That's a lot of work!

[Music] well hey there gang let's do a number of little jobs this week it's time to assemble a strat from disparate parts of numerous manufacturers what could go wrong oh no let's be optimistic you guys know i usually turn down any opportunity to assemble kit guitars for people and like parts casters my skills are needed elsewhere i think of that as it's work for the hobbyist it could be fun for someone in many cases but usually they're trying to call me in for damage control after they've made some huge mistakes you know i want to work on things that have been broken rather than stuff that's ill-conceived from the get-go you know this is for a customer for whom i've done a bunch of work he just had eye surgery he can't do it for himself he said please i said yeah he said come on i said this is a fender product he likes the late 60s swoopy-doopy headstock so he bought himself a squier neck put it on and discovered that the fit is not fantastic so he wants me to shim it i'll color the shim white he's got a flashy pearloid pickguard he wants a humbucker uh he's got some new pickups some metallic covers and better tuning machines lots of fun parts here's the thing i can tell right now that this stuff being from any number of sources is not going to fit together first try it's always you can just throw it together for me right is no almost never if every part requires some finesse to get it to fit you're talking hours upon hours and unless you have substantial experience you're going to learn that though cosmetically similar some parts just don't fit together you could be mixing metric and imperial measurements squire versus american standard dimensions placement of screw holes vintage american versus modern american placement on an inexpensive instrument it gets maddening we'll see what happens okay before i dig in too deep i want to get a basic assessment here to see where we're starting off checking the action it's around seven sixty fourths neck relief is a bit high at seventeen thousandths string clearance over the first fret is like twenty seven thousandths on the base side which is quite high okay so the first thing i'm going to do is straighten the neck a bit see what that did yeah it's around seven thousandths now which is good and now we're down around just over five sixty fourths on the base and six on the treble i'm just gonna take care of the nut height as well so now the action height's okay i lowered the saddles down to where i would want the action to be on the outside e strings here and you can see that they're pretty much on the deck there's a lot of screw protruding at the top and frankly it's just it looks kind of weird so it definitely needs a shim to increase the neck angle the thing with shimming a neck pocket laterally is you have to concern yourself with where the strings are going to end up in relation to the pickup pole pieces when you're done and to be honest where this is now is not bad at all actually it's not perfect on any pickup but it's kind of what you would expect to see in a guitar in this range i really don't want to push it that much towards the treble side i don't think so i might end up just leaving it where it is and simply filling this little gap on this side actually let me load the new pickguard first and see what the new pickups are like before we get into that we'll save that for later next frugal pro tip i'm going to take the strings off here but i'm just going to clip off the weird ends because i can save these and reuse them for the setup portion of this whole thing because i'm likely going to have the strings on and off a number of times and that way i'm not spending extra money for another set of strings which i'm just going to have to throw out and once again we're in the situation where though the cover has holes in it to put the strings through ostensibly you can't get the strings through it so you have to remove the cover i'm just going to disconnect the jack to start off with here this has a fully shielded cavity that's interesting the grounding wire to the tram has been soldered or soldered directly to the claw and through the end of the spring which is probably not the best idea i don't think i'm gonna do a little work on this mandolin this is a trinity college model from the good people at the saga musical instrument corporation a venerable firm that makes millions of instruments this has got a couple of little issues and it's a lefty as you can see i must remember to put this strap back on before restringing it this is one of these where it would be really annoying if i didn't this is kind of an interesting design it's not very gibson-like at all the top has a curve to it which i don't know whether that was carved or whether it was radiused by pressing into a form of some kind the sides don't have the undulation you would normally see if this was you know sanded in a radius dish pretty robust top and the back is flat and when i say flat i mean really flat there's no arch in that at all which is interesting very few makers would do that the issue is there's a crack that runs through the top at the end of the fingerboard and what also seems to go through the support that was placed under it now the customer figures this may have been glued once before so we're going to see what's actually going on in there this instrument was converted for left-handed use and as such it has no side dot markers on the fingerboard we'll put some of those in for him as well upon inspection we see that there's one diagonal crack through the sound board and it carries on through the support plate which surrounds the sound hole there's also a remnant of tape there on the end of the brace which i don't know what that's about perhaps left over from a previous repair this leads me to think that the best adhesive for this is probably thin super glue you know this is the shape the sound board wants to be and i can be sure that it will get drawn deep into that crack afterwards i'll make up a thin support cleat to put under here for added insurance i'm following the pattern on the fingerboard for some reason mandolins have their marker here at the 10th fret rather than the 9th which you find on guitars some people are very particular about that the lacquer on this is probably some kind of catalyzed urethane it's very chippy in other words it wants to kind of delaminate from the rosewood underneath pretty quickly so to be kind of careful you see what i mean about the delamination as soon as you break through the surface you end up with this ghostly white mark around it it's actually an air bubble so when i hit this with some super glue that will hopefully get filled and turn clear again you just have to be very careful because it's fragile like this you know it would be easy to knock that piece off i'm using thin super glue in this case to both glue the dot in and try to consolidate that finish after which i'll pair off the excess i'll sand it and polish it make it look shiny i think that's an acceptable result so the crack does actually go up through the top here i'm just squeezing some glue through with my finger just removing this piece of tape we've got this tipped in such a way that the glue is not going to run all over the surface but capillary action will draw it down throughout the crack the sad thing is it's going to become more apparent as it's wet with the glue but maybe we can sand that a bit as well get some dust in there and take care of that dark line planed some material for a little cleat i'll just scribe around the outline there and cut it to shape glued it in place and here i'm just adding some shellac to the end of the fingerboard here to seal up the work after sanding i didn't forget what a great tailpiece if anyone knows where to get one of these to buy them commercially let me know because i want one you know sometimes i can fake it on mandolin but with it upside down get ready for some atonal droning [Music] do [Music] this is a nice big heavy brass inertia block for the trim to get it on there i'm probably going to have to remove all the saddles to access the screws yeah probably here's the point where i recognize that this thing does not have the correct screw pattern there's no way they're going together [Music] okay i've picked out two likely candidates for the neck and the middle position pickups checking to make sure that the fine copper leads are still intact i notice on both of them that they've got uh wires insulation which is burned through by someone else's soldering iron multimeter over to the ohms scale 20k ohms attach one probe to each lead the first one is coming up 6.92 6.96 so they're good match i'll also do the same to the humbucker which i know it is pretty light and it just has one hot lead this is vintage gibson style so there's not gonna be a whole lot of customizing options in terms of switching just gonna get kind of standard strat switching on this this is a hot pickup it's uh 15.45 next thing the pickup does not fit inside this route [Music] yeah these are bigger than any of the standard sizes so this thing was drilled out and probably mounted solid to something fantastic just for interest sake we'll see if these new knobs fit on these old alpha pots and no these are designed for american style cts pots or something similar so i guess we're going to rewire a pickguard this is the bridge from a 1967 fender coronado 2 base which is a pretty groovy instrument it's not here i only have the bridge i'm sorry this thing used little plastic inserts for the saddles and over time these have degenerated into something that is probably best described as black licorice it's become soft and squidgy it oozes around the string when it's at tension which can't be great for the tone but also it's been compressed or worn enough that the strings are now sitting too low and they're very close to the bridge pickup i've been tasked with trying to make new inserts for it so i picked up some of these tusk graftec two black nuts here it's an appropriate color it should do well i wanted the extra large rectangular blanks with you know no slotting or anything but nobody seems to have them in stock at the moment so i'm going to work with these i should just be able to get a big enough blank out of them i think so i've taken some measurements and now i have to cut and sand this stuff down to some pretty exacting tolerances because these are a pretty snug fit in their little encapsulating cups [Music] i made up a little custom radius sanding block by drilling through a piece of wood and sticking on some self-adhesive sandpaper i'm using gauge nut files to do this start off with a thin one to mark the position and then i can use the thicker ones to get the correct half diameter with these being more lightly slotted and also proud of the top surface by about a millimeter unlike the original there should be plenty of room for adjustment that's all done let's go back to the strat these are not metal covers they're plastic and the plating on these is very weak these are going to come off you know as soon as you play so i have to be careful trying to install them that i'm not going to damage this very thin metallic plating just installing the switch here and i realize the top surface of this guard is not countersunk for these screws i'll have to take that off again and do that hey these holes in the guard were bored for the smaller diameter metric pots so to enlarge those as well using a reamer here it doesn't take much i think i mentioned last week on that telecaster the idea of just simply putting a new guard on no never happened i've got screw holes missing and some screw holes misaligned so back to plugging and drilling they're going for a hard return installation on this one and you can see that i fixed the grounding wire to the actual claw rather than one of the fingers let's change out the tuners oh but wait different placement of the holes for the mounting pins in the back so you can't just drop them in no plug all of these mark all of these drill them all then install them so i plugged them all here i'm using a flush cut saw i'm aligning them i'm tightening the tuners just deep enough to give me some dimples so i'll know where to drill it's time to make a tapered shim for the neck pocket so i'll trace that out i'll plane it and sand it i have some holly veneer which is very white fine grained wood which should work pretty well for this i'll plane that to thickness and glue it in place so they'll be a good snug fit not even close plug them all maybe i'll keep the top right hand corner everything else has got to get plugged okay now i'm switching around tuners these are the staggered height kind and ostensibly you know the tall ones go here and the short ones up here to you know give you a better break angle of course this model on this headstock there is not enough clearance to actually get an e or an a string underneath the hole in the uh the shaft there so because we have two sets of string trees it really doesn't matter i'm swapping the taller tuners for down here just because oh i should show you that so you put your 46 gauge string through there um how does it go underneath itself ain't gonna happen with the shim in the neck pocket now the saddles are still bottomed out but now the strings are resting right on top of the frets which is pretty much where you want it to be okay enough for tonight it's one in the morning i want to get this video edited so i'm going to be up to like 3 30. there are still a couple things to do on this i need to put a drop of paint on that shim and the middle pickup base side screw is not responding to my requests so i'll have to open that up and find that it's stripped out and figure out what i'm going to do to fix that but it's playable like i said a lot of work this initially was framed as i think it needs some neck work and a shim and i've essentially now rebuilt the entire guitar parts casters not worth it i mean i can't blame this player he doesn't know you go online it seems like plug and play you pick the colors you want put it all together it's just like lego but it really isn't these pickups here have different string spacing from the previous ones they're wider i actually think it's the 50s vintage um what was it two and three sixteenths bridge spacing all the chrome is sparkly it makes the statement so i'll leave it up to you guys in the comments section we'll do a poll having seen me put this thing together and realize that 20 minutes on screen is actually five hours plus time and then extra for the glue to dry how much do you think this amount of fooling around is worth what should someone pay to have a parts caster assembled in this manner [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: twoodfrd

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Id: TmmynK1ccfE

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022