Gibson have so far spent 107 years building instruments, Fender have been at it since 1946... I should be able to do that too with no relevant background knowledge what so ever... This page will describe my attempt at building a stratocaster-like guitar.

I figured i'd start out easy by not making the neck myself, as that seemed way too hard. I have thus bought a used neck from Hamer Slammer. Below is a picture of a cardboard-cutout of the body i plan to make. It is somewhat inspired by the Ibanez' RG-series, just slightly less curved than the standard stratocaster, with a little more SG-like spikey-ness.

The bridge I ordered off ebay arived yesterday. Unfortunately, I'm too busy cramming for my exams to do anything with it...

I finally managed to cut out a prototype from a piece of wood that was left over from my kithen. The piece is not as thick as the original body, but hopefully, it will allow me to test-fit everything, none the less. I also figured out the paintjob.

I gave up on making a prototype of the body, thus, the piece of wood from my kitchen table will become the final body. If it turns out, that glued-together birch sounds horrible, I'll buy another neck and a nice piece of hardwood and make another guitar.

Having made that decision, I have now fitted the neck to the body, reshaped the headstock, and sanded down the body. Nice and smooth :)

bjuhn has gained 11 exp. bjuhn learns a new skill: ``freehand routing''.

Waai, progress :) I've made a mounting plate for the single-coil out of a piece of computer casing.

After careful calculations and precise measuring and drawing, the goddamned router guide slipped -_- Thus, the speaker holes didn't turn out quite as nice as i had hoped...

I still suck at updating :P

I broke my pickup selector switch, and the electronics generally suck...

Getting tired of the humming noises, I decided to rebuild the electronics. In preparation to this I scouted the internets, and came upon an site describing all the common errors guitar manufacturers make in their circuit design. Having based mine off of one such design, my guitar had all the same flaws. Thus, I sat out to shield the inside of my guitar.

As I was too lazy to go to a store to get proper shielding tape, I went to the kitchen to get the aluminium foil... Having no good glue to hold it in place, I just ducttaped it in place. High-tech, motherfuckers.

Before the rebuild, I had quite a bit of humming going on, the volume knob only turned down to 50%, and the tone knob did nothing. Now, the humming is gone, the volume knob turns all the way down... but so does the tone knob. Still room for improvements, I guess ;)