Hofner Colorama II restoration project (part 3) - re-fretting the guitar neck

In the last blog post, we stripped down and de-fretted a vintage Hofner Colorama II neck. Today we’ll re-fret it.

First of all, we need to do some initial preparation, so we lay the neck out on its jig just like in the previous post and then sort out the fret wire. These frets have been bought pre-cut and pre-radiused. They’re not all the same length, so we need to sort them in order of shortest to longest. Here we’ve punched holes (don’t use the frets to do this!) in an empty cardboard box and placed the frets in them in the correct order.

Next thing we need to do is clean all of the dust, etc., out of the fret slots. A thin craft knife will suffice for this, but do it in the opposite direction to the knife edge (in other words, if the blade is pointing forwards, then pull the knife backwards). Remember, we’re not actually cutting anything here, just pushing all of the dust out of the slots.

Next we take our shortest fret and do a test fitting in the first fret slot.

Uh-oh, it seems the fret slots on this 50-year-old neck are very thin and will need to be widened to 0.8mm in order to fit this more modern fret wire. Luckily the blade on this hack saw is just the right thickness (phew), so we can continue. Be extremely careful cutting the slots as you can easily pull a chunk of wood off the fretboard surface by accident.

Here you can see the difference between one of the original fret slots (top) and one of the new slots (bottom).

Also, you may notice that, despite extreme care, cutting the new slot has pulled up a bit of extra material from the top surface of the fretboard, so for the rest of the slots we will use tape, as follows (you can’t really see it in this photo, but if you run your fingernail down the middle of the tape, you’ll be able to make out the old slot very clearly, giving you a good guide for the hacksaw).

It’s important to know how deep to cut the slots. Simply measure the depth of the underside of the fret to deduce this. Here you can see a craft knife, which has been marked with the height we need to cut, being used to check the depth after we have sawed a new slot.

We use a plastic-faced deadblow hammer to tap the frets into place. This type of hammer is very forgiving and will not damage the frets (well, unless you REALLY try), so you can just keep on tapping until they are nice and snug in the slots. I tapped the ends of the fret into place before tapping the middle. This helps the fret to not spring up at the edges at a later date.

Here's my hammer:

Once all of the frets have been installed, we can use a fret rocker to check if any of them are sitting too high. If so, we simply give them another tap or two to encourage them to go a bit lower.

The frets are fitted, but they’re sticking out of the sides of the neck, so we use a file to file them flush with the edge of the fretboard.

Then we taper the edges so we don’t rip our hands to shreds when it’s time to eventually play this thing.

We may have to do some more finishing work on the frets (namely leveling and crowning), but we won’t know until the whole guitar is put together, especially given this particular neck’s back bow.

In the meantime, here’s the (more or less) re-fretted neck.

Hofner Colorama II restoration project (part 2) - removing the frets and stripping (scraping) the lacquer from the guitar neck

The neck on this vintage Hofner Colorama II is going to get tackled before we deal with the guitar's other issues. The neck is in quite a state, with at least the following problems:

1. The frets need replacing (total refret).
2. The fingerboard is very uneven and needs re-radiusing (sanding down to the correct curvature again).
3. There is a long crack/gap running along the fingerboard that will need to be filled in (luckily this is not a structural problem).
4. The nut needs to be removed and replaced.
5. The old lacquer needs to be removed and the neck needs to be re-lacquered.
6. A new waterslide-decal logo needs to be made and applied.
7. The relief on the neck needs to be dealt with (it is back-bowed, even when the truss rod is completely loosened).

Today we will just deal with the stripping down stage.

First thing to do is remove the neck from the guitar as follows:

The machine heads (tuners) and string retainer are also removed, leaving us with this:

Before we can do any more work, the neck needs to be supported or clamped down in some way, so a quick neck rig is made from a piece of wood and a screw is passed from the back of that into one of the holes at the heel of the neck. A second screw passes through one of the machine head holes to hold the neck firmly (this can be removed, or moved to another hole, when doing any delicate work in that area).

STOP! Before continuing today’s post, if you ever decide to tackle a project like this, I cannot stress this enough…. WEAR SAFETY GLASSES. And for the sanding part and lacquer removal part, WEAR A MASK. You don’t want to be breathing that stuff into your lungs. You have been warned.

The nut is tapped out from the side using a hammer and some sort of straight punch. This one appears to have had a shim below it. With the shim removed it is clear that the nut slot will need to be cleaned out and leveled a little bit before a new one is installed.

Nut slot in need of work:

Filing out the nut slot:

A small pair of end cutting pliers are used to SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY remove the frets. Patience is a virtue at this stage. Any rushed movement will surely pull up a chunk of fretboard material by accident.

Once all of the frets have been removed, the fretboard looks something like this:

A radiused sanding block with 400 grade sandpaper is now used to sand the fretboard down. Some of the cowboy-chord finger positions are really worn down, but we will try to get the fretboard as good as possible without having to lower the entire surface by too much. Also, in an attempt to minimise the effect of the back bow, the fretboard is sanded more heavily towards the middle of the neck.

Neck relief (back bow):

Since a lot of lovely rosewood dust is getting spread all over the fretboard, and since, coincidentally, we need to fill in a big long crack, this is a perfect (and very convenient) time to drip superglue along the crack, sealing that dust into the gap. Once the superglue has dried, it is actually easier to remove any excess with a fine file, rather than clogging up the sandpaper. A bit more sanding with the radiused sanding block and we should be done with the fretboard.


The crack before we started sanding:

After a bit of sanding, you can see the crack getting filled with rosewood dust:

Superglue is applied along the length of the crack:

A similar technique was later used on the deepest gouge in the cowboy chord positions of the fretboard.


Now onto the lacquer removal. Since the lacquer is literally flaking off this neck, there is no doubt what the best method is to strip this – with a paint scraper. Here’s a picture of the peghead with the lacquer partially removed. It is very easy to see what has been removed and what hasn’t.

Here’s another picture of part of the back of the neck, also with some lacquer removed. Some areas were easier than others to remove lacquer from, but the outer edge of the peghead was by far the most difficult, especially around the lower edge.

And now here's the face of the peghead after scraping:

The tuners on this guitar have been replaced at least once, and a couple of the tuners have been replaced several times, leaving it with a LOT of holes where there shouldn’t be any. Luckily, most of these will actually be covered by the new tuners, but we would like to fill in these holes anyway, especially since some of them lie very close to where new holes will be and we don’t want any screws to be wandering into the wrong hole.


Screw holes:

Check with new tuners to see what will still be visible:

The quickest and easiest way to do this is by superglueing cocktail sticks into the holes as shown here:

The cocktail sticks are now snipped and filed/sanded down to the same level as the peghead. As mentioned, these will be mostly hidden from view, so no need to worry too much about how well they match the peghead wood.

With the fretboad re-radiused, the lacquer removed and the holes filled, the whole neck is given an all-over sanding. Unfortunately the original logo decal has left a type of sunblock tan line on the peghead, so short of making the new logo an exact fit, this may need to be sanded further. That said, a quick test with a black and white printout of the decal we have made up shows that it is a very close match already.

Old logo "tan line":

Black and white test printout of our new logo:

Similarly, the serial number needs attention. Here is how it looked before the lacquer was scraped off:

And here it is after. It's still there, but hard to see:

Stay tuned for the next post where we will be re-fretting the neck.

The vintage Hofner Colorama II restoration project (part 1)

Some of you may remember me mentioning the 1963 Hofner Colorama II (also known as the Hofner 164) that I bought a while back on ebay. What do you mean you don’t remember? I posted about it right here: http://diystrat.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-first-ever-electric-guitar.html

Oh wow, was that really three years ago? Who knew?

Anyway, as is always the danger when you buy something without seeing it in person first, especially a 50-year-old guitar, you never really know what sort of shape it’s going to be in. The photos showed a guitar that appeared to be in fairly average shape for its age and most of the original parts seemed to be there, but upon closer inspection it appeared that this particular guitar needed a lot more work than originally anticipated. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single part of this guitar that doesn’t need work in some way or another.

In that previous post, I mentioned that I completely messed with my original Hofner Colorama II almost 25 years ago, and so I feel like this is a chance to redeem myself. Kinda like adopting a puppy after inadvertently running over another one, or something like that.

Here’s a list of the main problems:

1. Neck – The neck is back bowed and the fretboard is both badly gouged in the cowboy chord positions and has a crack running the length of several frets. The frets themselves are badly worn in places too, so a total refret will be required. The neck needs to be completely re-lacquered, the tuners need replacing with something a bit closer to original (and the extra screw holes from the replacement tuners will need to be filled in too). The logo will need replacing due to having to re-lacquer the neck.

2. Body – The paint needs to be stripped and the body refinished. The paint is literally flaking off, and there are some cracks where the pieces of wood are joined.

3. Pickguard and back vibrato cover – Both plastic covers are warped and are now somewhat convex in shape. The screws have obviously been lost/replaced over time and are a bit of a (bad) mix now, so will need replacing.

4. Vibrato/tremolo – The thumbscrew that holds the vibrato arm on is missing and the arm is held on only because the threaded stud had been hammered down like a rivet, destroying it in the process. Also, the chrome vibrato cover has completely split where the screw at the front end goes in.

5. Bridge – The bridge has been replaced with one that has the wrong spacing, radius, and won’t intonate correctly, due to being straight across, so will need to be replaced (at least the top part).

6. Volume/tone knobs – Oh boy, would you look at the state of those? They're in dreadful condition and will all need to be replaced. The knob markers/pointers are also really, really rusty and will need a thorough cleaning.

7. Electronics – The pots are not behaving well at all (cutting out, very scratchy, etc.) and will need to be cleaned out. Additionally, one of the pickups does not appear to be behaving well, although that might (hopefully) be fixed after giving the pots some attention. The output jack could probably do with some attention too.

Wow, what a lot of work for just one guitar, but, hey, think how much FUN it’s going to be! Amirite? Plus, you know, this will totally sort me out with the Hofner karma police.

So stay tuned as all of these jobs get tackled over the next few posts.

Adjusting the neck pickup height on a Fender Telecaster style guitar

The neck pickup on this Telecaster needs to be raised. However, as is the case on most Telecaster-style guitars, there are no height adjustment screws in sight. There is a way to adjust this, but it’s not entirely obvious. Although the following steps might seem like a lot of work, you can easily do this in 20 or 30 minutes.

Before starting, you should really ask yourself why you want to adjust the pickup height. A common mistake is to think that if you move the pickup as close as possible to the strings, you can get a more powerful and better sound. However, as you move the pickup closer to the strings, the pickup magnets can start to influence the strings themselves, even dampening them and affecting the sound in a bad way. For this reason you need to be careful not to raise them by too much.

The pickup on THIS guitar is noticeably low and the output is much quieter than the bridge pickup. I could lower the bridge pickup instead, but I already like how it sounds and don’t want to mess with it, so I’m going to raise the neck pickup.

Before continuing, let’s take some measurements. Press down on the last fret of whatever string you want to measure and then use a ruler to deduce the distance between the pickup and that string. Do this for both of the E strings and also measure one of the middle strings. The reason you need to measure one of the middle strings is that, since this particular pickup is curved on top, it could be closer to the strings in the middle than at the edges. What you don’t want to do is adjust it nicely at the edges only to find that it ends up far too close in the middle.

After measuring this pickup we find that we have a good 4 mm at each E string and just under 4 mm in the middle, so the plan is to raise it up by 2 mm at both ends.

First thing we should do is slacken the strings. You might be able to get away without doing this, but it certainly makes things easier.

Now remove all of the screws holding the scratch plate (pickguard) in place.

Lift up and remove the scratch plate. The pickup will stay attached to the guitar, so make sure you take this into account as you lift out the scratch plate.

You will now see that the pickup is screwed into the body of the guitar with two screws.

Before making any adjustments, it’s time to measure the pickup height again. That way, after we make any adjustments, we can measure how much the pickup has moved (since we’ve slackened off the strings, we can’t compare to our previous measurements now). This pickup is measuring approximately 4 mm above the guitar body at both ends. Remember that the plan is to raise this one by 2mm at each end, so we will raise it to 6 mm above the guitar body.

Although not necessary here, I have unscrewed the pickup completely just to show you what we’re dealing with. As you can see, there are two springs on the pickup screws. This allows you to adjust the height by simply turning the screws. Some Telecasters do not have these springs, however, and if that is the case for you, I recommend adding some now. Otherwise you will only be able to raise the height by propping something under the pickup, such as washers or coins. A cheap and simple method is to steal the spring out of a cheap ballpoint pen, cut it in half, and slide one half over each of the screws, although if you prefer you can get proper pickup springs or tubing from any number of sources.

Rotate the screw at each end to adjust the height (anti-clockwise [counterclockwise] to raise the pickup and clockwise to lower it – note that this is the opposite to most pickups). Keep measuring the height after each adjustment until the pickup is where you want it. Remember that in THIS case the plan was to raise it by 2mm, so we want it to sit 6mm above the guitar body. Your guitar will most likely be different.

If you want to experiment a bit, you could tighten your strings again and play a while to try out the new pickup height. Once you’re happy, you can replace the scratch plate. In this case, we already have the pickup height we want, so I’m going to go ahead and replace the scratch plate now.

If you haven’t already done so, tighten up the strings and enjoy your guitar's new sound!