Guitar 'smash' goes online

WORD is spreading through the internet: "Visit www.adayinthelifeofaguitar.blogspot.com – there’s an idiot breaking up a rare guitar."
About all I can say is, Hendrix, Townshend and a few other have been the smashers, the guitar attracts lots of bashers and all I am trying to do is make an old Japanese cheapie play a little better.
The renovation of the ColTone two-pick-up solid, however, was destined to run the opposite to smoothly.
The last post told how three of the four screws holding the neck broke, and created a flow-on effect of problems.
Since then, the head flipped off one of the six adjustment screws on the neck pickup as soon as a screwdriver went in the slot to remove them before a cleanup of almost half a century of grime.
Oh well, it will still work. I’m not touching another thing there; traces of grime can stay in the nooks and crannies.
There are plenty of other pressure points, anyway.
The frets have also given me lots of angst, with deep grooves in the first ssecond and to a lesser extent the third.
The last owner must have been big on open chords and long fingernails. The fretboard also has deep furrows.
The emergency solution for a country dweller without ability to run down to a local music shop to get some fret wire was simple: Remove the last two from the fretboard to replace the first two, which now go to the treble side at No 21 and 22, pending a proper replacement in future.
This allows me to have a chance at the guitar’s highest notes, if I ever need to get up there.

THE ColTone is now back together, with the previously listed adjustments but I must get a set of strings before I can finish the setup.
The nut puts the strings too close to the fretboard, so that will require attention.
Please, if anyone knows about ColTone guitars, please write to me and I'll post the details.

SOON, I’ll move on to writing some original observations about guitars generally, my love of the instrument and other players.
I also have a guitar stories floating around in the archives of my editorial column, Classie Corner (www.classiecorner.blogspot.com), so they’ll be in the mix here in the days, weeks, months and years to come.

Wrestling with a guitar neck

ANGRY curses echoed around my home workshop when the neck of a rare guitar refused to part with the body.
The wrestling match began after my commitment to make minor improvements to a rare and "trashy" 1960s solid body guitar.
You are reading history here because documentation of the ColTone brand is rare, even on the huge network of the internet (see last post).
The neck was so thick, with a sharp angular profile instead of comfortably rounded, that it was too awkward and left-hand challenging to ever give me any joy.
The options were to keep it as a display piece and leave it silent, or to ‘have a go’ at making it play better.
This meant the resolve to reshape the neck and tilt it back slightly to give better clearance of the pickups.

UNUSUAL aspects of the ColTone include the pickups floating on rubber bases that slot into the rebates on the body.
A lack of up-and-down adjustment meant the pickup at the neck was too close to the strings to allow right-hand freedom.
When amateur luthier finally confronted intransigent neck the bout went like this:
Three of the four screws passing through the backplate and holding the neck broke virtually on the first hint of torque. The steel must have been good, back in the 60s, don’t you reckon?
Then, I tried to drill out the screws that still held the neck to the body and had some success, judging by the steel shavings, but each time the bit slipped and stared chewing out the wood.
Still, the neck would not budge, so I helped it with a chisel between the neck and body.
Three hits with the mallet showed the reason for stubbornness. When the neck came away, part of it split off and stayed behind on the body.

YOU guessed right. The makers had applied a fair dollop of glue. I now had another problem and tried to remove the shards to glue them back on place.
More hassles: they would not come off cleanly and most were useless.
The picture shows the back of the neck after stage-one of the remedial action to square it up and fill the screw holes.
The back of the neck, meanwhile, is feeling the cutting edge of a coarse sandpaper and I bring it back to a comfortable profile.
I could keep writing about this for quite a while but have come to the limit today.

AS the blog continues I will have stories not just about the rarer brands but about the big names like Gibson, Fender, Maton etc.
Thanks for joining me. I hope to be on this blog for quite a while. A Day in the Life of a Guitar is here to stay.

Wanted: Info on ColTone guitars

THE picture shows what may be one of the world’s rarest guitar brands. A Google search today for the name, "ColTone", returned only one guitar reference. It was for "original 60s ColTone bass guitar" at $59.
The item has since been removed from ebay, so a research stream ran dry.
My ColTone two-pickup solid came from a garage sale just a few years ago.
The vendor, who looked to be in his 50s, said he had owned it since he was a kid.
The guitar has similarities to my first electric, an Ibanez two-pickup solid, which I bought through classified advertising in the Launceston Examiner, also in the 1960s.
At the time, the brand, Ibanez, was hardly known. The vendor gave it a French flourish, pronouncing it as "eye-bun-ay", which I blindly followed for a fair while.
The Japanese manufacturer slowly made inroads into the world market and I had to give in eventually and admit "I wuz rong".
A bloke called John Andrews bought my Ibanez in the early 70s and I went on to love a dreadnought acoustic of another rare brand, Bolero. More about that in future posts.

THE ColTone, like my early Ibanez, has a painted maroon body and a thick neck, the timber in which could be the same.
Both guitars seem to say "early Japanese", with about the same sophistication as the "ay" word.
A Google search just after the $20 ColTone acquisition gave another "one reference" result.
A guitarist blogging about his garage band said he loved his "trashy old ColTone".
Unfortunately, our correspondence is somewhere in a heap of back-up discs with vague labels. It may turn up at a later date.
However, he said I was the only other ColTone owner he knew of, after he bought his secondhand in recent years.
He had been unable to get any firm info about them, but someone had suggested "ColTone" had been a rebadging of a Japanese guitar, whose brand I forget. The name started with "T".
A reference to the huge headstock caused a grin through cyberspace, with my correspondent expressing a little amusement. The head, which looks as big as that of a double bass, is quite comical.

THE picture shows another tailpiece I fitted to replace a tin-can tremolo setup that had broken. I have strung it with a mismatched collection, just as the first test, and indications are that it tunes up okay.
No matter how rare this guitar is, I intend to reshape the neck so I can at least have a chance to enjoy playing it.
Any information about ColTone guitars would be welcome.

THAT'S about it for the second of many posts on this site. Thanks for joining me. Readers are welcome to visit my other blog, www.classiecorner.blogspot.com, which focuses on the marvellous world of classified advertising.

New instrument sounds first notes

GUITARS have come a long way since the 1960s and my first unbranded six-string acoustic with a neck like a hunk of ‘four by two’ timber.
But one thing remains the same through time: The guitar’s ability to take over lives and settle in for long-term tenancy in Cardio Street.
The slightly clumsy piece of joinery that first stole my heart found me through a classified advertisement in my local paper. No, it wasn’t in the personal column.
Imperfect as it was, the basic six-string steel started a passion for collecting guitars and many have passed through my hands on their way to a groping elsewhere.
The list includes not only the common top-line brands, such as Maton, Gibson and Fender, but also lots of other well known names (Ibanez, Washburn, DiGiorgio, Guyatone).
Some brands , such as ColTone, Horola and Bolero, are so obscure that references are hard or impossible to find.
All the guitars have been special to me. I miss some and regret ever letting them out of my control.
After flirting with so many cuties over the years I now have a longterm relationship with something a little meaner, a Telecaster copy.
The Hurricane by Morris stayed in its case under my bed for more than a decade during an emphasis on acoustic.
However, the black tele began to love me after a fair bit of fiddling to get the action and the neck angle just right.
A shim was needed to tilt the neck back slightly because the action was so close to the pickups and scratch plate that it upset the righthand movements.
This change simply meant a bit more height at the bridge.
I now cannot bear to think that the Hurricane and I ever will part company.
It is as good to play as any of the big name guitars I have caressed but, as one would expect, the pick-ups are not as good.
The sound tends to muddy at the higher levels but I have found that just a touch of reverb on the amp helps to sharpen it, without introducing more treble.
As a classic tele copy, it naturally has treble capacity galore but I have it set for a nice warm jazzy sound.

THANKS for joining me on this blog where I will soon get off my own (guitar) case and on to others, such as the bloke who has had a Fender Jazzmaster since its release in, I think, 1958, and another whose one-owner early 60s Telecaster came unscathed through a car accident that left him in a coma for months. Remarkably, the tele owner still plays professionally. As things progress, with permission of the players, I will introduce them to visitors to this site.

THE name for this blog, adayinthelifeofaguitar, honours the great Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfa. His great melody, Carnival (subtitled Manha de Carnaval or Morning of the Carnival), inspired a change of lyrics to suit the non-guitar-addicted community. The orginal says, "I'll sing as I play my guitar ..." The rewrite: "A day in the life of a fool ..." It makes one wonder why they bothered.