John Page Guitars: The Story of Number One Part V

So, when I left you all hanging back in January, I had just finished painting the neck. The body was in cure. Now it’s time to fab the pickguard and electronic assemblies, sand and buff the body and neck, assemble it all, tune/test, etc. Here we go…

At this point in the build Eddie (the client) and I both thought we’d be going with the standard size aluminum anodized pickguard on 001, so I went ahead and made it, the truss rod cover and the backplate. Later on down the road we changed to using a piece I call a “trimguard”, so this work was moot, but I thought I’d take you through the process anyway.

The cool thing about aluminum is that it’s a non-ferrous metal so you can process it using wood working tools. You have to be pretty careful with it, but it keeps you from having to invest a lot in special metal working equipment.

First, I layout the outline of the parts onto pre-polished sheets of aluminum (the blue color is a thin plastic protective film that will be peeled off later). While I’m laying them out I use a transfer punch to center punch the mounting holes that will be drilled later.

Then comes the rough cutting out of the parts. My goal here is to remove as much material as possible so as to minimize the amount of metal I will need to rout off later on in the process. The exterior cuts are done of the bandsaw with a fine-tooth metal cutting blade. The interior cut (the HB cut-out) is done on the scroll saw.

After the rough cutting I need to drill and counter-sink the mounting holes. Not only will I use these holes for the final mounting of the pickguard to the guitar but I also use them as alignment/mounting holes for the templates I use to rout the pickguard.

After the holes are drilled I can rout the pickguard to its final shape. But, before I talk about the routing operations, let me talk about the template first. Anytime I rout metal I make a two-piece template, a top and a bottom. The piece that I will be routing will be sandwiched between the two and aligned by steel tooling pins. This keeps the aluminum flat and mostly away from my hands.

I use two different routers to do the routing operation. The first router operation is to do the major material removal. I do this with a ¾” flush trimming bit on my beastly Onsrud Pin Router. This operation removes the majority of the material quickly and easily, but because of the cutter’s diameter it doesn’t allow me to get into the tight corner radii that I need for the butt of the neck or the humbucking pickup. That makes it necessary for me to do a secondary routing operation on a shaper with a ¼” diameter flush trimming bit.

The routers do a pretty good job of shaping the pickguard to dimension, but they don’t do a very good job on the edge finish of the aluminum. It actually melts and gums up a bit. This makes it necessary to draw-file and sand the edges. If you’re not familiar with the term “draw-filing” it is actually “drawing” the file towards you on the edge of the metal using the short side of the face of the file, instead of the long part of the face of the file (does that make any sense? probably not). Here’s a tip, coat your file with a piece of chalk during the operation. It’ll keep your file from loading up. Here’s a shot of what I’m trying to badly explain.

Here’s the difference that the draw-filing makes. The top pic is the edge of the pickguard after routing. The bottom epic is after draw-filing.

After that comes fine sanding and polishing with 0000 steel wool. This is a shot of that on the truss rod cover.

Well, after that I packed up the parts and sent them off to my friend and master anodizing god Peter Kellett. Peter does a fine bead blast on the parts and then anodizes them custom colors for me. 001 was a Rootbeer Bronze that Peter custom mixed for me. But, unfortunately after all that work, Eddie and I both decided that we didn’t want to cover up the killer quilt on the top with the pickguard that I had just made, so I started in a new direction.

I had been requested by Pai, the client who ordered 002, to put a standard trim ring around the humbucking pickup. I have a problem putting anything “standard” on my guitars if I think they detract from the original design… functionally, tonally or aesthetically. This was just an aesthetic impact, but for a brand new design I had a problem with it, so I set out to design my own P-1 style trimring.

After a bunch of drawings and prototypes, I finally came up with a design for a trim ring that looked like it belonged on my P-1. I called it a trimguard, because it was somewhat bigger than a trim ring and it looked like my pickguard… trimguard. Anyway, after showing the design to Eddie he agreed that we should go that route with 001, so I started making some out of different materials that I thought would look best with 001’s finish.

We ended up with a solid copper piece with a brushed finish. Unfortunately, I didn’t photograph the making of the copper piece. But, here are a couple shots of the nickel silver piece I made for 002. The process is slightly different from the process outlined above for the aluminum. Even though both the copper and nickel silver are also non-ferrous metals, like the aluminum, they are much harder, so I wasn’t able to use the scroll saw to cut out the interiors. I had to do it by hand with a jeweler’s saw. After that I was able to very carefully rout it.

Here’s the shot of the copper piece before I drilled the mounting holes and brushed it.

Now it’s time for the body and neck sanding and buffing. There’s not a whole lot of photos of this so I’ll be explaining my process a lot more than showing it. First the body. After the lacquer has cured for at least 30 days I begin the sanding process for buff. I use a 3” x 5” finform (laminated birch plywood with a phenolic coating on both sides) block with a 1/8” piece of rubber as a sanding block. I also use smaller blocks and a piece of visquine when necessary. I use Mineral Spirits as a lubricant while sanding, being careful to not use too much, wiping it off often and blowing out holes. Even though it is a very mild solvent it can affect the finish negatively if it stays in one place too long. I start off with 1000 grit, then 1200 grit and finish up with 1500 grit. I have found that it you sand each grit in the opposite direction of the previous grit it’s easier to tell when you have removed all of the heavier grit’s sanding lines… just a little tip.

When I’m completely happy with the sanding job (which can take way to long sanding by hand), I start the buffing process. I am not able to show the edge buffing process because the location of my buffer doesn’t allow the room necessary to take a photo. I buff the edge with a red rouge and then white. After the edges are buffed I begin buffing with the automotive style hand buffer. I use two different liquid buffing compounds at this stage with a final coat of wax at the end.

The final buffed body.

Now comes the neck sanding and buffing. The sanding process is pretty much the same as with the body except the blocks are different. I use a piece of 1/8” rubber to back my sandpaper on the neck profile to help keep it consistently smooth. I am not able to show the neck buffer operation for the same reason as noted above… sorry.

Now comes assembly! Yeah! It’s about time, eh? A lot of the pre-assembly work that happens at this stage didn’t get photographed. Those operations include the prepping of the neck pocket to receive the neck, the detailing of the switch slot and control holes, mounting of the strap buttons, installation of the string ferrules, etc. Installing string ferrules could almost be a small column in itself! Anyway, on to what I did photograph, I pre-wired the electronics. I made a small assembly fixture to mount the components to that is exactly like they will be in the guitar. This allowed me to access it all much easier and keep the solder joints much cleaner too.

Then I shielded the electronics cavity and the lead pickup cavity using a water-based shielding paint.

After the shielding was dry I installed the electronics assembly into the cavity, and installed the pickups and bridge assembly as well. Then I soldered the pickups, jack and shielding as necessary. It’s really important to cover the body when soldering in this instance. It’s easy for a tiny bit of flux or solder to splatter and mess up your lacquer.

After the body was assembled I keyed the neck.

Then mounted it to the body. I used ¼ -20 connector bolts and threaded brass inserts for this joint. I think they do a better job of tonal transference than the standard $8 sheet metal screws. But, that’s just my opinion.

At this point I sent the guitar off to my good friend J.W. Black to do the fret dress and set-up. Some folks have asked me why I send it to J.W. instead of doing it myself. The answer is pretty easy… ‘cause he’s one of the best in the world at it! I love to design and build guitars, but for some reason I have no “love” of setting them up… I have no passion for it. Maybe it’s because I’m not much of a player. J.W. on the other hand has a passion for set-ups. I also like having another set of hands and eyes check out my work before it goes to the client, it keeps me on my toes. I don’t have any shots of J.W. working on 001, but here’s a nice shot of him with a killer old Tele!

When the guitar came back from J.W. I left it in the rack for a few days and let it settle in. After that I played it and double checked the set-up. J.W. likes the nut a little higher than I do so I bought the nut down a few thousandths and attached the trimguard.

Here’s a close-up of the finished trimguard. I decided to put a thin Bakelite trim piece underneath the copper to give it a shadow line.

Voila! Finished!

After months of work Number One was finally complete. It seems like it was a much longer journey than it should have been. After all, I had been building guitars for decades prior to this. But this one was different, in fact this whole project was different. First, I hadn’t built a guitar in quite a few years. Most of my last decade at Fender was as an executive and designer, so honestly I guess I felt that my chops were a bit rusty. It took awhile for them to come back to me as a “natural” thing as opposed to something I kind of had to force myself to remember. Plus, and probably the most important factor was this, I knew that Eddie, like many of the other folks that ordered one of my new guitars, did so based on my reputation. I took that incredibly seriously. In my opinion “reputations” are based on “some” fact and a ton of lore, myths and rumors. I wasn’t worried that if the guitar didn’t live up to his expectations that I would hurt my reputation, I was worried that my “reputation” may have somehow taken advantage of him. So it was of the utmost importance that I built him the absolute best guitar that I could. 001 represented, in one single instrument, my entire career… jeez, no wonder I was freakin!

Here are the final shots.

And the most important test of all was whether Eddie was a happy kid or not when he got her. All these months later he still seems to be. Here he is recently wailing away on Number One, wearing his stylishly cool John Page Guitars T-Shirt (blatant plug)!

Is Number One the best guitar that I’ve ever built? I can’t honestly answer that, but what I can say is that it’s one of the most important I’ve ever built. It marks my return to an art form that I truly love and greatly missed. My sincerest thanks to Eddie and all my other wonderful clients for being so supportive and patient with me and my newest guitar venture… John Page Guitars!