Wednesday, July 16, 2014

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.

2 comments:

  1. In case you haven't hopped onto Amy's FB repost of this, you might consider using a StewMac.com Free-Way Pickup Switch. Low profile, lots of wiring options. If you had a larger pickup cavity, I would have suggested a REDActive system from GFS, mostly because the humbuckers look like the traditional Steinberger's EMG-Hz's.

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  2. Hi there.
    Bit of a long shot but ..
    Do you still have the P series body ?

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