The Guitar Gallery Forums - The Guitar Legacy of Matsumoku

Q&A, discussion, and information for the labels covered by The Guitar Gallery (Specifically and exclusively guitars made by Matsumoku up to 1987)
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PostPosted: Sat 31 Dec 2005 03:30 AM 
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Virtuoso
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I don't know why I even bought this guitar. Well, that's not true. It was cheap, in pieces, and made by Matsumoku. Yep, another rescue case.

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak1.jpg[/img]

I took to calling it 'the Hot Wheels guitar'... something about the ungainly swoopy lines and the really badly done black spray paint... it sat on my studio shelves for months, until I started thinking how cool it might look if I sanded it, painted it flat black with flames. And that's how this project started.

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak2.jpg[/img]

It turned out the black paint sanded off really easily... well yeah, that's what happens when you enamel spray paint a guitar with no primer or wood filler. Once the paint came off and the wood grain got exposed... well, it started looking not so bad. I went ahead and applied grain filler and sanded it back- and that's what you see here.

It's funny- because the PO had painted it black without filling the grain, there was black paint left in all the grain- and I started to notice that the paint acted something like tinted grain filler, that it kinda brought out the grain nicely. Still an ugly guitar, mind you, but it was starting to get under my skin.


[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak3.jpg[/img]

Here it is after the first coat of neck amber- I use only Reranch nitro, it's the best, and I've learned a lot from hanging out at the ReRanch forum

Notice that with the first coat it's shiny on the top, but flatter on the sides, especially along the side cut where the end grain is exposed, and it soaks in more. Very typical.

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak4.jpg[/img]

Here it is with one coat of amber, a couple coats of tinted clear, and topped off with clear. Neck amber is very yellow, designed to match Fender maple necks. Tinted clear is more amber, like the color of faded nitro. It's starting to look good!

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak5.jpg[/img]

Now the neck is attached, it's a guitar again. The bridge is set in place for testing. By this point I'd scrapped my original plan to paint it flat black, I was liking the wood grain way too much. Now, mind you, it's not a solid body, but rather an ash cap over mahogany core layers- and you can see it at the edge of the body and especially the body bevel, no hiding it, but who cares?

The bridge is a Bendmaster, one of the chrome stamped ones like was used on Spectrum DX's (not the stamped + cast black ones used on the LX, FX, etc). I was actually planning to use an ACT3 bridge I had around, but when I got to this point I realized the ACT3 was missing its fine tuner fingers, so that was out. The Bendmaster is fine though, if a little crude.

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak6.jpg[/img]

One of the things that had motivated me to rebuild this guitar was realizing that with its S-H pickups, it was basically a fat tele- I figured I'd give it the same wiring plan I'd developed for the Telerez.

If you're thinking tele, you should use a tele-style pickup, at least in the bridge- I had this MIM tele bridge pup that was dead, and AP2 had kindly repaired for me. It almost fit the bridge pickup cavity!

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak7.jpg[/img]

Heh, most people at this stage would think nothing of making the pickup fit by getting out the chisel and hacking at the body- however this is a Matsumoku body we're talking about, and just a mere Fender pickup. I'm not about to go hacking at the body when I can trim the pickup instead. It was very close, but I made it fit!

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak8.jpg[/img]

OK, I'm skipping some steps here- I liked the woodgrain so much I wanted to avoid covering it up with a big ugly pickguard- and the Atak1 pickguard is ugly! So my plan was to make a clear plastic pickguard that would hold the pickups and controls in place and show off as much of the wood as possible. I did a bunch of sketches and finally got it the shape I wanted.

Then it got ugly. I started to cut the clear pickguard out of Lucite, using a scroll saw like I've done before. I had all the usual problems of having the cut edges weld back together behind the blade- plus it was so brittle. After seven or eight tries I finally had it cut- and then when I went to drill holes, it just shattered into fragments. I must have gone through two dozen pieces of Lucite.

The lesson learned? It's Lexan that you use for pickguards, not Lucite!!! D'oh! I sourced a couple pieces of Lexan at my local R/C model shop and after a couple more attempts, I had my clear pickguard.

The problem, however, was that the Lexan pieces I could get were too small, they wouldn't cover the entire rout. Well... by now my original plans for the guitar were mutating wildly, and I started eyeing some pieces of exotic (repro plastic) tortoiseshell that i'd been holding... thinking how nice it would look against the wood body... trouble was, the tortoiseshell was really thin, designed for acoustic guitar pickguards where it's glued directly to the wood front, and is really thin. I cut out the pickguard shape I wanted, but it was way too flimsy, so I laminated it to a piece of white, with aluminum foil inbetween to show off the tortoiseshell. Looking good! (btw, I haven't yet removed the protective plastic from the tortoiseshell in this pic, as you see)

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak10.jpg[/img]

What's wrong with this plan? well, uh... I'm attaching all the wiring to the pickguard, and installing it, and THEN testing to see if the wiring all works? Hmm... and what strings am I going to test it with?

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak9.jpg[/img]

Fortunately, I do (ahem) have other guitars here. The Telerez kindly donated some vibrating strings, and it turned out the wiring was all OK.

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak11.jpg[/img]

This shot shows the components I used- similar to what I've used on the telerez, but not exactly. From left to right they are:

Volume control, with coil tap. In the past I've used a pull-switch pot to trigger coil tap, but this time I used a concentric pot so I'd have a variable coil cut and master volume on the same position.

Tone control- this is an inductive tone control that is neutral at 5, turn it down to 1 and it cuts the midrange, turn it up to 10 and it cuts low and high and leaves midrange. I find for tele pickups this is an extremely useful control.

Blend pot- instead of a selector switch, I used a blend pot to allow gradual mix of the pots- again very useful when one pickup is a very thin trebly single and the other is a nice warm humbucker- did I mention it's an MMK51 with cream bobbins? And the two pickups are permanently out of phase- but you only get that effect when you dial the blend pot so they're perfectly balanced, which is a different spot depending on the coil cut.

Output jack- just the usual thing.

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak12.jpg[/img]

Here you can see the pickguard installed (but not screwed down). I'm taking apart the bridge... partly to clean it and partly to get strings on. Trouble with this kind of bendmaster is you practically have to remove the individual saddles to get strings on. And there's no height adjustment, they're permanently set, so you have to not mix up which saddle is which. But then, after all that, it's fine.

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak13.jpg[/img]

And finally- the finished guitar!

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak14.jpg[/img]

I had no plan to make this surf style, but with the amber wood and the tortoise pickguard, it's really bitchin' radical, dude. I selected chrome knobs with a cream chickenhead for the blend pot (makes it very easy to tell where it's set)

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak15.jpg[/img]

I like it, I really do. Next session gig I get playing Ventures covers, I'm there with this axe, man!

[img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak16.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.nwlink.com/~paulcl/guitars/atak/atak17.jpg[/img]


Last edited by X189player on Sat 31 Dec 2005 06:19 AM, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Sat 31 Dec 2005 05:07 AM 
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Virtuoso
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Joined: Mon 16 Dec 2002 09:02 AM
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Location: L.A., California
Dang that was good.
You might consider doing a guitar repair book
like Dan Erlewine. A pic is worth 1,000 words.


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PostPosted: Sat 31 Dec 2005 06:11 AM 
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i think jbyear1 has a point there... a "how to" book of guitar restoration and modification for the lay person would be cool :up: .... and practical.... a "resto-mods for matsumoku".... or "uncle mat resurections".... could even put it together as an e-book... i know i would be darned interested in purchasing a copy of all the resurections i have eagerly followed on these pages and your other site :love:

besides doing darn nice work, you document the procedure so well.... definitely something to think about [/img]

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PostPosted: Sat 31 Dec 2005 06:20 AM 
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Virtuoso
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thanks! there'll be more where these came from...


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PostPosted: Sat 31 Dec 2005 03:32 PM 
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Another really nice restoration, X189, with some tastefully inspired mods here and there. Glad to know there'll be more where this one came from. Along with the idea of you writing a book on these retores, even an e-book, may I also suggest you consider a side business of "X189's Restored Guitars For Sale" as well, if for no other reason than to free up more room for new restores! 8)

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PostPosted: Sat 31 Dec 2005 05:58 PM 
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Virtuoso
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LOL, thanks. Actually I'm pretty sloppy (as Jeffster knows, he's looked close up at a guitar I've worked on) and there's not a whole lot of technical tour de force, not like Erlewine's, whom I've learned a lot from. There are definitely people here who do technically advanced repair and resto that is way beyond what I can do.

But I agree it's very useful (and entertaining) to see a step-by-step photo essay to see how it unfolds. But that's no hard to do, jsut keep a digital camera handy when you go to work on guitars. If everyone would do that, we could have tons more resto pics like these! So everybody consider grabbing the camera next time you go to work on a guitar!

I may indeed see about thinning the herd a little bit, but I'm not really overcrowded just yet- you can fit a lot of guitars in a room- it's way easier than my other hobby of auto restoration (8 cars in my driveway, yes)

I've been making progress getting some of them up on the wall where i can enjoy them more easily and pick them up to play mroe readily. But there are a handful (mostly of Phoenixes) that I've bought to document, and I need to spend time with them to decide if they're permanent residents or not.

Thanks for the encouraging words, it helps motivate me to get the next project going!


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PostPosted: Sat 31 Dec 2005 08:19 PM 
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Virtuoso
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Location: Orange Co. CA
X189 wrote:
Actually I'm pretty sloppy (as Jeffster knows, he's looked close up at a guitar I've worked on)

I beg to differ! The word "sloppy" never comes to my mind when I look at my CS-400, and the restoration you did. "Miracle" is more like it. I know that's a bit of an exageration in the positive, but sloppy goes way too far the other way from what I see.

Yes, she's still a bit relic'd, as we agreed to, but the work you did to restore those chewed off body corners was like the difference of night and day to me. You really did an amazing job there, IMO, X189!

Oh, I had a thought for you. Maybe you could get 2 birds with one stone by storing some of your guitars in some of those autos you're restoring! :lol:

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PostPosted: Sun 01 Jan 2006 11:24 PM 
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very nice work..... :)


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PostPosted: Fri 10 Feb 2006 08:08 AM 
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Axe Slinger
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Joined: Wed 23 Nov 2005 11:09 AM
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Wow, that's some beast. I was well pleased to see someone else has one of these.
http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/2079 ... dy10ln.jpg
http://img498.imageshack.us/img498/1765 ... age5qx.jpg
I hope this works as I've never tried it before. Sorry if the pics ain't here.
(serial number D400564)
This was my first ever guitar and I played it to death taking all my teenage angst out on it. I used to get slagged rotten at school for it because it wasn't a "big name" but I loved it.
It seems to be different to this one in that the body is (or seems to be ) two layers of maple or similar with a thin layer of darker wood in the middle which you can see through the crack in the finish and a veneer of what looks llike birch on top and bottom. I should get a better look when I get the black off.
This thread has inspired me to get it out of the atic and repair the badly butchered bridge fitting and restore my first love. It taught me how to play so I think I owe it one
This may take some time but I will post results.
Cheers guys


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PostPosted: Fri 10 Feb 2006 01:51 PM 
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Virtuoso
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That's cool, great to hear you still have it! YOu're right, it's a mahogany sandwich with thin layers (maybe maple or ash?) in the middle and capping the front and back. at first I thought it would never look good with a natural finish, but it's fine, the look of the layers is part of the fun.

Keep us posted, I love hearing about guitars that have history and have been well loved!


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