Stardate: Saturday, November 28th 2009.  11:00 A.M.

That's when I received my first project guitar.  No idea where it came from, but my boss stripped the parts off of it that he wanted to keep around for spares, and I said "hey, can I take that?".

So there it is.  Abilene is the brand.  Apparently (thanks to Google) they were a small subline for Samick.  Obviously this is a Strat-copy, so I'm excited to work on it, because getting practice in on this guitar will mean that working on my Strat will be easier.

I should also note at this point, that I have NEVER DONE ANY OF MY OWN GUITAR REPAIR!  This is a shame really, because I don't trust anyone else to work on my guitars, so I know that eventually they will all become ratty and I'll have to get them fixed up.  So that's another reason why I'm excited to have this thing I can tinker with.

So the first thing I did (as you can see in the picture) is take everything else off of it and learn as much as I could about the innards.  Frankly, the electronics of a Strat are a lot simpler than I expected.  I know next to nothing about electronical devices, but I understood just about everything when I was asking questions about it at work.

The next step was to get the nut off of the neck because it was pretty messed up.  So we tried to knock it out.

No dice.

So we tried to break a piece off so we could work the rest out.  But didn't go along so well.  After about 15 minutes of knocking against the thing, we were able to break it lose and fly off the neck.  Unfortunately, it took a little bit of the wood on the headstock with it.  It looked like whoever had this last put a new nut in there with superglue, thusly making it impossible to remove.

So first order of business in this repair effort is to glue that little bit of wood back on, and then after that's dried, glue a new nut in.

After that, I'll probably buy some new saddles for the bridge and put those on, and try to get it to play halfway decent.  After that, I'll rewire the pickups and output jack and see if it works.

Wish me luck!  If you want to follow just these posts, I've given you a couple options.  Just click on either of the links under the "Project Guitar" heading to your right if you want to view just the posts about the project or subscribe to the RSS Feed.

- Mike