{"id":624,"date":"2012-09-01T18:41:40","date_gmt":"2012-09-01T17:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=624"},"modified":"2012-09-01T18:51:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-01T17:51:15","slug":"the-reverend-goldtop-with-one-p90","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/the-reverend-goldtop-with-one-p90\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reverend &#8211; Goldtop with one P90"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The Reverend&#8221; was inspired by a video clip of ZZ-Top playing live at the Jools Holland show:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cia98Oirb18\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"320\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Billy Gibbons plays a single P90 Gibson Gold Top. At least, that&#8217;s what it looks like. There is some strange writing on the headstock, I could never figure out what it said. Anyway, I found the guitar looking really cool and decided to built one myself.<\/p>\n<p>So I got myself this Les Paul guitar kit, plus some spray cans&#8230;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The guitar kit itself was less then 100 euro&#8217;s. I think it was a 2nd choice item, I got it via am Ebay auction. I can even remember that I got the body and neck separate.<\/p>\n<p>The body has some blemishes, especially around the binding. The maple top was very thin, around the edges there was hardly any maple left. For a sunburst that isn&#8217;t that important but I don&#8217;t think the maple contributes anything to the sonic character of the guitar.<br \/>\nThe neck was a paddle neck with a very light colored fretboard. The binding was also a bit sloppy but I found that out later.<\/p>\n<p>I filled the neck PU position and a part of the bridge neck position with mahogany left from my Billy Bo guitar. Any gaps were filled with two-component wood filling material.<br \/>\nFor the switch hole an the volume\/tone holes, I glued a piece of laminate under the hole and filled the top with filling material.<br \/>\nSince I wanted to use a wrap-around bridge, I had to fill the holes for the tail and bridge as well. I used some cheap round wood for that. The top was filled with filling material.<\/p>\n<p>After that I painted the guitar with primer. Sanded it and first gave it a green top and after that a gold-top.<br \/>\nThe back and the body were originally planned to be dyed mahogany brown but I made a mistake in that. There was still glue left on parts of the body which I could have sanded away. This is easily checked with naphta. Anyway, I was to late and decided to paint the body and neck chocolate brown.<\/p>\n<p>After many efforts I got myself a decent gold-top. Drilled the holes for the bridge and found out that the neck was tilted in the body. So I had to remove the neck again, sand the heel and reinstall the neck. In that process I chipped some gold paint from the body which was a disaster to fix.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, after over a year of messing around, I got a very decent guitar. The costs are low, the effort was enormous. But I learned a lot!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_632\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-632\" style=\"width: 428px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/goldtop1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-632 \" title=\"P90 Goldtop - &quot;The Reverend&quot;\" src=\"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/goldtop1-535x1024.jpg\" alt=\"P90 Goldtop - &quot;The Reverend&quot;\" width=\"428\" height=\"819\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/goldtop1-535x1024.jpg 535w, https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/goldtop1-156x300.jpg 156w, https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/goldtop1.jpg 832w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 428px) 100vw, 428px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-632\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">P90 Goldtop &#8211; &#8220;The Reverend&#8221;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>My mistakes and tips:<br \/>\n1. Before you spray paint a body with a binding, make sure that any gaps between body and binding are filed with a filler that react the same to a dye as the wood. You can buy &#8216;mahogany&#8217; fillers or<\/p>\n<p>2. Sand a body very well before you dye it. I didn&#8217;t. It turned out that in the binding glue process, glue was spilled on parts of the body. Dye won&#8217;t &#8216;catch&#8217; those areas. With sanding you can prevent this. Check your body by using naphta. If you can&#8217;t sand those areas away, use a solid color.<\/p>\n<p>3. With these cheap kits, first put your guitar together to see if everything fits (make it playable). After you&#8217;re sure everything fits, start painting.<\/p>\n<p>4. Don&#8217;t use tape to mask binding. Just spray over the binding and scrape it away with a paint scraping tool. Gives you the best results!<\/p>\n<p>5. When you fill e.g. a pick-up hole in a body with wood, you will always see where you filled a gap.<br \/>\nThis is because of the different expand factors of the wood types. When there is a change in temperature, the woods will differently expand causing little. You can prevent this by using two-component wood filler on top of the wood (you must use a lot).<\/p>\n<p>6. Why did I use the green paint as some kind of primer? I had so much trouble getting that green from the binding (especially the little gaps between binding and body). So only use a primer that looks like your binding (white!) and the top color.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Things that went OK<\/p>\n<p>1. Leveling the frets! The guitar plays like a dream. Lowest action I have on any guitar.<\/p>\n<p>2. Keeping the contour of the body. By always using a piece of trespa to wrap my sanding paper around I was sure not to sand any &#8216;holes&#8217; in the body. This will happen when you just sand by hand. Especialy with the low grids (i.e. 240 and 600) use a piece of trespa when sanding. Also for the edges.<\/p>\n<p>3. Dying the fretboard with black leather paint. Since the fretboard had a very light color, I decided to make it look more like ebony by dyeing the fretboard with black leather paint. This is an old trick used by many pro&#8217;s. Don&#8217;t forget to mask the inlays since it&#8217;s quite hard to scrape the leather paint away. I would also recommend to mask the binding of the neck as good as possible. The black leather paint will find it&#8217;s ways into little cracks in the binding resulting in nasty black lines in your beautiful white binding. You can&#8217;t always scrape\/sand that away. I had to paint some of these cracks with white paint.<\/p>\n<p>4. The headstock. I really like the shape, perfectly symmetrical.<br \/>\nI used a paper template for only the right part but turned the paper around for the left part. By doing this you&#8217;re absolutely sure your headstock is symmetrical.<br \/>\nSo use a fine pencil to make the outlines of the headstock. Then with a jigsaw saw the rough contours. With a sanding cylinder mounted into a drill I was able to make the contours perfectly.<br \/>\nThe logo didn&#8217;t turn out that well. I printed the logo with a laser printer on white logo paper. Cut the logo very near to the lines and put it on the black painted headstock. With some black paint and a fine brush I concealed some of the lines you could still see.<br \/>\nSadly my laser printer didn&#8217;t print pitch black otherwise it would have been perfect.<\/p>\n<p>5. Filling some of the holes with filling material, you can&#8217;t see anything when you use two component wood filler. For big holes you can use a piece of wood but make sure that on top of the wood there is a lot of wood filler.<\/p>\n<p>6. The overall guitar, it sounds excellent<\/p>\n<p>Most of the hardware (tuners, bridge, pick-up and built-in booster) is from Guitarfetish.com.<br \/>\nStraplocks are Schaller&#8217;s. Nut is real bone I made myself. Guitar is equipped with 009 D&#8217;addario strings. In combination with the low action it&#8217;s so easy to play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The Reverend&#8221; was inspired by a video clip of ZZ-Top playing live at the Jools Holland show: Billy Gibbons plays<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-624","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":626,"href":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/624\/revisions\/626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edsguitarlounge.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}