COLE Custom Guitars, Setups & Repairs

09/06/2026

On to the next build.

I had the paducah and maple resawn by a local mill over in Sidney a while back, and its been acclimating in the shop since. Today I glued the pieces together for the laminated neck. And once again... you can never have too many clamps !
Hopefully I'll get two necks out of this block of hardwood. I still need to thickness the paducah that will be the top/cap of the guitar, through the thickness planer before edge gluing the book matched pieces that were also resawn.

09/03/2026

I have finished the refurbishing project on what I believe is a vintage, "TX-2 Explorer", Mako guitar. It was originally a pure white guitar but over the decades its turned a very pleasing, off white, almost cream colour. The refurbishing included a complete stripping down from top to bottom. One of the past owners had, for some strange reason, put three small 3/8th holes across from the tuners, and then fit them poorly with oak dowel. I tried painting the headstock but the holes could always be seen. So I made a cover plate for both sides of the headstock from the left over pickguard material, to hide them .... then made a matching rear cover plate for the spring /tremolo area. I did so much more to bring this guitar up to, what I think is a great beginner or intermediate player guitar. Certainly a big improvement from when I purchased it, and possibly better than new.
It'll now be put up for sale on Marketplace.

Special note:
In my last video(s) I was making a new bone nut for it. It turned out less than perfect so it got tossed and another nut made to replace it. By redoing the nut I was able to use my very posh, brand new "Music Nomad" nut slotting files. It made cutting the new nut so much easier, a real game changer.
Here are some photos of the Vintage (80's)
guitar.

09/02/2026

09/02/2026

In these next few videos you'll see me first getting the new nut down to its relative size and shape so I can then mark the two outer E strings where I need them to go where they won't fall off the fret ends when they're strung up and where I'll use those marks to find the proper string spacing for the inside 4 strings using a string spacing rule. Its time consuming to find the correct & perfect spacing because each cutout on the rule most the spacing either closer or further apart from each other.

09/01/2026

Because I over taxed my bandsaw with the wrong blade (and that mistake will never be made again) I had the wood for my next project resawn by West Wind Hardwood in Sidney. I'm excited to get started with it but I'm going to let it acclimate before getting started. Heres a couple of photos for you to see. One of the laminated neck formation of maple and paducah ( with I think ... a maple fretboard ) and one of the resawn paducah for the top. My only concern is the weight. The guitar body is maple but it'll be a "chambered body" to lighten it up. Paducah is quite a dense heavy hardwood as is maple, but to a lesser degree.
Thoughts ???

08/28/2026

I had a lot of fun building this
"Nintendocaster " but it was sold to a very happy customer today !

08/23/2026

With bandsaw out of commission for a day or so I've gone back to the Mako guitar I'm refurbishing. Here I'm starting to slot the nut to a point where I'll be able to put my digital string height gauge on and measure the distance between the bottom of the string to the top of the fret and complete the nut slot filing as needed. Thx for watching.

08/23/2026

Sadly my bandsaw is out of commission for the short term. At least that's what I'm praying for anyway. I was resawing a piece of maple when the "start capacitor" that is installed on top of the saw, started to smolder. Of course I shut the saw off and unplugged it immediately. Upon inspection I could see that the capacitor had indeed fried and melted to some degree, inside the cover. The wiring from the capacitor that leads into the motor housing was fried so I need to get into the motor to see what wiring needs replacing in there, besides the capacitor itself. ..... I contacted KMS Tools where I purchased the $1,000. bandsaw only to find out that the 2 yr. warranty that came on the saw and the 1 year KMS adds on, had expired 2 months ago !! Of course it did !!!!! 😡
So I'm left to attempt to repair this myself. Long story short here ...
I have the saw partially disassembled and the motor off the machine. I don't want to open the casing myself so I'll be taking into an electrical shop that handles this type of repair. When it comes to things such as this, I know my limitations. Hopefully the repair can be made quickly and I can get the motor reinstalled and have the bandsaw running again quickly. 🤞

08/21/2026

A short but yet drawn out video of refretting a Gibson neck. First vut the fret to its rough length, then because Gibson fills in the sides of their fretboard, the fret needs to have the "tang" ( the part of the fret that is pressed into the neck ) nipped off to allow the fret to seat properly. What I didn't explain ( or maybe I did 🤔 ... was that after nipping the tang off it needs to be filed flat so it sits flat against the fingerboard.