Just thinking... An aged body?

Just now, while trying to find a good way to age the adaptors for the tuners, I was reading on how to get some nice patina to different kinds of metal - but also found some nice ways to get wood to look aged.

So now I'm thinking of applying this to the ash body to make it look more vintage...
Would add something like this:

It's done using one or two layers of tea first, followed by a mix from vinegar and steel wool. The mix will react with the tea and stain the wood...

Preparing the bridge positioning - mounting the tuners

Despite the fact that the neck came with holes drilled for 10mm tuners, I opted for Gotoh vintage tuners with 8.5mm shaft.
To mount them, I had to use adaptors to fit the smaller shafts into the bigger hole. Unfortunately, the adaptors have not been aged, so that they look much too shiny compared to the tuners.
As I will need to unmount them before doing the finish of the neck anyway, I will try to age them somehow myself.

Placing the adaptors:

Drilling new holes for the mounting screws as the predrilled holes are in the wrong position:

Drilling bigger holes for the screws as the first ones were too tight:

Placing the tuners - they do nicely cover the predrilled mounting screw holes:

Preliminary mounting of the two outer tuners:

I will use those two tuners to attach some string, so that I can properly position the bridge, pickups and pickguard. (More on that will follow in one of the next blog entries...)

Headstock plate - some Photoshop

This is roughly my photoshopped idea of the headstock plate - laser-engraved aluminum...

The jeweller who did our wedding rings is also an expert on laser engraving. I need to talk to him about max object sizes, required material thickness, file formats and so on I guess.

http://www.schmucklaser.com/gravurservice

(Again, German language web site as this guy is located in Werne, a small town near Dortmund, Germany.)

I'm planning on creating something similar for the neck plate and the aluminum pickguard I got....

Electronics

Again, as this is my very first home-built guitar, I decided to take some easy turns on my way. This is also true for the circuit - of course I'm able to read a plan, get the proper parts and connect them, but I'm not the greatest expert on earth when it comes to nice soldering.
As I needed to purchase the components anyway, I finally decided to get some preassembled electronics - Rockinger was my friend again:
http://www.rockinger.com/index.php?cat=WG127&product=17076

A pre-assembled 4-way tele circuit

The description from the Rockinger web page - for those German-speaking guys among you:

"Wir beziehen diese speziell für uns angefertigte Elektronik für eine 4-Way-Tele aus den USA (4. Option sind beide Pickups in Reihe).

Zur Verwendung kommen 22 AWG Vintage Push-Back Wire, 2 CTS/Mojo 250k Split Shaft Potis, Oak Grigsby 4-Way Switch, Switchcraft-Buchse (vorverdrahtet), 22nF NOS (New Old Stock) Paper in Oil Capacitor sowie eine Widerstand/Kondensator Parallelschaltung am Volumenpoti zwecks Erhaltung der Höhen beim runterdrehen der Lautstärke.

Die Potis benötigen 10mm Bohrungen. Alles ist bereits in den richtigen Abständen auf einer Hartfaserplatte montiert, so dass es 1 zu 1 auf die Kontrollplatte übertragen werden kann. Inklusive Anschlussplan."


This way, I could still learn how things are put together, but not screw up. After all, not doing a good job here doesn't "add a personal touch" but actually results in the guitar not working at all.... And for me, doing all the woodwork, placing the bridge, getting the nut sorted, the frets clean and aligned, doing proper intonation etc. is of more importance than the soldering. (Cheap excuse, ain't it?)

... and yes, I DO need to connect the pickups still...
:-)

The pickups

One of the reasons I'm building this particular guitar is the fact that I really like the crispy clear sound of Telecaster singlecoils.

Rockinger has done a fantastic job in providing sound examples of all sorts of different pickups, which helped me a lot in finding "my sound" without the experience of having played hundreds of guitars and setups:
http://www.rockinger.com/index.php?page=ROC_Info_Pickups (sorry, page is in German, but I'm sure you will be able to find the different sound files anyway at the bottom of the page)

I liked the Fender Texas Special for Tele and Fender Vintage Noiselss for Tele, but eventually decided for the Rockinger brand pickups for Tele.

Bridge pickup:
ROCKINGER Telly Lead
http://www.rockinger.com/index.php?cat=WG091&product=07067

Neck pickup:
ROCKINGER Telly Rythm
http://www.rockinger.com/index.php?cat=WG091&product=07069

Sound example:
Rockinger Set for Tele

The finish - part II - materials

Like I mentioned several times before, I would like to do an oil - wax finish. With a look similar to these:

Or this, maybe a bit darker:

The oil
Reading through different web pages and forums, people every now and then seem to recommend Birchwood Casey Tru Oil, an oil originally made for gun stock finishing, that will not cloud, yellow or crack with age. So this what I will use as well.
http://www.birchwoodcasey.com

Depending on how much my ash body will soak up the oil, and how much the oil will darken the wood, I will most likely go for 2 layers of oil - more on that once I start actually applying the oil.

The wax
I'm aiming for a final color that is somewhere between dark chocolate and charcoal. As I assume that you can't apply too many layers of wax before the wood becomes all sticky and smeary, I wanted to find a wax that is very dark from the beginning, so that with the additional tint from the oil, very few layers of wax (ideally 2 or 3 with some good polishing in between?) would already achieve my desired result.
Also, I wanted to find a high-quality natural wax for this, with a high proportion of bees wax and carnauba wax.
Eventually, I found a product called Quick Colour Wachs, which is originally used for wooden furniture. I'm not 100% sure what country this is produced in (maybe it's Dutch?), I only found the product on Amazon with a pointer to a German web site:
http://www.quick-wachs.de

In order to get my desired look, I'm planning to combine two different colors, starting with the brown tone called "Jacobean" for the warm color, followed by the dark "Smoke" color to get the right tint.

This way, I may even be able to achieve a bit of a tobacco burst look to the body, with the center being a bit more brownish and the edges being a bit more charcoal-ish... We'll see....

Let's see if the results will be anywhere near to what I'm thinking of...

The finish - part I - the wood grain structure

As stated before, I don't wnat my guitar to have a high-gloss, smooth surface finish, but rather something where you don't only see the wood grain, but can still feel it as well.
I assume that sandblasting the body would do the trick, as this would probably come pretty close to how driftwood gets its looks.

On the other hand side, I don't want this effect to be over-exaggerated, and, I don't own a sand-blasting machine but want to do as much as possible on my own.
While thinking about how to achieve this look, I cam across the idea of using something like a steel brush on the body to remove parts of the softer grain structure to put a bit of emphasis on remaining the harder and darker grain structures.
I was a bit afraid though that the steel brush would take off too much, and that the steel brush might also put a dark dirty stain on the wood and deep into the grain that would be impossible to remove again afterwards.
While looking around for suitable brushes, I first came across a brass brush which would most likely be a bit softer and don't pose the risk of putting a stain, but then I found a nylon brush that is to be used on a power drill.

As I didn't want to ruin the body, I ran some tests on that area of the body that I wanted to carve away (as seen in this post: Shaping the body), and the result came out quite nicely.
Once I had carved the body, I then continued using the nylon brush on the entire body.
Unfortunately, the edges are quite hard, so that the effect on some of the edges is by far less visible than on the front of the guitar.

Also, the brush left quite a rough surface (which of course in part was what I wanted to achieve!), but then again, I also want the guitar to feel comfortable when touching it.

I will need to find a way to sand it down a bit more but retain the rugged look of the grain....

In this context - I'm planning to first use oil and then wax to protect the guitar.
I decided for this approach as it will keep the natural look of the wood very nicely, it can easily be achieved at home without a spray gun, and as far as I have read, it can also easily be repaired later on if that ever becomes necessary.

There's this UK-based company Wudtone - selling what I believe is a set of oils and different kinds of wax although I didn't really find any clear info on that.
They have plenty of different colors and surface fnishes to pick from. Whereas I will get different materials, their gallery of examples is really nice.
One of the body looks I really like is this one:
http://www.wudtone.com/shop/?wpsc-product=dark-tease

Carving the body

I wanted to do some modifications to the Tele body, on the one hand to allow for some more relaxed playing and on the other as I preferred such a look over the plain "saw a guitar out of a plank" look that Telecasters typically have.

There's a great YouTube video from Crimson Custom Guitars, showing how they hand-carve a guitar, using an angle grinder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVbzpLEh0To

I decided that I would give it a try in the same way and carved away....
By the way: I did draw the shapes onto the body with pencil before I started, unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of that step.
For the carving of the front, you can see the line on the body in the top left background of this picture (underneath the steel ruler) - I had a similar drawing for the shape I wanted on the backside of the body.

Again, this wasn't too dificult, I really like the result and even kept my two brown "tips" on the upper edge!
Also, while grinding I liked how the wood turned out without the primer that was already on the body when I had initially gotten it!

I still like the idea of creating something like a driftwood finish, not too smooth, and the sanding definitively added to the idea.

Fitting the neck pocket

As described earlier, I wanted to make the size of the neck pocket smaller, in order to reduce the gap between neck and body.
As I wanted to stick with Ash, but wasn't sure if I could get a piece together into shape that'd be precisely enough shaped to fit tightly, I decided to go with several layers of ash veneer, glued together.

While looking into this, I also decided that the edges of the neck (where it goes into the neck pocket) were rounded off too much as this would once again leave to much room in the corners.

So I would not only need to fill in the neck pocket but also take some millimeters off of the neck to get more of a straight edge (thus needing more layers of ash veneer to fill in that additional distance as well).

Initially, I tried to use a file to modify the neck, but as maple wood is really hard, and I couldn't get the angles right, I quickly stopped that attempt and made a template to use a hand router for this.
I'm quite happy with the result:

So now that I have the final size of the neck, I could mark the body for the final required fill, and continue on that task:

I cut the layers of veneer roughly into shape, glued them together, and sanded them into shape, making sure that the edges would still be straight and not slanted, and that they were all parallel and would fit nicely into the neck pocket.

I wanted the top surface to pick up the direction of the grain of the wood of the body, so once I got the glued-together piece into shape, I sanded it down a bit more to glue on a layer of veneer on top.

For now, I'm happy with the result. Some more sanding of the surface will be needed, but that will only happen as part of preparing for the finish.

The nut

When I got the neck, there was a cheap plastic nut included, and looking at the shape and quality, it was obvious that I would replace this.

I would have loved to get a bone nut, but neither did I want to cut the string slots, nor did I want to ask a professional to do it for me at this point (yet?).

After some looking around, I decided to get a moderatly priced nut from Rockinger, as they seem to be a much better quality than mine, were already slotted and even came in black, which suited my idea of the final guitar:
http://www.rockinger.com/index.php?cat=WG051&product=04175-04176-04185-04186&sid3=c6b7d664db3d465ec4bd066df0228a31

The material is "Graph Tech", which is a synthetic material with a very low friction.

To get the plastic nut out, I followed some advice from the net and really carefully hit the nut with a hammer / screwdriver from all sides to loosen the glue.
There was a hint that you have to be especially careful while smacking it toards the headstock, as chances are reasonably high that you would be breaking off the back part of the wood of the nut slot in the neck.
A final careful hit from the side got the nut out without any problems.

The slot was faily clean, and I only used very few strokes with a file to get rid of the remainders of the glue.
Additionally, as you can see int he pictures on the top, the new nut is not straight / flat at it's bottom, but cureved with a "foot" in the middle so that it can be either placed in a flat nut slot, or (by simply filing off the midle "foot", in a curved neck nut slot.

I only needed to sand the new nut down a bit to make it slightly more narrow, then took a file to bring the width down to the witdh of the neck.

For now, I will keep it as such, but I might revisit nut size and placement once I adjust the string height later on.

The headstock

I don't want to "imitate" the Telecaster neck but create something on my own, so I was playing around with different shapes.
I'm also thinking of putting a little plate or something to the head, as I don't think I can do a nice inlay with my tools, experience and abilities.
So I did some research on the net, and did some pencil drawings right on the head.

Some ideas that I came across:

This is what I finally came up with:

So I did some sawing and sanding...

So far, I'm happy with the result. (As you can see, I have also already replaced the nut - a bit more on that in a separate post....)

Fitting neck and body

When I tried to fit the neck with the body, things got a bit more complicated.
Until this point I was naiv enough to think that putting this together will be a piece of cake.

As could be seen in the pictures, the neck and the body had the holes drilled already for fitting them together.
Unfortunately, the holes in the neck are a bit too wide. For now, this is not a problem as for the fitting, they will keep the neck, but fore sure, before stringing I need to take care of this.

Using these hole now shows that there is quite a gap between the neck and the body. I'm not 100% certain why this is the case - if it's related to the fact that the neck seems to be a Stratocaster neck and the body being a Telecaster body, or what else could be the reason.

Although parts of this gap may later be covered by the pickguard, my guess would be that the gap will also impact negatively the sound and / or sustain later on.

So now I need to find out if the pocket is too big or if the holes are drilled in the wrong place.
If I had decided not to build a Telecaster type guitar, I might have just have gotten away by drilling new holes and repositioning the bridge, but as the bridge is attached to the pickup, and the hole for the pickup being milled already, this could be a major problem.

In order to find out how the neck, the body and the milled holes related, I started digging for CAD drawings of the original Telecaster on the net, as well as starting to create my own template.

By the way: the great guys over at TDPRI forum have created all the drawings - this was so helpful!
http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-home-depot/74504-d-size-tele-body-blueprint-files-here.html
--> PDF file
--> Autocad DWG file

Looking into all of this, the milled holes for the pickups were NOT all on standard positions and with standard sizes it seems - this is going to be really challenging.

This actually led me to the next problem - how to find the right position for the Tele bridge?
To find out, I started reading about intonation, about how the string diameter affects the compensation required etc.

My template above shows that the neck is actually a standard Fender fretted length with the twelvth fret being exactly at half the length of 647.77mm - at 323.85mm. So at least this measurement was accurate.

So my current understanding now is that as a rule of thumb, the length of the high E will be the closed to the calculated fret length (of 25 1/2 inches or 647.77mm), as the string has the smallest diameter.
So, as I want to put 009 - 042 strings on, as a first hint, the point of attachment for the high E string is calculated in the following way:
E string: 009 --> 0.009 inches -->  0.2286mm
scale length for the E string:
647.77mm + 0.2286mm --> 647.9986mm

All you pros out there will now probably think of me as a complete idiot - if you can correct me on my statements here, please add a comment, I would love to better understand this!

As per my understanding, the actual required compensation will be higher, but this will give me room to intonate properly the string.
There are some good web pages describing the required compensation, and this one even offers a calculator for different scale length, string gauges and instrument types:
http://liutaiomottola.com/formulae/compensation.htm
Other web pages suggest to just add 1/16th of an inch to the calculated scale length of 25 1/2 inches.

A good forum entry on this topic is this one on TDPRI forum:
http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-home-depot/147879-placement-hardware-undrilled-body.html

Here, they suggest to determine the length of the bridge position the following way:
"To place the bridge, you should find the center-point of the usable travel on the bridge saddles. This should be 25.5" from the nut (on the edge closest to the fretboard -- where the string should be lying)."
As a rule of thumb, this is probably a good advice, as it allows you to intonate / compensate in both directions, i.e. shorten or lengthen the string as required.
I will not do it like this for two reasons:

• I believe I will need more room to lengthen then to shorten, i.e. I will keep the saddles more to the end that will shorten the string
• I don't have the room as the pickup hole has been milled out already, and I believe I can work with this.

Let's hope I'm not mistaken.

So - after all this, my decision is to use the existing holes and to fill in some of the neck pocket to get a tight fit between neck and body...