Project Guitar

Devin picked up with Washburn G10-V, 'as-is', at a garage sale, for $20; broken bridge, unresponsive electronics, missing locks on the nut. Herein follows the account of my restoration of this guitar:

I would have loved to keep the Kahler surface-mount tremolo bridge--Kahler is about the only company that makes a sturdy, metal-capable surface-mount tremolo (as opposed to Bigsby, and such, with which I would be afraid to dive-bomb)--but parts for this bridge are scarce, at best, and a new one would cost as much as a new guitar. I also didn't want to drill out an opening for a strat-style bridge, which would also cost as much as a new guitar, especially since I'm not ready to do it myself, and would need a luthier friend to do the work.
So, I gave it a fixed bridge. My installation of the bridge is the only thing which is wonky--a little too far back, so the 12th fret harmonic lies slightly in 13th fret territory...

Thankfully the electronics were mostly intact. I had to replace the tone pot, and re-solder most of the connections (this would have happened anyway, since I completely dismantled the guitar in order to paint it). The most difficult part was actually finding good washers and nuts for the switches and pots. Ace, Menards and Home Depot all failed at delivering parts that were sufficient for electronics work. (any good recommendations, please let me know)

Aside from replacing a broken pickup ring, the last piece was a string retainer, since the headstock is a goofy wide shape, and the nut can't keep the strings on by itself. This was solved with a piece that came off of a parts guitar from the 50's or 60's (I don't know because it had no markings). I tried normal string trees, but the shape of this headstock required that they hold the 1 and 2 strings, and then the 5 and 6, which are too thick for contemporary string trees.

The custom paint was simply done by painting a coat of acrylic paint, then 1 coat of acrylic polyurethane, followed by applying the design, cut out of a mylar adhesive sheet. Then, all I needed to do was to spray on the main color, remove the mylar sticker to reveal the secondary color in the shape of the sticker, and clear coat the entire thing.
...yes, the design is a high contrast image of Cartoon Network's update of the Teen Titan, Raven. My own drawing, thank you.
The bad finish was courtesy of a brush-on polyurethane which didn't smooth out.

First test run was during rehearsal for my 80's cover band, the Thupergroup, which can require a lot of tonal versatility from an instrument. This guitar was more than up to the task, having switches for each pickup and a pull-pot to switch the bridge pickup to single-coil, and I am very happy with it. Despite the drawback of the original bridge being prone to losing barely replaceable parts, I offer kudos to Washburn for making a very cool rock guitar, even if it has a goofy headstock design.