12 String Telecaster - Jangles a Go-Go

Well, she's been finished for a month or two now, but today I finally had time to take some photos of my trans-black 12-string Telecaster.. I reckon she looks amazing! I've always had a thing for black and white Telecasters, and for a 12-string she is surprisingly comfortable to play.

Now admittedly I'm not the best guitar player that ever lived (far from it) and the 12-string is a challenge to play compared to the traditional 6, but god I love picking this bad boy up. Thanks to a nut height that needed no adjusting and a super straight neck, the action is low and very little finger pressure is needed to fret the strings. It's just so comfortable that even I can bust out a tune with just a little extra practice.

Already some scuffs on the back - tough love!

Despite taking half a day to get in tune, once the neck settled down the tuning stability is really quite good. Some locking mini-tuners would make this even better, but I can live with it for now. Some of the strings do need a little tuning tweak now and again and that's ok (as I said, for now). Unfortunately, just checking each and every each string with the electronic tuner is a major undertaking ;).

Trans-black flame maple with a deep Acrylic gloss.

The guitar's single coils deliver a beautiful jangly tone, especially with a clean channel. Open chords are especially nice and the sustain (even accounting for my bad finger placement) is great. Time to channel Marty Wilson Piper and belt out a few tunes by The Church.

Tune me please. Please?

All in all a very satisfying build and a great end result. I can't stop picking this thing up and strumming it. DIYGuitars did a good job with the kit, especially the dialed in nut height and I'm really impressed with the kit quality. I highly recommend you all to get out there and build your own 12 string Telecaster. There aren't many of them out in the wild (compared to other models) and that makes it all the more satisfying to own one.

Flamed Starcaster: Side Finish

With the burst looking great on the front and back of the Starcaster build, the more I looked at it, the less pleased I was with how the dyed sides looked. It was time to make a tough decision. If you remember from my last update on this project, the dye didn't take on the sides in a number of places where the craftsmanship was exceedingly average. Looking at it again, I decided to apply a solid colour to the sides to cover over these patches. I re-filled the entire surface with Timbermate, applied some primer, and sprayed two coats of MTN94 "RV-99 Marron Glace" over it all. Thankfully my masking was good and none of the primer or colour made it onto the front or back.

Stain would have been better, but MTN94 has covered the bad workmanship.

I'm really glad that I made the decision. The end result is pretty damn good I reckon - much better than the stain over those shoddy patches. I'm really liking how this baby is now shaping up. I'm in a bit of a quandry about what colour to stain the neck, as I usually go with a colour to match the sides. That's not going to happen in this case - there's no way I'm going to spray the neck a solid colour as well. Maybe Amber with a bit of a dirty Tobacco burst, but I'm still thinking.

Flamed Starcaster: Dying the Burst

I have found myself with a little time away from work this week, and therefore with some time for the Starcaster build - sanding the body and getting some Colortone dye onto this beast. With these semi-hollow kits there's usually precious little sanding required for the body. Unfortunately this kit was a second that I picked up in last years Pitbull Guitars birthday sale and with it came some pretty gnarly problem areas on the top veneer and the sides.

The top veneer has some very deep scratches at the bottom of the guitar, something that I can't do anything at all about. They are so deep that I suspect any attempt to sand them out would remove the veneer altogether. I could have done a solid paint job to hide them, but that flame maple veneer is just too damn beautiful to hide, even with the scratches. There were also a few very large glue marks around the edge near the binding, but a couple of applcations of Goof-Off put pay to them.

To test whether I had properly removed the glue, I applied a weak dye solution (Lemon Yellow) to the entire front and back to make sure it was taking colour. Thankfully no remaining glue spots were evident.

Weak Colortone Lemon Yellow shows no glue spots.

On the sides, there are two large areas where the factory has needed to extend the side veneer piece to fit around the entire circumference. Pretty shoddy craftsmanship all told, but that's why it was a second! I sanded the sides with 240 and 320 to try to get rid of as much of the joins in these extensions as I could, and then filled all the remaining grain and join marks with a slurry of Timbermate. After sanding back with 400 grit the surface felt nice and smooth but didn't look any better. In my eagerness to continue with the burst I didn't do a dye test on the sides, something I would rue later on down the track. Naughty, naughty!

I let the body dry over night, wiped it all over with water a final time to remove any remaining dust from the Tmbermate, and got on with creating a burst using Colortone dyes. I actually used 5 colours this time to try to achieve a burst that gradually becomes much darker on the sides than my normal "Honey Burst". I started with Lemon Yellow all over (applied a second time) and then a little further out with a feathered ring of Vintage Amber. This was followed by a further feathered ring of Red Mahogany, and yet again by Tobacco Brown. To darken up the edge even further I got out the Colortone Black and kept applying colour to the edge, all the while blending each transition back towards the centre with the other colours.

All in all I'm pretty stoked with the result, although the aforementioned scratches are standing out vividly down towards the bottom of the body.

5 Colour Burst from Lemon Yellow to Black (sort of)

Unfortunately, when I hit the sides with a combination of Tobacco Brown and Black, my haste in preparation became immediately apparent. In addition to the sections where the wood has been joined (the glue here was never going to adequately take stain) there magically appeared several nasty glue spots around the binding.

Letting the dyed body dry completely overnight, I resolved to fix-in the colour on the front and back of the guitar before trying to fix the glue spots on the sides. I had always planned on giving the dyed guitar several coats of Tru-Oil to really pop the flame and to deepen the chatoyance in the final finish. And so, on to the body went a first soak coat of Tru-Oil and boy did the colour of the dye and the chatoyance in the maple pop. Magic!

First soak coat of Tru-Oil starts to add uber-chatoyance.

The next day I applied a second soak coat of oil to both sides and again hung it to dry. With each coat the grain is looking better and better, but the scratches are looking more and more prominent. Oh well, we can't have everything right? You can easily see the scratches in the front veneer in the photo below.

Second coat of Tru-Oil is on and soaking in.

After a third coat of Tru-Oil, I was satisfied that the dye job was protected enough to be able to tackle the glue spots on the sides of the body. It called for some more Goof-Off and a bit of a roughing up with the wire brushes; slowly working dye into the wood where it once resisted.

You can see what I was up against! In the end I got something I ws happy with, although those join lines really couldn't be hidden - no way they were going take any colour even with the wire brush treatment. Oh well, some Tru-Oil on the sides and thne it will be time for some Acrylic clear coats!

Flamed Starcaster: A New Semi-Hollow Build

With my build queue down to a single (bass) guitar at the moment, it was high time that I dive into the stack and start another! After the Burled 335 turned out to be the sweetest guitar ever, I've been itching to get another semi-hollow build going. Enter the FS-1 Starcaster kit - a kit that Adam from Pitbull Guitars practically gave away at last year's birthday special!

Unboxing the Starcaster. Flame figure is evident!

Unboxing the kit, and doing a simple mock assembly, the kit looks pretty good. The neck fit is nice and tight and the flame veneer on the top of the guitar looks really awesome. There's a few discoloured glue marks around the binding on the back and a few obvious glue spots on the front and sides, but hopefully so,me Goof-Off should take care of these.

Dry fit of the neck is tight and the body looks good.

Gorgeous flame figure just begging to be dyed.

There's a small issue with the neck at the moment, and that's a small gap between the neck and the end of the pocket. This may close up when the neck is clamped, but I'll have a look at the floor of the neck pocket just to make sure there aren't any obvious issues (lumps and bumps) in there.

Gap at the base of the neck. The neck pocket might need a little sanding.

When Adam offered this kit at a bargain basement price last September, it was with the understanding that there were actually a couple of flaws in the body.Those flaws are pretty evident on the side of the body with some patching in the side sheeting and a few deep marks.

Patching in the side sheeting.

Some not so awesome stuff on the side, but I'll cope.

These don't worry me too much. To cover them over I plan to do a dark burst fading to black on the top and back so that the sides can be stained black. If these problem areas don't take the black stain then I'm not above hitting the sides with some black spray acrylic. Whatever it takes!


All in all I'm pretty darn excited about this build. I think I'll be ordering another GFS xTrem and Wilkinson roller bridge for this, as well as GFS pickups of some description. Since I love them so much in my 175 build, I'm thinking of using Nashville Retrotron pickups, but given the bad Aussie dollar I might fallback to Entwistle or Tonerider pickups from Pitbull. Decisions to come!

12 String Telecaster: Goof-off to the Rescue

Well more progress on the 12 String Telecaster today after a few days procrastinating over my glue issues. Resigned to the possibility that a solid finish may end up being the only possibility here, I decided to break out the Goof-off adhesive remover from Bunnings and give the glue spots some curry.

Goof-off glue remover - a bacon saver!

I made three passes over each glue spot. First I applied the Goof-off with a rag, rubbing hard on each spot for two or three sloppy applications. Then i took a clean rag and rubbed the same spots, trying to draw as much of the chemical back out of the wood as possible. This process I repeated three times in total, using up a good quarter of the container in the process.

After letting the body dry completely (this stuff evaporates pretty quickly), I then hit each glue spot with some 240 grit sandpaper; sanding until the (dye) tide lines around each glue spot couldn't be seen any more. I risked sand-through with each swipe of the paper, but there wasn't much alternative. It was with trepidation that I then broke out the black Colortone dye to see how successful my ministrations had been. Turns out they had been quite successful indeed!

A much better dye coverage second time around.

Fortunately there were no sand-through patches to be seen. Not only that, the dye had soaked into the previously bare patches remarkably well, with most of the glue spots now completely invisible. There still remains the faintest few spots around the bottom binding, and I'm still not sure what I will do about these. I'm not too keen to get too much of the remover on the binding, so I'll possibly use the wire brush during final dye application to try and get more dye in there. Either way I'm immensely pleased with the results. Looks like I somehow dodged a bullet with this one. Hats off to Goof-off. It gets a high recommendation from me after the results I've seen today!

12 String Telecaster: Fucking Glue Spots

Ok, did I say that the 12 String Telecaster kit had no obvious glue spots? Well, I was wrong. I got the kit out today to do some more sanding and to hunt for possible glue spots on the flame maple veneer (just in case :o). I'm leaning towards a trans black finish on the top, so I applied a weak wash of black dye to start to pop the grain and as a pre-colour just in case there's any glue spots to uncover.

A weak wash of black dye to highlight any glue spots.

The flame started to pop alright, but unfortunately I uncovered glue-a-plenty on the veneer. There's big gloops of glue around the binding near the neck pickup route, and it continues around most of the top half of the guitar. How the hell do you spill so much glue getting the binding on there and not clean it up?

A real mess around the binding

I'm pretty pissed off to be honest. These factories will build a kit with the thinnest of thin veneers to save money, but will then slather glue all over it to make finishing said veneer next to impossible. I don't know how I'm going to clean this glue up without sanding right through the veneer. I might try a few rounds of Goof-off Adhesive Remover on there to see if it helps, but I'm not holding out much hope. At this rate my nice flame maple 12 string is going to be covered with a solid colour finish. Not happy Jan!!

Jeremy's Mahogany Les Paul: Fit to Burst

It's crunch time for Jeremy's Les Paul build - today's the day that the front veneer receives its colour. After weeks of sanding, from 180 through 240, 320 and 400 grits, the body is finally ready to be dyed with Colortone dye. Before the dye could go on though, the grain had to be raised, and that meant several applications of a wet rag to swell the fibres followed by a light sand with 400 grit to cut them off again flat. All in all it took 4 such cycles to get the surface nice and smooth.

With that out of the way, the Colortone dye could be applied with impunity. I started by wetting down the whole surface of the guitar. This makes the first dye pass go on much more evenly; reducing the risk of the dreaded tide-lines forming. This was closely followed by the colour layer - Colortone Lemon Yellow. My god it was bright!

Layer 1 - Colortone Lemon Yellow.

I made a few passes with the Yellow to maximise the amount of pop from the flame maple figure. Despite my best efforts, including using a clean wet rag to try and drag colour out of the surface grains to maximise contrast, the flame figure was still only subtle at this stage. The next colour to go on, and the start of the burst proper, was Colortone Vintage Amber. In the beginning the contrast between Yellow and Vintage Amber was again very subtle, but the Amber did help to enhance the contrast with the flame even more.

Layer 2 - A subtle burst of Colortone Vintage Amber.

Next came the Colortone Red Mahogany layer. Using a combination of Vintage Amber and clean rags to blend the Mahogany into the previous layers, the results were really starting to take shape. Particularly pleasing was the way the flame figure took on the darker tones of the Mahogany when the colour was applied in an area and then taken off again during the 'merge'.

Layer 3 - Colortone Red Mahogany.

Lastly came a little Colortone Tobacco Brown to darken up the edges. To be honest the Tobacco didn't have as much of an impact as I was expecting, but I think by this stage the veneer was well and truly saturated and was refusing to take any more colour.

Layer 4 - Colortone Tobacco Brown, but to little effect.

All in all a pretty satisfactory burst. Except, that is, for the fucking glue marks along the top edge that made their sudden appearance half-way through the Red Mahogany layer. I could have cried when I saw them materialise out of thin air. At the time there was nothing for it but to finish the burst and leave the problem to be fixed later.

Glue spots. Where the fuck did they spring from??

So what to do?  Well apart from weeping into my after-lunch coffee, I let the surface dry under the fan and pondered my next steps. Armed with some friendly and poignant advice from the forumites at the BuildYourOwnGuitar forum, I grabbed my wire brushes, mixed up a 50:50 concoction of Vintage Amber and Red Mahogany and carefully set to the glue spots. The idea was to scratch each spot with the wire brush, pop some dye over the spot, and then blend it in with the rest of the burst. After 3 passes of this process, the burst had darkened substantially but the glue marks were a lot less obvious then previously.

Mischief managed. Wire brush an extra dye to the rescue.

If you know where to look you can still see the glue spots faintly lurking behind the finish. But really it's a hell of a lot better than when I started. I'm tempted to stop here and call it a day. No point tempting fate too far! I'll see how I feel tomorrow when I colour the rest of the body, but I'm pretty happy with how she looks right now.

12 String Telecaster: Unboxing and Mock Build

Yet another new kit arrived today that I'm very excited about. It's a new kit from DIYGuitars - a flame maple 12 String Telecaster! Even though I can't really play one for shit, I must confess that I am in love with 12 string guitars. I love my Olson 335 12-String build, and this build looks to be just as cool.

Unboxing the Telecaster

The kit came well packaged from DIYGuitars, with all the wooden pieces snugly placed and protected by soft sheeting. The components also came well wrapped, with the chrome components (bridge, control cover) especially well looked after. The 3-piece basswood body of the guitar has no machining marks or obvious glue spots and the binding looks well done. The flame maple veneer is subtle, but should come alive with a little stain. 

Some nice Flame Maple Veneer popped with a little water.

There's a little grain to be seen on the back of the body, but not too much. About the only negative I could say is that one of the string-through holes is a little off centre, throwing all the others off too. It won't be as obvious once the ferrules go it, but I'll still know.

One ferrule hole is not quite straight.

The neck is straight and fits well in its cavity. The 12-string headstock is a new one for me - I'll have to come up with some kind of design for the top - not that there's much wood up there to work with. There's also a subtle grain to the fretboard that I really like. It's going to be a hard decision whether to give the neck a little amber dye or leave it natural. I'm leaning towards a yellow + amber + orange burst for this one so an amber neck may not be the best decision. Still thinking on that one.

Straight neck with all those tuner holes.

Some subtle grain on the fretboard.

Straight from the unboxing to the mock build, and this thing went together in no time. 6 of the strings go through the body so the string ferrule holes needed to be aligned with the bridge. The factory has even marked where the top corners holes of the bridge should be drilled so there's no wiggle room as far as bridge placement is concerned. Just drill and screw.

Bridge positioning - making sure the string-through holes line up.

It really is a matter for this build, of placing the bridge and then adjusting the neck to get the strings travelling correctly. But with no wiggle room in the neck pocket either, it's in the hands of the gods to be honest. Let's hope the factory did its job properly, especially with respect to scale length and intonation. The good news on that score is that the bridge actually has compensated saddles for the high and low strings of each pair. Pretty amazing for such a cheap kit. My 12-string 335 build had no such thing with it's cheap tune-o-matic bridge. I can't wait to see how this bad boy sounds!

Flamed Telecaster: She's All Done.

Well the flamed telecaster is finally complete. I probably could have waited another couple of weeks for the Acrylic Clear to cure, but I never was very patient. In a month or so I'll give her another polish and that will be that. The hardware went on easily and without incident, and the wiring was a snap -  almost as easy as wiring a Strat.

 

I  still have to do a full fret-level and re-crown before this baby is completely done. I started to do it, but I wasn't able to immediately straighten out the fretboard for levelling. I've given the truss-rod a bit of a turn so I'll wait a few days to see if it straightens out. Even without the fret-level, the neck plays pretty nicely, and the GFS Professional Series 52 Vintage Pickups sound pretty sweet! She's now officially a 'Vintage' series ;). I've never owned a Telecaster before, and I'm really liking how it plays!