitar builder okay I used to own a guitar company I've been in guitar world I've built guitars for famous guitarists and whatnot I've done all of that stuff okay so when it comes to this whole guitar stuff I'm not just some chump you know with a camera that's on YouTube I know what I'm talking about so we should set back perhaps listen to what I've got to say about this if you're interested in getting one of these kits and I'm gonna walk you through the process of how to put one of these together now this this particular one I'm gonna end up giving to a friend of mine that wants to learn how to play and this is like ideal for somebody that wants to learn how to play okay so let's put the electronics to the side so the first thing that I notice with this other than you know the type of wood which looks really close to bass would but it could be that other word that they use in shine a lot it's like Halloween or Halloween ax which is it's like their equivalent to bass wood right it's generally a wood that you know doesn't have a lot of pores it's it's a very light wood it's not real dense so it's kind of easy to dent but it's really easy to work with when it comes to your tools so if you have to sand this body I mean and you have to do it by hand because you don't have a lot of hand tools this is perfect this is this is perfect because you're not gonna have to work on it a long time if it was something like alder you would be sitting there having to sand for a long time because alder is probably double the density of something like this yeah this looks like it was fairly well shaped and everything so so far so good we're looking we're looking pretty good there I can I can feel around here certain inconsistencies around the outside which basically means we're gonna have to come in with some sandpaper and we're gonna have to kind of make that feel a little bit nicer the routing looks pretty good and you would think oh well this is a CNC I'm almost positive this is not a CNC this looks like they used a pin router on this and the reason why I'm gonna say that it's a pin router because it's if it's not a pin router then whoever ended up doing the CNC stuff with it doesn't know what they're doing okay the reason why I say it's a pin router is because I see signs of wear okay of the template that they were using right here this dents right here at dents right here at dents I can see like a dent here intent here I can also see how this section up here is wider than what's going on right down here okay and right here is another section we're kind of dents in and that's usually a sign of the router kind of sucking the piece of material like that whatever you're routing you know kind of into it as well as people kind of pulling really hard on it you know trying to manhandle it and then so if they're using a template that's something that's like MDF it's gonna start leaving dents in it and then the router is just gonna end up kind of following that so this looks like it was a pin router that actually ended up doing the routing not that that really matters too much the important thing is it's in the right spot that's what's important and also is it the right size if it's too large if it's too large and people freaked out about this all the time but this is because they're foolish if you end up having a section that's just too large that shows up and it's gonna stick out you know you can use bondo to fill that up right because after everything's painted you'll never see it and bondo is not gonna change the way that it sounds or performs or anything along those lines and it's really common to be used in guitar manufacturing you know if you could if you could sand down a lot of your Ibanez guitars your Fender guitars or you know UBC rich or whatever they have all that paint on it you're gonna see you're gonna see bondo and all sorts of things inside there because that's how they end up fixing a lot of the blemishes and the mistakes and the dents and the cuts and the the knots and all that other stuff is bondo the first thing that I'm gonna do when I look at this is I wanna I want to look at the grain of the wood and stuff like that does it look okay yeah looks fine looks fine next thing I want to do is I want to see if it's consistent down the side and it's pretty consistent I usually will run my thumb like this back and forth to see if there's any weird things going on because the guitarist is always gonna feel the back of the neck any inconsistency they're gonna end up feeling that all feels fine the thickness of this looks okay if it's too thin it might be an issue it kind of looks like there's maybe a slight little forward bow at the end there yeah there is and what do you expect what do you expect so this this is kind of slight a slight curve to it just means it wasn't machined right or they ended up just they just didn't dry it correctly before they started working on it and you're not gonna expect high quality from anybody that makes these types of guitars but looking at the fretboard fretboard looks okay I can see something already though it's a decent okay if you look at the distance from here to here if you look at the distance from here to here it's different than from here to here that means that if they were putting a radius on here which they did okay they probably ended up using a set up to do the radius where they're not doing it by hand because do by hand would take too long so they usually end up having it set up like on a gizmo like this that goes back and forth over a belt sander because that's how I do mine but if you don't set it up just right and this set slower and you go like that you end up having it where it takes more off on this side then up here okay so it's kind of what looks like what what happened is it just wasn't quite set up correctly but it's probably close enough for government work okay but you know piece of Rosewood that's not bad it looks okay the frets on this or a little off they're a little off but it's not bad because this is all done by machine so there's gonna be a certain consistency to it now what I'm doing is I'm looking down the the fret board so if I take this up and I lift it like this okay I'm looking down it like that across the top and I'm looking at the the friends and by doing so I'm looking to see are there frets that stick up or the ones that go down you know does it look like the the neck is twisted or warped everything seems to look okay but the the frets some of them are not down all the way they're close but they're not down all the way which basically means you're going to end up having these high spots little spots high spots low spots so you'll never really be able to get the action as low as you would want it to be okay but we can fix that with minimal tools we can fix that because I know a lot of you guys that are gonna be going out and buying one of these kits you're not gonna have a lot of tools right that's it's kind of one of the reasons why you're buying the kit either affordable second is you probably don't have a lot of the tools if you have the tools you just build your own room right I think the neck for the most part we're doing okay and it is it sits in here nice and tight right that is actually a really nice fit that is a really nice fit something to keep in mind about that this is a really nice fit right so what's gonna happen as soon as we end up painting this okay because this is nice and snug soon as we start painting this this is going to start building up paint layers right it's clear coat so then the next not gonna want and fit inside there okay the neck is also unfinished which I actually kind of like that so during the time that we are working on this we need to keep that in mind right maybe just put clear here and don't put any paint you know tape it off put clear tops just to seal it but everything else just leave it alone because even with the clear it's going to end up being a little too tight let's look at the electronics here these are standard this is just so standard this is a type that you're going to end up finding in almost any any strap that's out there the caps are fine the types of pots that are here you know they're not like barns or CTS or anything like that but these are fine there's really nothing wrong with these these are gonna work you know um as far as the switch this is the standard the standard switch it's this is fine it's gonna last it's gonna be fine wiring seems fine big question what kind of resistance do we have here even though the resistance doesn't tell us anything just looking at the DC resistance of these pickups it's not gonna really tell us anything okay because we don't know a gauge wire that they used and so that's what I'm gonna try to figure out right now the standard is 42 gauge that's what you want is 42 gate and boy they've got this um this looks like they might be using 43 gauge in order to save money which is entirely possible you know it's it's it's kind of normal it's not wax and it's 43 gauge okay so what does that tell us that these pickups are not really going to do the guitar justice they will work okay but they're not gonna really sing and seeing this magnets kind of small too so at least they were smart enough to end up using a magnet that has a GAO strength that is in good enough relation to the way that they ended up winding it we are going to end up having a pickup that is it's gonna it's gonna sound okay but it's not gonna perform the way that you really would want it to perform so these are not going to be as good as something that you would find like in a standard strat or a squire they're going to be close to a squire but the Squires is actually going to be a little bit better than these okay it doesn't mean that this isn't anything that you can't learn on doesn't mean that you won't be able to get some good tones or anything out of it that's not what it means it just means that if there's going to be anything you want to upgrade in the near future think of these because it's going to end up making a big difference on the way that this guitar sounds this is a type of pickup that yet sometimes we're finding something like a squire or made in Mexico strat or whatever you know you see that the magnets are different the way the pole pieces are it's it's a much thicker bobbin even though this isn't ideal this is going to sound this would sound better than something like that this came out of a made in Mexico strat okay and so if you're thinking that this looks bad you know how how bad does it look compared to that made in Mexico strap mm not not super bad right I mean it's it's definitely you know this is heavier okay definitely this is heavier but essentially it's really not a whole lot there but they're trying to save money anywhere that they can usually these are about 53 what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come from outside to outside so right there's our 53 come from outside to outside it's right around 53 so that those different those distances are actually acceptable but usually it is 53 from the distance from point A to point B and right here we're getting like 50 millimeter okay what's this 48 yeah so we have 48 and then it gets bigger 50 and then like this is like 51 you know the the bridge is not ideal or anything like that it's you could tell it's a cheap alloy and all that other good stuff but it's really not that much worse than I think from a standard fender one but this is this is cheap metal I mean they've chromed it out but it's a cheap alloy you know but they've chromed it out and once again for somebody that's learning there's nothing wrong with this this will work just fine tuning machines okay now the tuning machines I can tell it's just like everything else it's made out of a cheap alloy that they just chromed out okay I can tell the machining is just the machining is just horrible okay but for someone that's gonna be that's a beginner this is gonna work out just fine of course they give us a plastic nut and all the screws and everything along those things okay the last thing we got are the springs over here yeah a lot of you wouldn't think so but the springs actually there's different quality of Springs right one spring is not the same as all the other Springs there's some that are made really well and there's some that are made cheap and Springs that are made cheap what happens is they have a certain amount of tension that you can almost count on right so it's always good like that but then as you start using it and you start stretching it sometimes that tension isn't there anymore right because it's just it's a bad alloy of what it just wasn't heated properly all sorts of stuff so you use it you pull back you do all this other stuff and each time the string the springs become looser and looser and looser and so you have to keep adjusting the spring tension in the back with everything that I have seen and whatnot I have to tell you you know if you if you spend a hundred dollars for something like this it would probably be better to go out and just buy a squire that's already put together maybe go to a pawn shop find one for 80 bucks or something along those lines even a squire too and pretty much the reason why I would suggest something like that is because you're gonna get something that has better components in it right so I mean it's almost like you're already getting like an extra 50 to $60 upgrade already in the components just by getting something like a squire now if you want to get one brand-new I don't know you nowadays I don't know what the prices of them are they used to always be like a hundred bucks nowadays it's probably little bit more than that but pawn shops you can always find it for 60 bucks 80 bucks and a lot of times they're in good shape and you know quite honestly at the end of all this the only thing that you really have to do is just paint this right that's it just paint it the way that you want and quiet you don't even have to paint this if you don't want to you just put it together and play it just like this if you want right so you have a working guitar you maybe spend 30 minutes putting it together with this guy right here this is probably going to be okay and if not well we'll figure something out but this guy right here I've got some 220 okay and what you want to do is just anywhere that you feel something that's that's inconsistent that sticks out that doesn't feel quite right you know go through and try to repair it now this is gonna end up being painted so you can you can actually sand against the grain if need be because it's going to be painted if this was something that you were planning on just finishing like with a stain then you wouldn't want to do it across the grain this for the most part I'm going to say it's pretty much ready to be painted I'm going to hit it with some air and a little bit I'm just trying to get rid of some of the dust here first so I'm going to be using a spray gun but this is what I'm gonna end up using for this particular guitar okay and that is I'm just using this dupli-color primer which you could probably get this also in a can right and then you get this at Kragen at autozone anywhere an automotive primer is ideal for guitars okay but this one I got years ago I can't remember exactly what it was for but I got it and I remember I wasn't super happy but it did its job okay so what we need to do is we're going to mix this up I have a stick here oh that is thin wow that is thin it almost looks like like I had mixed it with something but this is really really thin and it's thinner than I like because we need it we needed to to get on there we're just gonna have to do probably four or five coats to kind of build this up but I'm gonna stir this up real well I'm gonna put this in my my spray gun and then I'm gonna end up just keep spraying coats on it just keep building it up you know I could put some tape and everything on here to kind of prevent this build-up that I was talking about earlier but this stuff is so thin honestly I'm not even gonna worry about that but there is one thing you see right here I don't know if you can see that there's a there's there's some dents maybe if I hold it like this there's some dents right there this is perfect for things like bondo because we are in a rush we're gonna do the iron thing what I've done is I've put a little bit of water right here they're gone Baltimore gone awry so that's one of the good things about this kind of wood is it's very very susceptible to moisture right so you dent it a little steam everything's gone it's gonna raise the grain so we need to come through hit it again I'm planning on putting a lot on here I mean I'm a this is probably going to take me 20 minutes to it's a prime simply because of how thin this primer is I'll probably have to do multiple refilling of this so let me go spray this and I'll be right back okay well I almost had to use half of this can in order to put a thick enough coat on this guy and so during the time that you're painting this what you want to do is you want to focus on a lot of the areas that are going to be just drinking the primer and this is mostly going to end up being end grain that's going to drink it around the edges you're gonna see it want to drink anywhere that you see little imperfections from the sanding or in the manufacturing of the the actual guitar itself any little dents just keep hitting on the primer just keep building it up building it up building it up when you think you have enough build it up some more okay because what we want is this thing to be just completely soaked in primer and usually it doesn't look this bad okay but this the type of primer it is it's not very forgiving but it's gonna work after this completely sets up we're gonna come through we're gonna sand it we're gonna make everything perfectly flat now I'm gonna have a few tools that you probably do not have but I'm gonna explain how you can get around it the very first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go through with a small hammer you can use a ball-peen hammer doesn't really make a difference just as long as you have like a flat edge and it's it's not overly heavy you don't use a sledge and I'm gonna come through and I'm gonna hit all the way up and down every single one now the reason why I'm doing that is because if any of these were sticking up I'm trying to knock them further into the fret slot if you find that you have one that's not really wanting to stay in place you can squirt a little bit of superglue on the sides take a clamp and clamp it down in place until the superglue sets up and then just take a razor to scrape up the superglue okay whatever it takes to get that dude down there that's what you have to do now I'm gonna look down it again like I had done earlier to see if there's anything that's sticking up and I'm not seeing it looks pretty good at this point now we need to straighten out the guitar neck and I'm gonna be using this is what's known as a slotted straightedge okay but if I take this and I set it down like this this ideally would be setting perfectly flat on the fretboard and this is showing it's got a slight back bow to the guitar there's a slight back boat to it but luckily it came with an allen wrench that we can come in to adjust a truss rod and we can ask ourselves to which direction do we want to go sometimes it's righty tighty lefty loosey and sometimes it isn't so I'm pushing it this is rocking when I'm pushing it that way so we need to go this direction okay but right here I have got this flat what you can do is take a string put it right here on the top corner here right here on the top corner down here pull it tight okay and then when you do that if you lift it up like this you can see you know is there space can you see like space between there because if so it's got a forward bow if it looks like the the front board is going above it means you have a backbone okay and then you you can do that to kind of dial it in making sure that it's always exactly right on the top corner because it varies even it a little bit you're gonna be off and then you eyeball it you go down the side and you look does it look perfectly straight right eyeballing it and it does so now that we've got that and we know that the fretboard is level we don't really need to have this in a neck jig or anything like that to do a decent fret leveling I mean is it going to be ideal though but it's gonna be pretty good don't worry about things like that because that can come up real easy what we're going to do is we if it's maple worry about it a little bit try not to do that but if it's on rosewood or something like that don't worry about or ebony don't worry about so I'm taking a sharpie and I'm going over the tops of all of the frets here so I've got a little bit of naphtha and naphtha is essentially just Zippo lighter fluid and naphtha can clean up a lot of stuff without damaging any types of finishes now I have a sanding being that I use okay because I do a lot of this but chances are you probably don't have a sanding beam so what you have to do is you're gonna have to find something that's that's MIT perhaps glass or granite or aluminum something that can resemble this okay but it should be pretty damn flat you can use a piece of wood as long as you have a planer or you have like a jointer where you can make it perfectly flat then you can use that as a temporary sanding beam and we just kind of want to run it back and forth over the tops of the friends like this okay I'm not putting any weight this currently has 320-grit on it okay so now that we have run the beam over the top of it we want to see every fret have the same amount of wear on it and we don't want to see any black at the very very peak of the frets if we see any black on the peak of the frets that means that that part is low okay if you end up seeing that you have just really taken a lot off one fret that means it was high okay if you end up seeing that the if you end up seeing that there's some stuff that's been taken here but not here you probably end up having your truss rod not straight if you see that there's a bunch being taken off here but not here means you have a back bow if you see that you're taken off here and here but nothing here that means that you have a forward bow okay so you have to be really careful on how much you're taking off and if you don't have a notch straightedge now you do not have the types of files like I have you can use Emery boards right you just go down to the makeup department at any store pick up some Emery boards and you'll be able to do pretty good you can also go to places like Harbor Freight and find like very fine files that you might be able to get for a few bucks to kind of get in here to do a little work what you do is you run your fingers back and forth like this if you feel anything sharp if it's if you're coming here and you feel something sharp that's when you come in and you end up rounding that section over as well as rounding it over like that that goes away now you won't feel it the top is not as important as the bottom because this is where you're gonna be running your hands back and forth now if you actually want to learn how to build your own guitars or if you want to learn how to do fret work or if you want to learn how to do anything and everything when it comes to guitar repair or guitar building go get my guitar building course at rock-solid pickups it's about a 22-hour course that gives you really everything that you need to know about guitar repair and go to custom guitar building and troubleshooting and all that stuff I go over even things like how to wind your own pickups and design your own pickups I go over all sorts of different types of fretting and different problems you're gonna run into I go over fret leveling and in great detail everything that I'm doing here is cliff notes just for the sake of speed and whatnot I'm not feeling anything that's really jumping out at me saying that it's sharp so at this point I'm gonna take some 220 which it seems excessive okay but I'm gonna kind of fold it like this and down the edge I'm gonna be basically kind of hitting everything but this is going to make sure that if there's any fret that's sticking out I knock it down so I don't have to worry about it getting getting cut on it and it's also going to help round over some of the edges that I had just round over okay and you don't have to do this a lot and usually just you can tell by the way that it sounds after you've knocked everything over that is a little sharp I would rather have this take what's sharp then someone's hand from 220 I'm gonna jump over here to 500 then I'm gonna do the exact same thing this is going to be taking some of the scratches out that the 220 had created that feels a lot better I'm also going to end up using this to knock down the tops of the frets and I'm gonna be doing the exact same thing I'm gonna kind of curve it this way and I'm just gonna go over the tops evenly but not spend too much time that's what this is gonna do is this is going to end up rounding over what we had sanded now if I had to take out a lot so the frets I would have no choice but to go in and try to reshape it with a frappe bottle okay but I didn't take out barely anything and because of that I can go ahead and just run some 5-hundred over because it because it is metal you kind of have to kind of change out the sandpaper quite a bit because it'll break down the sandpaper kind of quickly there we go with that and now I've got some 1,200 we're gonna use if you want to go up to 800 and a thousand you can but just remember the more that you start sanding the more unlevel you're making the frets okay we've just got done leveling them the last thing we need is to make them unlevel because you've you're over sandals so this right here we're golden we're gonna try to wipe up some of that dust and now I'm gonna take this to the buffer if you do not have a buffer guess what you're gonna be sitting here for a long time doing this with buffing compound a long time I've got a buffer so I'm gonna take this to the buffer you can also use a dremel with a buffing wheel may take us I'm gonna buff this out as soon as I'm done buffing it I'll bring it back we have taken it to the buffer and now we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to our handy little friend called naphtha now the is hard to get in some states because they think that it's behind you know all the cancer in the world they're completely wrong about that just like their on everything else but it is what it is you know there's a there's a there's other things you can use to substitute for it so that's that's the important thing now what we want to do is we want to keep cleaning this until this no longer shows up okay and then that can take a little while if you don't clean it up what's gonna happen is the first person that picks up the guitar and they start playing it they're gonna have black fingers nobody's gonna want to play your instruments do you really go my god that's horrible so that's that's a lot better than how it used to look so we're going to do one more time around and then we'll put some oil on it okay so everything is looking nice and pretty what we're gonna do now is we're gonna oil it and I used Howard's feed and wax I've been using this for years I love this stuff what we want to do is we want to put a little bit here and the next thing that we're gonna do is we are going to rub this all over the the fretboard might as well get some right there too and we're just gonna let it sit in here for a second okay this is not gonna need a lot because there this hasn't really been exposed to anything but we just have to do this put that on there this also will help clean it due to the magic of television that minute is and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to remove all of the foils okay so now that we've let it soak in because we only want the amount that it can absorb in a short period of time to soak in that's it we don't need it to sit on there we just put it on let it absorb what it has lost clean up the rest call it good now the fret board I have to admit I'm not really happy with how well they ended up doing it I think they could have radiused it a lot better and I mean I can see the marks from the from the belt sander I can see it which basically means once again they were in a rush they just wanna go okay it's done throw it give me another one fufufu done throw it give me another and that's that's what they're doing but that's the only way that you can make a guitar this inexpensive if you set there and you're actually you know in detail the labor right it's just it's one of those things it is what it is but our neck is ready to roll okay so it is the next day and if we look real close at the the paint that's on here you're gonna see all sorts of texture and stuff and do you see runs and you're gonna see all sorts of nasty stuff and that's fine because we built this up heavy so that way we can sand it perfectly smooth and what I had done right here as I was using a little 220 just to kind of knock down some of that orange peel so you can see what it should look like same thing if I hold this up like this I'm gonna kind of go back and forth you should be able to see areas that look perfectly flat then there's like little orange peel areas in between and we want to knock this down completely where everything looks you know the exact same texture the better the primer looks before we end up hitting it with the paint the better the paint job is going to end up looking these edges man you got to be careful because if you're gonna go through anything it's gonna be an edge most of the time primer you can build up and be nasty who cares you're sanding it paint not so much and honestly it's not going to take a lot of paint to get this to the color that you want after that cures that's when we're gonna end up putting the clear coat okay and once again like I mentioned you can get a can of lacquer that's either satin or gloss or whatever and use that don't use shellac or anything along those lines you use it like use a gloss lacquer use a lacquer and you can get that at almost any place like Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever you're just going to end up putting a lot of coats on it and lacquer will melt into itself urethane will not okay so as soon as you end up spraying your first coat of lacquer let it let it set up a little bit okay hit it again if you if you just keep spraying spraying spraying it's gonna get foggy and it's gonna start giving you a bunch of drips and runs and you don't want to do that because the minimum amount of wet sanding the better okay now with the urethane I can I can spray it twice within just like a minute of each other set it up and then we're golden you know I mean I can wet sand it make it look really nice if I want to which I'm probably going to if I have a lot of orange peel sometimes I'll do something like a thousand grit knock down some of the orange peeled and switch over to maybe like twelve and they go to fifteen I don't have to go any higher than fifteen because I buff everything out if you don't have a buffer you might have to go a little bit higher before you can start buffing things out but you're gonna soak this a little bit don't it just soak it for too long and what you want to do is you want to sand everything down to where you don't see any orange peel everything should be dull looking and it should be perfectly flat okay this is one of the reasons why you need to make sure that you put plenty of clear coat on so that way you can come in a little bit later and sand and sand and sand and you don't go through it and you have a nice finish afterwards that looks like glass okay getting close to the end here and a lot of times I will not touch the outside edge the curved section I won't touch it because it like I said before if you're gonna if you're gonna sand through anything it's gonna be that okay so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to take this over to the buffer if you don't have a buffer okay what you're gonna have to do is you spend a lot of time with some type of buffing cloth and some buffing compound to make this look like glass okay and when I say it's gonna take some time in it's going to take some time generally what I'll end up doing is use the buffer because I can have this done in five minutes okay some people they'll end up using the car buffer which works but you have to make sure that you clamp this down before you do it because if not it's gonna throw it you also want to make sure that depending on how cured this is you use the appropriate amount of speed and pressure and generally what I'll do is afterwards I'll end up using paste wax [Music] on this this will clean out any of the extra buffing compound I'm not getting anywhere near there because we're going to end up fixing that so it's not such an eyesore okay but I do want to put this on here it's going to protect and it's going to clean it up when it comes to your paint job and it comes to the wet sanding and the buffing and all the other stuff the more care that you spend the longer time that you work on it and everything like that the the much better the finished is going to end up being okay and it's one of those things that by the time you're done it I mean it can look absolutely perfect if you're willing to spend the time on it in this particular case I just don't really see the point behind it I'm doing what is bare minimum necessary in order for this to look right but at the same time you know this isn't going to go to NAMM and I'm not trying to sell this or anything so so let's go ahead and start putting this together the reason why we are going to install the neck is because this is a tight fit okay just like that nice tight fit okay and the neck is not going to be able to shift too much inside this pocket and what we need to do is we need to anchor this get this guy in exactly where it needs to be and then from there we can measure from the nut over move the bridge wherever we got to move it in order to put it in place if we just set the bridge here and just guess and start putting things in we might be an eighth of an inch off right and we won't be able to set the intonation second is if we just assume that this is where the pick guard is going to be sitting which I mean it does sit here but the angle of it it can change the location of the pickups so it's best to put the neck in after the neck you end up kind of adjusting where the bridge to go and then you at the same time you're adjusting where the the pick guard should go after you lock that in you can go ahead and attach these and call it good now the types of screws that they give you for these types of guitars usually are very weak so they can snap or Liese because of the type of alloy that it's made out of okay so you have to be very cautious when installing these okay and what we're going to do is we're going to line that up with this get it fairly close to the edge here within about an eighth or so try to make the reveal look the same all the way around as soon as we have it where we want I am going to take a brad tip sometimes they call Brad point I'm going to go ahead and mark my Center okay remove this guy and I make these holes a little bit bigger then you need them to be simply because I need I need room just in case for me later on to adjust if I need to as well as the last thing I want is for it to be super tight against this and cause more friction which can end up creating a problem and what we want is a drill bit that is ooh this is just a little too big we want one that is just a hair smaller than this guy right here see what we got here that's closer okay the last thing I'd want to do is drill all the way through that so make sure you have an idea about how deep that goes [Music] all right so that is in that is nice and tight we're golden on death so now what we have to do is just kind of throw this in here temporarily now what we're looking for by putting this right here we're looking for the 25 and a half that's actually not bad where it is that's not bad where it is so and I got this it feels like it's pushed up almost all the way to the front is it for the most part it's pushed all the way up to the front so that's not bad so now the next thing we have to do is we have to figure out the location is it going to be far this way or is it going to be far this one okay and the way that we're going to end up and we know that this pushed all the way forward is a good location for the 25 and a half already right so we can go ahead unless this double check this that's fine and that's pushed all the weight and that's pushed all the way forward side to side though that's the important thing so what I'm going to do is I have the nut here and I'm gonna place this inside the slot that is step one step two we were going to take a string this is a thin piece of wire I have I'm going to set it in the slot and I'm putting it down I'm looking at the reveal the reveal is the distance between the string and the outside of the fret board okay I'm looking at the reveal and I'm kind of taking a mental note of it does it look the same all the way and up the down the fret board you know does it look the same and it yes it does it looks very close to the same now we're gonna do the high e does that look the same yes it does that's pretty damn good this where it is believe it or not is where it needs to be for the most part okay so what we're gonna do is holding this here this is what's known as a hinge bit okay and I'm going to pop one here pop one there I'm going to do it on each these go all the way down until it touches the [Music] right there some people that what they'll do is they they will have those up a little bit higher some of times they'll push it down a little bit forward it just depends on how the person likes to set up the guitar meet personally I like these things can be touching at top of the bridge we need to know if these pull pieces are going to end up lining up with our with our strings right so what we have to do same thing you can have your template bit on your drill generally don't need it because it goes in pretty easy same thing we hook it up on the low E come over here does that go over the top of the low E pull pieces yes what about this high E does it go over the pole yes it does okay so this right here where it sits believe it or not that's where this goes and but if it didn't we can shift it back and forth and make it right okay so right there right there right there so on this we are going to have a hot we're going to have a ground and then two of these is going to end up going to the the actual output which is right here okay so we got to get those out here we have a green and the Green is going to end up going to the back of the trim to the the claw itself okay one of the things about these these pit guards is a lot of times a wire will want to kind of get in the way of this thing wanting to sit down all the way so you have to kind of be worried so you kind of have to be careful about that and this is something that's very important that if you're gonna be soldering these things you got to make sure that you hook them up right okay because we know that the black is going to ground and we know that this is going to hot if we hook this up to ground and we hook this up to hot then what's going to happen is all the metal that's on this is going to become hot edding so anytime you touch it it's gonna go oh okay but if you have it where it's supposed to be anytime you touch it it should go silent so what we have to do is we have to find out well which one is the ground so we're just gonna touch the boat here okay and I'm using my multimeter right there that's our that is our ground that is our hot ground pot so we have to make sure that we hooked that up correctly on things like this where they have that little piece that's been cut up a lot of times you can get that hot enough with a standard soldering iron now I have a soldering iron that I can use for this actually if I wanted to and solder straight to the thing because it gets it gets that hot but most people's soldering irons don't really get that hot but if you end up wrapping wrapping it around that a lot of times if you hold it there for a minute or so you can get it hot enough there we go okay if you just go if you try to go straight to the the claw a lot of times it's just not gonna happen now I have a special bit that I had made years ago out of steel rod and I had drilled down the center and I installed a small drill bit so that way I can do extreme angles like this you probably you're not gonna have access to that so you're just gonna have to do the best you can with what you got the longer the drillbit the better I have a nametag right here that fits in that I can put that under right there like that we want to try to keep this wire somewhat out of the way now when it comes to the way that the springs get attached does it kind of make a difference on how you do it whether they're angled and things like that a little bit and giving this a little bit of tension here now I'm purposely putting decent tension on this because as as somebody that is a beginner guitar player more than likely they're not going to be using this trim a lot and if they do boy are they gonna regret it okay because most of the time these trims do not work very well and that's that goes true even for things like fender trim and the tuners are pretty much a no-brainer okay cuz what you end up doing is you take these guys you set it in place is after you put that in place you'll go ahead and you take your your little washer or whatever tighten everything down and I'll usually use a socket set for that a socket set is less likely to do any type of damage to the the nut so I just kind of put it where I think it belongs right now I'm kind of holding this down so that way you can see what I'm doing because usually this I do while it's hanging off of the bench and I don't really feel like moving the camera but from here you move this back and forth until it looks right something along those lines okay that doesn't look too bad right there and then as soon as you have it like that that's when you tighten it down the rest of the way okay that doesn't look too bad flip it over at the end you're gonna see we have a little screw hole here and we're gonna end up putting pilot holes and there you have to have a very very small drill bit but because these guys right here are so delicate you better do it because if not you're gonna end up having all sorts of broken screws and everything now when now when I say it's a small bit I mean it's a very very small bit okay and we are going to be using that to do the pilot holes so now when doing the pilot holes it's important you do not drill through I can't tell you how many times people drill through on this okay and we also want to make sure that we use an appropriate size screwdriver because if we come inside here with one that is not the right size it's going to strip the top of these because once again these are cheap alloy this is these are not good screws so we need to go ahead and put our strap buttons in we're just going to end up drilling a small hole right here in the center of that and also we're going to be drilling a small hole in the center following the center of this right there okay guys we're just moving along man we're moving along the only thing we've got left is pretty much stringing it up doing a setup putting the string T's on there doing a quick cleanup and maybe a final buff or something near the end and then we're pretty much golden right now these come with a set of strings and these strings are not ideal and I know that they're going to have a lot of stretch to them okay in other words when you first put these on you're going to have to stretch them quite a few times because they're going to keep stretching and stretching and you're going to keep going out of tune all right so what I'm gonna do to set the intonation is I'm going to end up using a tuner here that you can just clip on which is going to be good enough for what I'm doing so I've got this tuned to an e but we we can't just tune it to an e we have to we have to adjust the action first and we may also have to adjust the truss rod right to see what kind of forward bow or backward bow or whatever ideally we want it to be pretty flat if not perfectly flat with just an ever so slight forward bow and I say ever so slight we're talking just very very little okay but what I want to do is I have an allen wrench here that is going to end up going inside B so I have an allen wrench here that's going to go inside the saddle [Music] and I'm gonna just keep going all the way up this okay and if I hear fret buzz I'm gonna raise it up just a touch okay and I keep raising it until they don't hear any more fret buzz now what's important is this this is based on your playing style so if you are a light touch you're going to be able to have a much lower action okay if you have something like that you're gonna get fret buzz almost all the time because you're heating really hard you're going to end up having to raise your action so as far as I'm concerned for a beginner player that's going to be good enough so now when I hit this open we need to get this up to an e perfectly okay like that now what we're gonna do is we are going to fret the 12th fret right here and we're going to push down on it the same way as we had pushed down as if we were actually playing okay now when I do this when I do this I want you to see where the e is do you see how it's sharp okay now because it's sharp what that's telling us is this it's too far forward okay so we're gonna have to take this we're gonna have to move it back and with the amount that's there if we take this thing back oh maybe an eighth it'll be more than enough to bring this to where it needs to be do you see how you can still see a little red right there that's low well that's gonna get amplified when I start pressing down the twelve so if it's only off like a half of a cent or a quarter of a cent when I end up doing it on the twelfth it's gonna end up like being like like one cent off or maybe a half a cent off okay so from here the same thing I'm going to hit the twelfth and it's right on the money okay now that means my intonation has been set so we set the action because we're not hearing any fret bus okay we went all the way up and all the way down and we weren't hitting it really hard we were hitting it just a way that we would ordinarily hit it we set the action as soon as we did that we set the intonation and I'm going to do that to every single string now I'm in the process of working on the E string and I want you to listen to this you hear it sounds like a sitar Dada is because we need to put those string T's on so in this particular case what we'll do is we'll just kind of say right there is satisfactory okay and what we want to do after we loosen those strings okay is we want to go ahead and start bringing this down really just until this sitar sound stops okay now these these are loose and strings right now but I can already tell it needs to be taking down a little bit more and then now we're gonna stretch the strings and you grab them and you just kind of push like this up and down and these are going to have a lot of stretch and make sure you have not already cut your strings because sometimes when you're doing this it'll actually pull them out of the tuners okay and then that it's no good because then you'll have to replace the strings if you've already cut them okay okay so now we have these backed up to pitch we got all that stuff going on probably wouldn't hurt to fine-tune this a little bit more but it's pretty damn close right now and now what we're gonna do is we're going to have to deal with the nut okay and the way that we're gonna take care of it is like this is we need to push down on the third fret okay and what we do the distance between the bottom of the e and the top fret of the number one should be minimal and when I say minimal we're talking about a thickness of a piece of paper tops okay if it's if it's taller than that anytime that you push down these first three frets it's gonna go sharp even though you have everything in tune we're gonna do it by adjusting the depth of the nut slots now if you don't have a nut file the strings that you had cut off well they're the same size as a string and also this can be like a file you can glue this to the end of a popsicle stick something like that and it takes a while but you can get in there and you can file these things down to an appropriate height okay so I'm gonna go ahead and get these guys down to the height that they need to be at and when and like I had said before and like I said before when I push down that third I don't want to see much of a gap between that string and that first fret now I have a set of nut files and is this absolutely necessary it's not absolutely necessary but the thing is is it's going to end up making it where when you're playing the notes actually sound like what you're supposed to hit right because if not they can go sharp on that lower register so this just makes it where everything's just dialed in it sounds a lot better when you're doing chords and things like that like open chords years ago I didn't know about this when I first started playing the guitar and I used to wonder like what am I doing wrong you know it's like how I you know the intonation seems to be right what am I doing wrong and it was because the nut slot heights were incorrect okay but you might get lucky and the nut slots already might be at the the correct height already or really close to it and you just get away with it but anyway we got that done [Music] okay do you hear do you hear that right there where when I'm hitting on these low right there when I'm playing this you're gonna hear how it's out of tune okay so it's like this that sounds a little sharp doesn't it okay that's saying it's actually a little sharp still so it's saying that this needs to actually go back so what we're gonna do is we're gonna loosen that we're gonna bring it back a little bit more here do you notice how there's a it definitely sounds better so that's what setting the intonation can do as well as setting via correct nut height now these are ever so slightly off ever so slightly quarter of a cent maybe something like that and the nut slot height there's a couple of them probably wouldn't hurt to go down just a hair more and literally something about the thickness of a piece of paper can change it from where it's perfectly in tune to something that is not in tune now these are single coil pickups and I am in a room that is full of fluorescent lamps so we're gonna get some bus we are gonna get some hum there it is [Music] okay so we know that the electronics work but now we have to set up the pickups and the way that we're going to do it is like this we're going to start with the the bridge and what we want to do is we want to find a volume as well as a tone that is acceptable okay that seems a little bright to me so I'm going to lower that and I'm gonna raise this up the on this end okay [Music] you hear that brightness and those pickups that is from when they're under wound will they work yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I'm gonna say that that's pretty good I mean that's pretty shrill to me I'm gonna reason because ideally we want to have each one of these notes be the same loudness [Music] okay and then that tells us basically how to adjust this back and forth this way if we bring it too close to the strings it's gonna get real muddy and choppy and it's gonna break up and you also might end up getting kind of a warble e sound okay if you go back too far it's gonna clean up real well but you're not gonna get much output and it's gonna sound kind of bright so now [Music] not listening for tone but listening for volume we can tell that the middle pickup is not as as loud as the bridge so we're gonna raise this up just a little bit [Music] and that has how you go about doing [Music] and it's not so much about tone it's about the volume because you want to be able because you want to be able to be like shoot over here okay the same volume the tones different but the volume is the same and that's what we're aiming for [Music] this needs to come up in a big way [Music] these pickups are really weak [Music] and that guy was mentioned before later on down the line what you'd probably want to do pickups first everything else will keep okay pickups first second thing I would probably end up going with tuners and then I would end up going with also a bone nut because that would make a difference too and then if you're planning on using the tram put a couple of roller tees down there maybe even use a roller nut okay but for a beginners guitar there's really nothing wrong with this for a beginners guitar you know and like I said there's always that that little bit of pride that you have knowing that you are the one that had built it you're the one that put it together right you're the one that customized it yourself you're the one that did all that stuff and it gives you a really good idea you know by building one of these about you know how to do fret level it tells you about how to set up the pickups or maybe even change out pickups it tells you about intonation all that stuff teaches about scaling that shows you things about the the type of nut and adjusting the nut slots and all this stuff you learned so much from doing this so if you're someone that wants to get into repairing guitars or building guitars then I would recommend something like this as just for fun and after you're done you can give it to somebody not a big deal because it's like it's under 100 bucks you know if you have spare parts to swap out pickups and everything just to experiment you can do something like that - why not you know but if you're a beginner guitar player I would honestly I would just go out and get one that's already been built for 65 bucks there's people on Amazon and eBay and all over the internet now better selling these guitars like $65 we will find them on Reaper reverb and everywhere help just go get a used guitar at a pawn shop or something you know if you're if you're beginning don't don't waste your time on anything like this you know that's my opinion on it now that doesn't mean you can't have fun with these you know that doesn't mean that you can't build one and actually make this thing a hot rod where I mean it's just wow this thing is insanely good and you give it to a pro and they wouldn't know I could do that if I wanted to but I don't want to spend the money and I don't want to spend the time especially considering I could do a lot of that stuff with things that I have laying around here that's just much better materials you know better body material better neck and all that stuff but this is not bad this is not bad it is what it is and for the time that this was done it's not bad that I mean because the actual putting this together and all the work that I have done outside of the painting and wet sanding I only spent maybe two hours okay the painting and wet sanding maybe an extra two hours so all total you can have something like this done in five no problem you know the course the painting and sanding and you know letting it cure that takes like a day or so just for you know sitting around but the the actual putting it together is a cakewalk but anyway guys if you liked the video make sure you hit like make sure you subscribe while there other good stuff if you do subscribe make sure you hit that Bell cuz if not you will not be notified when I post a new video but until next time I will talk to you later

Channel: Gelvin Custom Guitars

Views: 583,873

Keywords: ebay guitar, stratocaster, strat, diy, diy guitar, homemade, how to build a guitar, how to put together, cheap guitar, cheapest guitar, guitar, electric guitar, guitar builder, review, demo, how to paint a guitar, art, how to set up a guitar, guitar review, guitar kit, diy guitar kit, build your own guitar, ebay guitar kit, amazon guitar kit, cheap guitar kit, guitar kit review, guitar building tutorial, tutorial, guitar building kit, guitar building tips, wills easy guitar

Id: zKLHLi4Tl4A

Length: 64min 36sec (3876 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019