TREE

The old nut on our Hofner Colorama II was in a terrible state. It was too shallow and had a piece of card underneath it in order to raise it up. Additionally the bottom was not flat. Here it is: I have no reason to trust this nut at all, so I'm not going to use it as a template for the new one. So here I am sanding a new piece of bone down to the right thickness using a piece of coarse sandpaper set on a flat surface: Then cutting the bone to length: Here I’m checking it fits nicely into the nut slot: Before I can continue, I need to make up a new half pencil, since I appear to have misplaced my old one. So we take a normal pencil: Slice it down the middle (watch your fingers): Superglue the lead into place (optional, but I find it a good idea, since there’s nothing really holding the lead in place at this stage): Remove superglued finger from pencil (again, optional): Sand pencil flat: And then I usually put some Sellotape (Scotch tape) along the bottom of the pencil to stop from ...

Back in this post (http://diystrat.blogspot.com/2011/11/hofner-colorama-ii-restoration-project_30.html), we applied some initial coats of paint (two complete rattle cans, in fact) to our vintage Hofner Colorama II and left it to dry for a few weeks. This is how it looked after that: The whole body was then wet sanded with 400 grit paper wrapped around a rubber sanding block. This left us with a clear view of any imperfections that were either small divots that were missed at the time of filling, or where the filler didn’t stay in place during pre-paint-application sanding. Rather than applying hundreds of coats of paint until these were filled in, they were spot-filled instead. To do this, we sprayed some of the red paint from the same rattle can into the rattle can lid, left it to thicken up for 10 minutes or so, and then applied it with a small paint brush (the paint brush can be cleaned afterwards with mineral spirits (turps) and live to see another day). The filled-in areas were th...

Mains Slave Switcher II Circuit Diagram . As a guide, a one-inch reed switch with 40 turns reliably switched on with the current flowing through a 150-watt lamp (approx. 625 mA) but larger reeds may require more turns. If the master appliance draws less current (which is unlikely with power tools) more turns will be required. The reed switch is used to switch on transistor T1 which in turn switches the relay RE1 and powers the slave appliance. Since reed switches have a low mechanical inertia, they have little difficulty in following the fluctuations of the magnetic field due to the alternating current in the coil and this means that they will switch on and off at 100 Hz. Mains Slave Switcher II Circuit Diagram: Mains Slave Switcher II Circuit Diagram C3 is therefore fitted to slow down the transistor response and keep the relay energised during the mains zero crossings when the current drawn by the appliance falls to zero and the reed switch opens. C1 drops the mains voltage to about...

Before lacquering the neck on our vintage Hofner Colorama II, we need to deal with the “Hofner” waterslide decal and the serial number stamped on the back of the headstock. Here’s what the serial number looked like before stripping the lacquer. And here’s how it looks afterwards: The “8” is hardly visible (although to be honest, it wasn’t stamped very deeply to start with), and in fact all of the numbers are in danger of becoming almost invisible once we add a few layers of lacquer. As it happens, I have a set of number punches, but they are a different size from the ones used on this guitar, which leaves us with two choices: sand the numbers off completely and re-stamp them, or try to repair what we already have. I’ve decided to go for the second option, since I feel a little weird about re-stamping serial numbers. Here we’re using a very small jeweler’s screwdriver as a kind of punch to deepen the outline of the numbers. The straight lines are easy, but the number 8 and the top of th...