My favorite place to find project guitars these days is Goodwill, mostly online. They only charge $8 shipping on anything they send out. This was a $60 find on Ebay. Yamaha EG303 form around 2000, with plenty of war scars. Mostly light scratches, but there was two small spots through to the wood and some road rash. I just sealed the bare wood with some thin AC glue.
It needed a good cleanup and the frets were worn down to 'needs replacement' depth. Previous owner played it a LOT and was fond of bending strings. So I pulled them, sanded the fretboard, and replaced the frets. Leveled, crowned and polished the new ones. I am getting better at fretwork after doing 5 guitars so far. I do admit that I will be redoing a couple as I did not do quite as good a job as I thought the first couple guitars. That's okay, live and learn.
There was two cracks where the base of the neck meets the body that I could not see a reason for. No damage in sight that would explain it. Maybe done at the factory, who knows. I used my nylon hammer to tap that area enough to open it at the bottom to be able to get some Titebond in under it. Also put some glue on both sides. I got good squeeze out at the bottom and the side cracks were still snug when I tapped it back into position and clamped it. Turned out solid in the end.
I had purchased a Fender Player Stratocaster loaded pickguard for $100 a few weeks ago. I took the pickups from that and installed them in the Yamaha pickguard. The original switch was a 3-way and you could only choose one pickup at a time, so I installed a 5-way switch instead. New CTS potentiometers and a new capacitor installed as well. The pickups initially sounded pretty blah until I reminded myself that I had not adjusted the height yet. Once I did that they perked right up. This Yamaha sounds a lot like the Fender Strat I picked up recently, which is not a surprise since they both have the same pickups and scale length.
The nut slots were very high, so this morning I took out the slot files and carefully lowered them. They could probably go a bit lower but I did not want to go too far and have to put a new nut in. I did my guitar lesson practice on it after I was done.
I will use the rest of the electronics from the Fender pickguard on the '70s Korean 'lawsuit era' Strat that arrived recently. It has some surprisingly strong original pickups and I think I will reuse them.
It needed a good cleanup and the frets were worn down to 'needs replacement' depth. Previous owner played it a LOT and was fond of bending strings. So I pulled them, sanded the fretboard, and replaced the frets. Leveled, crowned and polished the new ones. I am getting better at fretwork after doing 5 guitars so far. I do admit that I will be redoing a couple as I did not do quite as good a job as I thought the first couple guitars. That's okay, live and learn.
There was two cracks where the base of the neck meets the body that I could not see a reason for. No damage in sight that would explain it. Maybe done at the factory, who knows. I used my nylon hammer to tap that area enough to open it at the bottom to be able to get some Titebond in under it. Also put some glue on both sides. I got good squeeze out at the bottom and the side cracks were still snug when I tapped it back into position and clamped it. Turned out solid in the end.
I had purchased a Fender Player Stratocaster loaded pickguard for $100 a few weeks ago. I took the pickups from that and installed them in the Yamaha pickguard. The original switch was a 3-way and you could only choose one pickup at a time, so I installed a 5-way switch instead. New CTS potentiometers and a new capacitor installed as well. The pickups initially sounded pretty blah until I reminded myself that I had not adjusted the height yet. Once I did that they perked right up. This Yamaha sounds a lot like the Fender Strat I picked up recently, which is not a surprise since they both have the same pickups and scale length.
The nut slots were very high, so this morning I took out the slot files and carefully lowered them. They could probably go a bit lower but I did not want to go too far and have to put a new nut in. I did my guitar lesson practice on it after I was done.
I will use the rest of the electronics from the Fender pickguard on the '70s Korean 'lawsuit era' Strat that arrived recently. It has some surprisingly strong original pickups and I think I will reuse them.
