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Special Edition Build Off: Rat Deco

Specs:
29" Scale
GFS buy out Maple/Rosewood neck
GFS buy out Paulownia body
GFS Tela Gold Foils
GFS Squire 51 bridge
MGB guitar tuners

This is a build thats been on my bench for a little while. It started out as a pile of beat up clearance and buyout parts that I wasn't sure what I was going to do with but I knew I could do something fun with them. Initially I planned on doing a full or medium scale 4 or 6 string, but things changed as I went along.
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While painting some tools I left some vent covers that I bought as masks on the board and the overspray inspired some experimentation. I settled on the one I liked better but it wouldn't cover the whole thing so centered it on the back and cocked it a little to get a forearm stripe on the front.
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Then I had to do something with the neck. The top two tuner holes were too damaged so I cut it straight at the edge. At this point I had in mind to make it a 4 string using a take off bridge. I then masked a line to match the body and painted the headstock.

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For the back of the neck I like the look of a skunk stripe so I masked one off sprayed the back of the head and misted the shaft to match the spots on the body that got under the mask.
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Let those dry a couple days then hit then with clear coat along with the knobs.
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Let that dry another couple days and brought it in for a mock up. I thought about drilling out the pickup mounting holes and direct mounting them but then I found a gold neck pickup ring in my parts drawer and I had to figure out how I was going to make the bridge cover. My solution was to cut the bridge part off a tele bridge and just use the pickup plate.
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After some consideration I decided I would make it a 6 string so I drilled two more holes. Decided on a scale length and tuning and cut the slots. I tried something different and this is also the first time I've cut slots on a tapered board so they're a little crooked but it's consistent so it should be fine. I used calipers to make a mark on either side of the board and connected lines. It worked pretty well but i think I'll stick to fret find templates.
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Finally got around to unpacking my luthiery stuff from a move and decided to start by finishing this one up.

Started by trimming and leveling the frets, mounting the neck and got most of it mounted and wired up.
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I ran into an issue with the bridge because the height adjustment screws were too short. My local ACE didn't have longer set screws or enough of the m3x20 socket head machine screws so went with what they had, I might replace them later but they're kind of growing on me.
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I found a locking nut in my misc. parts bin, and couldn't find my short nut stock, so I decided to use that with the zero fret.

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I also decided I was tired of moving a clip on tuner between instruments so I installed a stealth Diaddario Clip-less micro tuner on the back of the headstock.

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Then I just had to string it up, set it up, and tune it up. I had to drill out the tuner and bridge holes on the C and G string, swap to shorter intonation screws on the C&G, and longer ones on the E&B. It's tuned CGDAEB with a mix of Dunlop super bright stainless and Kalium hybrids because Kallium's customer service sucks and sent me the wrong C and G strings, but Jason @FretNation got a pack of short scale Dunlops (and five other sets of singles for oddly tuned basses) to me quickly.
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It sounds great, the neck pickup is a little mushy but warms up chords on the plain steel strings, and the bridge is nicely focused and bright and sounds great with a bunch of drive. The middle position is a little phasey I probably won't use it often but it's still usable.

I have inlay stickers and another control plate and humbucker conversion ring for the bridge pickup coming on a slow boat from china but until then it sounds and plays great.
 
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