Been a while since I summarised what’s been going on at Derelict Central – largely because ‘Derelict Central’ moved from my old base in Warrington to Birkdale, Southport. Or about 85% of it has, at least. My planer and scroll saw are still in my old workshop.
My only current built-to-order is a ‘Treblemaker’ three-humb
ucker + Bigsby Telecaster-style semi-hollow. It has a Tiger Maple back that I’ve been applying finishing oil to for the last few days, which is looking gorgeous!
I’m still working on ‘Amy’ as a gift for a friend’s daughter. This will be the fourth time around for the poster+epoxy top. Given it was always a prototype, the whole goal was to learn lessons. On the plus side, I managed to lay my hands on some more French versions of the poster, which definitely adds a certain je ne sais quoi. On the lessons side, the top is fixed down to my desktop to ensure it is completely level (had one sloping pour), glue and plasticine are in place to prevent leaks, and the top of the strip wood is exactly the depth the top needs to be, so once the epoxy is running over the top, I’ll be good. Other lessons include ‘epoxy resin doesn’t like being planed’, ‘rout the epoxy before fixing it to the body’ and ‘warm up the resin’. Hopefully, fourth time’s a charm…!
So otherwise, as I await drying times on the various projects underway, I’ve been spending some time on my own little collection of axes. The black & white pearl Esquire is ‘Bucky’, I think the first or second guitar I ever modded. It’s a cheap Chinese copy that I bought for €15 off Facebook Marketplace in Saint-Hilaire from a 17yo French girl named Aurélie (the stickers were hers; she also memorably and illegally bought me a beer because I was late meeting her). It first got a neck P90 pickup, but has since evolved into this rawk’n’roll machine. It has a single Seymour Duncan humbucker, wired straight to a push/pull volume pot (allowing the humbucker to be coil-tapped), and nothing else. I quite like the ‘one knob, no switch’ aesthetic, since that’s the first control panel I ever milled/cut/drilled from scratch from a sheet of aluminium. It’s LOUD.
And the final part of a guitar-tastic few days of New Year productivity is ‘Butterslide Down’, another of my own mad projects. A butterscotch & black solid-body Tele, this is a ‘Coodercaster’ (named after Ry Cooder, a slide guitarist par excellence). Those are gold-foil microphonic pickups, there’s a Bigsby, the neck radius is a fairly flat 12″, there is an extra-high nut and it will be strung with stupidly fat (.11-.56) strings for my new-found love of delta blues slide playing.
Tomorrow I plan to start cutting into an old Resonator I bought off eBay, so I can make it an electro-acoustic. My first real foray into messing about with a completely acoustic guitar. Wish me luck!
