All lacquered (not licquored) up and ready to go.
This has been a pretty satisfying reworking of the guitar. I was able to get the bow out of the neck, reshape the neck profile, refret with slightly higher frets, change the color, and lower the action. Pretty successful on all accounts.
The final setup went well and I am very pleased with the increased playability of the guitar. Lowering the action through cutting the nut slots deeper and taking bow out of the neck greatly improved the feel of the guitar. Cutting the nut slots deeper also took out the string stretch required to fret the unwound strings at the first few frets. This meant that these strings did not go sharp when playing at those first few frets. D-minor now sounds like D-minor! The new, more rounded neck profile is much more comfortable to play. Good stuff all around.
And I’m loving the new color. The original was nice looking, but it never popped for me. This time around I added a fade from the original yellow/amber to deep mahogany red. It now looks as I envisioned it before I started building.
5 Comments
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Beautiful!
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Hey cowboy,
Like your site would love to build my own single cut guitar a Les Paul 59 style can you recommend where I can get a good set of plans?
Warm regards
Cassandra
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Author
Thanks! The Bartlett plans are considered to be some of the best out there (http://bartlettguitarparts.com/products/plans). You can also build off of the Catto plans (Google for them), though they are apparently not as vintage correct. Not a big deal if you just want to build a nice LP. I used the Catto plans, plus a bunch of other info from various sources.
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Just came here for the “locating the bridge” post, but couldn’t help reading the whole story. A beautiful job and a nice tale of it, congrats!
Best regards from Spain,
Antonio
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Muchas gracias, Antonio!
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