Guitar Of The Month – January, 2024
Congratulations goes out to Al Stoddard for his guitar build, to earn him Guitar of the Month for January 2024.
Al used our LPK-200 kit as the basis to create his guitar.
“Before I discovered Solo Guitars, I had never built a guitar in my life. I ran my own business for 25 years and just retired about 2 years ago. I found the Solo Guitars website by mistake and was blown away by the DIY Solo Kits. I have been taking guitar lessons for awhile and my teacher builds his own guitars so I put 2 and 2 together and thought “heck I can do this”. This was the start of me building Solo kits and this is my now my 4th kit. My 1st kit was a TCKA-110, followed by an STK-15-SD, PJBK-10 and now this LPK-200.
I ordered the LPK-200 and it arrived in California in 8 days. I opened the box and was blown away – it was beautiful! Right away I followed the insert that says to pre-assemble the guitar first for any issues. I pre-assembled the guitar, and everything was perfect and the neck was spot on. I installed the high and low E strings to check for spacing and neck straightness and they were perfect.
I started by sanding the body with 400 grit and then glued the neck in. I was very nervous the whole time but it worked out. Then I proceeded to grain fill the body and then the neck. After that I prepped the guitar for color using 400 grit and spray painted color using Oxford Supply Heritage Cherry Red and applied roughly 4 coats.
I followed that up with 4 coats of Oxford clear gloss, and eventually an additional 4 coats on two separate occasions for a total of 12 coats of clear.
After waiting for a long 8 days, I sanded starting with 600 grit wet dry 800/1200/1500/2000/2500 then proceeded to buff and polish. It turned out beautiful as you can see and way better than what I thought it would be.
Thank you to Dave, Scott & Kevin at Solo for all your help!”
-Al Stoddard
