Guitar Of The Month – February, 2024
Congratulations goes out to Domenic Bonaminio for his guitar build, to earn him Guitar of the Month for February 2024.
Domenic used our TCK-15 kit as the basis to create his guitar.
“I decided to build a custom guitar that would be a blues/rock machine with the versatility to play different styles of music. The initial inspiration for my build was Billy Gibbons’ peeler telecaster. I didn’t want to replicate the guitar, but I love what that custom style stands for. I set out to build a hybrid guitar that allows you to ROCK classic tunes and with a flick of a switch and a pull of a knob turns into a tool that sings the blues.
When I set out to buy a kit, it was important to buy a kit that had great reviews for level frets. Searching led me to buy a Solo Guitars TCK-15 kit with alder wood body, and I’m glad I did. The frets were perfect! When I unboxed the pieces, the alder wood body was in great shape and ready for my creative spin.
I began by sanding the wood parts starting with 80 grit sandpaper stepping down to 220 grit sandpaper. The second step was to drill for the string ferrules. Drilling and pressing in string ferrules is challenging and I recommend searching online for tutorials. There are many to choose from. Next, the bridge pickup cavity needed to be routed out to fit the humbucker. Finding the exact spot to router was easy. I mounted the Babicz bridge and traced where the humbucker sits. This gave me the exact location to router out.
After some thought on what the finish should be, I finally decided to use several coats of Tandy’s leather mahogany stain on the side of the body and the back of the neck. I taped off the edge of the maple fretboard to make a color separation from the maple fretboard. I found that multiple coats of leather stain creates an opaque look that seals the wood. Any over-staining onto the top and back of the body easily sanded off leaving a perfect edge. The top and bottom of the body were stained with one coat of Minwax black stain. This highlighted the grain without adding too much brown color. I lightly sanded the parts with a fine grit 3M sanding pad to remove any standing grain. Before sealing the wood, I tore a narrow strip of sandpaper and shoe shined the edge where the side and top of the body meet. This exposed an even amount of wood that I stained several times with acrylic gold paint mixed with a small amount of 90% rubbing alcohol. The alcohol thinned out the paint enough to penetrate the wood and evaporate off. This created a gold pinstriping effect that highlighted the face of the guitar nicely. To seal it all in, I used Minwax gloss wipe-on poly (three coats) lightly fine sanding in between each. It goes on thin and won’t affect too much tone, so I’m told. The last step here was to tone down the high gloss finish a bit by lightly sanding with a fine 3M sanding pad and top coating the build with Gibson guitar polish.
The guitar assembled easily, but before installing the parts, I copper taped the pickup and control cavities. I did some upgrades from the original parts to really make this build my own. I scored a new/used Babicz FCH-TELE HUMBUCKER, Z-SERIES bridge from an online seller. The humbucker chosen for the bridge pickup was a Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates modeled after Billy Gibbons’ famous 59 Les Paul of the same name. The neck pickup is a Seymour Duncan STR-2 Hot Tele. This pickup gives a little less telecaster twang and more of a stratocaster sound which is great for strat sounding blues. The pickguard is a Fender triple layered cream/black/cream color. I feel the cream color compliments the maple neck and contrasts the darker black highlights in the body. I swapped out the electronics that came with the kit and soldered in a Fender 3 way switch, a DiMarzio pot for the tone, and a DiMarzio push/pull pot to split the humbucker. Cloth 22 gauge cloth guitar wire was used to wire it up. Dunlops straplok system replaced the standard strap buttons, and the last part to be installed was Fenders Classic Gear tuning machine heads. The holes needed to be reamed out a bit to make them fit. These tuners have a gear ratio of 18:1 for finer tuning and a classic look that finishes the job nicely.
The parts in this kit fit together perfectly right out of the box. This guitar came out great, and after the final setup, plays awesome! I’m happy with the end result and will definitely be building another kit in the near future”
-Domenic Bonaminio
One response to “Guitar Of The Month – February, 2024”
Great job Dominic. Your choices on this build were spot on and you ended up with a beautiful custom ax.
Hope it plays and sounds as good as it looks!