I got to work on the body. I had to plane a lot from the thickness of the wood as it was far too heavy; I settled on 40mm thickness which is still more than a true Firebird but less than a Les Paul. I sanded all the countours and routed the pickup holes and neck pocket. At this point I realised my neck was located deeper into the body length than a real one, but this was somewhat necessitated by using a bolt-on neck, and in fact the guitar balanced nicely at that anyway. I didn't quite get the contour right for the imitation "through-neck", so I routed the edges for an inlay. Shame to paint such beautiful wood!
My neck was from a strat copy, but I needed a reversed headstock. After much thought I decided to achieve this by cutting a V in the headstock and turning it over; the front will be covered with a piece of scratchplate material which will give a similar look to the original. The back will be hidden by the paintwork! The mock-up also revealed that in my effort to replicate the flat, low fingerboard of the Gibson I had set the neck too low, and had to shim the neck out with a thin wooden wedge, as the bridge was flat to the deck even with a millimetre routed from under it! The neck was screwed and glued once the position was satisfactory.
The next bit took a little longer than anticipated - couldn't get it ready in time for NotWigan without rushing so Christmas got to intervene. After lots - and lots - and lots more sanding and smoothing, I put a coat of varnish on to see if the natural colour was viable. In hindsight that stage was a mistake, because it caused problems with the paintwork later. There were a few small but noticeable areas that needed a little filler, and the varnish accentuated the grain mismatch on the front that was hardly visible before. You can't tel in the photos above, but you can below - the lower half is lighter than the upper half.
So back to what I originally expected to do anyway. The black scratchplate suggested a white body, which will look good with my white Gretsch anyway, so I started with the Halford's aerosols - white primer, rub down,, more white primer, rub down, white topcoat, rub down, etc. I'm used to painting cars, and pretty good at it, but wood takes so much more paint to get flat, even when you think you've got it fairly smooth to begin with! I began with two cans of Vauxhall Glacier White, but that was too harsh and greyish, so finished with a further three cans of Ford Diamond White, same as the roof of my Riley Elf. Each coat got two days to harden before rubbing down, then finished it off with a thick coat of one-pack lacquer from my DeVilbiss spraygun. This combination has taken forever to harden - it had a full week before fitting the hardware and even then the back got marked with deep indentations in the soft paint. Even as I type a week later, with the guitar hanging near the boiler each night to bake the paint, it's still soft to the fingernail.
I refitted all the hardware, with new pots and knobs from Allparts. The original pickups are not great, being old Hondo single-coils-in-humbucker-cases, only I've uprated the magnets and added a second coil of uncertain origin to the bridge, which now gives me a number of combinations through the 4-way slide switch. It sounds fine, though the output is fairly low, and strung with the 9-42 George-L strings given as freebies from StringsDirect at NotWigan, plays nicely. There are still a few fret buzzes so I have some work to do to perfect things, but I'm pretty happy with the results. So much so that if I can fix the frets properly I may well treat it to some Seymour Duncans in the future!
Back of the headstock - this used to be the front!
Look at that neck joint detail!
The guitar finally got it's first public performance at UKMG Spring GI '06, where it featured as the "negative" (in colour!) alongside Holly's Thunderbird bass on "Bring Me To Life", and was played - and complimented - by the enormously talented Trev Ridney as a slide guitar in open Am on "Road to Hell".
STOP PRESS: A fire at my home destroyed the music room, severely damaging the guitar. But it will rise from the ashes, like a true Phoenix...
This is my attempt to build an interesting, exciting guitar on the cheap! (my wife doesn't think it's cheap, but really it is...)
The basis is the neck, the last original relic of my 70's Audition strat copy. That really was a terrible guitar, but mostly due to poor quality hardware; the neck itself is OK. Over the years I abused and modified it until I came to the conclusion it was never going to be good enough, so I bought another guitar (the black Hondo). The Hondo got a pickup upgrade and the Hondo pickups got doctored and dropped into the strat copy, where they began to sound passable... I started thinking!
I decided I'd like to build a Firebird copy to go alongside Holly's Thunderbird. I made up a template for the body and went to talk to the RM technology teacher, who sorted me out with a couple of old mahogany benchtops, which we laminated together then cut out the rough body shape.
Next I scoured Ebay and began collecting hardware; a set of machine heads and a stop tailpiece. The scratchplate and tunematic bridge were bought from Allparts and at last I had all I needed - though the fact I mistakenly ordered a black scratchplate has changed the entire plan!
I then did as much research on the Firebird as I could, and quickly realised I could not replicate the original, but I could certainly make a copy in the spirit of the guitar! Original Firebirds were fitted with banjo-style tuning pegs, but some transition models were fitted with Kluson tuners on a reverse strat-style headstock. This was black-faced and stepped slightly like the body. Every Firebird I have ever seen has a white scratchplate, so my black one will be pretty unique. I also have a 4-position slide switch instead of the three-position toggle, which suits my doctored pickups, so I will locate that below and between the pickups.