The Story of Fire…

I recently got a new guitar, and it’s awesome. Most people that have seen it have asked me “Dude, what is that?”. While I have repeated it’s story a few times, here it is with details and pictures.

One more thing. I am also a bit of a dork, in that I name all of my guitars. Some are obvious (Kramer & Jackson), some are not so obvious (George & Junx). This one is called “Fire”.

Anyway…

It all started few months ago when I was talking with a friend about costs/possibility of building a custom guitar. Based on that discussion, I started searching for parts and doing some rough calculations on costs. That got me thinking…

The Challenge

Can I build a custom guitar end-to-end of decent quality, for around $500?

The Lesson

For those of you with ADD or that don’t feel like reading anymore, here are the bullet points of the lesson:

Parts from different vendors will have different specs/tolerances, and therefore may not fit perfectly.
It will cost a little more than you expect.
See number 1.

The Process

I got more serious about my research. I created a spreadsheet, and created a list of every part I would need, it’s price and it’s direct link. All of the parts would come from vendors online, other than the few that I already had in my “misc. guitar parts box”. (which turned out to be not very many)

At this point, I needed to finalize the design I was going for: Basically a Charvel San Dimas clone with top mounted floyd, and a HB/S pickup config. Simple, sexy and built to ROCK.

The Sources

All of the parts were sourced from one of four different places;

www.guitarfetish.com, (Body, Bridge, Misc. hardware)
www.ebay.com (Neck, Pickups, Tuners)
www.warmoth.com (Custom cut pickgaurd)
www.n-tune.com (n-tune).

The Talent

At this point I need to point out that part of the original “plan” was for me to get all of the parts, assemble the guitar, and simply take in to an expert for a final setup.

By far, the smartest thing I did was involve Darren Ross of http://www.rossguitars.com/ before I even ordered the first part. He was instrumental (see what I did there?)in advising me on some the parts to order. I also quickly realized that he probably could assemble it much faster, and with higher quality than I ever could. Meaning that he wouldn’t have to fix any of my stupid mistakes made during assembly, when he was doing the set up.

He did an amazing job! Most of the pictures are also thanks of him.

The Parts

Here they all are. Ready to be taken over to Darren’s place to begin assembly.

Body – Pauwlonia with a flame maple cap. Very similar to Alder.
Neck – 22 fret maple with “skunk stripe”
Bridge – Black licensed Floyd Rose
Pickups – Ibanez IBZ/USA. They are Dimarzio OEM. Bridge is close to a “Breed”, neck is close to a “HS-1”.

The Assembly

Like I hint to above, we encountered a few “bumps” during assembly. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have found these, and if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to solve them as elegantly or quickly as Darren did.

Problem One (Mounting the Bridge)

The routing for the bridge wasn’t in the correct position, and routing for the pickups was too far back. If this wasn’t addressed, the guitar would never intonate correctly, and the strings would never line up correctly on the neck.

The solution was to route the bridge slot, and glue a small piece of maple into the pickup cavity. Then drill the holes for the posts so they are in the correct position.

Problem Two (Bridge sustain block)

The bridge (Black Floyd Rose copy) shipped with a sustain block that was too short. Since we were “flush mounting” the bridge as opposed to “recess mounting” like you see in just about every other guitar with a floyd these days (including my Kramer and Jackson), the block needed to be longer.

This is where my “misc. guitar parts box” came in handy. I had a longer brass block from the Gotoh that I installed in my Kramer. Of course, the holes were smaller in the block, so Darren had to drill them out to fit the new bridges screws. Thank goodness it worked!

Problem Three (Bad fret)

The 22 fret neck I got off eBay must have been made on a Monday or a Friday. Because the 14th fret was whack. Like the fret wire was a different, smaller gage. Therefore, Darren had to replace the 14th fret. Otherwise the neck buzzed like crazy. Here are some shots of before, during and after the fret replacement.

Installing the Locking Nut

This wasn’t a problem, in that we knew that we were going to have to route the nut in order to install locking nut. Darren built a quick jig to hold the neck so he could run the router.