Factory Five is a company which sells kits which you assemble yourself, into functioning cars. Their kits are very high quality products with serious engineering behind them and for a long time I’ve been wanting to build a Factory Five 33 Hotrod. Someday.
In the meantime, I occasionally go to their web site and salivate over some of their cars. Recently I was staring at this car:
I started asking myself what I liked about this car and I realized what I really liked was the paint job, the dirty, old aspect and the scratchy lettering. And then I thought this might look really cool on a guitar!
So I started a project to build a Telecaster which drew its inspiration from this car. The first step was to paint the body – this was the most important element.
The next challenge was to use hardware reminiscent of those wheels. Eventually I decided to only use hardware from Schaller – tuners, knobs, pickup rings, and the bridge, all in a satin pearl finish. My hope was these parts would remind me of the wheels on the ’33.
The Schaller bridge used is the 3D-6, adjustable in 3 dimensions, including string-to-string width, which is very handy when putting a humbucker in the bridge position of a Fender style guitar, because you can narrow the string width to fit the humbucker.
For pickups, I wanted something to suggest an automotive theme. Eventually I learned that Seymour Duncan offers a raw nickel finish along with gold mesh on its humbucker pickups. Taking a chance that the gold mesh would suggest a car’s front grill and that it would not clash with the red paint, I ordered a Pearly Gates humbucker for the bridge and a Jazz humbucker for the neck pickup.
Working on it:
And here is how it turned out.
Ciao.
Categories: music
Guitarhacking 