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00:00It took me over four months to build this 1959 Les Paul guitar. If you haven't seen
00:06any of the videos, I put a link to the playlist in the description below. You
00:10can go check it out and get yourself up to speed. Now that all the woodwork is
00:14completed, I'm ready to dust this guitar off and send it off to be painted. One
00:20last thing I gotta do before I send it off to paint.
00:24So for the paint, I brought the guitar to my buddy Martin. He and his dad run Bravo's
00:34custom guitars. These guys do everything from pleat refins to repairs. They'll
00:40spray lacquer finishes, poly finishes, pretty much any finish you want. Any
00:44color, vintage colors, color matches, distressed finishes, anything you can
00:49think of. So if you're in the LA area and you want to go check them out, I'll leave
00:52a link in the description below. I got a few shots of them prepping this guitar,
00:57getting it ready to paint. Because this is a 1959 spec guitar, of course we're gonna
01:02do a sunburst. The owner chose a cherry sunburst in an aged lacquer, but not
01:08distressed. So it's not as shiny, it's not a highly buffed lacquer, but it's got a
01:12nice aged patina to it. You can see how meticulous they are with their approach to
01:17painting these guitars. They've been doing this a long time, they know exactly what
01:21they're doing. And the results show.
01:24So now that the guitar is painted and it looks beautiful, I'm ready to put this
01:29all together. So the first thing I want to do is get the electronics placed and
01:34then I'll start to do the setup as far as the placement of the bridge and the
01:39tailpiece. Get the tuners installed and then do all the final details. I got the
01:44switch installed and I put in the pots and this whole configuration and I've got the tuners
01:52here. These are Kluson either knockoffs or I think they're knockoffs. He's got these Seymour
01:59Duncan's slash model. I believe these are Alvinco 2's and so these are gonna go in the guitar.
02:06And so right now I'm just getting set up to do the tuners and I ran some of the wiring. I didn't
02:14connect anything yet and I still have to do the setup. You can see I have just the tailpiece
02:20bolts installed. So let's go ahead and get the tuners on here and then we'll start getting the
02:28pickups and also the position of the bridge. I'll show you how I do that. So let's get rolling.
02:36Now I'm getting ready to do these tuners. I know there's a couple of schools of thought on the
02:41placement of these tuners. Sometimes people like to have them be parallel to the like have this be
02:49perpendicular to the neck so they're perfectly straight. Something about like that. I'm not sure
02:56if that's how I want to do these or not. Another school of thought on this is to line them up this
03:04way which kind of lines up these little radiuses here and gets them to sit about like that with each
03:12other which by putting a straight edge here you get that effect. So I guess I have the option. I'm not
03:21sure exactly how the vintage ones were done but I think I'm going to do it this way. Leave it in the
03:28comments what your thoughts are but this is how I'm doing it on this installation. I've done them
03:33both ways. The way to do it this way you line them up with a straight edge underneath them and now each
03:39one is going to be perpendicular to the neck but they line up they kind of skew a little bit this way.
03:47I don't know I'm rambling and I'm probably getting too anal. I'm just going to line them up
03:51the way I normally do it like this and I think that'll be fine.
04:04Yeah there's one side now I'll do the other. There now both sides are done and
04:10from the front everything looks great.
04:18Okay so now with both high and low E strings in place what I did was I centered these saddles
04:27so they have some adjustment back and forth got the intonation set
04:31actually the actions the actions not even you know set up yet the nuts not set nothing said I'm
04:39just trying to get the placement of the bridge and you don't want this to be perfectly parallel
04:44to the tailpiece so right now it does have a bit of an offset
04:49it's 844 between those two points and on the treble side it's about 911 so it's got a little bit of
05:05angle this way you know I'm exaggerating but this way which is correct
05:10and I have room for adjustment on all the saddles so I think this is going to be the placement of it I
05:18just have a piece of felt underneath this bridge here so it doesn't damage the body I'm going to
05:26file the placement exactly where this string is going to get placed but right here is where I want
05:32to drill my posts now I just spotted the holes because I got to drill them different diameters for the threads
05:43because the posts are going to be this thread here so I want that to fit in there really nicely
05:51and this obviously is way too big
05:54and now to screw them in take the two thumbwheels lock them together real tight it grabs onto the
06:07thread and you use that to get these guys screwed into the right place one thing I am going to do
06:15I'll put a little bit of wax on these threads just helps it go in a little bit easier about a half inch
06:22from the top of the thread to the top of the body seems to be a good starting point
06:33yeah that fits perfect nice and tight
06:42now all the electronics came off another guitar and so this harness is pre-wired I have to finagle it
06:49through the body because it's all put together and so that was a little bit challenging
06:58okay so now I have the pickups wired in from the pickup it's going to the outer lug from the switch
07:05it's going to the middle lug so all these wires are feeding through the guitar coming out here and I have
07:12them labeled blue is the bridge this is going to be my neck that's going to be the ground wire
07:21and then this one here is going to the jack the way to wire this switch you can see if you look at the
07:28switch you got these little terminals and as I flip the switch you can see it opens that one up
07:36and only the this side is connected in the middle they're both connected and flipping it this way
07:47this side here is connected as far as the terminals you got your um this gets mounted in the guitar like
07:54this so this side over here is going to be your ground I'm sorry this one is your ground this goes out to
08:02the jack and then these two are your two pickups
08:14and that's pretty much wired in now let's double check that we get a signal
08:32now I got the pickups wired in now I'm getting ready to screw down these pickup rings
08:45I'm just splitting hairs with the spacing on these pickups they line up good with the neck
08:50pickup but on the bridge they're a little bit narrow it's taking my time getting it lined up
08:55I'm gonna start with one hole seems to be just about right right there
09:07let me do the other four then the pickups will be mounted and then I think I just need to finish the
09:13nut which I started and then I need to mount everything else like the truss rod cover get the
09:20strap buttons and the pickups that should take care of everything okay the way I'm doing this I don't
09:26have the bridge quite set yet so I'm going off the first fret I push down on the third fret here
09:36and then I check the spacing underneath this string to make sure it's just a slight little clearance but I'm
09:44going to leave it a little bit high for now and I'm going to finish the top of the nut because these
09:53strings are way too deep right now so I'm going to finish the top of the nut but I'm going to set the
09:58bridge then I'm going to come back and fine tune this to get these perfect
10:02on a less pull you want to follow the line of the string with your file
10:23now one other thing before you check this height you got to make sure the string is up to pitch
10:28because if it's too low it could be too much slack in there and I'll give you a false reading okay
10:34because this is a new bridge it does not have the little grooves see how this bridge and the saddle
10:40it's got the little grooves already filed in it so this does not have those filed so I'm going to set
10:48the outside strings to be where they need to go and then I'm going to use a string spacing rule to get the
10:56spacing between these strings then I'm going to use a just a pencil to mark it off I'm going to file
11:02each one individually one by one okay that looks
11:11that looks about right to me so one by one I'm going to go ahead and file the same radius
11:17in each one of these saddles just a little bit just to hold the string in place
11:26so far the intonation has been perfect it's pretty set pretty close
11:31okay now intonation set bridge is slotted the nut is slotted let me get the action set because it feels a little low to me
11:54okay the nut slots are a little deep right now so I'm going to take some material off the top of the nut
12:03and then get this all polished up what I do is the lower three strings just below the thickness of the
12:11string so the width of this slot you want to basically make the same a little bit lower
12:18then the width of the slot is going to be the depth and I just do it by eye and then these three strings
12:27I get them really low about the thickness of the string so whatever the the depth the whatever
12:34the width of this slot is that's how deep I make the slot I'll measure the radius on the top
12:41to be 12 inches but as far as the depth I just do it by eye
12:48go with a pretty coarse file at first
12:55just to make quick work of this you don't want to sit here for a month of sundays filing your nut
13:01okay now that seems like a good depth to me radius is 12 inches so I'm going to take three grits of
13:16sandpaper before I polish it I'm going to do 400 600 800 you can go to a thousand or 1200 and then polish
13:24it but I'm going to stop at 800 that should be good enough and I also eased the back radius back here
13:31so
14:01And with that, I will say this guitar needs strap buttons, but other than that, it's done.
14:12Let's see how it plays.
14:31Let's see how it plays.
15:01So if anybody out there wants their 59 industrial Les Paul built, hit me up.
15:16I'll gladly make you one.
15:18Don't count on it being done anytime soon, though.
15:20Might take me a while.
15:22And don't forget to like, share, and subscribe.
15:24See you in the next one.
15:31See you in the next one.
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