Johnny Wishbone

Yep, this. Just remember that it will stay hot for a few seconds so don't try and unclip it straight after soldering your connection. It may sound totally obvious but I've forgotten at least a couple of times, much to my immediate distress!

Smooth Hound wireless. Not used it at rehearsal/gig yet but after a couple of hours noodling around at home I'm already thinking of getting a second set just for the house!

Spot on, and much the worse for it in my opinion. Ed's voice changed after 'Vs' too and became much more raw-sounding, which works on a few songs but for the most part isn't as good as it was before. Knowing him and his 'rejection' of fame, I've no doubt this shift to sound less accessible is completely deliberate.

Yeah mine were definitely orange! The good news is that the tint mellows pretty quickly (at least mine did). Either that or I just learned to live with it pretty quickly and my eyes are now playing tricks on me!

This was the only one that wasn't 'right'. I've had three maple Jazz necks from eBay and they're all spot on. Two of them were used here: I guess for less than £30 a chuck you are taking a punt, but that's half the fun 😉

Frets pulled, slots filled with super glue. Was going to use veneers but given the the neck cost me £16 I figured there wasn't much point spending another tenner. I read about the super glue method somewhere and, as we usually have a few tubes lying around, thought I'd give it a go. Did the first fill last night and then a refill this morning. Pretty pleased with the result. I've given it a light sanding by hand just to get the excess glue off, but have ordered a proper radius block to make sure I get the proper surface. Once that arrives it'll be a few rounds of sanding, a good oiling and we're ready to re-install and string it back up!

Are these still available? I've just treated myself to a SmoothHound for Xmas and strap-mounting the transmitter definitely looks like the way to go for me!

They weren't even stiff! I do use the wax trick for stubborn screws but these sheared with almost no effort!

And now we get to the worst of it. With the strings on and tuned up, I thought I'd rough out the string height, neck relief etc before leaving it to settle overnight. It's at this point I noticed the biggest problem of all. I originally assumed that I had a high fret somewhere as it was choking out, but closer inspection reveals that the 12 fret is actually significantly lower than all the others! A high fret can be sorted reasonably easily, but 21 of them will be something of a struggle. Looks like the planned fretless conversion is now a necessity, rather than something to be tackled further down the road.

I did manage to get the neck on, which was also a struggle as the neck pocket isn't very straight. Applying some counteracting force on the neck whilst I drilled the screwholes has made the best of a bad job, but it's still not 100%. There's clearly a bigger gap between the E string and the edge of the fretboard than at the other side, but I can live with it. Also strung it with some cheap flats and added a thumb rest (I won't actually use it, I just like the look on a P).

Well, this kind of got put to one side following a very long bout of 'can't be ar$ed' disease, alongside some other very dull domestic priorities. Managed to pull my finger out a little this weekend and, to be honest, I'm kind of regretting it. First job was getting the machine heads on. I can only assume that the screws supplied were made of advent calendar chocolate as no few than SIX of them snapped whilst being inserted, whilst another's head stripped almosy immediately. I'm now 7 screws down so have ordered some more which I hope are better quality. I managed to get most of the snapped shafts out with mole grips but have had to drill the others out (which also resulted in a snapped drill bit!)

FWIW myself and one of my band’s guitarists use The Drop quite a bit as we use 3/4 different tunings in our set. Works perfectly well for both of us and saves time fiddling about between songs. I will however say that if you’re precious about your tone, then retuning your instrument is the way to go. The drop pedal doesn’t sound bad per se, but it does alter your sound somewhat, as you’d probably expect. That said, if you’re in a two guitar rock band, for example, it’s unlikely that either yourself or the audience will notice the difference. YMMV, of course.

Shielding done, electrics fitted, bridge mounted. Annoyingly, I’ve now discovered that the pickup mounting screws I have are (a ) too big to fit through the holes in the pickup covers, and (b ) not long enough. I suspect the routing in the body is slightly deeper than normal as the pups themselves do seem to sit further into the cavity than I would normally expect. New screws needed *sigh*

Well, between a bit of chiselling and Dremel work, that seems to have sorted it!

Bought some tuners from Ben. All as described and turned around quickly. Good comms throughout. Cheers!

I’d highly recommend Rob at http://www.guitardecals.co.uk/. Very good quality, reasonably fast turnaround and it’s buy one get one free. I’ve had a few done him recently.

This guy collects/stocks all kinds of knobs - might be worth shooting him a message? He has an eBay shop but sells direct for slightly less. https://www.facebook.com/ampstack/

They seem to be all or nothing. I’ve seen them twice - the first time I thought some roadies had walked into the stage and played an impromptu set, the second time was life-affirmingly good.

The neck was a super tight fit in the pocket - it wouldn’t quite go at first, so I gave the pocket rout a light scrape with a sharp chisel to clean what was left of the original red paint out and, with a little persuasion, in it went. Still plenty to do, but this ‘dry run’ gives an impression of how the finished build should look.

The saga continues. The pickguard isn’t a great fit - if I align the neck pocket cutout correctly the back edge of the control cavity rout is exposed. If I cover that then the bottom edge doesn’t line up with the bottom edge of the body properly. To make matters (slightly) worse, the pickguard that’s actually the best fit (given the above issues) is the one I didn’t want to use due to the red blotch about halfway along the bottom edge (It was only about a fiver, to be fair). I have a much nicer looking one, which I paid a bit more for (pictured earlier in the thread) but it doesn’t cover the body cavity as well as the cheaper one. This is particularly annoying because when you lay them over each other they appear to be almost completely identical! Major wiggling required, and some filing/shaving of the guard around the neck pocket, plus some light chisel work to shift the back edge of the pickup rout a couple of mm further back. Still got a couple of screw holes to sort out - one is perilously close to the edge of the rout underneath, and one is actually over the rout. I’ll probably just glue that one into the hole in the pickguard to make it look like it’s actually screwed into something. The fit around the lower cutaway is still pretty crap, but I’ll probably live with it as reshaping and trying to get the bevelled edge back doesn’t sound an attractive endeavour. The problem I now have is that the hole for the jack socket is pretty much flush with the edge of the rout (2nd picture). I can’t actually get the socket in there unless I remove some more wood, and I’m not sure how I’m going to do so. I can’t drill it as there’s nothing to drill into. Filing/sanding will be a pain in the ar$e as there’s a fair bit of material to remove, and I don’t have access to a router. I suspect some work with the Dremel might be the best solution.

Result (well, partial): the neck seller has agreed to a 50% refund and I get to keep the neck. I’m still disappointed it’s not the “right” one but it does look like a nice bit of wood, and the fingerboard in particular has some nice grain. May as well suck it up and crack on. The refin’d body has spent the last few weeks at our practice room whilst the paint cured and has finally made it home with me tonight. I’m a little short of time this week but may grab a few hours at the weekend to get the build into some sort of shape. As I think I mentioned in the OP, my long term aim with this build is a fretless. I’m not entirely sold on defretting the neck myself, however. I’d be more than happy if I could pick up a fretless neck for decent money, but they don’t seem to come up often (annoyingly I missed Beedster’s fretless neck cull in June) so I rather suspect my hand will be forced in that regard. It just seems that with defretting there are too many things I could make a right balls of, and I’d rather save myself the hassle. One could argue, though, that making a balls of a neck that has now cost me £16 isn’t exactly the end of the world. Onwards!

That’s the seller I bought from.

Just ordered some of the aforementioned Adagio flats from eBay. I’ve been meaning to try flats for a while, but £30 a set minimum is an expensive ‘try’ (about 25% more than my usual rounds). At £13 a chuck it’s a no-brainer!