New guitar soon day

OilCityPickups

Wanted a cheap resonator ... ideally with a neck pickup for some while. Pulled the trigger at the weekend on a B stock Harley Benton for the daft price of 117 quid. The plan is to put one of our Oil City Winterizer Firebird pickups in the neck ... perhaps do some work to make the cone seat better. Have a 'beater' resonator that I can take anywhere and not worry about. I await Thomann's delivery :-)

Wanted a cheap

Sarge

Nice!

1979

Very nice!

usedtobe

Looks very cool!

OilCityPickups

Not expecting miracles ... but usually cheap resos can be made better with a few simple tweaks  

Sarge

Have you seen sollophonic guitars?
http://www.sollophonicguitars.co.uk/

Not going to be to everyones taste, but I like em.

OilCityPickups

I've lusted after one of those for some while ... but I would probably look at doing a conversion myself ... the cones and covers are readily available ... and all one needs is a cheap Tele copy and a router. I wanted an acoustic for noodling ... so hence the HB ... but if I get time ... how about a flying V resonator using a modified mandolin  cone and cover? 

OilCityPickups

The Resonator arrived today ... no thanks to Parcel Farce ... who kicked a hole in the box and delivered it to the wrong address!

Photos tomorrow.

Well first impressions were not favorable ... looked great ... but totally unplayable. Firstly the machinehead  buttons were loose and vibrated like a bastard, Grover copies so an easy fix to adjust the stiffness and sort it ... but annoying.  

The big fault was that the bridge saddle had been shaved so low that the top three strings were actually touching the cover plate ... sounded like a sitar! 

Off came the strings ... nice D'Addario bronze jobbies ... and off came the cover plate. Another problem, the cone was sat up at the tailpiece end and not even properly in the 'well'. 

Out came the cone ... a huge overrun of glue had totally blocked the well 'lip' ... so a Dremel was used to quickly restore the ledge back to bare wood. I intend to fit a maple bridge saddle, so I simply grafted a bit of rosewood on the bottom of the over cut saddle as a temporary measure. So far a half hours work ...

Saddle back in, cone re mounted and sitting flat ... cover on, re strung ... and wow! That sounds nice. A tweak of the trussrod to counter a nasty forward bow ... and it's sounding really nice.

A bit overly bass happy perhaps ... but a bit of fettling and string choice should help that. Loud as f--k and sweet as you could wish. I have played £300 resonators that sounded worse.

A shame about Thomann's god awful checking ... okay it was B stock ... but that should be cosmetic. If a beginner had gotten this guitar they would have been really disappointed.

57Deluxe

Yep - they will have a tone for sure.