The Mod Squad
Dave Burrluck continues working away at his kitchen table to produce a professional-level bolt-on electric… hopefully!
Idon’t think I’ve ever asked a Master Builder at Fender – or indeed any other luthier – whether, after years of making guitars, they still get excited about the prospect of the outcome. I can honestly say, even though I built my first electric guitar back in the early 70s, the excitement is still there. The temptation to throw it all together bish, bash, bosh Jamie Oliver-style is very strong, but even with a basic build like this vintage-style ‘T’, I’m reminded by previous cock-ups to take my time.
In our last issue I’d prepared the neck and body, which boded well – the apparent quality of both parts is extremely high. With my aim to simply evaluate the kit, I’d left behind thoughts of a posh sprayed or reliced finish and I’d applied a quick (and reversible) sealing finish: oil/wax to the neck and a thin French polish to the body. It’s time to start the assembly.
In Build
The beauty of Leo Fender’s groundbreaking blueprint means that you don’t have to be a luthier to create an electric guitar. So long as you have basic practical skills and some similarly basic DIY hand tools, you’re good to go, even if your ‘workshop’ is your kitchen table.
The hardest part – and, again, it isn’t really that difficult – is to attach the neck to the body. The supplied instructions clearly tell you how to tap the vintage-style grommets into the headstock, line up the
tuners, mark and drill the holes for the retaining screws, apply some lube and screw ’em in [pic 1]. Finally, you push the supplied nut into its slot; ours is on the tight side, so I lightly sand one side with 400-grit paper on a flat surface and that’s enough to just make it a snug push-fit. The nut has light grooves and, though we’ll come back to properly adjusting the depth of those in a while, it’s good enough for its initial purpose of helping to line up the neck and body ready to drill the holes in the neck for the four ‘bolts’, which are actually screws, of course.
Next, you need to mount the bridge plate with just the two outer screws. The neck fits the body pocket beautifully and you need to hold it with a G-clamp: always use small wood blocks between the pads of the clamp and the neck/body. Using a couple of old strings, string up the outer E strings and check they sit equidistant to the edge of the fingerboard [pic 2]. If they don’t, you need to slightly reduce the pressure on the clamp and move the neck sideways. Once you’re happy, tighten the clamp and turn the guitar over. Use a drill bit to mark the holes for the neck then disassemble [pic 3].
Secure it to your bench, or in our case table, then drill the four holes for the neck screws. If you have a drill press, that’s preferable, but you can use a hand drill with a sharp drill bit and use a square to check by eye that you’re drilling as upright as possible. You only need to drill to a depth of approximately 17mm, so measure the tip of the drill bit and just wrap a piece of masking tape around it to indicate your stop point [pic 4].
The actual holes in the body are drilled a little smaller in diameter than they need to be, which helps with the proper marking of the holes you’ve drilled into the neck. But you now need to open those out to the diameter of the screws you’re using – no more, no less [pic 5]. The neck screws should be a tight push-fit through the body and only screw into the neck. Refit the neck and place the four screws
(lube those threads!) through the neck plate and through the body. Screw ’em down a little at a time moving in a diagonal fashion from top to bottom corners [pic 6].
Load The Parts
I continue my build by firstly loading in the bridge pickup to the bridge plate [pic 7] then simply wiring in the output jack to the control plate. Both need holes to be drilled to mount them and just lay on the very nice black-sprayed Bakelite pickguard while you line up the control plate [pic 8]. At this stage, I leave off the neck pickup – simply so I can easily access the truss rod – which can be wired in later. The instructions tell you to place a ground wire under the bridge plate [pic 9] before you mount it. This isn’t really necessary, because the bridge is grounded by the metal plate under the bridge pickup. However, I do it anyway just in case I fit a bridge pickup without a baseplate further down the line. Wire in the bridge pickup and screw down the control plate.
The nut grooves are still too high, but don’t worry about that at the moment. The next step is to string up, but use some cheap strings, because these are really for a guide and will be replaced once we’re done fettling and adjusting. Now capo at the 1st fret. Next, you can set the rough height of the saddles. As ever, never raise a saddle under full string tension; just relax the relevant string beforehand. If you have a radius gauge, you can set the string height of the outer strings – I start with 1.6mm (1/16-inch) – then raise or lower the saddles to match that radius. Alternatively, just measure each string to that same height from the top of the 12th fret to the underside of the string.
The neck, as we said last issue, has a single-action truss rod. In build, a slight 0.020-inch relief is built in without any tension on the rod. This is a relatively big neck, and once strung with 0.010 to 0.046gauge strings and left for a couple of days under tension, I have just enough relief for a clean buzz-free action. At this stage, I haven’t touched the frets at all.
Nut Adjustment
Back in the mid-90s I was asked to write a book about guitar setup and maintenance. Veteran guitar repairer Bill Puplett was my technical mentor and we both agreed that we wouldn’t cover cutting a nut: it was a pro’s job. Today, everyone thinks they have the skills to do it. How times have changed.
The nut here is already grooved, but to maximise the action you’ll need to deepen them. I used proper nut files for the low four strings and an X-Acto razor saw for the two high strings [pic 10]. Fret files are expensive and unless you plan to fettle more nuts in the future they’re not worth the one-off expense. Maybe you can borrow some from a friend? Alternately, you can use needle files – a knife taper and fine round are especially useful. A set of feeler gauges can be used to provide a stop point, too: basically the height of the fret plus 0.012-inch on the treble side and 0.020-inch on the bass side are good starting points. Of course, the old-school method is simply to check the height of the string over the 1st fret after you’ve fretted the string at the 3rd fret – it should just clear the top of the 1st fret.
Typically, I’ll get the grooves close to correct then I’ll clean up the nut with fine abrasive paper and make sure the strings don’t sit too far into the nut – they really should sit in grooves that are half the diameter of the string in depth, certainly no deeper than the full diameter of the string itself [pic 11]. Once all is clean and tidy, a couple of drops of Super Glue will hold the nut in place.
Nearly There
A couple of days later and after a couple of hours’ play time I have a minimal ‘final list’ to work through. The fretting here is seriously good, level, and the frets themselves are pretty well polished. The ends are a little sharp, so I tape up the ’board and just use a small pillar file to round the edges of each fret [pic 12]. A light rub with 800- then 1000-grit wet and dry paper on a hard wood block (which is straight) polishes the fret tops further, moving across the frets from bass to treble side [pic 13]. Then, again with both grades, you can rub the fret ends by hand. Finally, a polish with an ultra-fine abrasive pad followed by 0000 wire wool (as ever with the pickup taped up) has them mirrorshiny and ultra-smooth [pic 14].
Finally, I load in the neck pickup and solder it to the three-way switch. Now’s the time to adjust the pickup heights when you’re plugged in and generally let the guitar settle in a bit – it’s getting used to being a guitar. While you’ll no doubt be hugely proud of your achievement, this is also the time to evaluate it, not least comparing it to other similar guitars you or your mates might have. In fact, all I need
to do is dial in those string grooves at the nut and double-check the intonation.
I then hammer in the string ferrules so I can through-string the guitar, and I put on a fresh set of strings. Finally, I mark the holes for the pickguard, drill them and screw it down. Job done!
Final Thoughts
This is a fantastic kit. You need only basic DIY tools, although a set of fret files, as discussed, will certainly help. Provided that you have some practical skills, it really shouldn’t be a problem to put it together. The caveat is the final setup: you might need some help from a friend – but even if you paid a professional it would be worth it. Put together well, the quality here far exceeds the price and I think it’s fair that you’re looking at the equivalent of a £1k-plus Fender by comparison. Of course, if you have the skills to spray and/or relic an instrument, not to mention fettle and fine-tune like the Patrick James Eggles of this world, you could really produce something of enormous quality.
But it really is an open book. Purposely, I’d put the kit together with a simple finish, as is. I could have gone down the relic route, added different pickups, control circuit, changed the neck shape, added body contours… and on it goes. However, as I did, you could simply build it, play it and then do any of the above mods. The truth is, only a few hours after putting on the fresh strings I was using the Wilkinson ‘T’ to record some guitar parts. There’s a lovely resonance, quite dry and almost acoustic-y and raw, that does a pretty good impersonation of the real thing when married to the WVOB bridge pickup. The control circuit is excellent with smooth pot tapers and a very well-voiced treble bleed. I’m seriously impressed.
Ultimately, a great kit such as this is a great learning resource, and with such a quality foundation it’s going to be pretty hard not to build yourself a fine example of Fender’s original solidbody guitar. Thanks to Leo’s original blueprint, the hugely experienced detail of Trev Wilkinson, and the superb craft of Harmony Musical Instruments, we can all be guitar makers – even with minimal skills.
That should give you something to think about till our next issue.
In the meantime, if you have any modding questions, or suggestions, drop us a line – The Mod Squad.