President's Day Weekend Guitar Projects - Part 1

I was pretty busy over the President's Day weekend. I made some progress on a guitar for my buddy Jesse, and finished up a project for myself.

I am fixing up an old Teisco-built Silvertone for Jesse. This is a guitar I bought on eBay, a few years back, and ended up very disappointed. I was under the impression that I was buying a playable guitar, but what I received was someone else's project which had gone bad. Still, I wanted it badly enough that I didn't demand a refund/return, but I just set it aside as a future project.

Recently, I showed it to Jesse, and he decided he would like to add it to his collection of old Japanese axes. So, I got to work on it, Friday.

First, I removed the godawful mismatched junk tuners that came with it...

Then, I plugged all of the screw holes,

 and touched up the paint on the back of the head stock.

 After I installed new tuners, I turned to the wiring.

The pick guard and pickups that are on the guitar are not original, nor is the paint. When this guitar left the factory, it had 4 pickups, and was painted red. Someone in the past spray-painted the guitar black, and grafted on a two-pickup pick guard, which almost (but not quite) fit.

Inside, there was some of the worst wiring I have ever encountered in a guitar. The pots were corroded...

the rocker switches for the neck pickup were wired backward...


and numerous connections were just twisted together and taped. Other connections had big globs of solder on them, which I had to remove and replace.

Three hours after I started working on the wiring, I had both pickups and all of the switches working. The corroded pots were replaced with new 500k pots, and I trimmed the pick guard so that it fit between the neck and the bridge.

That night, I took it to Jesse so that he could play it a bit and see if he wanted to modify anything before we do the finish work. He wants a tortoise shell pick guard, for sure, but I want to make sure that he is happy with the pickups before I start cutting a new guard.

Once it is complete, I will post pictures of final build on the old Teisco.

Next up, Back To The Future! (I created an approximation of a guitar I once owned...)

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