DIY Electric Guitar

Status: complete

I have owned 3 guitars all of which cost less than 200€ or have gotten for free, so i decided to buy a real guitar for once. I have always wanted a classic Les Paul model, but to get a decent one you have to pay at least 400€ which I wasn’t interested in. After looking around I instead found this DIY guitar kit at thomann for 89€ I instantly knew that this was what i wanted to do, so I bought it and after a few weeks it arrived due to being out of stock.

I knew from the start that i either wanted it to be either white with black details or have a dark wood finish, and since the color of the mic and knobs that was included was better suited for a dark wood finish that’s what i went for. Out of the box the guitar had a transparent coating, so the first thing i did was to sand that down. I started with sand paper 80 which was too course, but then finished the job with 120 and 180 which was a much better choice since i wanted a smooth finish. After that I painted a few coats on both the neck and body until it achieved the color that i wanted.

When this was done i glued and screwed in the neck into the body which was very easy. To assemble the electrical components themselves like the mic, pots and jack was very simple and it didn’t even require any soldering which was a surprise to me. The manual was very bad at describing how to wire it all together, but I still managed to get it working after a few tries. Now i only had to put on the strings and it should be ready to go! (I thought)

Lastly i spent about 4 hours tweaking the bridge height and tighten/loosen the truss rod in the neck to get the strings to be close to the fretboard without having the lower strings burring. I ended up having the strings at a slightly higher above the fretboard than I would have wanted, but that’s alright.

In the end the project was much more successful that i had expected and the guitar is a joy to play on. I really recommend building a DIY guitar kit both due to the fact that it’s very cheap and it’s a fun project that doesn’t take that long. In the end i think i spent approximately 15 hours on this project which isn’t that much actually.