The most offsetting part of a stratocaster - A "rescue dog" strat conversion project

[bodhi]

I'm sure everyone's been holding their breath waiting for updates, as there's not anything else going on in the world right now I've been working on this slowly but surely, but had a few phases of things to get through before I felt like a proper update would be due.

A few weeks ago, as I was trying to figure out what exactly to do with the lower bout, I was watching the TV and had the guitar in my lap, and basically eyeballed a line (indicated by the pencil):



... the sharp-eyed will see that this isn't quite what we ended up with for the body cut, but it's pretty much where the edge beveling ends up...

A while later I used a piece of paper modeled after the upper horn bevel and transfered that exact (-ish) line to the lower horn, as well as the back side of both upper and lower sections. That had me moving the actual point a bit more outwards from the center than I had originally thought (so it's not actually the darker line pointing a bit down towards the back), but I feel it probably works better this way. With this established I grabbed the closest pen I could find, which turned out to be a marker, and drew the rest of the lower horn cut plan:



The guiding factors here were that I wanted a similar edge bevel to the upper part, so I felt that it should have a tip of some sort, and then the bevel shape guided the actual orientation. I also want to be able to use a jaguar switch plate, so needed to leave enough space for that to look like it belongs, but at the same time to not make the bevel as "deep" as on the upper horn. As we'll see, I feel this works out pretty well.

The previous evening I also realised that the tip location isn't particularly far away from what you'd have by outlining a strat template that's been moved over "one set of neck screw holes", if that makes any sense. The resulting outline is somewhere between a JM/Jag and the mustang shape, based on my playing around with the paper cutouts earlier.



While not completely out of question, earlier I had noticed that my in-the-moment band saw cuts of the section where the pots would be took off too much material, so I set about to fix this. I know that once I realised the issue it'd haunt me forever... The following picture is really confusing, but it's showing the multiple patch-block fix that I used to add back some material to the section (there's some wood under the body that doesn't have enough contrast for it to make sense immediately):



This time the glue up was really with quick-drying epoxy, I have confused 4h polyurethane with epoxy in my previous posts. The epoxy allowed me to use the drum, belt and orbital sanders an hour later to again remove most of the new material ( ), only to get back approximately somewhere close to where we started with that corner. Before all the cuts and sauna bench plank gluing and all that...



At this point the control section and narrow part of the lower bout happens to incidentally be basically an exact SG shape, as I had moved the narrow section outline a bit with the drum sander, and I was kind of expecting this to be a fun detail in the whole project... However, after putting the guitar back into playing condition for a few days, I realised that the body didn't really sit right and would probably look a bit awkward with the same kind of beveling as the top section...

So back to the fray again: This time I used a rasp, file and a japanese style pull saw in my kitchen to cut out the pieces and added back some material to the outline again.



I planned the final line with some pencil. Don't think it's an exact match to anything but it might have been roughly the mustang paper cutout at two different angles to match the edges where the patch blocks meet the existing body... After cutting that I also did the softer Fender-style edge roundover on all the previously patched blocks that were still square, but the table router at the workshop had broke, forcing me to use a hand-held router which of course slipped a bit... (actually worked just fine on the other side, but might have grabbed some grain with this routing direction)



It's not the biggest thing in the world, and I tweaked the edges quickly with an orbital sander, but again something to fix. No material and gluing though, this will just be sanded out. You can also see some detail of the "expert" patchwork above... Realised quite a while ago that I'll need to use some kind of filler to fix everything anyways, so not really concerned. At least yet.

After all the rambling, here's where we are today. I used a rasp and some quick sanding a couple of hours ago to shape the edge bevel on the lower part:



The beveling is a bit tricky to make out, but here's a detail shot at another angle.



I'm pretty happy about all of this so far in this adventure. There's been a fair deal of setbacks and fixes, but nothing catastrophic... There's still 3-4 outline spots that I need to fix on the body itself, as some sections are too flat after I've used a belt sander. The belt sander is good for 90 degree angles and smoothing out stuff, and fortunately now the remaining fixes should be pretty small. The beveling also needs some attention here and there, but so far so good.

I've also been doing some non-trivial routing for the cavities on the back, so the swiss cheese section of this build is well underway. Also picked up a router extension for a dremel for some detail work at home, namely the floating tremolo routing on the front, but I'm probably going to try something on a bit of scrap first, for a change...

[Vendetagainst]

Damn that looks cool! Love the shortening of the lower horn, really adds a unique look.

[bodhi]

So, let's pick up the story with the front routing, which started about a month ago already... I know I "promised" to try to work on a piece of scrap first, but outside of testing how the tool works for a few minutes, I thought the light weight and smaller bit compared to the normal router seemed pretty manageable, so fairly quickly went straight to work on the front routing for the trem.



I was working more or less only with the pencil outline of the trem completely "decked", so with that in mind it probably went pretty well... Since the individual saddles on the Wilkinson trem theoretically have a fairly large range of adjustment, I ended up giving fairly ample space there, without reallly knowing what to expect. Having set up the saddles and intonation properly today, I'm happy that I gave decent space there, but probably went a bit further than actually required based on what I was measuring the maximum saddle travel would be.



The previous pic is still one from work in progress, I cleaned up the edges a bit later on. It's not the prettiest work, but will mostly get covered up by the tremolo itself, and I'll probably try to fix some of this as well with wood putty (not sure if that's the correct term), along with a lot of the other larger gaps on the body... Just from trying to "straighten" some of the cuts and a bit of wandering as the router bit caught, the section where the upper saddles are quite a few millimeters wider than what was intended. I didn't draw myself proper alignment lines or put down tape or anything, so I guess I just got caught up in the moment without thinking of what was going on...

Just beside that I also filed down the edge of the trem cavity on the back, allowing for more travel for the tremolo before it hits any wood. Feeling happy about this, I put it back into a playable state, only to realise that the attachment "pipe" that the trem arm itself screws in to was hitting the inner part of the trem cavity before anything else, so ended up removing some material from there as well.



Now with all of that gone, the back edge of the bridge hits the bottom of the front trem route first. That route is approximately 8 mm deep, and I can divebomb to the other side from the extended (messy) routing under the saddles themselves. My understanding is that trem range of this kind is dependent on string gauge and setup, but I seem to be getting over a major third on the low e (above G#), and slightly over two half steps on the high e. The middle strings are roughly in between, but approximately minor thirds. This is with some sort of mismash 11/10.5 set of Curt Mangan strings, as I've replaced individual strings with whatever's handy as they break. All the strings are breaking at the locking tuners as I've taken the neck, trem and springs off to work on the body itself, so I'd guess it's just something to live with and that it won't really be a persistent problem once things settle down.



So, three weeks ago, this was where we were at. I also decided to counter-sink the jaguar switch plate with the Dremel, as I was thinking that there might not be a pickguard there, but I'm still undecided on that part of the aesthetics. Tried cutting some paper to get a rough idea, but haven't really been totally convinced of any ideas yet...

With the switch plate routing, I decided to chisel out the outline before routing the part, which seemed to help a bit with wandering lines and the like, but inspecting my work it felt like the plate wasn't really straight. I probably made the wrong decision about which edge/corner to route into to straighten it out, so the whole thing ended up a bit messy. Good thing those putty jars are fairly large...

Functionally, I think the Dremel actually works well enough for this kind of thing, but you should treat it like any other router with a template or some guiding blocks, so that the end result is better than what I've experimented with here. The good part is that the bit I used is only 3mm in diameter, which allows for some nice detail work that a normal router bit just won't ever be able to. It's nowhere as powerful, though, so use the right tool for the job at hand...

[bodhi]

At the same time as working on the front routing, I had also started with the back routing. The workshop has a few places to discard pieces of wood that no one is about to use, and I happened to find a few even sticks of birch that I shortened a bit to form a router guide. Double-sided tape on one side will easily form enough of a makeshift guide, and depending on the case might even be hard to remove if the pieces of tape are large enough and the surfaces are flush.



As you can see in the picture above, I had made some lines, making sure that the front end of the routing bit didn't go over the edge bevel by the neck, and similarly anchoring the back edge on the flat section.



This whole routing cuts into the beveled area on the back, but also a bit on the front bevel, so I need to leave material around to not cut into the upper bevel.



A smart person might fit the piece before doing any of the beveling, but even though I originally intended to do some kind of upper cavity here, I didn't really know what the dimensions would be beforehand, and what we ended up with is larger than what I originally was thinking of, as I want to try some things out...



I have similar routing going on on the lower half of the body, but the back section of the jaguar switch plate area is an indicator that you still need to make sure your routing support pieces are stuck on firmly...

Now then, what to do with the ugly hole on the upper back? I'm fairly sure that there's not really going to be enough hot licks being played here to require proper cooling, so let's get to work with patching things up. I had some spare pieces of the grey alder sauna bench planks around, and since they're thick enough, I spent some time at home cutting up cardboard to match the outline of the section. When I got back to the workshop, it was probably more than an hour's work with a bandsaw, belt sander and orbital sander to get the shape down. I wanted to edge up on it to not go too far, and despite making sure that the lines were pretty straight, not a lot of the angles were all that square.



With that shape down and actually fitting the route, there was still a fair amount of work to be done. After some other attempts, I realised that the quickest and neatest way to get the cutouts for the lids to sink in to the body was by using a hand saw. With the shape of the front end there were a couple of angles to work out which I couldn't manouver with the larger machinery, and the piece itself is fairly small. Oh the satisfaction when that piece finally slid in neatly...


With that in place, I later on used an orbital sander to cut the bevel back in to the lid itself, after adding screws to the lid edges so it'd stay in place. The screws were sunk down under the edge of the lid, so at the same time I could use the orbital sander also to make them flush with the back surface. Seems to work fine, and actually using the larger orbital sander seemed to make a more even job of it than what I had achieved with hand tools and a drum sanding bit for the handheld drill.

Back to the front, I had originally thought of making holes in the mustang switch positions to have convenient access to pickup-specific toggles, but after playing around with some pickguard shapes it felt safer to leave the holes in the JM location. Only I moved them a bit closer to the pickup route than where they would normally be. After some quick testing, it seems the mustang three-way switches will fit with the same spacing as some roller potentiometer bracings that I have, so I drilled out screw holes as well.



On the back, I routed out a section a bit deeper still, so the thickness of the remaining body is approximately what a pickguard would be, which allows me to mount the pots without making screw holes for them on the front. Not sure if that's going to be used much, but I wanted to verify that theory for a future build.



And here's what the lid currently looks like from the side, I still need to cut out the sections that are not on the surface to actually make some space in the cavity, but that probably should be fairly easy with a hand saw and some sanding.