Recent Painting & Projects

 Happy weekend everyone! Just a quick post about some recent minis painting and other projects I've been working on recently.

First up is this Kraken for Armada. It's from Monsterpocalypse collection but was the right size, price and look so... INTO THE BANDSAW YOU GO!

 Yeah, he was chopped in twain at the waist and has the Viginia-class in his tentacle gently removed.

The resulting model...

He's on an 80mm square base and ready to wallop some boats. Speaking of which, Ziggy's Dwarves are mostly table-ready and we played a small learning game of Armada last weekend. Good fun. Go Goblins!

I also assembled and painted some TT Combat MDF buildings for Infinity. Pretty happy with the result there.

And in the category of non-gaming projects, I've been mucking around with guitars. It started with this kit last summer that I added a handful of "Kustom Gadjits" to and really enjoyed the process.

Surprisingly, it turned out really well, plays very nicely and spawned an urge. So in January I purchased another kit, this time a Jazz bass clone. I've never had a bass and because I know what I like guitar-wise, wasn't really after another six-string.

The process was equally enjoyable and this is how she turned out.

You can tell I had a bit of fun with that paint job. I'm no bassist, but it's a fine learner's instrument.

So then I went right off the deep end. My main guitar for 20+ years, my Tele, got some attention. My first Tele that I bought in 1991 was stolen in the late nineties. It had been modded a bit with a pickup replacement. This is a standard Telecaster:

My son's parakeet had caused a little damage to the bridge pickup, pecking at the winding. So then I'm torn - if I'm going to go through the effort replacing one pickup, why not go bananas and replace both? A couple weeks of shopping later, I ended up on replacing both pickups.

I bought a Wilkinson Hot Rail humbucker for the neck and a Wilkinson Vintage Alnico dual-coil for the bridge. This would involve chopping up the pickguard, replacing the bridge itself and routing out the bridge pickup cavity in the body. The of course there would be soldering - a skill I am very familiar with but never expert at. A tall order for a greenhorn like myself, especially considering the going rate to replace an American Standard is about $1100. 

I went at it patiently, and over a handful of weeks brought it to life.

DEEP KIMCHI. Routing the body cavity out was scary as hell and the biggest opportunity for complete disaster.

Slow and steady wins the race though, and in the end, this beauty was re-born.

In keeping with recent politics, I've made it "less white." It's a burner too, holy shit does it growl.

Mods

1) Neck pickup swap. Also involved cutting the pickguard hole larger.

2) New bridge that would accommodate a full-size humbucker.

3) New bridge humbucker pickup.

4) More pickguard cuts to fit the new bridge.

5) New control plate to make it blacker.

Damn that was fun. I'm ready to chop up another guitar.