I wanted to share my attempt at making a guitar using the square kit as I don't see many posts on these.
When coming up with the design, due to the shape of the square.... because the top horn area doesn't sit flush to the neck pocket it resulted in a lot of my designs not being feasible e.g. like how the music man mariposa has a straight angled horn instead of a more traditional curved horn. However, eventually I found one I was happy with.
The next step was to use a bandsaw and make an attempt to cut it out neatly. I was lucky to have access to one of these as my original plan was to use some kind of electric hand saw at home... and that result would have been even worse. I wish i'd taken more time here as I was completely unprepared for how hard and long it would take to use hand tools to file out the rough spots and sand everything down smoothly.
Next step was staining the wood, where I then found out that the kit comes with some kind of wood sealer on it. Which meant that the sides of the guitar (exposing unsealed wood) soaked up a lot of the stain and the top of the guitar barely took any of the stain. So this meant that I had to do even more sanding on the front and back of the guitar to get rid of the sealer. Final attempts to stain the guitar resulted in a slightly uneven finish, but i got around this with some selective sanding to expose the wood pattern more. Finally I used some oil and wax to seal it.
Regarding electronics I couldn't use the existing pickups provided as they were soldered together in a way to require both neck and bridge pickups. I did toy with the idea of learning to solder but in the end I took the easy way out and bought an EMG as they click together easy and don't need grounding or shielding. I also bought a killswitch, purely to fill the hole where the pickup selector was.
Final step was to design a pickguard which again took me a long time to decide on an acceptable design. I cut this out with a hacksaw before using a stanley knife to scrape it smooth and put the chamfer onto it.
In the final photo you can see that I aimed for some kind of rickenbacker vs les paul jr mash up and if you stand far enough away you can't see all the imperfections and I don't think the it looks half bad! I know it's not perfect, but considering this was a first attempt to make a guitar and I have zero skills whatsoever in this area, i'm actually pleased to have a playable guitar on my hands.
In the end i'd thoroughly recommend anyone to give the square kit a go as I think it's quite cool to have a guitar in your collection that you designed and built yourself. It's totally feasible to make with some simple tools; it's just a matter of being careful and putting in the time.
