Things of guitar kit-dom

Rambles of things about kit guitar-dom. They are an interesting adventure, especially when they are rapidly assembled by stressed out & overwhelmed kit provider prior to shipping.



First thing I noticed was some string buzz on the lower strings in the first couple o' frets. It's got an original floyd bridge clone which doesn't have individual saddles for each string; a saddle allows you to adjust the action of an individual string. So to set action is basically screw bridge all the way down & slowly raise each side so no more string buzz occurs on the 1st 12 frets of each string. It took a bit of tweaking but I seem to have gotten it. Too bad I have to take it all apart. ha. I might upgrade the bridge to something that has the saddles for each string as I use those GHS Boomers that have thicker Low E, A, D strings. With the bridge it has on there, the action would have to be raised higher & it would feel like the strings were in outer space.

The 2nd thing I noticed was that the high E string was very close to the edge of the neck & easily slipped off the neck while playing. It also felt weird to bend or tap on it. I peaked at the back of the neck & sure enuff the locking nut was positioned without much care or attention to detail & gave the Low E more room on the fret board as the nut hung over the neck's edge on the low E side.

The 3rd thing I thought I needed to do was finish the back of the neck & fretboard. I was not feeling too comfortable with learning that process, although it sounds much easier than doing up a body with 5150 or whatever stripes. ReRanch.com has good instruction for finishing a guitar's neck along with a Wood Satin Clear finish. After emailing John G., the paint guy who wrote the book, I realized that I didn't have to finish the fretboard or the back of the neck as the natural wood feel feels great.

I could start taking it all apart & priming the body as the primer isn't too much. But I'll have to wait a while to get the desired paint & chrome paint kit that I'll also be using for it. The chrome kit is like $115+shipping & the needed paint supplies is like $125 + $42 for the primer + $18 for the final rubbing compound. It sure would be nice to walk into a store to get these supplies but there's no store I can find that carries urethane based things. I'm guessing there's some environmental thing in our state that does not allow for these products to be obtained easily. So ya gotta pay shipping if ya want to play the painting game.

Anyway that's the life of this kit at the moment. Strange thing is that I haven't plugged it into me amp yet. Busy busy with boys & such.

Side note: I learned this week that after 10+ years of having this amp, that I've hardly used, the effect return input jack is a stereo, tip-ring-sleeve-jack so I can have major stereo mojo from my Quadraverb 2's output running into the amp. Way cool.

Until later comes, turn it up to kit-dom.