Vintage Japanese guitars for slide, mods etc

[snakehips]

Hi there !

Having spent more time at home this last 12 months because of all things Covid, I decided to use some of my time to create something like my bandmate has - a cool sounding electric guitar for slide guitar, but something out of the ordinary/usual.

My singer/harmonica player from a 5-piece blues band I play keyboards in, also plays slide guitar on some tunes.
He gets a crackin' sound out of his guitar. He always jokes with the audience at gigs that it's the "cheapest guitar in show business" !!!
And in some ways, it looks cheap & nasty BUT it sounds so good !

Here it is, resplendent with stickers :


The guitar is a circa 1964 Teisco Starway and it comes with two great pickups.
Some time in the long distant past my bandmate bought it, in a 2nd hand shop, for a tenner, with a humbucker already installed in the bridge position (so the original bridge pickup had been shifted over towards the neck pickup).
My bandmate is left-handed - but he strings it up right-handed and flips the guitar round, to play left-handed, with the strings "upside down" to him.
The volume & tone pots get in the way of his left picking arm - so he has Blu-Tak wedged under the vol & tone knobs to stop his arm turning the pots while he plays. These guitars come with rocker-switches which don't work very well and are nightmare to try and fix. The original non-enclosed tuners are OK but not by today's standards.

The pickups on these guitars sound great ..... and, they just sit on the guitar surface - so are quite slim (height-wise) - and so will fit under the strings on a National guitar (another bandmate of mine, Prof Scratchy, has had one of these Teisco pickups on one of his Nationals for years).
I was looking for a suitable pickup to fit on one of his other Nationals

So, late last year, another of these Teisco Starway guitars came up on ebay for not too much (£250 I think it was, inc shipping)- and I thought I could kill two birds with one stone - steal one pickup for the Prof's National, and use the rest of the Teisco guitar to build/mod a new slide guitar.

Here is my bandmate's Teisco again, close-up :

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[snakehips]

Hi again !

So, this is the Teisco Starway guitar that I bought. V slightly different version as the headstock has a sunburst finish.
This one already had the original tuners changed out for real cheap & nasty tuners - so they had to go.
I decided this guitar was going to be for my bandmate.

Below is what I did to make this guitar a wee slide guitar monster - with links included for the parts I bought.

The bridge is a simple chromed-steel bar with slots, but no real individual string intonation. Although the bridge base is screwed down, you can unscrew it and reposition it. As it turns out though, the intonation is actually quite good, when tuned to Open D with nickel-wound 13-56 strings (with a wound 3rd string).

The guitar has a rudimentary tremolo / string anchor system. Tuning stability is terrible and even the holes for the strings to be fed through are v difficult to access. I decided the tremolo system had to go.
I managed to find a simple chromed brass string anchor on ebay (for about £9, link below), that fitted inside/onto the original metal tremolo base AND it's hinged cover - thereby keeping it's vintage appearance when the cover is back on. Well, OK, it was a little too wide to fit inside - but I filed off about 1mm off each end - THEN it fitted. It's far easier to change strings now and my bandmate doesn't use tremolos anyway.

Tuners - I didn't want to go crazy spending too much. The holes in the headstock for the tuners had already been enlargened to 10mm. From online searches, most tuners for 10mm wide holes were of the expensive "locking tuners" type. However, I found a set of Wilkinsons EZ-Lok tuners that fit, for about £25 - and these turned out to be ACE ! They are not "locking tuners" in the modern sense. Imagine a regular tuner - but there are TWO string holes in the post, at 90 degrees to each other. It seems a daft idea BUT you feed the string through both holes and it REALLY holds the strings in tune. I am so chuffed with these tuners - and highly recommend them. And they have a 1:19 hear ratio - which is excellent !

Pickups - I gave one of the Teisco pickups to Prof Scratchy.
In it's place, I wanted to put in a humbucker, like my other mate's Teisco.
Humbuckers vary in price widely - I didn't want to go cheap OR spend far to much either.
I went for a Tonerider AC2 Alnico II PAF Humbucker (circa £46).
I knew I'd have to route out a hole for the humbucker to sink into the body - and I've never done anything like that before !!!!
I had a Dremel drill and made up a jig to guide the Dremel drill bit to cut a hole exactly the correct size. I Sellotaped the jig onto the guitar, after lots of careful measurements ! See pics
I wanted a middle pickup and have had a Kay pancake/zippo pickup spare for years, awaiting the right project. This one sits on the guitar top, so no pickup routing required for this one.

Scratchplate and rocker switches - I wanted to get rid of the rocker switches. My bandmate doesn't even use the Vol & Tone controls on his guitar, so I felt I should get rid of all of that, just have one Master volume pot, positioned somewhere not to be knocked by his arm.
The scratchplate is made from 3mm thick aluminium sheet, with a satin finish.
As the rocker switches are mounted on a square hole cut into the aluminum scratchplate, removing the rocker switches would leave a large hole.
I decided I'd need to start again with a new scratchplate - and wanted to go with 3mm aluminium again. I found a large 3mm satin-finish plate - enough for 3 scratchplates, in theory !).
Now, I wasn't sure what type of pickup switching I wanted to go for, for these 3 pickups, and wasn't sure what pickup combinations might sound good together, if any, so I decided to try out on/off mini-switches for each pickup, plus a humbucker/single-coil switch for the humbucker, to give a wide range of tones. I tried all that first on a cheap bit of thin black plastic scratchplate - and all worked OK.

Shielding - I painted the pickup and control cavities with shielding paint and also connected wires to the bridge and tremolo plate, all soldered to the output jack.

Once all working, I made a new aluminium scratchplate, as close in shape to the original one. Cutting through 3mm of aluminium is not that easy - so that took me a fair bit of time.

How does it sound ?
Incredible ! Lots of different tones, and perhaps because of the simple string anchor and the hefty neck, this guitar sustains for days !
The Tonerider Alinco II humbucker is the nicest I've ever heard - and I'm not a fan of bridge pickups over all !

String anchor : www.ebay.co.uk/itm/140594534453?var=440025143310
Tuners : www.northwestguitars.co.uk/wjn05-ez-lok-tuners-for-right-handed-guitar-1-19-ratio/
Humbucker : www.northwestguitars.co.uk/tonerider-rocksong-alnico-ii-humbucker-neck-bridge-pickup-for-les-paul-sg/
Satin Anodised Aluminium sheet - www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08LSN7GTB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Pots,output jack, mini-switches, length of black & white wires for wiring everything together, all from NorthWest Guitars


Pics :

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[snakehips]

And the finished guitar, with new aluminium scratchplate :

Downsides ?
I spent a fair bit of money on parts and the guitar itself
Took a few weeks to complete, doing a little at a time
Cutting the humbucker cavity and cutting out and shaping the 3mm thick aluminum sheet was difficult / time consuming
The guitar body is actually quite small, and the neck & headstock is long, and with the new, heavier tuners, the guitar doesn't hang well on a guitar strap - it's neck heavy

Upsides ?
I had a LOTTA fun rebuilding this guitar!
The guitar sounds ace, with lots of different tones.
The sustain on this thing with a slide is awesome !
My bandmate loves it.

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