A few months ago, I purchased an ES-355 kit from theFretwire.com and I can say that it was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I’ve loved guitars ever since I was a little kid and I have always wanted to build my own. Several years ago, I started a project, from raw wood, but was never able t build it. What I didn’t know then, but have learned since, is that the guitar is a complex machine that must be calibrated with care. Every measurement must be precise or the guitar will never perform accurately.
When I found the kit that I wanted, I placed the order and anxiously awaited its arrival. When it finally came in, I was in a rush to start building it and I was even more in a rush to play it. When I took out all the parts, however, I could literally hear my bubble burst. There were a lot of pieces and parts, plus the body and neck were prickly. It was clear to me that I was going to have to take a more thought-out approach and map out what I needed to do.
As is the case with any project, organization was going to be the key to success. As I’d never built a guitar, or even painted a guitar, I had to first learn how to do various sub-projects. For example, I researched “how to sand and paint a guitar’ and then watched a bunch of YouTube videos until I was fairly oriented on the steps involved in painting a guitar. I researched each step involved in the installation of each step until I was riffing on my ES-355 semi-hollow body guitar.
I’ll go through each step within the next few articles, but I highly recommend organizing the steps into sub-projects. For example, the general steps to building a kit guitar would generally be:
- Sanding and painting (or staining) the guitar body and neck
- Wiring the electronics
- Installing the bridge (or tremolo unit)
- Wiring the electronics (pickups, volume pots, switches, and input jacks)
- Installing the electronics
- Installing the machine heads
- Bolting (or gluing) the neck to the body
- Installing the strings
- Tuning the guitar
- Playing Eruption full blast
Now, most kits come with the fretboard and frets pre-installed. If they don’t, that’s an additional step. However, my kit came with the frets installed. But even with a kit, unexpected stuff will emerge and while those unexpected things will be frustrating, in my experience, they will provide learning fodder that is invaluable.
