I put my new guitar together yesterday. It looks like it took the guy on YouTube half an hour or so, but it took me most of the day! I had to watch a few more YouTube videos, and chat with a friend of mine re truss rod adjustments, but overall it went pretty good. Everything is from the kit, no upgrades at all, even the strings are the crappy strings from the kit. I was happy I spent the extra $20 for a solderless kit so I could put it together without a soldering iron (which I don’t have). I’ll have access to a soldering iron when I do the finishing, but this way I could put it together on my own to test it out. I didn’t put all the screws in the pick guard, because it wasn’t necessary just to test it out, and I didn’t put the spring tree retainers on at all, because those holes aren’t pre-marked and I don’t want to realize they’re not in the perfect spot when I put the guitar together again after it’s finished. I also didn’t use the shielding paint yet. I don’t really understand grounding so I have to read some more and watch some more videos to figure that out. There’s actually not a lot of noise, but there is some, so that paint should presumably help.
I’ll need to wait a bit now before finishing it since Covid cases are pretty high and I’ll be going over to a friend’s wood-working shop to work on the finishing. I talked to him about plans today, so that will be underway at some point. I’ll take the guitar apart, finish it, then put it back together again. Then I’ll spend some more time on the set up before I decide if I’d like to upgrade anything (excluding strings, there will definitely be new strings). I’ve already learned a bit about maintenance, as there was a pretty major buzz on the lower frets at first and I did get the truss rod adjusted correctly, while also learning something about the bridge saddle screws and adjusting intonation. I could certainly do more work on the set up, but since I’ll be taking it apart and putting it back together again I decided to wait until then. I did realize just now while playing it that although the fretboard is pretty decent, the frets need some more work as I nicked my finger enough to bleed a bit while sliding up the fretboard.
There’s a lot more to do yet, the finishing has quite a few steps with potentially multiple days in between, but even at this point I’m very happy with my purchase. Imperfect playing aside, I thought I would put up a short demo to show that it is in fact playable. The strings kept going out of tune, and the 1st string fell off the nut a few times. To be fixed after the finishing …
