Strat finished!

Remember this?

 

It's the Squire Strat I bought (used of course)  for the purpose of modifying.  When I first posted about it (http://cardrawingsetc.blogspot.com/2009/01/long-time-no-blog-new-guitars-again.html), I showed an image of what I planned to do:

Well, here's how it turned out:

 

Not too bad, I guess.  I made the mistake of painting it in a dusty basement used for wood work so the paint is far from perfect, but it turned out alright.  I finished it this past spring (2009), but just now got around to posting about it.

Here's a close up a little switch I added to work the lights....

Yes, I said  lights. I embedded a red LED light between each fret.

 

They are powered  by a couple AA batteries mounted in the guitar between the neck and middle

pickups.  One wire goes along the length of the neck from the first fret light to the end of the neck, where it ends (so I can remove the neck) and contacts a wire going to the batteries.

Each LED is soldered to the neck wire and to a fret.

A ground wire goes from the batteries to the bridge.  Whenever a string touches a fret, it closes the circuit and  the light comes on.  (Well technically, two lights come on since the strings always touch two frets - except the on the first .)

Eventually I'll post a video, but for now here's a photo.