For my final project, I had originally intended to construct a guitar from scratch, based around a design I'd come up with myself. I enlisted the help of the outstanding Joshua Conrad, and we drew up CAD plans for it to have the CNC router cut out the body. Alas, I was unable to get a suitable piece of mahogany in time to have it completed before final project presentations, but that isn't stopping me from following through with it. I will post documentation of this project when it gets finished later on.

Nevertheless, I did not want to walk away from these ideas, and I'd found with my second project that working on effects pedals was as fun as I'd always thought it would be, and I got hooked. I constructed a pedal based upon the Big Muff circuit, and housed it in an enclosure painted olive drab, like the original. (click here for photographic documentation of its construction)

Additionally, I decided to rewire my guitars so that they would function much the same way that the one I had designed would work. That is, stereo output with a separate channel for each pick up.

I started first on my SG clone, and rewired it so that there were essentially two complete circuits consisting of one humbucker, one volume, and one tone knob. Then I wired those outputs to separate lugs on a stereo jack which I purchased to replace the mono jack on the guitar, since I didn't want to have to drill a hole for another jack in the guitar, nor did I want to have to hook up two cables to the guitar.. I took care to wire the jack so that if I were to plug a standard mono cable into the guitar, it would still function as a guitar with a single humbucker in the bridge position. (here are photos of this guitar and its wiring)

After wiring this up, I needed a way to split the signal out to two mono channels again, so I made a simple, passive box that is essentially, two mono jacks and a stereo jack wired together with one channel from the stereo jack going to one mono jack, and the other channel going to the other. It was so simple, I almost didn't expect it to work because of that. The splitter box worked, however, so I moved on to another challenge. (here is a picture of the splitter and here are pictures of the separate amps each mono output goes to, as well as a picture of the stereo cab that the amps' outputs go into)

I have a stratocaster that I built from parts when I was 16 years old. This guitar's finish was in bad shape, since I'd last worked on it when I was in high school, and if I wanted to try to wire it up in stereo like the other guitar, I was going to need to come up with a new plan, since the strat has 3 pickups, not two, and I wanted to leave in as many tonal options as I could easily integrate. So for this I determined that I would wire the bridge pick up to its own channel once again, and the other two pick ups would be on a channel together, but that if I wired in a three way switch, I could set up the top two pick ups to work with the switch the way that pick ups on a Les Paul work, that is, either pick up independent of the other, or both of them together. Essentially, the top 3 options of a standard strat's pick up selection. This required putting a new switch in the guitar, but otherwise, it was not entirely too difficult. If I had a little more time and money to put into it, I would replace the bridge pick up's volume pot with a push-pull pot, and use that to allow the bridge pick up to be coil tapped, since it is a humbucker in single coil size. This would allow me to have the sound of three single coils, or two humbucking pick ups, or any combination in between. Also, while I was working out the wiring on the pickguard side of things, I refinished the guitar completely. I took several grades of sandpaper to my old finish, and removed a considerable amount of it, then repainted it the same olive drab color as the Big Muff I built. I gave it several coats, and decided that I liked the way it looked and that no further painting was necessary. I let it set for a night and then installed the rewired pickguard into the newly refinished body. (click here for documentation of the work performed on the strat)

So after rewiring two guitars, refinishing one of them, making a box to split a stereo signal, and building an effects pedal from scratch, I wasn't as disappointed that my project guitar did not get finished, but I still wish that it was. Also, I couldn't find a suitable enclosure for the EQ that I'd been working on, so that just ended up being a populated PCB, and little more for the time being. I also designed a better splitter box, but I have yet to be able to construct it. This splitter was different from the original because I'd designed it to have a 3pdt switch that would allow the output of the splitter to be AB or BA, and have indicating LEDs to go with it. When that box eventually gets made, I will be sure to update this page further.