Oh you have to finish this. This has been the most intense and informative build diary I have followed. Lots of great ideas, with lots of great tips on how to achieve them.
She is a weapon of beauty and we need to hear her sing to our souls. Scott plug in your desire to hear her play and make it so. Man she needs to breath......this girl is gonna wail.
Modified Fender TBX tone control (bass cut <-0->treble cut)
Treble cut filter cap with On/On/On switch (Volume only, Volume & TBX, Volume & TBX & Treble cut)
Overconfidence and ambition to try and fit it all into a standard Tele cavity
One stain coat of Dingotone Beta orange on body and headstock face
Two Intensifier coats of Dingotone Beta on body and headstock face
Colortone vintage amber mix stain on neck
Two coats of Dingotone Mk.1 clear neck stain 'base' on neck
The beta orange really stains binding, and I mean really. Much scraping of binding! But I love the colour
First beta top coat on body
And that's where this build diary paused, briefly (about 2 years and 4 months ago)… and Wokka's nagging started.
The build didn't actually stop at that point, I was still applying the finish, I just didn't get around to an update before the build did pause. To finish the initial catch-up, here's the rest of the finishing I did two years ago.
The beta orange was proving to be very volatile even after plenty of drying time. It seemed to re-activate when applying my top coats and quickly stained my cloth.
It was going on well and looking pretty good. But, then we had a couple of days of higher humidity and the finish took a turn. Coat #4 went from smooth and nice to coarse, rough and lumpy over a couple of days.
(second image is without flash to get the contrast to show how rough it was)
I couldn't risk wet sanding with water to clean up the roughness, not enough protection for the wood. And, with the volatility of the orange I couldn't risk using a solvent to sand, so I had to go with dry 1200 wet'n'dry. I just wanted to smooth out the finish without taking off any more of the top coat (or orange) than necessary… but the paper was still stained very orange. With time and caution it was eventually smooth again.
But it meant more orange moving around with the next top coat.
Fifth top coat, or replacement of #4 really. Back to a nice smooth finish.
Although the body was mostly smooth again with the 5th top coat, the patchiness was still occurring. Hard to photograph clearly, so I took some shots without the flash. You can just see the patchy/streaky sections scattered across the body, and it was pretty much the same on the headstock face.
And, that's where I had to put the build aside two years ago. I was planning to let it dry for an extended period to see if that would improve the patchiness, but then life got in the way and it kept getting pushed aside (while also gathering a layer of dust).
While working on my YB-4 build I had a look at the TL-1TB's neck, and sighting down it something didn't look right. I was worried that it may have warped a bit while it had been hanging, but it looked more like a couple of frets may have just lifted slightly from all the temp and humidity changes over the long years of neglect. It was time it had some attention.
I re-pressed the frets to sort out any raised ones and gave it a light level to get it back where it should be. Black marker is a high spot, red everywhere else.
Re-crowned, cleaned-up and polished.
The binding was still stained from the last top coat application two years ago, so to start fresh I scraped the binding yet again (probably for the 7th time, or more, time).
Volume only/Volume & TBX/Volume, TBX & Treble Cut
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