I made this guitar from a kit.  It came out surprisingly well, considering I had very little spare time to work on it, no experience, and it was a really cheap kit.

  A close up on the headstock.  Shaping this was one of the hardest parts.  

Close up of the body.  Nothing especially tricky here, just lots of sanding.  I decided to go with a matte finish and sand through the paint in a few places.

I thought I had a picture of what the kit looked like when it came in the box, but I can’t find it now.  Basically, the body was already cut out and routed, and the neck was built, but the headstock was not shaped.  All of the hardware was disassembled in little tiny bags, some of it floating around loose.  One nice thing about this kit is that I did not have to do any soldering because everything came with these quick connect clips. I actually can solder, but I was happy to not have to.  Anyhow, here are some pictures of the work in progress.  

All set to cut the headstock out.  In retrospect, I wish I had not used the jigsaw.  It wound up leaving little scratches all over the headstock that I had to sand out later.  

Getting ready to paint the body.  It wound up being a little breezy that day, and I had a few little bits of dust to sand out before I could move on. 

I tried to insulate with aluminum foil and adhesive spray.  Not sure if this is anywhere near as effective as that copper tape or some kind of conductive paint, but I had no idea how good or bad it would sound, so I decided to go with what was cheep and close by.  The guitar does not buzz anymore than my Fender does, so I guess it worked.  Sorry this picture is so weird looking.  It’s because of the flash on my phone camera.  

All in all, I am pretty happy with the whole thing.  The guitar sounds good tonewise, but there is something wrong with the nut that makes the open strings sound out of tune compared to the fretted notes.  I think maybe the slots are not cut deep enough.  I am going to see how hard it would be to replace or fix on my own.  My initial plan was to sell the guitar when I was finished, but now I have grown rather fond of it.  I dunno what I’ll do with it.  I would like to build another, so maybe I should sell this one to justify the expense and time investment.  

Once I come up with a permanent fix for the nut, maybe I will record a video with it and put it up here.  Or, maybe I will try to play it at our show on the 23rd of this month.  We’ll see.