Guitar Of The Month – September, 2022

Written by: Kevin Strom On: Oct 5th, 2022

Congratulations goes out to Eddie Weiss for his guitar build, to earn him Guitar of the Month for September 2022.

Eddie used both and body and neck from our B-Stock Section as the basis to create his guitar.

“Try as you may, you simply can not go to Solo and not grab something…whether you need it or not.  It’s like a candy store in there for us folks.

On this particular visit, I was pulled in like a tractor beam to this Tele neck and body that was in the Deal Zone.  It looked lonely, it called to me.  It was a customer return and the price was right.  I like the carved / aged / relic type look on “certain” projects.  Hey I know it’s not for everyone but I wanted to do one up this way.

Using my Dremel and other tools, I started the process on the body.  Bit by bit (no pun intended) she became to come alive.  Carving away with the Dremel started to give me the look I was looking for.  I even used special type of surgical cutting knives and acrylic scrapers to get some real fine detail in the carving. I torched the body a bit as well to give a bit of color shift for when after the paint was applied if that makes any sense. 

I used some Krylon Jungle Green as a base that I had on hand and the cracks were filled in with a nice high gloss Jet Black acrylic ink. Some fine tip sharpies were also used to complete the effect.

Both Matte and Gloss effects were used and the combo of both gave it its’ final look.  Not too much sanding was required after some Oxford Nitro was applied (love that stuff and you will too). I still kinda wanted that “dull” look so after wet sanding with some 1000 grit sand paper and finishing with ultra fine steel wool, the higher green color became nice and matte.  The black in the cracks and carving remained a sweet high gloss.

The neck itself needed the regular type work.  Bit of leveling frets, lowering the nut etc.  I added my WEGD logo to the headstock for a final touch.  The logo was cut on my vinyl cutter machine using a beautiful holographic film.

I must say, if you spend the right amount of time and effort working on necks, you will get them low and fast playing – as this one now does. Solo has a great selection of specialty tools to help you achieve your ultimate neck set up.

The electronics were pretty straight forward and I used a Wilkinson bridge.  I opted to modify in a hot rail type pickup in the bridge position. Bit of messing around there but looks cool and sounds pretty crisp.  I actually had to “shave” off the ends of the pickup and make a bracket support so it would fit properly in the cavity. A tiny bit of routing had to be done but the bit of extra work was worth it.  One of the last things I will be doing is picking up another black pickguard from Solo.  I will be cutting, carving and experimenting to see if I can get some body color flowing through the cracks.  Stay tuned on that….

This is not my first build and I do a lot of custom type stuff like this.  An addiction? Yes! I can’t wait to get on to my next custom build very shortly.  I suppose I am only limited to my imagination. 

I got to play this guitar at an outdoor gig a few weeks back and I was pretty happy – still a few tweaks here and there as expected though.

The only problem for me is these things tend to “disappear” around here.  My son borrowed this one and I just can’t seem to get it back….

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the WEGD / Solo Green Meeanie!”

-Eddie