Travel Guitar Part 1 - Making the head smaller

What you will need:

For the conversion:

Necessaries;

One Stratocaster-copy with a bolt-on neck

Jig saw

Screwdriver

Drill

Mallet or soft Hammer

Soldering Iron and Solder

Preferables;

Work Bench

Sander

Circle Saw

Buying the Stratocaster

It is important that the neck is straight, the fret work is OK, and the electrics work. Don’t waste money on perfection as we will set it up well later. You can find one on e-bay from £30, or from an advert in your local area. My total expense for this guitar with new strings was under £50. After the set-up it plays very nice.

Part 1 - Making the head smaller

Cutting down the head

REMEMBER-When removing the neck look if there are any shims (small pieces of paper/card) and note where they were so you can put them back.

The idea is to get at least 2, and hopefully 3, of the 6 tuning-pegs on to the opposite side of the head.

We are limited mostly by how big the tuning-heads backs are, smaller, obviously, is better.

Working on the back or underside of the headstock. First make a template of the tuning-head.

Remembering the line of the strings should be quite straight, and definately cannot cross each other.

There probably will only be a few possibilities, but try everything.

You will end up with something like this.

Remove the 4th tuning-peg from the nut, and push out the bush.

Keep everything in a tidy way, we will be putting it all back on.

Test your drill bit size in the back-side of the hole of the removed 4th tuning-peg.

You must measure from the back-side as the front side will include space made by the removed bush, and therefore be larger.

Drill the hole you have marked for the new 4th tuning-peg, accurately measure the area of the removed 4th tuning-peg from all sides as the hole may not be in the middle of the tuning-peg template. Every mm counts. Go slowly.

To fit the bush you first need to drill out the depth of the bush from the front side, again check the size of the hole from the removed 4th tuning-peg. You may need to use the soft hammer or mallet a little, careful not to damage the bush.

Fit the tuning-peg onto the head.

Hopefully it looks good, mark the edge of the tuning-peg back, especially if it has gone over the template marks you drew before.

Now repeat with pegs 5 and 6.

Mark the new edge of head, when you’re happy with the shape saw it off with the jig saw.

If you can afford the time. I recommend taking all the tuning-pegs off to sand and further shape the head. It is an important aesthetic part of your finished guitar. You could also oil it now, with linseed oil. But you don’t have to bother with all that. I didn’t.

Drill out the tuning-pegs screw holes one size smaller than they were, this will give you a tighter fit.

OK, put it all back together, this will give you a considerably shorter guitar already. My neck came out at 58cm (23”) perfect for carry-on luggage. It fits in a 55cm bag diagonally.

You could stop here, but we’re just getting going.

Part 2 - Making the body smaller