Jazzmaster Phase 3: All the other stuff (it’s done!)

My impatience got the best of me this weekend. I squeezed in whatever time I could to work on the Jazzmaster and finally got it all set up late Sunday night. I started out by tackling the remaining wiring tasks, such as installing the pickups and running the ground wire: While the wiring harness I bought from Hoagland Brothers was very nicely wired, I struggled to keep the extra pickup wires neatly contained. I did what I could, then added the foam pickup supports, and placed the pickguard with some masking tape, in case I needed to get in later and tweak (or fix!) any of the electronics: Almost ready! Neck was installed after this: After stringing it up and doing some quick playing, I realized that the nut was just way too high—any open chords I played...

Posted by on Jan 16, 2012 in Gear Geek, Jazzmaster Copy Build, Music Gear Projects | 0 comments

Jazzmaster Phase Two: pickguard wiring, bridge cups, tremolo install

Spent a fair amount of time on the Jazzmaster tonight and made some great progress. I started out with attaching the wiring harness to the pickguard. One unexpected thing I ran into was that the pot shafts for the volume and tone controls were too thick for the pro-drilled pickguard holes. I used a rat tail file to open them up more and that seemed to work nicely. The pots also had pretty long shafts, so I added some extra washers on the inside to keep the knobs from sitting too high off the pickguard. Similarly, the roller pot shafts for the neck pickup were too thick to fit through the mounting plate, so I used my dremel tool to open those up a little. Once completed, I had to do some more tweaking, but it finally came out right. Next, I moved on to the...

Posted by on Jan 14, 2012 in Gear Geek, Jazzmaster Copy Build, Music Gear Projects | 0 comments

So, I’m building a Jazzmaster from parts.

As if I didn’t have enough guitars already, I recently decided to sell of a ton of music and recording gear I had not used in forever, or just simply didn’t want any more. I was able to upgrade/crossgrade a ton of my gear, and one of those things included buying the parts to build my own Jazzmaster. I’ve been wanting to build a guitar for a long time, but the cost of locating all of the parts always ended up being about the same or more than just buying a guitar that was all set to go. One day while browsing eBay, I came across some auctions by MJT Custom Aged Guitar Finishes. They do custom painting and  aging of aftermarket guitar parts to give them that worn look. They were offering a package, where they painted/aged all of the items for a...

Posted by on Jan 13, 2012 in Gear Geek, Jazzmaster Copy Build, Music Gear Projects | 2 comments