Guitar Of The Month – June, 2021
Congratulations goes out to Bert Rufenach for his guitar build, to earn him Guitar of the Month for June 2021.
Bert used our LPK-10 DIY kit as the basis to create his guitar.
“A year and a half ago I bought a Solo LPK-10-DIY Flamed maple kit for my son. With the lock down I used my time building him a tribute 1958 Les Paul style guitar. This was my second kit guitar that I built so I chose a sunburst finish.
I started by rough sanding everything with 320 grit sand paper and then 600 grit and was careful not to sand through the flamed maple veneer. The sunburst finish required lots of color testing on scrap maple wood before hand. I used aniline water based dyes and hand rubbed them on with light sanding between colors to get the right fading balance, if needed for the burst. I grain filled the sides, back and neck with a water based grain filler with some aniline dye to get the color I wanted. For a while I thought the second layer of pale yellow was going to leave the guitar looking greenish but with less dilute yellow water colored dyes the yellow came through as did the orange and red dyes. The blackish brown highlighted the borders well.
I used a low pressure spray gun and applied about 30 layers of Mohawk Classic Instrument lacquer. The colors instantly popped out. That part was quite exciting because till then I didn’t know what my first time efforts would produce. I sanded with 320 grit about every 10 layers with a week of drying in between. Using soap and water and a sanding block, I wet sanded the taped off top starting with 600 grit and progressing to 1,000, 2,000 2,500 and then buffed with my large polishing wheels. I then taped the top to protect it while I worked on the sides, back and neck. I glued the neck using 2 clamps and Tight Bond original glue, being careful not to damage any wood while clamping. I used the same process of grain fill, sand and spray.
The assembly and setting up went straight forward with no issues. I replaced the stock pots with high quality CTS pots and replaced the stock pickups with Gibson Original 57 Classic Humbuckers. I got lucky and found an original old stock Gibson pearl inlayed head stock laminate and added a Les Paul water slide sticker to it. I bought some vintage correct aged tuners for it but my son liked the shinny chrome ones better that came with the kit.
When I gave the guitar to my son he was quite surprised at the professional quality look. Building the guitar was a 4 month labor of love. The flamed maple top from this kit looks like almost perfectly matched up flamed halves, and I found it very hard to find a flamed maple Les Paul styled guitar with anything better even when I looked up 5 star and boutique grade flamed maple tops. The guitar feels and plays so nice!”
– Bert Rufenach
5 Responses to “Guitar Of The Month – June, 2021”
Beautifully done!!!
Where did you get the Les Paul decal and the Gibson Inlays?
First thing I did after reading was to copy this page for future reference!
Well done!!!!
Hey Bert! For being only your second guitar kit, I’d say you hit it out of the park! Your son is one lucky guy! I hope he plays it with pride for many, many years. Awesome job Bert. Thanks for sharing your project with us!
Be careful Gibson doesn’t see this!! They are very touchy about their logo being used on a non Gibson product!!
Beautiful!!