Step 7 - Body Coat & Pickguard Prep

It took a little longer than I figured to restain the body. A few areas didn't want to take the stain so I had to put on several coats & wait for them to dry. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't go with this stain, as it's difficult to work with in this application. It worked fine on my test piece, which was a scrap of raw pine I had laying around, but I think the sanding, grain filling, and ash combination made it difficult to get decent coverage. From what I've read and seen, an alcohol based stain or dye added to tung oil works great. No way to get the white I wanted that way as far as I know, although reranch.com carries a Fender blonde that would have been close.

Here's the first finish coat. I'm using Deft clear gloss since that's the only nitro product I could find around here and I've read a couple of build notes where it was used. I built the spray booth out of the box the Carvin case came in. Just doing my part to help the planet by recycling ;)


I also took the plastic cover off the black perloid pickguard. It took a bit of finagling around to get it all off, as I had to loosen or remove several screws. I hope I got the pickups back where they're supposed to be, height-wise. Guess I'll find out when I start playing.

While I had it apart, I put on some chrome knobs I had laying around. I'm not impressed with the stock plastic Fender-styled ones that were on it. Who needs numbers anyway? As I was looking at the circuitry on the back I noticed this capacitor between the volume and tone pots:



For those of you who aren't electricians, the capacitor is the green, chiclet looking component in the middle of the picture. You can also see the heavier wire soldered to the bottom of the volume pot on the right. That's the circuit ground, which ties all the components on the pickguard together. Notice that the cap leads are real long and almost touch the ground wire? Yikes! Shorting one leg of the cap to ground is a recipe for trouble. Granted, this circuit is going to live inside the guitar where it's unlikely to move around, but when I first looked at it, the cap leads were almost touching. Shipping and handling of the pickguard could easily do that.

I've read several posts on the Carvin BBS describing problems with the pots, either cutting out or being scratchy. I'm wondering if Carvin gets any returns where this is the problem. I'm not saying this is the cause, but it's not the best way to build things either. It would be easy to solve in assembly by using a piece of wire with insulation to solder the pot grounds together. I fixed mine with a small piece of black electrical tape between the leads.




Well, depending on how quickly the Deft dries and whether I get sidetracked, (I hear there's a football game on today!) I'm should be doing final assembly real soon.