The Plastiaxe I

The Plastiaxe I is based upon the 3D printed design at:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1068688

For the most part, it'll be a direct copy with a couple of minor adjustments.

The single coils will be salvaged from my old Samick and fitted with custom 3D printed covers in black, and some black knobs.

I'll fill the cavity under the bridge as I'll use a chrome donor hardtail from the Jurassicaster kit instead of a tremolo. I really don't see PLA lasting under a whole lot of tension, so adding to it with a tremolo seems to be pushing ones luck. 

I'll keep the chrome tuners from the same build as well. 

There's apparently around 100 hours print time involved with this. My printer is reporting about 1.5 days just for the lower quarter, so that makes some sense. I've put a logo on that quarter so I'll need to move the output jack from where most people have put it. I'll likely make a side mount and glue it in and use some black wiring to stop it standing out. 

I don't yet have a neck. I'll find one at some point. Big jobs never seem to quite turn out right when I 3D print, so I expect this will be a long, drawn out process. Then I'll need to sand this complex pattern on material that isn't all that great for sanding, attempt to paint it, glue it together section by section and hope the whole thing comes out stupidly strong. There are some suggestions on best adhesives to use. That'll be on my list of future things to get.

This build really is just a novelty, so my expectations are pretty low. If it comes out reasonably playable, I'll be pretty surprised.

ST-Custom: The Jurassicaster

The Jurassicaster is based upon an ST-1 Custom kit from PitBull Guitars.

Basswood body with Maple neck and a Rosewood fretboard.

The plan:

This is a base model guitar so my expectations aren't high. Quite simply, this guitar will not look like this for long:

- It'll be black, the pickguard will be black and the whole thing will be coated in polyurethane.

- I've going to coat it in Jurassic Park/World stickers - most of which are Wish, and a couple of vinyls from eBay. I don't want to have too much layering, but I do want to coat the body fairly well. 

Changes from the kit:

- Chrome bridge - replacing that with a Babicz hard tail. That cost about what the whole kit did.

- Chrome tuners - replacing those with some black Grovers. 

- The existing pickguard will be used but I'll spray it black before I coat it. 

I've 3D printed and painted some covers to fit over the humbuckers for the time being, and printed some black Fender style knobs. Eventually I'll toss these humbuckers out and use the black ones from my Epiphone Les Paul when I'm ready to replace those (i.e. when I stop spending too much on building guitars to fund decent pickups). 

I'm more focussed on making this guitar playable and having quality mechanical bits - like the tuners and bridge given these affect a lot of how the guitar performs. There's little value after all investing hours upon hours in preparing the guitar, sorting the neck out, adjusting the string heights and intonating it if the damned thing won't stay in tune or intonate properly. 

This won't wind up being something that everyone will like. At the end of the day, it's a chunk of basswood that will be covered in stickers. As much as anything, it's a test for me to try my hand at clear coating and polishing. 

I'm not going to turn a $180 kit guitar with $200 worth of name brand components into a $2000 guitar. If I can get it to a quality that I'd happily pay $500 for, then I've probably achieved a result. If I can make it better, then that's awesome.

Currently it's in transit, and the bits for it are behind it, so it might be a week or two before this one gets off the ground.

TR-IV The Thunderaptor - Part 1

The Thunderaptor is a Thunderbird style kit from PitBull Guitars. 

Basswood body with a maple neck and rosewood fretboard.

Current status: Waiting for stain to dry.

The plans:

Initially I was going to burst this Karijini red, but I've decided against it. This stain was a bit creepy - it has a really earthy feel yet felt like I was covering the guitar in blood. 

It's disturbing. It needs to be a bit freaky. 

What I'm changing from the kit:

- White pickguard? No thanks. No pickguard. 

- Machine tuners. I ordered the Grover upgrade but they only had gold. No drama, I'll sell them for more than they cost, and use that to recover the cost of the black Gotoh minis I've brought.

- Chrome knobs. Nope. A set of black Gotoh Tele-style domes thanks.

- Bridge. I've ordered a black Babicz FCH 3 point bridge to go in place of the cheap chrome Chinese bridge. 

What I might change at some stage:

- The pickups. Maybe. I'll see what these are like. Between the kit, the tuners and the bridge that cost as much as the entire guitar kit, I'm a long way into something that is currently two chunks of timber. 

Prep work:

After hours of sanding I hit this with some stain, and discovered maybe I needed to do more sanding. There is a weird mark between the pickups that the stain is not quite taking to. A resand over that section didn't help. It looks like a good spot for a decal anyway. 

Hopefully by tomorrow night it should be ready for an intensifying coat.

Introduction

G'day. The name's Dave.

I figure I should explain a few things so what I'm doing makes some sense to you. 

First and foremost, I'm an IT guy. I've loved computers my entire life, despite never having one until I was 12 years old. We didn't have computers for gaming, though I did have some when we got a PC. 

It wasn't that long after getting a PC and being a teenager in a small bush town with no nothing better to do that I started hearing the hype about Jurassic Park. I put a lot of time into Jurassic things. I was drawing my own maps of Isla Nublar and I wrote my own dinosaur database.

I'll point out at this point we didn't have connectivity to BBSes or the like. Occasionally I'd get a box of floppies of things from a relative that might have been of interest and that was about it. 

It was also about this time that I started playing bass guitar. By no means my first instrument. I'd been listening to bands like AC/DC and Guns N' Roses (much to my parents disgust) for a couple of years already. 

Long haired metal head meets computer nerd all wrapped up in a tall, skinny, bespectacled frame. Great fit in a small town.. huh? I never fit in from the day I got there, so clearly I wasn't one to care much what others thought. 

The movie came out, computers were cool, dinosaurs were interesting, Ariana Richards was cool, UNIX was a thing I needed in my life. 

Fast forward to the mid 90s and a friend had access to the Internet. My first interest was finding out what was going on with Ariana Richards. There's a long story spanning the best part of 20 years involving me handling a lot of online stuff for Ariana, but that's really another story for another place and time. Any long term fans have probably already worked out who I actually am.

I went off to University briefly and discovered Linux. That was 1998. By 1999 I was using FreeBSD - a more UNIX like variant of well.. BSD UNIX. Today, I'm a system administrator and I handle mostly Linux. At home there's plenty of FreeBSD.

Over the past 20 odd years I've run heaps of websites and servers running these operating systems. My PCs mainly run Linux. I'm past being a fanboy and have progressed to the "right tool for the job" mentality. 

Anyway, if you're here for guitars, that's all bloody boring nerd stuff, but suffice to say that Jurassic Park sew some seeds that have set the course of my life, so it has importance to me. And besides, it's cool.

Recently I decided to start building guitars from kits, and doing it properly. 

This come about funnily enough because I wanted to refurbish an old Samick Stratocaster copy with some mungy frets and crap electronics. 

I found a Squier pickguard loaded with original pickups and fresh electronics and transplanted it.. after reshaping the guard. The old white was replaced with nice new black. The garbage old machine heads were removed and new Gotohs ordered. 

I started doing research on how to fix the fretboard up, and ordered some tools. 

Then I looked at a kit bass - a Thunderbird clone. Something I really wanted to make my own.  I hadn't even received it when my second kit was ordered. My second kit was still in transit when I started on a 3D printed guitar....