I've been a long time lurker, and thought I should finally post something here.
For a long time I have loved the Fender CBS transition era guitars and basses. It started off with my love of a 65 CFM Jazz bass I saw on Talkbass, and quickly spread from there.
Last year I became more of a guitarist than a bassist, and I decided to build a Jazzmaster that would suit my needs.
The main inspiration:
I was doing this on a bit of a budget, and jazzmaster pickups can be difficult to come by in Australia unless you go to a custom builder. With this in mind, I decided to use p90's, as I could get them easily and they are a sound I love.
This was the first mockup I did when parts started to arrive in the mail.
The body is made from Basswood, and is of a good weight. Fairly light, but still has enough mass to it to feel like a nice solid guitar. The electronics is a les paul junior harness that I bought online. I knew that I would never use the rhythm circuit, so it made things easier for me.
I wanted the knobs and covers to appear a bit aged, so I decided to try the coffee trick:
It worked ok, Not the best, but I was happy enough with the result.
Here's my first real gaffe:
In my rush to purchase a neck, I neglected to notice that it had a Telecaster heel. I sold this neck to a friend, and went shopping for another neck.
Whilst waiting for the neck to arrive, I ran into my second hurdle. The body routs were all made too large, which meant that the pick guard did not cover all the holes in the body. Because of this, I needed to add some wood to the internal cavities. I traced the shape of the cavity on tape and cut it out. Once it was cut out I could just stick the tape right on the wood, which made making plugs for the holes easy.
It's not a perfect fix, but I was able to fill the gaps with wood filler and make them flush with the body.
The next issue was that the routes for the pickups did not line up, which meant that I had to route out the center part of the body:
And now for the drilling of the neck holes and the fitting of the neck plate:
I love vintage MIJ guitars, and this was my little tribute to that. In the future I would like to get Neck Plates that are stamped "Made In Australia", but that will be many years down the track.
This picture also shows the pickguard and the paint I used to paint the body.
After fixing the body and making the neck screw holes, I was able to mock up and test all the components together.
Here you can see the stained pickup covers and Knobs, as well as the replacement neck I purchased.
Next I wired up the pickguard and added some pvc to cover the rhythm circuit holes.
Please excuse the dodgy wiring, that's now been fixed.
Whilst figuring out how to do the cover for the rhythm circuit I decided to redrill the holes on the trem, so they lined up better, which resulted in another mishap:
Luckily it was in a location where I could chisel out the drill bit and just glue some wood to plug the material removed by the chisel:
