Back to 1987 - My Steinberger copy

So now that I've almost completed the Junior. I've decided to turn my attention back to my Steinberger P-series copy, the guitar I am now calling 1987. First I drilled the holes for the neck ferrules using a 5/8" drill bit.

Then I attached the neck and the bridge and took 1987 for a test drive without any electronics. The guitar plays great. There is a fret buzz at the 6th fret of the G and D strings. But thats to be expected as I have not yet leveled the fretboard.

There's only one problem - the strings are sitting unusually high off of the guitar body. So I need to do a little more routing.

First I routed the neck pocket about 4 mm deeper. This put the fretboard about 1.5 mm above the body now.

Then I routed out the recessed bridge pocket an additional 2 mm. This will allow me to lower the height of the bridge saddles as well.

After I dealt with the string height, I moved on to routing the control cavity, and drilling holes for my volume and tone pots. I will still need to put in a pickup selector, I am just trying to find one small enough to fit comfortable between the volume and tone.

The guitar is now ready for final sanding and finishing. Here's my 1987 siting next to a Steinberger P-series body I purchased off of eBay a few years back.

Number 6 - the Jr has been completed... and then trouble

A couple weeks ago, I completed Number 6, the Jr. The guitar has two Seymour Duncan pickups, a JB and a Jazz. the pickups are both wired for series/parallel dpdt switches.

I rushed completion of the guitar so that I could bring it with us on a trip to visit family and friends. In the days following the completion I brought the guitar upstairs and hung it on the wall.

...and played it several times before starting our trip.

So the guitar traveled in a standard gig bag in the back of a car for about a 30 hour road trip over 10 days. While the heat was partially to blame, the reality was that I did not allow the shellac enough time to cure in a dry location. As a result the gig bag left some impressions on the finish.

...as did the wall hanger.

...dings also set in.

So, I now had to take a couple steps back. First, I turned on the dehumidifier in the basement and set it to 35%. Next, I sanded the marks up areas of the body with 400 grit wet (using mineral spirits not water) sand paper. Then I began french polishing again, just the affected areas. Now that this is done I will run through the sanding and final polishing steps in a couple of days. The shellac should be hard enough now to not mark up so easily.