Heretick
Nunc Stans Soldier
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2021
- Messages
- 92
- Reaction score
- 274
I own a very ridiculous guitar. Let me explain.
When I was 16, I won a guitar off of the wall of a waterpark arcade. A Zebra-striped strat copy by the brand "Mahar". It was one of the worst guitars I've ever laid my hands on, as you could imagine. Spending god knows how long on a waterpark arcade's wall and enduring the extremes of humidity and moistness that brings had wreaked unspeakable levels of havoc upon a neck that was, to be fair, probably borderline trash in the first place (as an aside, there was also an acoustic guitar on the wall that I could've opted to get instead. Try to imagine how awful THAT thing probably was).
Once the novelty wore off and I was left with the reality that this guitar-shaped object was a basically unplayable (in tune, at least) pile of junk, it sort of just languished unplayed as a trophy and a funny story I could tell.
Well, I also love modifying guitars, and this guitar became my ground-zero for my highly-unskilled first attempts at... nearly everything that has to do with modifying a guitar, honestly. There were some really quite incredible mistakes along the way. You'll see. The guitar has also kept evolving over the years, so some of the newer modifications are significantly more well executed. But without further ado, on to the the pictures.
Here we have the guitar as it exists now. S-S (with a dummy pickup in the middle). Bridge pickup is a Tele pickup out of an Indio Tele clone, neck pickup is an extremely inexpensive Alnico 5 piece from STRATosphere. My first (and only) attempt at relicing a guitar, mainly because I just thought this thing would be really fun to just beat the shit out of. New neck, of course. We'll... we'll get to that.
Hahahahaha, yeah... One of the most rookie mistakes possible; when drilling the holes on the heel, I blew clean through to the fretboard and through the frets! Incredible. And yet, the frets remain fully playable. I got VERY lucky.
The bridge is off an old Mexican-made Squier from the 90s. Let's talk more about the neck for a moment: The neck is a cheap Chinese strat neck from a time when the market wasn't flooded with options like it is now. Virtually the only game in town at the time was a company called Kmise. Decent necks, but they had a glaring issue: the heels weren't shaped correctly and as such don't sit fully all the way into the pocket. This was ultimately a known issue with Kmise necks, and I'm not sure you can really get them anymore. The saddles are adjusted so far out because that's the only way that it will intonate properly. And... yeah, it actually manages to intonate pretty much spot on with the bridge like this. Again, I got extremely lucky. Also you definitely cannot use this thing as a vibrato lmao. Full lock-down.
I flipped the boat jack inside-out, because why not, I guess?
A Gibson-style switch tip jammed onto a blade switch. Because, again, why the hell not?
This guitar ended up being the sort of quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept of my favorite way to scallop a fretboard. It's a light/medium scallop that starts only under the three treble strings from the 5th fret on, and then the full fret from the 12th to the 22nd. I love it.
A closeup on some of the "relicing". You can also see that the body is made from multiple sandwich laminates of plywood. It's hilarious.
Absolutely incredible tuner install job. Squier tuners with the two pegs in the back that I really didn't have a good template for, so I just sorta.... winged it. The results are... as you would expect out of young, inexperienced me. Well, it fits the vibe, at least...
So, despite everything I just showed you, despite the fact that the guitar is constructed out of spare parts and actual trash, this guitar absolutely FUCKS. It sounds incredible, it plays like butter, and is just funny as hell. I have no goddamn idea how I blindly lucked my way into this thing turning out as shockingly excellent as it did, but holy shit. It's so fun. And so stupidly cool.
Seriously. Shit audio quality and it's just some random improv shred, but it gets the point across.
Let me know all the terrible things you think about this guitar! And if you have any experience with (or even own!) a particularly stupid guitar yourself, I'd love to hear about it!
When I was 16, I won a guitar off of the wall of a waterpark arcade. A Zebra-striped strat copy by the brand "Mahar". It was one of the worst guitars I've ever laid my hands on, as you could imagine. Spending god knows how long on a waterpark arcade's wall and enduring the extremes of humidity and moistness that brings had wreaked unspeakable levels of havoc upon a neck that was, to be fair, probably borderline trash in the first place (as an aside, there was also an acoustic guitar on the wall that I could've opted to get instead. Try to imagine how awful THAT thing probably was).
Once the novelty wore off and I was left with the reality that this guitar-shaped object was a basically unplayable (in tune, at least) pile of junk, it sort of just languished unplayed as a trophy and a funny story I could tell.
Well, I also love modifying guitars, and this guitar became my ground-zero for my highly-unskilled first attempts at... nearly everything that has to do with modifying a guitar, honestly. There were some really quite incredible mistakes along the way. You'll see. The guitar has also kept evolving over the years, so some of the newer modifications are significantly more well executed. But without further ado, on to the the pictures.
Here we have the guitar as it exists now. S-S (with a dummy pickup in the middle). Bridge pickup is a Tele pickup out of an Indio Tele clone, neck pickup is an extremely inexpensive Alnico 5 piece from STRATosphere. My first (and only) attempt at relicing a guitar, mainly because I just thought this thing would be really fun to just beat the shit out of. New neck, of course. We'll... we'll get to that.
Hahahahaha, yeah... One of the most rookie mistakes possible; when drilling the holes on the heel, I blew clean through to the fretboard and through the frets! Incredible. And yet, the frets remain fully playable. I got VERY lucky.
The bridge is off an old Mexican-made Squier from the 90s. Let's talk more about the neck for a moment: The neck is a cheap Chinese strat neck from a time when the market wasn't flooded with options like it is now. Virtually the only game in town at the time was a company called Kmise. Decent necks, but they had a glaring issue: the heels weren't shaped correctly and as such don't sit fully all the way into the pocket. This was ultimately a known issue with Kmise necks, and I'm not sure you can really get them anymore. The saddles are adjusted so far out because that's the only way that it will intonate properly. And... yeah, it actually manages to intonate pretty much spot on with the bridge like this. Again, I got extremely lucky. Also you definitely cannot use this thing as a vibrato lmao. Full lock-down.
I flipped the boat jack inside-out, because why not, I guess?
A Gibson-style switch tip jammed onto a blade switch. Because, again, why the hell not?
This guitar ended up being the sort of quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept of my favorite way to scallop a fretboard. It's a light/medium scallop that starts only under the three treble strings from the 5th fret on, and then the full fret from the 12th to the 22nd. I love it.
A closeup on some of the "relicing". You can also see that the body is made from multiple sandwich laminates of plywood. It's hilarious.
Absolutely incredible tuner install job. Squier tuners with the two pegs in the back that I really didn't have a good template for, so I just sorta.... winged it. The results are... as you would expect out of young, inexperienced me. Well, it fits the vibe, at least...
So, despite everything I just showed you, despite the fact that the guitar is constructed out of spare parts and actual trash, this guitar absolutely FUCKS. It sounds incredible, it plays like butter, and is just funny as hell. I have no goddamn idea how I blindly lucked my way into this thing turning out as shockingly excellent as it did, but holy shit. It's so fun. And so stupidly cool.
Seriously. Shit audio quality and it's just some random improv shred, but it gets the point across.
Let me know all the terrible things you think about this guitar! And if you have any experience with (or even own!) a particularly stupid guitar yourself, I'd love to hear about it!
