Johannes et Jacobus Custom Telecaster “The Black Pearl”

This telecaster style guitar was built my son and I.  It is really what some people call a partscaster project because I bought most of the parts and assembled them rather than carving the guitar out of a piece of 200 year old gnarled driftwood and having it finished by a Zen priest Japanese sword polisher.  It is actually the third guitar we have built. 

The body is Ash, in three parts. We stained it with a Dark Oak stain, then spent ages finishing it off with Danish Oil.  When finished it did look rather like a piece of Tudor furniture that had once lived on a Pirate ship, so we decided to continue the piratical theme which is why we called  it “The Black Pearl” after Jack Sparrow’s ship in the Disney film “Pirates of the Caribbean”.  The neck is a second hand Allparts neck I got for just over 50 quid on eBay, and I finished it with an extra very thin layer of lacquer.

It has Wilkinson gold machine heads, a Bigsby style tailpiece tremolo arm,  a Wilkinson bridge with roller saddles and ebay scratchplate and control panel.  I got most of the electrical parts from Axesrus with the exception of the pickups.  They are Seymour Duncan pickups which came from Crazy Train Music, and they are a bit different from the usual Telecaster pickups.  These look exactly like the traditional Tele set, but are in fact humbuckers with the coils stacked vertically instead of side by side.  The coils have a tap between them, and the guitar is wired so that either pickup or both can be switched from single coil to double coil by pulling and pushing one of the control knobs. You can  just about see in one of the pictures below that one knob is pushed in and the other pulled out. There is no tone control in the circuit, just two volume knobs.

The tremolo arm is exactly like a Bigsby, and works the same.  It’s a far east knock off, and is perhaps one of the ‘licensed by Bigsby’ items, just without the stamp on it to say so.  I have a genuine Bigsby on my Gretsch, and the only difference I can see is that the Gretsch Bigsby is made of a duller metal, more like gunmetal.  The quality is about the same.  The Far Eastsby cost a lot less, though, at about a third of the price of a genuine item.  

There is a slightly cheesy decoration on the shoulder of the guitar, where we nailed a piece of a horse brass that has a skull and crossbones motif in the middle.  We also hunted around until we found the right ‘aged brass’ finish knobs and strap pins.  The control panel is finished in shiny gold, though you can’t tell from the picture.

This is one of my absolute favourite guitars.  The neck had to be shimmed with small pieces of brass to get the angle right for the higher than normal bridge, necessitated by the tremolo mechanism.  I spent ages setting it up, tweaking the truss rod and getting the shims just right.  The action and intonation are now spot on, and the sound  is fantastic.  It even stays in tune after you use the tremolo!The switchable pickups give everything from clear twangs to heavy growls.  In fact, I strongly recommend these Seymour Duncan pickups – STK T1 and STK T3 Vintage Stacks. They are a bit pricey (something over a hundred quid for the pair), but they really made the sound on this guitar. 

This is the circuit I used for this project – I think!  I just did it from memory and I don’t want to take the guitar apart to check.  The pickup selector is a standard Telecaster switch, and the other switches are DPDT switches on the potentiometers, activated and deactivated by pulling the knobs out and pushing them back in.