cakes wrote: Thu Sep 04, 2025 3:36 pm The cost of a Warmoth build is much less than say, a brand new Fender American Standard, but like 1000 times better and customized to your every want and need. Even if you paid a professional to put it together.

Oh, no doubt. If I'd pulled the trigger on the last one, I'd probably have the only mahogany Fender Swinger body with a P-90 & mini-hum in Sonic Blue on earth. I'm excited to see your finished product.

W.L.Weller wrote: Thu Sep 04, 2025 3:21 pm Nothing against you and your soon-to-be beautiful instrument, or any of the other existing beautiful instruments in this thread, but every time I go to the Warmoth website and start assembling parts, I wind up close to a thousand dollary-doos. And I start thinking about the other guitars $1k would buy. Obviously my problem and not anyone else's, though.

I've had success waiting. The strat earlier in the thread was $600 all in. No hookups or once in a lifetime deals. The pickup is a Seymour Duncan JB I bought at a storefront. Nothing from alibaba. I just watched my email for sales announcements from Warmoth / Musikraft. I would have probably saved $50-100 plus 70 hours if I bought the body already painted.

If you start fucking around with options or inlays of wizards and shit, yeah, it'll get pricey. But I bet even a neck with a wizard inlay would show up if you waited long enough.

I have a parts telecaster that was kind of a hookup situation. I'm $210 all in on that. I've played two telecasters in the last ten years that I liked better. One of those teles was a 1957

Resale value, though. Buying a bunch of parts new isn’t going to seem like a very economical choice if you decide to sell, unless you do it one piece at a time.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Sep 04, 2025 7:06 pm Resale value, though. Buying a bunch of parts new isn’t going to seem like a very economical choice if you decide to sell, unless you do it one piece at a time.

I noticed Warmoths can sell for a random number. The ones that sell at good prices tend to be guitars that were put together well and don't stray to far from tried and true builds.

My personal experience in looking for a warmoth for sale was looking at the quality of how they were put together and the options included.

Having sold Warmoths personally, I always got for it what I put in.

It's a crap shoot for sure, but I think it's worth doing, especially if you learn to do things yourself, you can tweak if you want to do something different. I love the universal pickup routes for this reason.

You don't buy these things thinking about resale value, you buy them cause you like putting guitars together.

I probably said all this earlier in the thread, sorry, I'm too lazy to go back and look....none of mine cost more than $1300 tops, and most were more like $1k, which isn't cheap, but that's with stainless steel frets, locking Hipshot tuners, graphite nut, fancy pickups, gotoh trems and nice electronics. You're not gonna get anything from Fender that nice for that price. And if I wanted a tele with a simple forearm contour from Fender I'd have to pay like $5k for a custom shop and wait 4 years or something ridiculous.

They have sales all the time and there'll be necks/bodies for like $120-160, which is just stupid cheap for what you get. If you have some pickups and parts lying around you could put something killer together for very low dough.

I'm sure I sound like an evangelist for them and I'm sorry for that but I've just been so impressed with the quality of their parts. I go to guitar shops and try stuff out and almost invariably feel like "this feels realy heavy and plays shitty compared to my warmoths at home". The only off the shelf guitar I've played in the last year that really impressed me was a Reverend Billy Corgan I played at CME last fall. Played nice and looked cool. I really really really hate to say anything nice about anything even Corgan-adjacent but that was a fine guitar.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Sep 04, 2025 7:06 pm Resale value, though. Buying a bunch of parts new isn’t going to seem like a very economical choice if you decide to sell, unless you do it one piece at a time.

as a whole guitar, absolutely

disassembled, you're fine, maybe even coming out ahead assuming you didn't take a spade bit to it or do totally wild alterations

I ended up getting a little charcoal filter fume extractor for extra precaution.

I got it soldered up, looks real nice. Much better than the first time. I think the pots I used first were shit, because the new ones work as expected. However, I have this one problem: when the tone pot for neck pickup is at 100%, it fully cuts out. I looked it up and I can only find answers on how to clean tone pots or that it might be a ground issue. Is it possible that this pot is bad? Seems fishy to my naive sense. It gets really quiet and scratchy at like 95%, but then fully cuts out at full attenuation.

Well, it was definitely a bad pot. I had an extra one laying around, thankfully. The pickups sound great, and the guitar feels pretty good, even though it's not set up yet.

Got it all set up. Did a halfway decent job for a first try, but I need to work on the action more. The pickups sound great, the middle position feels like it'll be really useful. I love this P90 bridge pickup, and blending it with the PAF is really nice. If both are at 100% volume, it sounds very much like the PAF alone, maybe a little more focused. Dialing the humbucker back with that high end sound of the P90 is so nice together.