TL-1TB Build

[Pendragon]

Hello to all,

My name is Richard, been trying to play guitar for some time but have found a real hobby in fixing up old guitars and decided to try my hand at building as I can't find the specific guitar I have been wanting. Bought the TL-1TB kit as a base and a baritone neck off eBay and bashed the 2 together for my first build, will be posting in the builders diary. Plenty I already know how to do and plenty I have not so will be an experience.

[Pendragon]

I have mainly been focused on the headstock to get my head around some of the techniques needed before tackling the body but have also started on it.



Received the Kit yesterday and proceeded with sanding and fitting the different neck, making sure to adjust the neck alignment before I started painting.



After sealing the body I started work on the neck to stain the wood, unfortunately I believe my stain was off as the end result is not what I expected.

[Trevor Davies]

Hi and welcome Pendragon.

It would be best to start a build diary in the "My Build Diary" section.

Good luck with your build. + The blue looks great!
What stain did you use?

[Pendragon]

Feast Watson Maple Prooftint Stain, the stock photos show it more as a yellow tint but this has come out more orange.

[Simon Barden]

Hi and welcome.

Is the Baritone neck a conversion neck? If not, you’ll have scale length issues if the bridge isn’t moved back. See my reply to a baritone neck question here: https://www.buildyourownguitar.com.a...ad.php?t=12401

Sanding the neck with too fine a grit can cause uneven take-up of the stain. If you’ve gone finer than P240, I’d sand it again with P180 and try staining again. You’ll put the very smooth finish on the clear coat.

But the neck may also have been treated with sonething like shellac or a sanding sealer before you bought it, in which case that will need to be sanded off before the stain will take.

[Pendragon]

Thanks for the input, I can't get specification of the neck itself other than intended scale length and measurements but during mock up I checked the position and a quick measure had it almost at intended length.

I gave the neck a sand down of P180 before starting any work on it, the stain was darker on the rag than what was expected, in hindsight I should have test first.

[Simon Barden]

The Feast Watson website shows the stain pretty much that colour. Though the Bunnings website shows it much more yellow on ash. That could be wrong or they could have used a very diluted stain . All those Prooftint stains seem pretty dark to me, so were probably applied undiluted in the FW examples.

You may need to dilute the stain considerably with IPA (isopropyl alcohol) or metho (the official FW ‘colour reducer’ will undoubtedly be some alcohol based thinner). And always test on a piece of scrap wood first, say pine, that’s a similar colour to maple.

[Pendragon]

Have started a thread in the My Build Diary.

[Simon Barden]

How many frets does the neck have? If its a 30” neck then it’s likely to have 21 frets if it’s not a conversion neck, and 22 if it is. There will only be about 1/2” / 12-13mm difference in the neck length between the two types, but with a TOM style bridge, you won’t have enough adjustment available with a non-conversion neck unless you plug the post holes and redrill them the right amount further from the neck. So its worth putting some masking tape between the post holes, drawing a line between the hole centres, then drawing a line parallel to that about 2mm further forwards. Then put the neck in the pocket and measure 30” along the neck from the high ‘B’ (high E slot on a standard guitar) parallel to the edge of the neck, to where it meets that forward line (TOM saddle forward position). You need to measure along the path of the string.

The thicker baritone strings will intonate a bit further back from the nominal scale length than with standard guitar strings, so the top/high B will probably intonate about 1 to 1.5mm back from the 30” (762mm) scale length.

So 763 mm coming anywhere between the two lines and you’re fine. Very slightly out and you’ll probably be fine, but if you have a significant discrepancy you’ll have issues.