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Guitar Project – Part 1

posted September 2nd, 2012 in Guitar

Back in February, somebody at work was giving away a few project guitars that they had gotten at some point and had since given up on ever actually working on. I managed to win the race to claim one of them, although I don’t know how much of a race was involved because the description of “hot pink” may have put some people off. It turned out to be an Ibanez Studio, which the Wikimedia Commons suggests was built between 1978 and 1982. It came with a pair of humbuckers, but it seems that one of the previous owners decided against the neck pickup and filled in the cavity with something. I guess I’ll have to decide whether I want to get it routed back out or just leave it as a one-pickup guitar. But first, there’s the matter of getting it to a state that I can work on it.

First, it was originally covered in stickers. I took off the strings, and the tailpiece and, at the suggestion of a guy from Home Depot, used Mötsenböcker’s Lift Off to remove the stickers. It kind of worked, although I’m not sure how much difference the sticker removal stuff did versus just soaking them in water — I still had to scrape/chisel the stickers off.

Once that was done, I had two more things to remove. First, the bridge was very much stuck in place, courtesy a pair of screws holding it in place that basically no longer had a slot for a screwdriver. What was there got chewed up pretty quickly by trying to turn them; it seemed to be pretty soft metal. I actually don’t remember at this point how I got them out, but it may have involved hammering a flathead screwdriver into them just enough to get the screwdriver to grab. You know, take advantage of the fact the metal was soft and getting eaten up by the screwdriver anyway.

Second, I had to remove all of the electronics. This was basically where the project stalled because I am inexplicably terrified of using a soldering iron. After a few months, I asked around either for suggestions or at the very least a pep talk that I could successfully desolder the electronics without burning myself/burning the apartment down. That was when some helpful people on the luthiery subreddit pointed out that for the most part I was going to want to replace the electronics anyway (even if I didn’t replace the pickup, which I probably will), so I could at least postpone the hassle of soldering by just clipping the old wires. Sounds like a winner to me! The pickup end of the wire coming from the pickup is stuck somewhere in the case, so I had to be careful to snip it tight against the original solder, leaving as much of the original wire as possible. The rest of it was less important but I still tried to cut everything tight.

There’s still one random wire that I have no idea where it’s connected on the other end; I’m guessing it’s a spare wire from the electronics that are no longer there. But now I have a hot pink guitar body sans stickers and electronics that I can spend the next x amount of time sanding down. (Because of course I’m going to sand it all down by hand, while trying not to get pink paint dust all over everything in my apartment in the process.)