GUITAR KITS

Just about any guitarist who's worth his weight in Lycra has at least one project guitar - you know, a cardboard box filled with old tuning gears, a stock pickup that was left-over after you replaced it with a Duncan, an old body from a Strat clone that somebody painted black with shoe polish, and a dream of one day putting them all together.

Now, for those of you with a do-it-your-self tendency and time on your hands, Carvin sells the Bolt-On Guitar Kit, a Strat-style electric guitar. The kit contains an unfinished body and neck, pre-wired pickguard (available with three single-coil pickups or a humbucker and two single-coil pickups), tuners, jack plate, bridge (either a hard tail or a Carvin/Wilkinson tremolo unit), end pins, and all the other hardware to complete the guitar, including strings. The kit also comes with comprehensive and complete instructions for the assembly of the guitar.

The Set-up

The first thing I noticed when I opened the box was the beautiful grain of the alder body. The instructions wisely state that a tung oil finish is recommended for the body for its ease of application and the preservation of the natural beauty of the wood. Good enough for me, so off l went to the hardware store for tung oil, sandpaper, steel wool, a one-inch paint brush, and latex gloves, all of which added I another 30 bucks to the instrument.

The finishing process doesn't really take all I that much time. First you sand the body smooth. The flat surfaces of the body appeared to be machine-sanded at the factory, so most of the hand sanding seems to concentrate on the edges. After the body is dusted off, I use a sticky tack cloth, and tung oil is applied in the cavities with the one-inch paintbrush. Then tung oil is applied to the rest of the body. When the tung oil is first applied, the grain of the wood really comes out. Carvin recommends using four coats of tung oil finish. The finishing process doesn't really take all that much time, hour-wise, but you have to allow six hours between coats for the oil to dry.

The finish is also applied to the maple neck. Maple has a much more subtle grain than aIder, so the highlights in finishing are less drastic, but the tung oil finish provides a satiny feel that is preferred by many guitarists over a traditional lacquer finish. Taking care not to tung oil the ebony fingerboard, the neck also takes four coats of finish.

Now I'll be the first to admit I have zero aptitude in wood finishing. In fact, I'm all thumbs. But the nature of tung oil is very forgiving. flaws can be sanded out, and nobody notices the difference. The end result for me, hack that I am, was a beautiful amber-hued body that caught the attention of my bandmates.

After the body and neck were finished, the rest of the assembly required less than two hours to finish. All of the holes for the hardware were pre-drilled and everything lined up perfectly. The tuning keys, strap buttons and spring claw (for the Carvin/Wilkinson tremolo) went on easily and effortlessly. The shielding for the control cavity was a little tricky due to the nature of the copper foil tape. The main trick is having the pre-shaped bottom piece line up properly so that 1/8-inch overlaps the sides, and lining up the side strip so that it's parallel with the bottom of the cavity and leaves a 1/8 inch lip on the top (to contact the shielding on the pickguard to totally encase the control electronics) This really wasn't too much of a challenge, but it did require a few restarts. The neck fit tightly to the pocket of the body. There was virtually no gap on either side of the neck. Carvin even pre-waxed the neck screws to lubricate them for insertion into the hard maple of the neck.

After all that is accomplished, the next step in the instructions has you wiring the jack plate to the pickguard and screwing them into the body. Fine, but that step was the only flaw in the instructions that I found, and here's why; they instruct you to screw the two threaded pivot posts into the threaded brass inserts, but the instructions never have you install the inserts into the body. After reading through the instructions again to be sure I didn't miss a step, I took the matter into my own hands, and pounded in the inserts with a hammer with the head wrapped in masking tape (what Carvin recommends for installing the string eyelets on its fixed bridge model) The masking tape prevents scratching the parts. [Note: Carvin now includes stud installation procedures in the kit instructions]

Once the inserts were in planes the tremolo was installed and the guitar was ready to be strung lap. Now the instrument was ready to be set up for action, intonation, pickup height, truss rod and tremolo action. One of the four pages in the instructions for the bolt-on is dedicated to adjusting the Carvin/Wilkinson tremolo. But the instructions are easy to read and understand, and include illustrations that make setting up the trem a snap. The pickups are Carvin AP-11 single coils that have 11(!) adjustable pole pieces - each one for each string and one in between each of those, which helps keep string volume consistent when bending. The neck has a two-way truss rod adjustment that didn't need tweaking on this instrument. Once the intonation is set (tools for adjustment of the tremolo and neck are provided with the kit), the guitar is ready to rock.