The Franken-Strat
If I could have my very own security blanket, this guitar would be it. I've said it before, and it pretty much holds true that this guitar goes with me wherever I go. It was the very first guitar I ever owned - I received it as a Christmas gift during the 7th grade - and it was also my very first full scale project that I undertook.
To tell the truth, the guitar that this used to be was not very good; it was a starter guitar, and it came with an amplifier that was of better quality than the instrument. I still played the hell out of that thing with my friends, and when the time came for me to get a new guitar (which I did 2 Christmases later), I completely took the old guitar apart, and stripped it down to the bare wood, paint job and all. From there, it became my own ongoing project - an outlet for me to practice my soldering, circuit design, and pretty much everything else.
Contents
Concept
This guitar started life as a lowly beginner's guitar, a part of the Behringer V-tone Guitar/Amp Kit. There wasn't much to the setup but, for a 13-year-old budding musician, it was perfect. After a few years of heavy use in our garage band, the obvious signs of wear began to show; the fretboard became dirty, the internal wiring began to come loose, and the pickups started to crap out. I considered taking it into the shop to get fixed up, but for a guitar that is probably worth no more than $50 it just wasn't worth it. I badly wanted to take it apart myself and try fixing it, but I still needed to play it every week in my band. The answer to my problems came 2 Christmases after I got my first guitar, when my parents got me a much nicer guitar. It wasn't long after when I began work on the old one.
The first thing I did was pop off the strings and open up the pickguard to get a look at the wiring inside. What I saw was a jumble of wires and components that made no more sense to me than did (what's a good analogy that I can use that would apply to my 15 year-old-self?)... girls. I began doing my research (not on girls) and eventually figured my way around the basic inner layout of an electric guitar. Once I felt comfortable enough, I gutted everything out from the inside. After removing the innards, I started taking off all of the hardware, like the bridge, neck, and jacks. Now I had the guitar down to just the body - but I wasn't done there. I decided that I had grown tired of the gloss-black finish of the guitar, and wanted to paint it something else while I had everything taken off of it. I didn't have a particular design in mind at the time, but I decided to go for it anyway, and I spend almost two days shaving and sanding off the finish until I had the guitar down to bare wood.
Somewhere during the brainstorming of what to do next with the guitar, I mulled over possible paint jobs, until I decided on the most fitting one. I decided that I would paint my guitar to match Eddie Van Halen's own Franken-Strat. I was really into Van Halen at the time, and read a lot about Eddie's guitar and how much he modified it and the stages it went through during his career. Figuring that this one would probably end up the same way, I thought that it was a perfect fit. Plus, I really liked the design.
Dat guitar. Not to mention those pants...
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