Building my own guitar

I’ve been wanting to build my own guitar as a project for a while now… at least since high school. So now, I finally had the time and resources to do it!

Keep in mind I haven’t soldered much outside of fixing my old Thinkpad Yoga laptop 2 years ago, so I had to find a ’72 Telecaster Thinline wiring diagram and solder it up. Here are the components:

-Fender Lonestar Deluxe Stratocaster neck (70s style, Maple, 22 frets, Modern C shape)
-Pots, Caps, Switches etc from Emerson
Warmoth Body (Cherry Sunburst, Tremolo Bridge, ‘F’ hole, humbucker pickguard)
Lollar Pickups Lollartron Neck model (4.4k)
Lindy Fralin Twangmaster Bridge model (8600 turns)

I was really interested to see the combination of a Filtertron style pickup (the Lollartron) with a Wide Range Humbucker style pickup (the Fralin Twangmaster) to see what that combination would sound like. I don’t know of any production guitars that combines those two.

For reference, here is a list of all the different production pickups in order of increasing strength:

Single Coil:

-Strat style single coil (used by Fender Stratocaster, Telecasters etc this the most common single coil design)

Strat style single coils
Strat style single coils

-Lipstick style pickups (used by Danelectro guitars and a few others)

Lipstick style pickups
Lipstick style pickups

-Charlie Christian pickups (used by Charlie Christian’s Gibson)

Charlie Christian style pickups
Charlie Christian style pickups

-Jazzmaster pickups (used by Fender Jazzmasters)

Jazzmaster Pickup
Jazzmaster Pickup

-DeArmond / Dynasonic (used by Gretsch guitars)

Dynasonic Pickups
Dynasonic Pickups

-Gibson P90 (used by Gibson guitars)

Gibson P90 Pickups
Gibson P90 Pickups

-Blade style / stacked single coils (usually noise cancelling single coil alternatives to humbuckers)

Joe Barden bladed pickups
Joe Barden bladed pickups

Humbuckers (dual coil hum-cancelling pickups)

-Filtertron (used by Gretsch guitars)

Gretsch Filtertron
Gretsch Filtertron

-Wide Range Humbuckers (used by the ’72 Fender Telecasters)

Fender Wide Range Humbucker
Fender Wide Range Humbucker

-Gibson PAF style (used on Gibson Les Pauls, SGs etc this is the most common style of humbucker)

Gibson Burstbuckers
Gibson Burstbuckers

Anyways thats alot of different styles but I chose to combine the unique Filtertron style with the Fender WRH style…

Building a custom guitar
Building a custom guitar
Building a custom guitar
Building a custom guitar

…And the results speak for themselves!

Oh, and I’m now finished porting my Java based stock simulator (such a hassle to download csv’s from the deprecated Google Finance API and install a JVM on the computer to run) to React/Node so now it has a complete graphical UI and fetches in real-time. Which is nice, but it still needs stock index fetching capability. Github repo link here check it out.

… and also had enough time to make a video about all my UMPC gadgets! yay!

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