Sanding and polishing the neck is complete, everything turned out great, It was assembled and installed and checked for alignment and scale length (25.5"). The next step is to decide on the pickups, use these un branded (no logo) set or install an aftermarket replacement set.

The neck is installed and now its time to wire this bad boy up, but first here are the pictures of the finished neck. After the clear coat is finished its a good time to treat your fret board. You don't want to put the treatment on while the back of the neck is sanded because it will soak into that wood and you would have a heck of a time getting the clear coat to lay down.

The neck is assembled and installed to the correct length of 25.5". Notice how far into the body it had to go to reach the proper scale length. When we get to working on the body you will see why this has happened.     Next we will work on the wiring, we'll show you how to install a "bridge on" switch, and explain the tones that it creates. Here is our "bridge on" switch for this project, when you flip it up the bridge comes on no matter where you are on your pickup selector allowing you to run all three pickups at once or allow you the combination of bridge pickup and neck pickup together, neither setting is available in a stock 5-way switch setup.

  Sanding and polishing has begun on the Austin Floyd neck and it looks like it's going to turn out nice. The clear coat was pretty orange peeled (meaning it was not smooth and if you look at it in the right light the surface looks like an orange peel does.) so we started with 600 grit sand paper and wet sanded it down until it was smooth enough for the next step which will be 1200 grit wet.

The goal with wet sanding is to get all the shiny spots sanded which in turn should make it smooth.

 

This is what your looking for and trying to sand out without sanding through.

 

  We are just waiting for the clear coat on the neck to be ready to wet sand and polish and then we will continue the conversion. Wet sanding began on the 10th of April so check back soon for updates on this project.

  We have the Floyd Rose mounted and ready to string this baby up but I am upgrading the pickups now too and I have to wait for them to arrive. Hopefully this will be in the finished category.

 

   We are about a week away from fully assembling this custom clone build of a Hamer Dayton. All the parts are laid out in their various places ready to be assembled just waiting on some parts to come in to assemble it.

This is the 5th Daytona clone we have made and this one is going to get all the stuff that people look for when trying to pick a Hamer Daytona out of a crowd. Strap buttons, bridge, locking tuners, tremolo cavity cover and with the 22 fret neck with the skunk stripe it will look almost completely accurate.

 

This one will potentially carry some unique Homeland pickups if they pass the test and I hope they do because they are being reviewed on this months "Parts Review"  The ones being reviewed are the HL-148, HL-150, and HL-152.

 

  We bought a used guitar to walk you through the steps of cleaning and maintaining a used guitar and we are going to do some upgrades to it too. The full stories on the modifications will be on the Upgrades page and the cleaning and maintenance will be on the Restoration page.

This is a beautiful guitar, but it almost wasn't, it was shipped here with the headstock hanging out of the end of the box. Anything could have happened to it, it doesn't take much to break the headstock off especially when the strings still have full tension on them. Fortunately it made it here with only a bent tuner on the high E string. Luck. It would have a shame to destroy something so pretty and in such good shape before hand.

 

The Story on the Restoration page is broke up into 2 sections, section 1 covers tear down,  cleaning, and hardware cleaning.   Part 2 will cover wiring options, reassembly and setup. Part 2 should be posted some time in the middle of May.

  These articles assume that you are mechanically inclined and know how to disassemble various parts such as the tremolo system and harness removal. If you have any questions simply email me it is checked at least once a day.