My dad's first guitar build

As a few of you know, I got my start in guitars from my dad. He had played in bands back when the Beatles were first becoming popular, but didn't have a whole lot of playing time since. He seemed interested, so I bought him a kit and he put it together with a bit of help.

Since it was a strat kit, and Fender likes to patent headstock shapes, it came with a pretty square looking headstock. First step was to make a cut. He didn't really like the Fender look anyway, so he opted for more of an Ibanez shape.

Sanding, sanding, sanding. That's most of the finish work on these kits.

Add some blue stain and some clear coat, and this is the finished product. I always think they look a little boring without a headstock logo, but that's what it is... a pretty standard looking guitar.

As for playability, there is a little to be desired. While it looks nice, it's incredibly light due to the swamp ash body. After adding some shims, the action isn't bad, but it's really, really noisy single coils in there that don't have a lot of output, so when he tries to play Rocksmith it becomes very difficult to get the noise down enough that it detects the sound for tuning.

I think if we were to put some hot rails or even cool rails in this, it wouldn't be half bad. But as it is, all I hear is noise unfortunately.