Skate Guitar update!

I wasn’t happy with the milling of the electronics chamber since it was very rough and the shape didn’t really fit to the body (yes, I’m a designer ;-). Luckily a friend of mine had access to a CNC machine so he milled some templates for the router – yeah!!

Yeah! The CNC milled router templates

A nice side effect was that the new shape also removed some more material which made the guitar slightly lighter in the end!

The router template mounted to the guitar

The finished electronics chamber

Additionally I wanted to remove some material by drilling into the body starting from the pickup chambers – luckily it didn’t really influence the sound in the end, or maybe I just don’t hear it…

By doing so I terminated a drill – I should get better tools next time. It took a while to get it out of the body ;-)

Ooops… Wasn't me...

Interesting shape...

The next project was to replace the crappy hardware. I got me some new poties and stuff from the local guitar store and some pickups from Ebay (Gibson 490R for the neck and a 498 for the bridge). Lessons learned from changing the pickups: Gibson pickups require a deeper pickup chamber – so I had to do some rough milling afterwards…

Since this was my first serious soldering experience it took me a while. Soldering was not the issue but I did do lot’s of mistakes (cable too short etc.) which took time.

My first real solder project!

Result of this update is that the guitar feels slightly lighter and the electronics now work like a charm. The sound is nicer – due to the new electronics. Although I’m not really happy with the neck pickup, it’s pretty warm, maybe I’ll replace it someday (just need to figure out which pickup to choose ;-)