Welcome to Just Wood & Strings! I’m Nate Plaunt, the founder of this website and I’m dedicated to giving you the very best in musical instrument repair advice, with a focus on tips, tricks, and helpful tools.
Backstory
I started my journey down this road back in 2018. I had always wanted to build a guitar from scratch, but never really took the time to figure out how to do it. Music has always been important to me – I have played guitar in several bands dating back to high school and had owned just a few guitars during that time. Even though I played this instrument, I knew very little about it – the extent of my knowledge was pretty much just how to tune and intonate.
Well, that all changed when I won fantasy football.
I’m sure you are wondering “what does fantasy football have to do with guitar repair?” Well, that’s a good question. You see, part of the reason why I had never moved forward with building a guitar was that I was afraid it would cost a lot of money. In 2017, the fantasy gods were smiling down on me and I won the championship game in all three leagues which I was a part of. This sudden infusion of dollars (that my wife didn’t know about ;)) sparked me to finally take that jump. I took to the internet an pieced together a guitar that I had always wanted – a Telecaster.
The guitar that started it all
My first partscaster – a recreation of a 1964 Fender Telecaster. Here are all the pieces:
I sourced these pieces through many different sites including eBay, Amazon, and Reverb. Throughout that process, I learned about the once-invisible-to-me sub-market of guitar parts buying and selling and quickly began to see a way to keep my hobby moving. I began to find deals on guitars – both working and broken – and was able to either fix, re-sell, or part out to create a sustainable income to support future purchases.
This site is here to help people of all skill levels enjoy the hobby of guitar building and repair. I’m glad you are here and I hope you find something interesting on this site. If you have questions, feel free to drop me a line anytime and I’ll get right back to you.
By the way, here is the finished product of the guitar above. There’s a full writeup about it in the instruments section of this website. Enjoy!
