And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for… here is our first batch of hardware after spending about six hours in a rock tumbler filled with pea gravel.

As you can see, it came out quite nicely. It’s hard to say whether I will attempt the “acid bath” on these as well. I guess I’ll have to wait and see how the rest of the pieces come out. So far I’m mucho happy with the results.

In fact, if you look really closely (here’s a close-up) you may even notice that the strap buttons have developed a small amount of rust––nice touch, eh?! I quickly washed them off when they came out of the tumbler yesterday, and apparently that was all the water it took to start the process rolling.

Amazingly, during the six-hours of my second batch I actually managed to seriously bend the post on my high-E tuner… I could hardly believe it when I saw it. Now that’s a freakin’ Relic.

Checking that my tuners still worked I noticed quite a bit of popping and grinding in the gears when I first started to turn them, but after a few minutes of twisting each of the machine heads the grit seems to have worked its way out.

Hehe, and I love the fact that the bent tuner is the high-E––the exact one you would most expect to get hammered out of shape when you accidentally swing your guitar’s headstock into your drummer’s thick-ass skull

Welcome To EGR Labs  OK, so here’s a little look behind the scenes at EGR Labs (aka, my spare room.) Obviously, the Baja Tele we purchased has been taken apart, with great care given to photographing the wiring (it’s an S1 system) since we don’t want to run into difficulties putting it back together.

All parts were put into separate containers and labeled with blue sticky notes, just to be on the safe side and to keep everything as organized as possible. The tear-down actually took longer than expected, but with a little luck we managed to get all necessary hardware removed from the body without undue difficulty.

Sanding The Body  Much to our surprise, sanding of the poly finish wasn’t nearly as difficult as expected––while Fender’s site doesn’t list it in their official specs, many online retailers claim the Baja Tele has a “thin” poly finish, and it’s likely that this explains the ease of sanding.

Starting with coarse 60 grit paper we managed to take off a good amount of poly in just over an hour of heavy dry sanding (by hand.) Perhaps we could have used an electric sander, but as you can probably guess, the sanding was a great way to get out some of my pent-up aggression!

By that time we had already hit bare wood on many of the corners and edges, and it was at this point that I switched up to 100 grit for about a half-hour, and then on to 200 and 400 grit for detail work. While some resources recommend wet sanding, we stuck with the dry stuff, and were quite happy with our progress.

The plan is for our final instrument to be topped with a thin coat of Olympic White nitrocellulose finish, so there were two main goals to this first sanding––1.) generally prepare the body for nitro by roughing up that shiny coat, and 2.) strategically expose some bare wood to emulate the natural wear and tear of many years of hard playing.

The idea is that we will sand the Tele’s body down yet again once we’ve got a coat or two of white nitro and clear top coat applied. At that point we will further expose these bare areas, and with a little luck I think we can get a few different layers of color coming through––white on top, the Baja’s sanded-down Blonde underneath, and below that the natural Ash.

It’s my assumption that exposing these bare areas now will make it a lot easier to produce the very natural worn-in look we are hoping for.

Tackling The Pickguard  If you were paying attention you may have noticed in the top photo that our mint green pickguard came in as well this week. So, following the many great suggestions over at Relic Deluxe, I began to sand that piece too.

Unlike the heavy-handed sanding of the body, sanding the pickguard requires a much lighter touch, and I can already see my own tendency to over-relic… luckily, it’s just a pickguard and it can be easily replaced if I screw it up.

I will post photos and detailed explanations of what I did to relic the pickguard in another post, but for now, let’s just say I’m having a lot of fun with this part of the process.

Aging The Hardware  After reading through a number of online “relic” resources, we finally accepted Relic Deluxe as our main bible, and so far they haven’t let us down. In keeping with their recommendations we decided to age our guitar’s hardware via the Rock Tumbler approach.

Yep, we managed to purchase a brand new 6-lb capacity rock tumbler on eBay for about $50 US, and late last night I loaded it about 3/4-full with rough gravel (Home Depot) and a few guinea pig pieces of hardware for testing purposes (neck plate, strap buttons, and their respective screws.)

In the photo here you can see all these pieces loaded into one of the tumbler’s heavy rubber cylinders. After taking this photo I popped the top on, sealed it down good, and started the whole thing tumbling.

Relic Deluxe recommends just a few hours, but for giggles I left it running all night. G and I were quite happy with the results… but you’ll have to wait for the next post to see ‘em.

So, our guinea pig guitar in the so-called “Great Tele Relic Experiment of 2008” has finally arrived, and this afternoon I managed to get in some decent BEFORE pictures… in the interest of fully documenting this project I am posting them here for all to see.

I’m happy to say that this guitar plays beautifully, and is in really incredible shape save for the few nasty dings on the back. Even if I hadn’t been attempting this relic project I still wouldn’t have passed this deal up.

Being a Classic Player’s Baja Telecaster, the guitar is outfitted with Fender’s S1 Switching system, which basically allows you to get a number of new pickup combinations out of the instrument (in series, in parallel, and in and out of phase.)

With a 4-way pickup switch that adds up to eight different pickup combinations, and while I always thought of myself as a bit of a Tele purist, the reality is that I just LOVE this setup. in Position one, with the S1 switch up, you get a really gorgeous humbucker tone, albeit with a shimmery Telecaster twang.

Really cool. Not sure yet about the out-of-phase combos, but I suppose time will tell.

The guitar also sports a really mean sheen (poly finish at play,) and I can already tell it’s going to take some serious sanding to get that down to something more manageable.

Unfortunately, the finish is also a bit too yellow for what I’m ultimately after, so this is going to turn into quite a process––first sand the poly down some, then add a somewhat transparent coat of Olympic White nitro (until we get the color we’re aiming for,) then add a clear topcoat, and then finally sand that back down a bit to remove the brand new shine.

Whew! Should be a good workout anyway. Of course, there’s little hope of removing all of the poly, so I won’t even be attempting that, but if I can get some of it off, and get a few nice nitro coats on top, I’ll be more than satisfied.

I’ve also picked up a few other extras that will be needed for the project––a cheap rock tumbler, for aging the hardware, a whole bunch of wet/dry 3M brand sandpaper, and a nice mint green 5-hole Tele pickguard (not easy to find!) that I finally managed to order from Callaham Guitars.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot––the upside of that yellow coat is that while the body of this Telecaster is a bit too lemony for my taste, the neck is already decked out in a nice vintage-style amber tint.

Sure, it still needs to be aged, but I’m relieved that we won’t have to tint it as well… that’s just one less step. And besides, Fender’s got that vintage amber color down far better than I ever will, I’m sure.

So next step: take this bad boy apart, take lots of photos of the inside cavity just in case I can’t figure out how the S1 Switching goes back together, and divide up all of the hardware into separate bowls in order to keep everything organized.

First things first… I guess it’s time to get sanding.

Oh yeah, and please keep in mind: THIS IS NOT A “HOW-TO” KIND OF POST. I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE, AND I MAY WELL DESTROY THIS INSTRUMENT. I AM DOCUMENTING THE PROCESS FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT, BUT I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY IF YOU ATTEMPT TO MODIFY YOUR GUITAR IN ANY WAY!

In case you haven’t seen it, Gibson’s kicking off May with the introduction of the new Les Paul Push-tone––a uniquely versatile instrument in that you can literally push the pickups out of the back of the guitar, unclip the wires, and swap in a completely different set of pickups, apparently in minutes.

While this isn’t all that new of an idea (Ampeg’s Dan Armstrong Plexi model began offering something similar nearly 40 years ago,) it’s certainly the first time you’ve been able to quickly swap the pickups in an LP… the Push-tone ships with both a pair of BurstBucker Pros, and a pair of single-coil P-94s (basically humbucker-sized P-90s.)

You can use the pickups in matched sets, or literally mix n’ match for your favorites combination of tones.

Other unique features include a AAA maple top with matching maple trapezoid fretboard inlays (really nice touch, here,) a Tone Pro bridge and tailpiece, locking Grover tuners, 24k Gold potentiometers (designed by Gibson, and produced by Bourns,) and a newly designed Neutrik output jack.

The Push Tone will also sport a mahogany body, mahogany neck w/’50s rounded profile (24-3/4“ scale length,)  ebony fretboard with 22 frets, amber top hat knobs, nickel hardware, dual volume and tone knobs, and traditional 3-way pickup switching.

The guitar is listing for a whopping $4,449.00… ouch!

If you’re an old Zemaitis fiend like myself you’ll definitely want to check out Vintage Guitar Magazine’s review of the S22 Metal Top.

For nearly two years straight I’ve been trying to get my hands on one of the new Zemaitis models, but as with many boutique instruments, they are incredibly difficult to track down outside of the larger metropolitan areas.

Priced at $9,000, the S22 is a top-of-the-line heir to the classic “metal top” design that helped put Zemaitis on the map, and while luthier Antanus Zemaitis himself passed away in 2002, Tokyo-based Zemaitis International has apparently done an exemplary job of living up to their namesake in terms of quality and design.

Of course, the feature that stands out most on the S22 is its gorgeous hand-engraved top and hand-machined Duralumin hardware (yep, that’s aircraft aluminum,) including bridge, tailpiece, control cavity covers, jackplate, pickup rings, truss rod cover, and headstock logo.

That’s a helluva’ lot of aluminum, and according to Vintage Guitar the rather weighty mixture of mahogany (neck and body) and Duralumin means the S22 absolutely sings with sustain.

The guitar also sports an ebony fingerboard with 12“ radius, Schaller machine heads, and a pair of DiMarzio DP103 humbuckers––oh yeah, and it ships with a deluxe hard shell case with aluminum handle.

You can check out the full review over at Vintage Guitar Magazine.

Exhibit A The photo to the left is the gorgeous Custom Vintage Humbucker Telecaster Heavy Relic in Vintage Blonde, which has been taunting me from Music Zoo’s website for nearly a year.

I say “taunting” because there’s no way in hell I would personally pay Fender over $3,000 just to pre-age a guitar for me… but that said, this curvaceous beauty just keeps calling me back, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to say no.

So what’s the next best thing, I ask? You guessed it––in the Grand American Spirit of destruction, experimentation, and good old “I-can-do-better-than-that-guy” chutzpah, I’ve decided to take a stab at creating my own Telecaster “Relic,” one piece of sand paper at a time… ooooh, you just know it’s gonna’ hurt.

And to be honest, while it would be great to walk away with an artistic masterpiece like the one above, my prime motivation for potentially demolishing a perfectly good Telecaster is really quite simple: it just sounds like fun!

Exhibit B And so we come to the “guinea pig” of our experiment… thanks to the magic of eBay, late last night I managed to purchase a slightly dinged Classic Player Baja Telecaster for what amounts to literally a song and a dance.

This is the much raved about MIM ‘52 Tele Reissue, designed by the Fender Custom Shop and packed with modern niceties, like S1 switching, medium jumbo frets, a 9.5“ neck radius, and a pair of Custom Shop ‘69 pickups.

And yes, that’s a poly finish, so I’ve got some heavy wet-sanding ahead of me… I can hardly wait.

The Players  Luckily, through a bit of creative conniving I’ve managed to recruit the brains, beauty, and braun of a top secret partner-in-crime, whom will hereafter be referred to only as ”G.“

Between the two of us we should be able to manage most of the necessary requirements for artistically deconstructing an otherwise perfectly good guitar.

Timeline  Who can really say… 60 days? 90 days? I haven’t a clue.

Resources  Relic Deluxe, Guitar ReRanch, Callaham Guitars, Fender Custom Shop (for inspiration,) and of course Music Zoo.

Why You Should Care  Because this whole ill-fated experiment is likely to turn into one giant train wreck, and who can resist the temptation to watch one of those?!

If you’ve ever wondered why I’m constantly drooling over the Master Built ‘61 John Cruz Stratocaster, wonder no more––classic look and feel, versatile electronics, amazing tone. Now if I just had $5,000 lying around…

Not a whole lot in the “guitar news” department this morning, though a few worthy links managed to find their way into my browser…

• Limited Edition Volcano – Reverend Guitars has busted out with a new Limited Edition of their low-cost, award winning Volcano––the aptly titled Volcano H90.

They’ve apparently swapped out the neck humbucker for a vintage-voiced P-90 (a GFS Mean 90 to be exact) dressed in a traditional humbucker form factor. Guitars are signed on the back of the headstock by Reverend President Joe Naylor. Strictly limited quantities available, and list price is running $769.

• Eastwood Tuxedo Copper – And while we’re on the subject of P-90s, Eastwood this week announced the addition of a new color option for its dual P-90 Airline Tuxedo model hollowbody.

The guitar, which is a tribute to the ’50s-era Kay Barney Kessel, is now available in Eastwood’s popular new Copper finish (see the high-res photos here.) Street price is still $849.

• EH Micro POG Demo – Last but not least, Dave Weiner has posted a new video demo of the Electro-Harmonix Micro POG over on YouTube, and it gives you a pretty good idea of what this diminutive pedal really has to offer.

I don’t know about you, but I particularly like what EH’s latest polyphonic octave generator can do with arpeggiated chords… super sweet.