Article Tags: project diy jem custom

After lots of time learning how to paint, the Project Jem is complete. (Well, need to adjust the neck angle...) This became Franken Jem in honor of Van Halen's Franken-Strat Kramer guitar from the 80's. Here's an album with pics. There's some other unrelated pics in the album. If you're a friend on Facebook you can see these, but I didn't include the ugly ones there.



What I did: fretwork, scalloped upper frets on high side, increased the lower cut-away, drilled a monkey grip, carved a recess for the tremolo, gold Gotoh Floyd Rose, electronics mod board from Guitar Fetish, kill switch, Dimarzio Activator-X, copper Faraday cage for electronics, lots of body contour sanding.

: sounds like a demon through my Marhshall, super high gain with pickup and 1Meg pot, 'clean' is very dirty, electronic mod board is far superior to a tone knob (that's my opinion though), countouring make the body feel more comfortable

- : I'm not good with paint and the guitar reflects that, 'clean' is very dirty (it was designed this way though), DIY = you know everywhere you made a mistake

The hardest part was dealing with things you can't anticipate and painting. On thing I didn't anticipate was the wood I used to plug the single coil holes would swell when I'd paint. I sanded and repeated around 4 times, tried, 9 coats of paint, tried to figure out ways to cover the swells, etc. Eventually I just lived with it. The headstock shows my idea for the original paint concept. I was going for a dual starburst look from gold to metallic purple to black. I wanted the body to look like a comet tail with the same concept. That wasn't as simple to do so I cut out purple on the body except for the recess. The electronics took a little bit to get the grounding correct. I used a copper embossing kit for the electronics cage. That's a bit more heavy duty than foil. The guitar suppresses hum well for being so high output.

The guitar is very high output--seriously high output which is what I wanted. I can go straight into a board and it'll clip, with a preamp you get an edgy, blues dirty tone--that's your clean tone. I use a Boss ME-70 and the guitar screams. Going guitar, cord, Marshall you get a tight, distorted tone.

The whole project was fun until I hit the problems and those took the vast majority of the project's time. No offense to the end product, but before I started my wife suggested I just buy a Jem. Why I didn't jump on that I don't know... I'm happy with my custom beast.

Maybe next Christmas I'll bring up buying a Jem again. :)

Added on: 2009 12 24