Interests

When I'm not at work or busy with family I spend much of my free time with my guitars. During the 2020 pandemic shutdown I learned that there were guitar kits that could be used to build your own custom guitar. I have played off and on since I was in high school and have always had wanted to understand better how guitars actually worked and how I could upgrade my old 1983 Ibanez Roadstar II. Money is always tight when you have a bunch of kids (we have 5) and inflation is running wild so I talked my wife into letting me refinish and update some of the hardware on my old guitar before I tried building one from a kit. I knew from my research, predominantly YouTube, that there would be a bunch of tools I would need to buy and spending that kind of money wasn't really an option.

I decided that if I didn't have to buy some of those specialty tools like working on frets I would be better off. I did buy my first soldering iron though and did my first attempts with that where I dripped solder on the finish of my guitar. I ended up replacing the chrome hardware with black hardware and replaced the pickups and output jack. I attempted to stain my old guitar with a sunburst kind of pattern, but it came out terrible. a while later I end up pulling the guitar back apart and sanding the previous finish most of the way off. I ended up leaving some of the finish in the wood grain to deepen and really pull it out. I've come to understand that I really like to be able to see and feel the wood grain through the finish so I don't use wood grain filler on my guitars, even when using spray paint.