Episode: 2801
Title: HPR2801: Guitar Set Up Part 1.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2801/hpr2801.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:01:32

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This is HPR episode 2,801 entitled Guitar Setup Part 1.
It is hosted by NY Wheel and is about 29 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, NY Wheel talks about setting up a guitar.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hello, this is NY Bill and I'm here with a guitar related HPR today.
It's still going to be hacking a bit because we're going to be tweaking on the guitar, not
playing it or teaching it, but I was, geez, I start a lot of my podcasts like this, I was
doing something online and saw this.
Why did I see this online?
Well, it doesn't matter.
I saw this and I kind of, I didn't laugh, but like, you know, I wonder what I could do
with this.
I wonder if I could take a very inexpensive fender and make it play as good as a $1,000
$2,000 American fender.
So I happen to see this in the corner and it was 269 delivered free.
I don't know if you consider that a lot, but, you know, as far as guitar goes, as I'm concerned,
you know, for, you know, your electric's going to be a nice electric going to be a $1,000,
$1,200 bucks, pushing up, if you're going to go for like a Gibson Les Paul, you're going
to be getting into like, geez, $2,000, $2,500.
If you want like a Gibson ES, American, then you're starting to creep up around $4,000,
you know, guitars can get very expensive.
But I'm wondering if you can find like an inexpensive, they've got to be out there.
I haven't been in a guitar store in probably 20 years.
I've been, any guitar I've bought, you know, in the recent past has been from online.
And I've, I've been playing guitar for, geez, I'm really old now.
It's been a long time.
And in that journey, I restored a guitar, 1956 Les Paul.
And I had to, the Les Paul was, I weird, my friend and I first got our apartment.
This was probably, oh, 1991ish or something like that.
A friend and I decided, you know, it's time to move out of our parents house and he wanted
to as well.
And I said, well, why don't we get a apartment together and then it'll be cheaper.
So we couldn't afford furniture.
I'm just digressing here because this all comes back to guitar.
We couldn't afford furniture.
So like, you know, friends or family on both sides gave us a couch or, you know, a table,
you know, something like that.
And in the town we lived in, they're in the spring.
They do like a, you know, a spring clean.
You can put anything at the curb and the, uh, the trashman will come and take it.
So we decided to go out at eight o'clock at night when everybody put their trash out and
see if we could find anything that we could put in our new apartment.
And like we found a lamp.
This lamp ended up shocking me.
That's guitar related as well.
Jeez, I'm going to have to digress twice.
And we found like an end table.
All right, the guitar shocked me.
Once we get in the apartment, I'm playing an amp.
And if you touch the strings, you're grounded.
And the lamp was at old like 1950s, two prong plug.
And someone had wired it wrong up in the socket so that the neutral, which should be on the
outside of the bulb and the hot, which is just a little pin on the bulb, that was backwards.
So the neutral was making the whole, or the, the reverse wiring of it was making all the
metal parts on this lamp live and the neutrals in the middle.
And I'm holding a guitar once in that living room.
And I reach over to turn on or off that light.
And I touch the metal of that lamp and boom, 120 volts through me.
The amp goes, and well, my whole body did as well.
Okay, we go back.
The aggression goes back.
You're going to have to follow this.
Like, what are we on?
So we're driving around.
And for some reason we kept finding bowling balls and we took a whole bunch of bowling balls
and we were like, we had like 20 bowling balls and we're in his driveway, like pretending
it's like pool and making a knockoff each other.
You know what you do way back when you're like 20 years old and you can't even afford a
beer yet.
You just do weird things.
Or we found beer.
More likely we had found beer and we're playing with bowling balls.
So I'm in the passenger seat.
He's driving around and we take this turn.
It's dark.
I think I had a flashlight and I'm looking in the garbage.
Yes, we were out garbage picking.
And in the corner of my eye, I see what looks like a headstock of a guitar.
And he keeps driving.
He keeps driving.
I go, hey, Bill, his name is Bill as well.
Just go around the block one more time.
Let me go see what this is.
And we come up on it and it is the headstock of a guitar.
And I put the flashlight on it and I look closer and it says Gibson.
So immediately this is going in the car.
Whatever the heck this is, it's going in the car and we're taking it home.
So I get out, I take some garbage off from either side of it and it's a Gibson Les Paul.
The kicker is it's burned.
The thing was burned.
So near as I can tell, there was a house fire here.
This was a 1956 Les Paul and it was in the case.
The back, the Mahogany and the back got some syncing.
The top seemed okay.
All the binding was gone.
Every mother of pearl dot up the neck and the binding there was gone as well.
It was like all melted away.
Some of the mother of pearl was in there.
It was like shrunken and brown and like curled up.
So that got burned.
Up in the Gibson, the G was gone.
The I was gone.
The dot over the I is still there.
It's like original equipment, the B, the S, everything and then the end of the N was
still there.
The neck was completely warped and the fretboard was pulling away from it up to about the seventh
fret.
The neck was going backwards and the fretboard was going forwards.
Now this might seem like a lost cost to you, but as like a 20 year old kid finding a 1956
Les Paul, I think the serial number was six and then there was a little space.
Six, space, one, one, six, space, it was either six space, one, one, six, six or six
space, one, six, six.
I remember making a joke to my friend that it's got three sixes in it so it was supposed
to burn.
Anyways, I took this thing home and we, you know, I put it on a table and I was just staring
at it for a long time and then it dawned on me.
Why don't I try and restore this thing?
And it took like years, I had to, you know, find out where to buy mother a pearl and find
out how to cut mother a pearl and find out how to shape it and inlay all those in and
find out how to do binding.
They and the whole thing down, I had to do, figure out how to fix the neck which was just
loosen up the truss rod and that straightened out the neck part of it and then glue the
fretboard back to it, you know, the binding.
I couldn't really do paint very well back then so it was like, I spray painted it black
and they had the, you know, the original cream binding.
I found all the, not original, but like period replacement stuff on a place called Stewart
McDonald's and I've used them quite a bit over the years.
They sell guitar making supplies.
Some people say they can be a touch expensive, that's, you know, if you want to keep looking,
there's like allied, allied Luthorii and, geez, what's that really inexpensive one?
Guitar fetish.
That's a really inexpensive one where, you know, you can get inexpensive hardware as
well.
Anyways, I've kind of been out of the scene for a while.
I still build here and there but I haven't built one in quite a while.
Where the heck was I going with that?
Oh, so if I realized like a few years after like getting that guitar playable again, that
geez, if I just did everything to this guitar except for cut out the body shape, why don't
I try and build my own guitar?
So this was 20 years back, I started it amassing, well, not amassing tools, I didn't buy a
whole entire workshop to begin with but I would use like any tool I could find at my
grandfather's or, and I did start building guitars for starting with electrics and then
eventually acoustics.
So if you look around on my media goblin or even I had a flicker account and somehow flicker
over the years has changed NY small B-I-L-L to capital NY space, capital B-I-L-L.
I don't know where that happened or who did it but I haven't used it in years but if
you look there, you'll see a telecaster that I built as well.
I was trying to recreate a original telecaster in 1952, was it black guard?
Okay, we go through all that to say, that was 10 minute ramble just to say what I'm
going to say now.
I was online somewhere and I saw the inexpensive squires and I thought, can I get one of these
fairly inexpensive guitars and make it play as well as something that's going to cost
a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars?
It's in my hand now.
I opened it up.
I've always liked telecasters.
This is a squire telecaster and I've always liked the original, I don't know how close
this is to the butterscotch, but this is that yellowy butterscotch.
But however, I like rosewood fretboards just personally.
I can play, you know, maple's fine but just for some reason I prefer, I don't know, looking
at it or touching it rosewood.
So it came in the box and I was expecting like a bit of a wreck, inexpensive guitars
I've seen in the past, like screws will be crooked, things won't line up, the neck
will have like crack next to it, the finish will be junk.
I was really shocked with this guitar, this guitar is in good shape.
The neck feels fine, the finish all looks good, all the hardware looks good.
I haven't plugged it in so I don't know, sometimes they cheap out on the pickups but it
plays good already, it stays in tune.
The interesting thing with this, this might be where there's doing some cost cutting,
it doesn't have any finish on the neck.
It seems like, well I don't know if it's almost like an oil finish.
So it feels almost like wood, it's very smooth, but I find that's really good for playability.
So I guess what I would do to this guitar, besides I don't know if in the future I probably
won't keep this, I'm going to give it to like one of my nephews on my knees.
What it does need, what I find it needs is the frets aren't polished, they scratch, I
don't know if you can hear that, let me get the, so if I play this note and can you hear
like scratching, you should do like a mirror finish.
So the first thing that needs to do is these frets need to polish up.
A lot of cheap guitars come with a very cheap plastic nut, this one seems to have something
like a Korean or whatever they call that like a fake bone, so the nut seems good.
I like the height at the nut at the first fret, let me check the relief.
So the relief is higher than I expected.
So the relief is controlled by the truss lock and it's the curvature of the neck and you
want a little bit of relief, you want the neck to kind of bow, is that the light work?
Bow up, it's to get, so when you bend the note it would, it would short out, short out.
It's for playability when you bend a note, if you didn't have any relief you're going
to hit that next fret, the next fret in front of it is going to kill the note.
But this has like a fair amount more than I would put on a set up.
The other thing is the string action, it's good, it's playable, but I think I can get
it lower and faster.
So I'm going to have to take this down to my workbench, cut the strings off it, I'll
talk about masking the neck, I'll talk about polishing the frets, I will talk about changing
the bridge height and doing intonation and setting the relief on the neck.
So let's do all that and I'll, I'm saying, let's do all, like I'm not going to do it right
now, I'm upstairs, I got to go downstairs and I'll see how well I can get this, this
one playing, I have a 96 American Strat, I can, you know, use as a comparison.
I play that all the time, so if I can get it as good as playing that one, that one plays
very nicely.
And I also have a, it's either in 1993 or 1994, they call them MIM, it's a made in Mexico,
telecaster, that one is the only guitar I bought brand new and I still have to this day.
So that one plays very nice as well, there's a rumor that when they were setting up the
Mexican factory, they didn't have the facilities to make necks yet.
So those very early MIMs, Fender America was, well, they were probably, you know, what,
a hundred miles apart, ones in California, ones down in Mexico.
But the American factory was sending down American necks because the Mexican factory didn't
have the tooling to do necks yet.
So some of those early, early 90s made in Mexico Fenders were coming with an American
neck, which is all, like, they are nice necks and it was all nicely polished.
That guitar play is very nice.
So let me see if I can get the, like, this scratch drives me nuts.
I suppose you could call it sustain, you could just keep scratching this thing and this
stain will stay there.
But no, we're not doing that.
No, all right, let me get this down to the bench and I'll talk about it some more.
All right, I'm down here in the settler.
I just put a towel over my woodwork bench just so I don't mower up the finish.
I also use a neck cradle, it's another thing you get from guitar supplies.
Oh, the other, what was the other place you can get guitar parts?
It's going to come to me.
Anyways, it'll come to me.
So now that I'm down here, the telecaster that I made from scratch is here as well and
the yellows are different.
Let me take a picture and the one.
So the lacquer that I used on the 52 black guard that I made years back, I got from
a place called Re Ranch and they make, you can get, they re, what do you want to say,
re blend, they make old guitar colors and you can buy it as either you can get like
court or you can get a rattle can.
So this one that I got, I'm going to take a picture here in a minute, was the butterscotch,
the old original butterscotch and those were ash guitars.
There's new one, I don't know what's underneath it, it kind of looks like alder, alder, alder.
But the yellow is too buttery, maybe it's just like a moderate, maybe this is not butterscotch
but some other thing.
You see if you can tell the difference, yeah you can see the difference.
So in this shot here in the front is the butterscotch and in the back is the yellow, the kind of
more buttery yellow.
I do like that you can see the grain through the finish on this wire though.
So usually on these inexpensive, well inexpensive guitars, they use almost like plywood.
They may have done that here.
I haven't opened it, maybe I'll open it later, I got to get the strings off first.
What they'll do is the whole entire inside of the guitar will be like layers of plywood
and then on the top is just the thin laminate of like a decorative wood and on the back is
a thin laminate of decorative wood and then the sides which I'm looking at now, you can't
see through the sides.
So there could be laminates there that no, they're not.
I can see through the sides and this is a stacked set, one, two, three, four, five, six.
Well much more than an American, Americans use like two or three, no so far, so far like
for the price of this, this is decent.
This is not like a piece of plywood unless they've gone through it awful lot of trouble
to try and mask it which would just increase the cost.
This looks like I'm not sure what type of wood it is but it's a solid, it's a solid guitar.
So the first thing to do is I got to get these strings off, just I'll take the tension
off and once I get the tension off I want to look at the neck relief again, see if it's
changed.
So the neck relief, now it still seems like a quite a bow, a back bow.
So goodbye strings, oh if you're doing an acoustic, don't do what I'm doing.
Change your acoustic strings one at a time so you're not stressing out that top, solid
body guitar.
You can just clip them just like this.
I don't know what type of strings these are too.
I'm going to get these strings off, yeah they didn't, they didn't go out of their
way to secure the string on the post, there's a technique to that, that could be an HPR
all by itself, all right strings are off, there is no garbage, garbage, the other thing
you do not get, oh yeah you do, I was just going to say you do not get any hardware
with it, but yeah there's the Allen wrench, the two Allen wrench, oh good the two Allen
wrenches, I was just looking in the garbage when I threw the strings out and some of the
packaging is still there, the packaging that was going over the headstock and here is
the Allen wrench to adjust the truss rod and here is the Allen wrench to adjust the bridge,
I'll need both of those, okay I'll set those aside.
So the first thing, yeah this is a decent nut, whatever the material is it's not like
cheap plastic.
The first thing to do to buff up frets is to mask the fretboard and you do that with
just the ordinary blue painter's tape, which I don't know where mine is, oh yeah it's
on the floor, where else do you keep it?
What you also need though to do this is scissors, it keeps scissors over here because this
is two inch painter's tape and you could get smaller I suppose, smaller painter's tape.
But as you go up the fretboard, you know the frets are getting closer and closer together
you got to start cutting this stuff in strips, yeah it's even too big for the very first
fret so let me just cut it in half and just overlap it.
So I got a cut edge that's ragged, I got a straight edge right off the tape so I'll put
the straight edge right at the nut, the ragged edge is on the first fret and then the
straight edge from the tape and have the ragged edge overlap the other tape, so I'll do
a few of these and I'll take a picture and show you, yeah I can see now it's like a
minimal, they probably leveled the frets and then they did a minimal crowning, I don't
know if I'm going to re-crown these, I have a crowning tool, crowning is putting the
after you level the frets, they're all flat on the top and the crowning tool is like a
file that is convex and it will put the ridge, geez I don't have any terms for this stuff
it's just on my head, it'll put the fret ridge back in the roundover, okay so like if
I stop here, so here's the first three frets mask and if you see on the third fret how
I cut the tape and that ragged edge, I'll just put the straight edge up at the second fret
then let the ragged edge hang there and then I'll put the straight edge of the same piece
of tape I cut on the third fret and let the ragged edge you know just overlap that tape,
do that all the way up the neck and I'll stop talking here and I'll do that all the way
up the neck, so as I was masking off this squier neck, I looked to my left and I realized
that that 56 Les Paul is over here in a case, I suppose I could take a picture of it,
I'm dropping the recorder in the open this thing, it's been a while, it's sanded back
down now, I had a cheap, not cheap, but I had the closest, I could find to a gold
top from guitar or a car rattle can, so like go to the automotive place and I found like
some gold with gold flake and I spray painted the whole thing, it never looked right but when
I found that re-ranged company I found that they had gold top paint, lacquer, so I ordered
that and when I ordered that I sanded this thing back down and I thought you know I'm going
to do it properly, I think I sanded it in the fall but I have to wait till late spring,
like I have to, when I do lacquer it's a whole spray rig, it's out in the garage and
you got to wear a mask with lacquer because it's pretty harsh and I spray a quick coat
on a guitar and then I open the garage doors to let the air go out, I don't have a proper
ventilation area, but anyways here is the camera, this is the 56 gold top, at the top
you can see I'm doing a repair, I don't know if you can zoom in on this, well I can just
take a snapshot here, so there's the original head, you can see I've worn off it is at the
top, the Gibson, like I said, only the end of that end and the dot over the eye is original.
What I'm doing here in the, where the tuners go, those were so worn out from the years
that they started to like wiggle and just make the wood warp, so I've got some maple
dolls in there, but they're not just maple dolls, they are maple sandwiched with mahogany,
so on the back you see mahogany and on the top you see the proper maple, that gets stained
black up at the top, down here, so there are the original soap bars that came on a 56,
and if you look in those cavities that's the original gold top paint, I didn't take
any of that off, and down on the bridge one, you can see where I started writing, I
was like 20 years old back then, so this thing's pretty old in its restored state, it still
smells really cool, I started writing the serial number, but that's faded, so it looks
like it might have been 6166, that's possible, what went wrong here, when I got it I went
down and grabbed my father's 35 millimeter camera, this is back in the film days, but I
didn't really know how to use it, so I took his camera and I took a role of film and I
loaded it at the best I knew how, and I took pictures of this guitar burned and in its
terrible state with the expectations of restoring it and then showing the before and after,
and then showing the before and after, but not knowing how to load that 35 millimeter,
I guess I didn't have the film over on the wind, that wind spindle, so I closed the
camera up and I started winding, and the top of the camera says you're on picture one,
and I took a picture, what I never got that film up on that spindle and it never started
winding, so I took 24 pictures and then brought the film to a place to get processed and
the lady goes, there's no pictures on this film, so I kind of regret that, I do have
other pictures like during the restoration, but those are actually pictures, I would have
to scan them if I showed anybody, pictures before we did these quick pictures with our
phone, so anyways, I just finished up masking the squire, here's a picture of it masked,
and it's getting late, I have to go start dinner soon, so I think this might be like a two
or a three-parter, because I'll talk about setting up a guitar, getting the frets leveled
and buffed and all that, and setting up the truss rod, setting up the bridge, the differences
between doing this with a coosthick and electric, this could be, yeah, this could take a couple
parts, so, alright, I'm going to leave you hanging there, till next time guys.
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