The very first guitar I got was an acoustic no name hunk of junk with an action so high it was virtually unplayable . I was twelve and tried playing it for a good six months before i gave up
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Then when I was fourteen and a half, I decided to build an electric.
My Idol was Hank Marvin, but I knew I'd never afford a Strat, so..............
Some boys I knew already had a hofner colorama and a framus, so I borrowed the colorama for a night and took loads of measurements and copied the fret spacings and measurements from the last fret to the bridge saddles (actually a one piece bridge cut to shape)

I drew a strat template on thin cardboard and eventually ended up with a reasonable facsimilie, so went out and bought some wood from a local woodyard (think it was poplar) and after painstakingly cutting out the shape with a coping saw (I broke 4 blades) I had my body!

I Had to cut the neck pocket out with fine cuts with a tenon saw and then chisel it out and sandpaper the bottom. The neck came from a piece of very light coloured obeche that was very old and had been in the woodyard for years, when I told the guy what it was for, he said "this is what you want then" and actually gave it to me for free
I then spent another 2 weeks with my dad's spokeshave and copius amounts of sandpaper (no strat front and back contours mind) and then drilled loads of holes under where the pickguard would be to lessen the weight.

The body was then painted in crown household pillar box red (3 coats!!) and, after a few weeks, I wet very fine emery paper with fairy soap and water and gently went over the body to get the little lumps out and polished it back up by french polishing it back to a shine , the results were pretty good!

The neck took a lot more time, I drew outlines of the headstock and fretboard and then went back to the woodyard and asked them if they would cut two long cuts either side of where my fingerboard would be , intending to do the short cuts back home myself
Alan at the woodyard said , he'd do all the cutting, not only did he do the neck spot on to my carefully drawn lines, he turned the paddle shaped head sideways on and split it down for me and took off the excess (a half round shaped file, wrapped in gradually finer and finer pieces of sandpaper, took care of the rest of the transition down to peghead thickness)

The neck took another two weeks of rasping, spokeshaving and worst of all, sanding, till it felt right to me, so after that, it got a few coats of french polish (complete with it's completeley flat fingerboard ,and frets installed, Hey, I was only fourteen and a half!!)
Obeche is a fine wood , I knew nothing about truss rods and in the 2 years I eventually played my "strat", that neck never moved, warped, or twisted , it just stayed true .
Next came the electrics, something completeley alien to me, so, off I toddled to the library(this was 1963 remember) and borrowed as many books about "electric guitars" as I was allowed
After gaining my masters degree in electronics (reading till my brain hurt!), I decided 3 pickups were too complex and one would just have to do (but set in the treble position and SLANTED, YEH), so I found an old reel to reel tape recorder and scavenged the tone and volume knobs and controls off them and went into Manchester and bought a Vox single coil (Think Telecaster neck pickup without the wax potting)
After trying it out on my " Test bed" ( actually a guitar top "E" string tightened with a tuner peg between two screws with a bottle as a bridge), it sounded crap, so I wax potted it myself with amazing results It worked !!! (and my eyebrows grew back ok!!)

I decided that my primitive strat build would be too complicated if I tried to do one of those fancy angled jack socket thingies, so stuck with my original idea to have one volume control, one tone control and a jack socket where the third knob would be , that would be my salvation!!
The Idea worked like you wouldn't believe (actually, maybe you would, 'cos someone did the same thing to strats around 1983 ish)

Next up , came the problem of the bridge/tremolo something I'd only seen up close once, but had never see the backplate removed , or had any idea how it actually worked, so I set about thinking how it would be possible to make something similar that worked.
I eventually settled for a mild steel bar with 6 holes drilled through it for the strings and one for the tremolo arm . this was then passed through a steel plate which had been drilled both ends and then bent like this l_____l This plate would be screwed to the body and raised by shimming it underneath to the required height . Then came the springs.
I gave it to my dad who came home that night with two motor bike chain links welded at either end . By utilising the remaining 2 holes in the chain links, I was able to construct 2 spring holders so the springs stayed attached to the tremolo, but just rested on and pushed against the guitar body (actually, the pickguard which I'd made from a piece of white coated plywood) think a bigsby roller bar with 2 small springs instead of 1 big one
The time came to test it and it worked, but the intonation was terrible, so I decided to start grinding parts of the round bar flat with a small grinding wheel attached to my dad's drill
This was very slow and labourious, but after a day, the intonation was nearly spot on and the bridge bar resembled one of the wilkinson compensated tele bridges ( still had to take it off a few times to keep rounding the flats on it off at the back edge, so my strings didn't ping when I used it ( I was even able to use it upwards where the springs would lift slightly off the pickguard )
I used that guitar for 2 years -total cost @ £12
________________________________________________________________________
My next guitar was a Rosetti Airstream 2 , a strat like guitar with a jaguar type trem and two pickups .

It sounded ok, but the action just wouldn't lower without buzzing, so I only kept it for 6 weeks
I then had to ask my dad to sign an HP agreement for me to eventually buy a Strat . I went to a small local record shop where the owner said he would give me a better part exchange than the big shops in neighbouring Manchester

. I saw an album cover of Buddy Holly and the crickets where they are holding a gibson single cutaway and Buddy's Strat and said "one just the same as that"
He had dealings with rare American imported records, so he sent off for a Fender catalogue . I have seen the Fender story in which Mark Knopfler says the Fender catalogue, that's how we spell it in England , has a distictive smell. I know exactly what he means, the paint used at the time was dupont car paint and to duplicate the process in a printed document, made it smell , well like PAINT!!, and red Fenders !!

I called in to see him about 3 weeks later to see if he'd heard anything and he said that somebody from Fender had rung him and asked if I would take a light blue strat with a rosewood fingerboard instead (It was being sent to Ireland, but the guy who ordered it, changed his mind, so they would ship it over to England for me if I said yes)
I jumped at this , even though Hank's was red , this would be cool, a blue one!. It came and I was annoyed at having to buy a case (they weren't supplied with cases in the uk).
I pcked it up and we were gigging that night, it was a Saturday, I was pretty naive and wondered why the trem was decked and made a clunk when used,as it snapped back against the body . Quality control and final checking must have been hit and miss at this time and to be honest, they weren't technicians, just cheap labour

I came off stage and my fingers were raw , so the following day, I set about it
Off came the trem backplate and the springs were tightened beyond belief , so I backed them off but it still felt like sh1t, so I put on lighter strings ( there wern't any light guage strings at that time, they were nearly all 12s with a wound 3rd, so what we'd found out, was , use a banjo string for 1st, a heavy 1st for 2nd, a PLAIN heavy 2nd for 3rd and so on it felt just like tuning down 2 steps and the strings felt slinkier
I then altered the saddle height (it was way too high ) and messed around with the trem spring claw till I was happy and the next weekend (complete with surgical tape, still on my ring finger tip), we played again . What a difference!, the tone out of that thing was amazing (if a little bassy), the neck was smooth compared to what I'd been used to and the thing just looked so cool!

Two years later, i got made redundant and had left the group and was a bit disillusioned with music (plus, I'd started seeing a girl ), so I reluctantly sold it to a guy in a rival group who was constantly begging me to sell it to him (wish I'd kept it )
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fast forward 14 months and my love life was on hold and I'd heard a bass player I knew had left a pro group and so I went to see him and asked if he wanted to start a new group, he replied only if he could include a drummer we both knew. I jumped at the chance but had no guitar , so on the pretext that mine was in bits, I said to give me a week to sort it. He said fine as he was going on holiday for a week , so we arranged to meet up a week later .

I then had one whole week to come up with a guitar , so I went to Manchester to a shop that repaired guitars and bought a maple neck from them . It was fretted and was in good nick apart from the headstock, which looked awful . Out came the coping saw and sandpaper again . I didn't have enough wood left for a strat shape, so did a telecaster shape instead , even down to french polishing the newly sanded edges and putting a "Tedcaster custom esquire" logo on it with Letraset.

For the body, I again went to the woodyard and bought A piece of pine which was quite light surprisingly , so the headstock shape determined that this was to be a telecaster type build . This time i worked a lot faster and first stained the body a mid reddish colour, but it looked terrible, all patchy, so I tried spraying it light blue with one of those new fangled car spray paint cans
That was better , but it still didn't look right, so in desperation at my impending deadline, I cannibalised an old fur coat my Mum was throwing out and covered the body in fur!
A telecaster bridge with a burns sonic pickup installed in it, went on next and I managed to wire up a Telecaster copy control plate which had the jack socket on it and make a Pickguard out of white plastic sheeting . I found out that the control plate and Pickguard were very hard to fit over the fur, so out came an old cuthroat razor of my grandads and I simply shaved off the fur from the edges round the pickguard and control plate areas!

I tuned and intonated it and plugged it in and..................................NO SOUND!!. I panicked and tried everything and was just about to take the control plate off when I realised I'd wired it wrong . The tone and volume controls both worked well BACKWARDS!!
With not really enough time to rewire it, I actually played it like that for 3 years and just found it weird whenever I tried another guitar out ( the bass player took one look at it and said "that's different ". We split up after 2 years and I only found out a few months ago that he'd died).
_____________________________________________________________________
I eventually sold that for peanuts to a young kid after getting given an unamed, strat style guitar (never seen one like it since) with 4 pickups, a chrome scratchplate with rollers and a bigsby style trem that played superb

Then I traded that in for an encore strat (an early one with a proper strat shape headstock). It was in black with a rosewood neck, but crap pickups, so I gutted it, put in a floyd rose copy,passive EMG's and a friend of mine who does bodywork resprayed it with silver and red metalflake over black

I sold that to a vicars son after I got my current guitar , a 1968 japanese reissue (it had a kinked stratocaster logo, so I had it refretted with Jim dunlop frets and a transition logo applied).and then refinished the headstock myself with 17 coats of nitro to sink the logo into the laquer
I got it 1st of Nov 1995 and still have it today.

_________________
Ted

"All right, guys, uh, listen. This is a blues riff in "B", watch me for the changes, and try and keep up, okay?"

That's an incredible story...I love it! I really like well-thought-out, well written posts like this.

But I really, really hope you have some pics of that first guitar you built...I didn't notice if you mentioned whether sold it or kept it, do you still have it?

Please share any pics if you have them...

_________________
Good Vibes To Y'all!



Screamin' Armadillos
Texas Roadhouse Music
Guitar/Slide Guitar/Harp/Vocals

Sorry,sadly I don't have any,and I did sell it but somewhere kocking about is a pic of one of my brothers, Jack posing with the fur-o-caster, I will try and find it

_________________
Ted

"All right, guys, uh, listen. This is a blues riff in "B", watch me for the changes, and try and keep up, okay?"

great post and an interesting story

_________________
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancin'

Ted, thanks, wonderful recounting of your adventures in amateur guitar building, etc. Quite the enterprising young player! Hope to see your pic of the furcaster!

_________________
I'm twanged if I do, twanged if I don't

Just a quick update of this
I have looked high and low and can't find the picture of my brother posing with the fur covered "Tedcaster" custom esquire, but did find this pic of me in the sixties with the Rosetti airstream (only had it a few weeks )



Ted

_________________
Ted

"All right, guys, uh, listen. This is a blues riff in "B", watch me for the changes, and try and keep up, okay?"

Thanks for that Ted: an enjoyable read!

I love this story. Thanks.

_________________
I remember when we were free!

That was a great story Ted. I'd love to see some pics of the furocaster (necessity is the mother of invention) .